 I realize that what we have to come to accept as religion today is the result of many centuries of social, religious, and political agendas stacked one upon the other, some of which belong to a less enlightened age. Human beings impose their own precondition prejudices on to God. Yeah, I've said that before, humans put their own opinions on to God sometimes. But it was once an enlightened message becomes skewed by the controlling elites, iron grip on power, position, and financial survival. This seems to produce self-righteous individuals who are either unwilling or unable to take the moat out of their own eyes because they are so busy pointing to their neighbor's size. I haven't speaking about these discoveries with Rijal and Arielle and they had explained to me how our human conception of God is directly linked to our perception of the universe. The scientific and religious theologies that we embrace become filters that cause us to either incorporate or block out certain ideas. For example, a philosophy that teaches the universe is endlessly in motion and constantly reinventing itself and plants a natural sense of security in the changing currents of life. We innately know that change is the natural order of things so we embrace the seasons knowing that all things come full circle. A philosophy that teaches us that the universe is constantly expanding causes us to expand our own scientific and spiritual knowledge. A philosophy that teaches reincarnation prepares us to accept all cycles of life agreed absolutely youth maturity old age and death with grace knowing that we are eternal beings and that death is but a portal into other worlds. Thus we have nothing to fear. Conversely, a philosophy that teaches us that we are damned since birth which is the fundamental philosophy of original sense produces a society of neurotic, anxious, judgmental people who never feel safe enough, perfect enough or deserving enough of God's love. All these dualistic religions teach that God resides in heaven while Satan lives in hell. We as orange sinners are stuck in the middle trying to get to heaven. This philosophy fosters a relatively relentlessly struggling mentality where we continually fall short of perfection and thus our zoom are doomed to forever heroically try to reach the care in the sky. We will never be perfect enough, wise enough or enlightened enough to reach God. The best we can hope for is to die and finally come into the presence of God. We believe that all that is holy is up there then by implication all that is not holy is below our feet and that includes our planet. This kind of thinking treats everything as a commodity including animals, plants, the land and our life sustaining waters. Being grown up in the church, I realize that most of us are programmed at a subconscious level to feel abandoned at an early age. We are told that God is out there somewhere but where? Oh right, maybe he's in heaven. When we add the threat of damnation to this we are caught between our yearning for love, our fear of disapproval and our endless quest to be good enough to please the divine. Then once the disordered doctrine of original sin was added to the idea of punishing God we learned that we are all damned anyway. Original sin was an idea created by the early church father St. Augustine who lives from 354 to 430 CE. It was never a doctrine taught or promoted by Yahshua. It postulates that when Adam first had sex with Eve sin was born into the world and other words humankind fell into imperfection through the act of sex and thus we were cast out of paradise. According to this crazy logic we are all damned at birth because we were conceived through sex. Or even if we never had sex ourselves we are still damned because Adam and Eve had sex. In Augustine's versions we were all innately diseased and can only find salvation through the church. In essence he proposes both the illness and the cure, creating a powerful loop of shame and guilt, manipulation and fear in his followers. I really hope that the fundamentalist Christians understand this because I feel sorry for you. The original word for sin just meant to miss the mark and to understand who you are. I really hope that you research this stuff because you will find so much liberation from the hell that you are living in. You are living in hell right now, mental hell by this type of gaslighting and manipulation and fear mongering. Fear mongering isn't God, God isn't manipulative. Please research, please free yourself. Instead of the freedom of the will in humanity's original royal dignity Augustine emphasizes humanity's enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering and helpless, irreparable damage by the fall for that original sin. The belief that we are damned from birth is so fundamentally wrong that it creates a deep layer of shame at the very base of the human psyche and this belief then generates the feeling that we can never be good enough to win God's love. We are innately unworthy and unlovable. By extension this also means that we can never be good enough to earn the love we seek from our romantic partners, our parents, or even from ourselves. Some historians have attributed Augustine's doctrine cascading human sexuality to a need to reject his own highly lustful nature since Augustine was a great hedonist in his early years. He kept a mistress for 13 years with whom he had an illegitimate son. Thus he preached that the only remedy for this kind of powerful sexual lust could be found in the conjugal rights of Christian marriage. Attempting to have such a right with a virgin, he was engaged for a while to an 11-year-old but he even kept his mistress. The only redemption for sexuality, he said, is the resurrection of the body. Unfortunately, this kind of warped theology was later legitimized by two subsequent popes. The concept of original sin was first introduced into the Roman church when Christian bishops began arguing about the pre-existence of the soul. Reincarnation had always been a part of the early Christian canon for the first five centuries of the common era and was openly taught by Yahshua, yes, that is absolutely true. As we shall see, it was part of the belief system of the Essenes and the Pharisees, two of the three.