Faith 3X3X3

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 for establishment of a religion include: 1) a mythology; 2) a claim of miracles; 3) a difinite doctrine regarding the "hereafter."

Most people want a religion that is colored with mythology that also 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 they do not have to measure up too drastically in order to claim the promised reward for their chosen belief.

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 means followers must do whatever the mouthpiece says; 2) release self of personal desire--meaning much the same as the first; and 3) advance the "faith" through self-sacrifice--again meaning followers must be thoughtless, suffering slaves for God.

Basically these three restrictions produce believers that sometimes become emotionally destructive. Genuine history has further shown that if these fundamental cult-prescriptions are followed without question the ultimate result was destruction of social and intellectual progress.

If all the above mentioned elements and restrictions are met, the inevitable result for that corporate-style belief system is to slip into the trinity of deadly sins by which all hard-line religions are known: 1) literalism, 2) formalism, and 3) dogmatism. This trinity functions to crush any sense of personal communication with the universal essences that creates as the ultimate Cause.

What little spiritual content the belief system might have offered is then transfigured into material obsession because:

1) Literalism is the insistence upon taking self-serving accounts written by unknown authors--but which are always attributed to some divinely blessed person--as unquestionable truth. 2) Formalism is the excessive and often rigorous adherence to man-invented ceremonies concerned entirely with external, extraneous aspects of worship that supposedly attract divine attention. And 3) Dogmatism is the assertion that particular beliefs are authorative, and that their unproven and improvable principles presented as spiritual guidance must be accepted as absolute truth.

Initiating and preserving these schisms between rationality and faith does not serve in the best interest of humankind's higher potential.