I was raised in the church, sang in the choir from the time I was little until my mid-teens, went to youth group, and most of my family’s outings were church campouts and picnics.

At the age of 16 while sitting in the balcony listening to the Sunday sermon and the preacher telling me who was going to heaven and who wasn’t, a switch flipped. The programming no longer ran true. That day, not sure why that day in particular, but that was the day that I left the church.

I still went for the next two years–had to, since I was living at home–but it was never the same. I never had the same buy-in, the same confidence in the message, the trust in the words. For a time, I threw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. Jesus was a fraud. The whole church thing was a scam, and if it wasn’t, if it was true then I didn’t want anything to do with that God or the people who believed in him.

Fast forward to today …

Jesus is my brother, my good friend, a teacher, but the religion created in his name is still a fraud and if he was here he’d say the same thing.

Jesus didn’t pull punches when he walked this earth. He still doesn’t but you won’t see that unless you are willing to look beyond the fairy tales and see what religion is really selling. If you are willing to listen to his words with your heart, you’ll see that the message from most pulpits isn’t the teaching of Jesus. In fact, it has no resemblance at all.

His message was never about being God’s son, a deity appearing as man. It was never about saving others other than by showing the way, not the way to believe, but the way to be. His message was was about a man, a human male, who saw through empire’s lies and spoke truth to power.

He was a champion of the people who stood for the poor and destitute, for those disenfranchised by that same empire. Because he had awakened, because he had spent years doing his inner work, seeing through the lies of programming, he no longer feared death and someone who is that fearless is a threat to empire.

He was a flesh and blood being who was crucified because he was uncontrollable, because he wouldn’t stand down, because he saw through the lies … and he was transformed into a God by the very people who hung him on a cross, the same ones who demanded control then and who demand control today.

What better way to do that than to make a hero of the people into someone beyond the reach of ordinary man? Even today, 2000 years later, any words that even hint at the flaws in the accepted story are heresy. Putting distance between Jesus and the rest of us, handy if you don’t want his message going viral, was simply a brilliant political move.

The bells and whistles, hoops and hoopla, were created to control those who do, and even those who don’t, call themselves Christians, and it is abusive. It tells people they don’t need to do their own work, don’t need to spend their 40 days and nights in the desert, don’t need to face their doubts and most certainly are forgiven for every bad thing they do.

It prevents people from realizing who they are, what they are, and who and what Jesus was. It manipulates emotions and exploits fear to distract people from the path of awakening, from the recognition of not twoness, from the actuality of their divinely human, humanly divine brotherhood and sisterhood.

And that my friends, is an abuse of power. It twisted words of understanding and love into something that doesn’t even approach the teachings of Jesus, which by the way are the same teachings as every enlightened master. Love. Love one another. Take care of each other. Your humanity is divine.

As a naive and innocent young girl, I was taught to fear God, that if I didn’t believe in the right way, God would throw me into the pit of hell. Depending on which church and which minister I listened to, the requirements shifted, adding to the confusion, but all of them pointed to the one and only way out of the bind that God, by virtue of my human birth, put me into.

If you’re a literal sort, God made the rules, created the snake and the apple, deftly instigating the fall from grace. Then he made up the conditions for redemption. That’s a pretty sick God if you ask me.

That a God of love would punish those who don’t understand his contorted rules seemed to me like a God created in man’s image, not a real God. Once I began thinking (perhaps that’s why so many pulpits are against intelligence) it never ever made sense to me.

If God is omnipresent that means he’s everywhere and everything, snake, apple, me and you. Perhaps religion is designed to shield us from that knowledge. Who’d of guessed!

Believe and be saved. Believe what? The Bible? Which of the many contradictions and versions? The literal Bible? Okay, which one? Believe the preacher? Same questions. The current best interpretation? What crap!

If believe and be saved is true then many Christians either don’t genuinely believe, or believing doesn’t save anyone, because most are scared shitless of living, let alone dying. If they weren’t they wouldn’t feel compelled to control everyone and everything.

There is just too much white static around the edges for me to get on board. God murdered his son to save me and all I have to do is believe in the murderer (and his murdered son) and beg forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? For being born human? For an apple God planted in the garden eons before?

What I find truly wonderful in this whole story is that regardless of the concerted programming, the tons of pressure to conform being applied, the certainty of excommunication and shunning, of being on the outside and headed straight for hell, many of us are seeing through the deception.

We are waking up despite all the effort to keep us swaddled in a manger of intentional misinformation and duplicity. We are breaking through the wall that was built between us and our divinity, our natural birthright. Like Joshua at Jericho, we are bringing that man-created wall down.

Image by Dolgren