EMBRACE GOD OVER MAN-MADE RELIGION

Beneath the Spin*Eric L. Wattree 

EXCELLENCE IS THE KEY TO BLACK EQUALITY 

EMBRACE GOD OVER MAN-MADE RELIGION 

 

I don't expect many people to understand my point of view on God versus man’s religion, because it's taken me a lifetime to come to terms with it myself, and I'm still growing as I speak. But God and religion are two completely different things. God is existence itself. He, she, or it is what “is” is. God is whatever force is responsible for what we refer to as reality. So if we exist, so does God, because we exist within God - we're a part of God, as is all of existence. Religion, on the other hand, is merely a bunch of fairytales invented and compiled by man to get other men to believe he speaks on behalf of God. So religion is not the word of God, it's the word of mere germs under a toilet seat. It's man's attempt to convince other men that he knows what’s on God’s mind, in an effort to gain power, prestige, and wealth. That explains why there are over 4200 different religions on Earth. But if God had anything to do with any of them, there would only be one, right?

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But it’s useless to try to convince most people of that, because chances are, they were indoctrinated into their religious beliefs while they were children, and “the fear of God” was placed in them long before they had the ability to think for themselves. They were taught that if they ever questioned what they’d been taught for even one second, that would constitute a “lack of faith,” and a lack of faith is a slap in the face of God. So if they didn’t repent, mend their ways, and ask for forgiveness immediately, God would smite them, and condemn them to burn in the pits of Hell throughout eternity.  

That’s a hell of a punishment for a God who’s supposed to be loving. It sounds more like man, and in fact it is. It’s man’s way of keeping other men locked-in and so afraid to question what they’ve been told that they'd refuse to ever consider the validity of what they'd been taught for even a fleeting moment - and for most, it's working brilliantly. 

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But even as a kid, all that walking dead men and talking snake stuff sounded fishy to me. I got tired of bumping into poles because I had my eyes closed praying for forgiveness for looking at a girl's ass. So I decided to embrace God in my own way, and I kick my man-imposed religion to the curb. So at the tender age of 14 years old, one Sunday, even as Rev. Edward Victor Hill was preaching Hell and damnation, I stood up and walked out of the church never to look back - and later as an adult, I never took my son and daughter to church once, for the very same reason I didn't expose them to drugs.
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My grandfather, who was a devout Christian, but with a sense humor, used to tell a funny story about that episode. He said after I left the church and refused to return, the Reverend sent his assistant pastor to the house to try talk to me, and they haven’t seen him since. I don't know whether that was true or not, but the assistant pastor and I did have an extended discussion, and he did seem to be paying close attention. 
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MY MOTHER, VERLEE WATTREE,
AND REV. E.V. HILL

The only thing I regret about the episode was I found it necessary to sever my relationship with Rev. Hill. I always liked the Reverend. He was a very impressive and charismatic man - and after all, he did baptize me. But ironically, over thirty years later my son went to college with his secretary's daughter, and since my son is named after me, the Reverend knew exactly who he was. So we were able to have a very pleasant, and mutually respectful, conversation over the phone as peers. That gave me an opportunity to get closure on our relationship just before he died. I thank God for that, because in spite of the fact that I rejected his beliefs, I always felt guilty about getting up and walking out in the middle of his sermon. It was disrespectful, and disrespect is ungodly. I had only turned my back on the Reverend's beliefs, not the man, or God. But as I sat there in church, I just couldn't take it any more. I couldn't just sit there pretending to believe something that I considered nonsense. But that wasn't the Reverend's fault. I do believe that he was being sincere in his beliefs.  

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After I left the church, I began to reassess everything I’d been taught to believe up until that time. As a result, the fantasies that most people casually accepted as common sense due to their childhood indoctrination, I saw as nonsense. But again, I started on my journey at 14 years old in response to Rev. E. V. Hill spewing what I easily recognized as conservative nonsense disguised as the will of God. He was a Black conservative, and just before I walked out, he was preaching about the "sin" of young Black women wearing short skirts and the Natural hairstyle. So when I got up and walked out of church, I didn't know it at the time, but I was not only rejecting religion, but conservative propaganda, which I later found was one and the same. 

RELIGIOUS LUNACY

So, no, I don’t expect people to understand how I see religion, because it’s taken me a lifetime to understand it myself. It took me half-a-lifetime just to get over the fear of being honest with myself. After being brainwashed with the threat of eternal damnation as a child, it was a very frightening thing to admit that God didn’t make men Gods. It took me over half my life to admit that Jesus was just another man, and all of the stories of the magic tricks he was supposed to have performed were all myths.
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That's right, I said it. God doesn’t deal in magic, so Jesus was just a man like any other man. That’s why he died like any other man when they stabbed him. No, he didn't die for our sins. He died because they stabbed him, but his followers had to come up with a way to justify how a "God" could die. So they came up with the "died for our sins scenario" as the perfect explanation. Then they went and stole his body out of his crypt and claimed that he got up and walked away, another blatant lie.
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God doesn't work that way. He doesn't deal in magic tricks. God is the essence of logic and consistency. And why would God have to go through all that? If God wanted to make a point, why didn't he just have Jesus laugh at his tormentors after they stabbed him? That would have said it all, and it would have been a case-closed event. But wait, I know. "God works in mysterious ways," right? Christians are very practiced, so they have an answer for everything that doesn't make sense.

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What I just described is perfect logic, and if the average person hadn’t been indoctrinated into Christianity as a child, the facts would be just as crystal clear to everyone else as they are to me. But their judgment has been obstructed by their religious beliefs. So my journey away from religious indoctrination informed me in many other ways as well. It demonstrated to me just how easy it is to take control of people’s minds, and that had tremendous political ramifications – like how many White people have been brainwashed into believing in their superiority, and on the downside, how many Black people have been brainwashed into embracing the religion of a people who claim they're inferior - and even that, has risen to the level of a religious belief. They even tried to explain away the brilliance of Barack Obama as being demonic. 

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So while many people are motivated by their desperate attempt to get into Heaven when they die, I don't think in those terms. My new knowledge of just how weak-minded man can be alerted me to the importance of focusing on intellectual development. We must stop indulging in religious fairytales and strive to develop our intellectual acuity, and that entails questioning everything. So my ultimate goal in life became intellectual development. I'm fixated on it, like most Christians are fixated on getting into Heaven. So I don’t waste my time speculating about the hereafter, because if God wanted me to know what was going to happen to me after my death, he would have given me a way of knowing. So, I see the Christian obsession with going to Toyland after we die for just what it is – a childish fairytale.  

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So as I watch people get all decked out and filing out for Sunday services, I look upon it as a religious ritual, a Voodoo dance, and a gross waste of time. What’s so Godly about getting all dressed up every Sunday morning to go and pay to be screamed at?  For me, it only shows how easily people can be misguided and manipulated. It's not only a meaningless ritual that serves no useful purpose, but a gross waste of time and money. When was the last time you heard anything in church that you hadn’t heard a thousand times before? I’ll take a chance and answer that for you - never. So what’s the point of it?  I’ll tell you the point. The role of the church is not to teach about God, because nobody in the church knows anything about God. The one and only role of the church is to give you a booster shot of brainwashing every Sunday to keep you in line. 

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The time we waste being screamed at every Sunday morning could be used in contemplation, learning something new, or bonding with our family. But instead, we spend it reinforcing our childhood brainwashing. Thus, church serves only one purpose - to convince us not to think, and since God created birds to fly, fish to swim, and man to think, church is actually, ungodly.
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THE BIBLE BELT

The most religious people on Earth are also the most backward and undereducated, and religion is routinely used to promote social prejudices. The religion of the Taliban doesn't allow women to go to school, speak in public, or handle personal business without a male sponsor; and the religious right supported Trump's policy of separating immigrant families and putting children in cages. In addition, what we refer to as "The Bible Belt" is the most hateful and bigoted areas in the United States. These things are no accident. Religion and ignorance has always gone hand in hand, because the very foundation of religion is based on consuming supposed "facts" without any validating substantiation. 

ABOUT CHRISTIANS, THE BIBLE, AND GOD  

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The hearts of Black Christians are in the right place, but they're misguided. I know, because I was raised by Christians, and I’m also a man of God. But we learned about God in the wrong way, and from the wrong people. Look at how ungodly the people are who taught us about God. As they taught us to love thy neighbor, they were lynching us on a whim, and as they taught us how to do unto others, they held us in bondage. So how can we even begin to believe in the nonsense they taught us?

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They taught us as children to have "faith" in their word, and if we didn’t believe, it would anger God and he would condemn us to burn in the pits of Hell throughout eternity. But that's nonsense on many levels. God doesn't need a book to speak to us. He speaks to us through our hearts and our minds. The book we've been taught to have faith in is the superstitious rantings of 3000-year-old dead men who didn't know any more about God than we do. They wrote it to mislead us into believing in the word of man, and honoring them, instead of following the true word of God that resides within our hearts. How do I know this? Because I’ve listened to the word of God, the words that God whispered into my heart. And God has whispered to my heart that these false prophets don’t even follow their own words:  

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PRAY IN PRIVATE  

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"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. ... But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” MATTHEW 6 

(CONTINUED)  

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 WAKE UP, PEOPLE, AND STOP PUTTING MAN BEFORE GOD 

https://wattree.blogspot.com/2021/04/wake-up-people-and-stop-putting-man.html 

 

Eric L. Wattree 
Http://wattree.blogspot.com 

Ewattree@Gmail.com 
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA) 
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.