Today's established religions, while they may inspire some or provide spiritual satisfaction to true believers, serve no real purpose other than to divide. Culture today is filled with stratification and divisiveness, and religion is just one prominent example. What people seem to forget is that, in the end there is a common thread that connects almost every religion and belief system... past and present. This is the idea that we are all interconnected, and any decision you make, whether you deem it consequential or not, ripples out into the world around you and affects others.
The progress of the human species is the sum of all our actions, and I would argue that belief in a "God" can only hold us back. There is no "God" in the sense that there is some angry loving man in the sky, who wants you to act a certain way but might not smite you if you don't. There IS a collective unconscious, a web that weaves the entire universe together (string theory), this is the true meaning of "God". All that ever was, is or will be came from a point of pure, unfathomable energy (the idea of infinity, if you will) and has been expanding outward. It will inevitably reverse this expansion, a collapse of all things back onto Source is unavoidable.
People who have reached "enlightenment", these people understand this. They can feel truly connected to everything and everyone, and in reality this is exactly the case. Here's some food for thought:
-We are composed of atoms, so is everything around us. The entire universe, everything in it is made up of these same atoms
-Reduced to the most simple model, an atom is simply energy. 99.999% empty space, with orbiting electrical energy (electrons) and a central neutron of negligible mass (composed of energetic particles and held together by one of the 4 known basic forces, the strong interaction).
-These atoms are created by highly energetic reactions inside stars, the kinds of reactions hopefully being recreated at CERN. This means that every atom in your body, in your neighbors body, and the ground you walk on to get to their house, it all came from the stars.
So basically, everything around you is energy... there really isn't a material form in existence. Our senses have just developed in a way that allows us to interpret this energy based on past experience. You take this energy in all the time, just as readily as you release energy. The more negativity, fear, hatred, and greed in the world... the more readily negative energy becomes available all around us. The more love, compassion and understanding in the world... the more readily positive energy becomes available to us. In case you haven't checked on the state of the world in... like 20 years... there's a lot of negative energy out there.
Now that I've gotten this far, I have absolutely no idea where I was trying to go with this post... other than to make the argument that "God" is an archaic concept that is holding us back as a civilization. I'll leave anyone who actually read this far with a link to check out here:
http://www.ascension-research.org/reality.html
