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Religious myth
By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut
An unending flow of irrelevancy
Demythologizing us (taking the myths out of our patterns of thought) is a great way to start over in life. If we want to breathe again, we have to let go of things in the past that are not allowing us to do this.
Because we are so caught up in the myths, they choke the life from us. We are often completely unaware of just how much this is happening to us.
I see all formal religion, itself, as mostly a trap, a crutch and a dead-end. It's a waste of time, and of life.
Jesus thought so, and that's why he spoke out against the religious structures of his day.
As a race of Man, we are still not freed, after all this time in our growth and evolution, from ways that keep us tied to fear and confinement. And today, in the name of Jesus, even greater mind prisons have been built and fortified through the annals of time.
This is hardly just a phenomenon of the West. Easterners too must see the ways that their religious shackles must come off. While great insight and benefit is possible from the teachings of the East, far too often it is not happening, because adherence to their myths, and their confining doctrines continually hold them back.
We all must become free of it if we are to fully live; from the East, to the West, and back again. As a world of Men, we must all get ourselves somehow free again.
The irrelevancy that flows continuously from orthodox and authoritarian teachings, regardless of the source, stifles lives, and inhibits growth. Yet we stay within these structures. Some are always hoping to change this flow from within.
But how can we merely update a corrupt myth? Better to abolish it?
Some just do not know what to do to replace all of the myths that have supported their thinking for so long. They are strong and fearless enough to think about boycotting these power-mongers who run the traditions, and even in most cases to go so far as to stop the funding (manifested through legal forms of societal tax evasion) that has helped keep their myth-spreading functions possible.
Things might be different if these institutions were spreading love, and charity, wherever they go. They aren't. When one is busy protecting the "castle," the concerns of the townspeople living around it don't exactly get first priority.
The new "moat" project has not been met yet, and a dozen new alligators are on backorder. Where really is the time for charity work?
So, instead, their propaganda and narrow worldviews continue as forms of power accessing and fear-mongering. They are infectious diseases of the worst kind. They prevent people from standing up on their own feet; rather, they provide places for them to hide, where they can refuse to face a world on their own, and move on their individualized path of personal evolution and solitude.
Conformity is a primary goal of these groups. Under the guise of being united, authorities push for a streamlined, seamless knitting of all minds together as one with God's Mind. There is thus little room to think on your own, and even less room to seriously question anything.
You are with the other outsiders when you introduce outside ideas. The chief sin is to be an outsider. So the myths that propel these movements are "practiced" over and over and over again, while "sacred scripture" is used to back everything up, and nothing from the outside world is allowed to penetrate this hermetically sealed, religious bio-world that has been devised.
Little it is that they know how much they have already been "infected" with thought that are not strictly from their own orthodoxies. The add-ons and take-a-ways that have been building through the ages provide a version of who they are as a shadow of their former selves.
Whatever the original founder started out to do and be, the blundering followers saw to it that they certainly are not that anymore.
In the first place, and when you think about it, it is amazing to imagine that people should try and conform to the ideas of extinct cultures and antiquities, when in our modern times we have available to us so many ways to grow and evolve. But if it proves too difficult to stand up singularly, as a man, and face the reverse flow, who is going to voice a descent?
As to the myths themselves, they are many, and too numerous to even mention. They concern how we see the world, function in it, report to our superiors, fall in line, and maintain our place.
They are old and static accounts of past worldviews that, while no longer containing relevancy in a newer time and world, are maintained because of comfort, and security, and historical preservation.
The antiquity is not even quaint. And we can't live back there anymore, back in those places with them.
We must find the courage to move on, and face life as it comes to us today, without the defenses that applied to previous times and places.
We must lovingly put these myths to their rightful rest.
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