Godliness + gullibility: a marriage made in hell?

So now it’s okay to be gay, according to Pope Francis. Before, it was forbidden by God as intrinsically evil and a mortal sin. (Not that we need anyone’s permission to love.) If God exists, though, I doubt that he changes his mind just because we humans become more assertive about our rights. Nor would he make mistakes, although humans certainly do. So what does this say about the Church’s credibility …not to mention our gullibility? And if the Church preached beliefs that served to control us and had nothing to do with God, how has that distortion affected our psyche, our sense of self, and our evolution?

Or did Pope Francis get a private update from God, recently, and forget to tell us? I can just imagine how that went:

God: Francis, I’ve messed up. I said it was a sin to be a homosexual, but I got it wrong and you’re going to have to put a positive spin on things, down there. Tell them I’ve had a lot on my plate, that I’ve been multi-tasking like crazy and things can get hellishly confusing when you’ve got an important job like mine. Politicians understand this. They know how it is.

Pope Francis: No problem, God. I’m on it. I’m bringing all kinds of good things to the people and they love me so much, now—especially the homosexuals—that a small thing like that won’t matter. And, if anyone objects, I’ll just say that the early Church misinterpreted things and I’ll be sure not to put the blame on you.

God: But that’s going to make the Church look bad. Won’t that affect your credibility?

Pope Francis: Not for long. We’ll just do what politicians do—blame those who were in power before us, and keep them distracted with important issues such as money and poverty. Anyway, everyone’s so blown away by how nice I am, for a pope, that they’re not looking too closely at this stuff. It’s almost as if they’re desperate for some evidence that the Church is there for them, to justify their blind faith in us. I’m untouchable. Even the media are afraid to say anything nasty about me. And this social media stuff is fantastic. Have you seen how many Facebook friends I’ve got?

But this is not about whether the Church got it wrong or even whether its teachings are valid. It’s about how readily we accept what we’re told—about God and about ourselves. Because we haven’t just been told what to think of God; we’ve been told what God thinks of us—and it’s not good, according to most world religions. This manmade intervention between us and God creates all kinds of problems with our self-worth, our healthy sense of entitlement and our autonomy, not to mention our innate spirituality. It explains why we fail to question certain issues, accepting them at face value, while we question almost everything else in life—politicians, the media, secondhand-car salesmen, our relationships, our opinions, our feelings, our rights and our acceptability. Yet, ironically, all of those self-doubts come from us having been directly or indirectly programmed to believe that we cannot trust ourselves and that we’re unworthy.

Over 2 billion Christians believe what they’ve been told about God, about themselves, and about their inadequacies—and we’ve all been conditioned to be subservient to a higher power that supposedly knows more than we do about what’s right or healthy for us. Such power over our hearts, minds and spirit is only possible because we’ve lost our own spiritual connection—our own internal moral compass, our unerring intuition and our essential divinity. We’ve lost touch with the deeper truth—that we are god and that there is no separation between us and universal consciousness, of which we are an integral part.

Faith in self—our rocket fuel for life

We are stand-alone units of self-sufficiency, with all the faculties and creativity we need in order to thrive, love and connect with others, and powerfully orchestrate our lives. We’re not born with a ball and chain attached to our legs, yet we often live and act as if we were. If we had more faith in ourselves than in anything or anyone else, how might that change our world? How might that enhance our confidence, our contribution, our communications, our choices, our ambitions, our leadership, our actions and our interactions—personally, professionally and politically?

Nothing would have a more profound, salutary or empowering effect on our planet than that single shift in human perspective.

Having faith in something outside of ourselves undermines our evolution, whereas having faith in ourselves is like rocket fuel, opening up a world of infinite possibilities. It’s the key to fulfillment and to accessing our spiritual essence. It’s also the quality most urgently needed on our planet, if we are ever to create a healthy balance or true democracy. As human beings, we’re designed to trust our innate wisdom and to have faith in our intuitive ability to follow our own unique path. Anything else is a distortion of our essential humanity.

I believe in the power of me and in the power of you. Together, as a team, we can do amazing things …unless we allow others to convince us that we’re not good enough, that we’re victims, that we should take sides, that we must compete in order to survive, and that they know best. Religions have a lot to answer for …but so do we, if we fail to reclaim our autonomy, our humanity, and the mastery of our own minds and lives.