Most human beings need to believe in something and monotheistic religions give people the absolute certainties that they seek as well as peace and hope of a life after death. A religion stresses the importance of having faith even though the information that is given is not based on any kind of proof. Most religious people are not interested in proof anyway, because deep down they want to believe that something or someone is really watching over them, it makes them feel less lonely, and gives meaning to their lives.
Also, a lot of people need guidance in their lives, just like children need parents to tell them what is right and what is wrong and how they will be rewarded if they behave in a certain way or punished if they do not obey. It is the same with religion. It helps guide people through life by telling them how they should behave and what they should believe in.
Nobody truly knows what kind of message the prophets were trying to transmit to the world, since we do not know how much of their message was interpreted by other people before putting it in writing, how much information was modified, edited, or simply misused to control people and make them believe a different story.
For instance, in the Christian religion, not all of Jesus’ messages were included in the New Testament. During the Council of Carthage of 397, the church left out some of the gospels and writings where Jesus Christ preached for the human spiritual awakening, the existence of an inner God inside each human being and the unicity of man with God. Due to a simple lack of understanding or a will to control the populations by means of fear of an exterior god, the church hid the teachings related to humans as spiritual beings with a divine spark. Instead, just like all the monotheistic religions, humans were manipulated into believing that only God was in control of their lives, and that people had to submit to His will. As people started identifying with these monotheistic religions and being controlled by them, they completely detached from their inner self and lost the opportunity for a spiritual awakening.
As opposed to religion, a spiritual path provides so many different options of what the “truth” could be and mean for each individual. It is up to each individual to realise and sense what feels right, to analyse and understand the Universe in which he or she lives in and to reinstate the awareness of Unicity.
Guilt and sin are no longer the main factors in the agenda but rather the freedom to search for the truth by asking the right questions…
In monotheistic religions, God is portrayed almost as human, with moods, ideas and credos. It is pretentious of human beings to believe that the Superior Power that created the entire and infinite Universe would have similar thought processes about life, good and bad, right and wrong or even be concerned with the details of the lives of humans on this planet. And why would such an enormous and amazing force be concerned about whether we believe in Him, or not? Ego is a human trait. The Absolute just Is whether humans want to believe it or not. If God had the same thinking patterns as humans, he would not be God. People do not exactly understand what God really is, and therefore they give Him a human resemblance and behavioural process. Of course, poor interpretations and translations of various sacred books have not helped to quench this misunderstanding and therefore God keeps being brought down to a human level, as if we were indeed created literally “in His image”, thus making Him a human above humans.
The result of thousands of years of misinterpretations along with human ego and greed have turned religions into means to control populations rather than truly help them evolve spiritually.
