about the religious haters or lumpers, I think all religious thinkers accept a fatal flaw, they their way is the only right way and every other way is not right, wrong, or even pure evil... condemning anything is not the pure love of spirituality, or God's love as we may call it... but most religious people (as opposed to spiritual people) readily accept condemnation (and the prejudices, the lumping)...

people of any group are judged by the actions (or inactions) of the majority of that group...

some people fear and lump all Muslims into an "evil terrorist" label because a small percentage of Muslims do horrible things with legal and holy sanction (from the Muslim perspective) and the vast majority of the Muslim world look the other way, allowing all the horrible things to happen without standing up and standing *against* the horrible things...

some people fear and limp all Christians into the "evil empire" label because a small percentage of Christians do horrible things and have vast power to wage war with a legal and holy sanction (from the Western perspective) and the vast majority of Christians look the other way, allowing all the horrible things to happen without standing up and standing *against* the horrible things...

but how do the horrible things happen?... who does them?... who pays for them?...

where do the weapons come from, mass destruction or basic rifles, bombs or missles or bio-terror?... they come from government projects... mostly from governments dominated by Western, Judeo-Christian belief systems... from the tax dollars the vast majority of Judeo-Christians pay to the government... from the oil and natural resources pulled from the Earth...

it has nothing to do with God or any gods or any spiritual path, it has everything to do with the corruption of the religious organizations, religious values, and the abandonment of basic human decency and ethics and enlightened thought (or God-thought, if you follow my reasoning)...

those who claim to represent God, those most powerful leaders who declare wars and point fingers of hate and fear at others in the name of God are our leaders...

they represent us...

we stand by their actions because we tolerate them, we accept them, in many cases, because we've become so afraid, we support them...

so we hate them and they hate us and we kill them and they kill us and everyone goes about their daily lives as if noone has any responsibility for the small percentage of boths sides waging war, verbally, physically, and intellectually, against each other...

against us...

war makes the leaders rich, so that's their incentive to continue waging it, to continue the fear-based rhetoric, to continue the hating...

but why do we allow it?...

blinded by fear?... apathy?... too busy struggling to make ends meet?... to busy trying to keep our heads above water to care?...

who actively stands up and tells their leaders to stop the hate, the killing, the terror?... and what do we get out of our tacit silent support of the hate-mongers?...

left alone?...

seems like a very high price to pay for a tiny bubble of peace, especially when it's such a fear-filled false and peace...

and temporary...

where is the spirituality, the love, the truth?...

buried under busy days, eaten away by fear, erased by the way we close our hearts and turn off our minds so we don't have to face the real news, our own tolerance (even thrill) for spilled blood and killing and horrible things we've developed as a species...

all the organized religions start with the same spirituality... love... be good... do good for each other and for God and heaven awaits... don't fear death if you are a good person and true to love and God... that's where it all begins...

doctors and theologists and other intellectuals and wise people can debate forever about whether there is some fatal flaw in the human character, in the genome, perhaps, that leads us to need someone to hate and fear... a devil or even a God... or a people who created a tradition, a religion that is different from the religion we choose...

all I can do is hold out my open hand and offer as pure as love as I can find inside of myself as honestly as I can give it... I write letters to world leaders and my government officials telling them I do not want them spending my money on any thing or activity that kills or hurts... and whenever I am lead to think about it, like now, I express my views as honestly as I can...

I ask questions that few want to hear and fewer want to answer... I keep asking even when I know I might be annoying because the questions are one path, spiritual or not, toward true peace and love... the answers to the questions can start us on changing the fear and hate...

greedy leaders control our world today...

we let them...

no religion is going to change that fact... and no diety is changing it either... whatever we believe, whatever we believe in, the world is left in our hands... life is about what we do, what we say...

if spirituality is going to change the world for the better it is because the majority of people or at least enough people decide to act on the spirituality instead of staying silent and tolerating the hate and perpetrating the fear...
as long as the majority pretends it is someone else's fault, someone else's responsibility to stop the hate and reach past the fear, then we continue down the road of self-destruction as a species...

we perpetuate the cycle...

as long as we can continue ignoring the news and tsk tsking or blaming someone else for the hate and fear that feeds the terror and allows our leaders to act as though killing others is a good thing for us, then we choose death over life, we choose hate and fear over peace and love...

someday I hope we all choose peace and love...

and not just the words...