History has shown repeatedly that for any religion to gain followers it must embody at least one of three elements: if it contains all three it is a surefire winner. The necessary ingredients in the recipe for initiating an organized religion include: 1) a mythology; 2) a claim of miracles; 3) a definite doctrine regarding the “hereafter.”
Most people are brought up in or gravitate to a religion that is colored with mythology that includes alleged miracles about which they may express awe and fear. Such seekers also generally feel a need for a limitless eternity that is nevertheless alluded to in measurements that imitate their own limited understanding of mortal life. That way the seekers do not have to measure up too drastically in order to claim the promised reward for believing.
Braided into this recipe for an organized religion are three common restrictions that allegedly assure special favor from heaven. These are: 1) submit to “the will of god”—which actually means that followers must do whatever the mouthpiece of the cult says; 2) release oneself of personal desire—meaning much the same as the first restriction; 3) advance the “faith” through self-sacrifice—again meaning the followers must be thoughtless slaves for the “faith.”
Basically these three restrictive demands produce believers that consequently struggle with inner resentments that often become emotionally destructive. If all the above mentioned ingredients are incorporated into the “faith,” the inevitable result for that rigid belief system is the degeneration into a trinity of deadly sins common to all hard-line religions, which are: 1) literalism; 2) formalism; 3) dogmatism—all of which are designed to crush any sense of personal communication with the universal essences that freely creates as ultimate Cause. These three sins of hard-line religions then transform what little spiritual content of belief that the belief system might have to offer into material obsession.
The reasons for this are: 1) literalism is the insistence upon taking self-serving accounts written by unknown authors–but always attributed to some divinely blessed person–as unquestionable truth; 2) formalism is the excessive and often rigorous adherence to man-invented ceremonies that are concerned entirely with external, extraneous aspects of worship that supposedly attract divine attention; 3) dogmatism is the assertion that particular beliefs are authoritative, and that unproven or improvable principles presented as spiritual guidance must be accepted as absolute truth.
Are such man-concocted indulgences really in the best interest of mankind’s higher potential?
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