A majority of the people of our world are followers of some religion. Religion is their platform or institution to express their devotion or faith to a divine power.
But religious faiths and religions have caused immense hatreds, wars and bloodsheds in this world and that is one of the reasons that make those people with a higher mind capacity to think negatively of religion. That might even force them to abandon their belief in any unseen divine universe power and might turn them into atheists.
If God is one and all humans are children of one true God, then this kind of a situation should not arise.
Indeed some thing has gone wrong some where !
To find out that something which went wrong, we should try to find out the character of a true religion and the value such a genuine religion can have in our lives.
Let us consider some of the following statements from my divine guide book regarding the character of a true religion :
Genuine religion renders the religionist socially fragrant and creates insights into human fellowship. But the formalization of religious groups many times destroys the very values for the promotion of which the group was organized.
Human friendship and divine religion are mutually helpful and significantly illuminating if the growth in each is equalized and harmonized. True religion puts new meaning into all group associations—families, schools, and clubs. It imparts new values to play and exalts all true humor.
True religion is a meaningful way of living dynamically face to face with the commonplace realities of everyday life.
But if religion is to stimulate individual development of character and augment integration of personality, it must not be standardized. If it is to stimulate evaluation of experience and serve as a value-lure, it must not be stereotyped. If religion is to promote supreme loyalties, it must not be formalized.
No matter what upheavals may attend the social and economic growth of civilization, religion is genuine and worth while if it fosters in the individual an experience in which the sovereignty of truth, beauty, and goodness prevails, for such is the true spiritual concept of supreme reality. And through love and worship this becomes meaningful as fellowship with man and sonship with God.
After all, it is what one believes rather than what one knows that determines conduct and dominates personal performances. Purely factual knowledge exerts very little influence upon the average man unless it becomes emotionally activated. But the activation of religion is superemotional, unifying the entire human experience on transcendent levels through contact with, and release of, spiritual energies in the mortal life.
During the psychologically unsettled times of the twentieth century, amid the economic upheavals, the moral crosscurrents, and the sociologic rip tides of the cyclonic transitions of a scientific era, thousands upon thousands of men and women have become humanly dislocated; they are anxious, restless, fearful, uncertain, and unsettled; as never before in the world's history they need the consolation and stabilization of sound religion. In the face of unprecedented scientific achievement and mechanical development there is spiritual stagnation and philosophic chaos.
There is no danger in religion's becoming more and more of a private matter—a personal experience—provided it does not lose its motivation for unselfish and loving social service. Religion has suffered from many secondary influences: sudden mixing of cultures, intermingling of creeds, diminution of ecclesiastical authority, changing of family life, together with urbanization and mechanization.
Religion has always been a conservator of morals and a stabilizer of society. And this is still true, notwithstanding the contrary teaching of many modern socialists and humanists.
Always keep in mind: True religion is to know God as your Father and man as your brother.
Religion is not a slavish belief in threats of punishment or magical promises of future mystical rewards.
Sectarianism is a disease of institutional religion, and dogmatism is an enslavement of the spiritual nature. It is far better to have a religion without a church than a church without religion.
As religion becomes institutionalized, its power for good is curtailed, while the possibilities for evil are greatly multiplied.
Man can never wisely decide temporal issues or transcend the selfishness of personal interests unless he meditates in the presence of the sovereignty of God and reckons with the realities of divine meanings and spiritual values.
If you have read it all, please do some meditation on these in solemn divine presence !
Share your convictions with your fellow beings !
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