Hi Hawkeye-
If you'll forgive my rather cynical outlook,  I personally feel that organized religion operates as a level of apologetics between the basic urges to screw our neighbors for our own hedonic gratification in sensuality, power, possessions etc, and the higher moral sense that is necessary in order to maintan a social environment. As an example, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldoun pointed out that the purpose of society is to gather enough survival skills in a single place that a group might endure, despite an environment in which an individual would certainly perish. We tend to idolize and extol these social virtues as "virtues", and sometimes we even have Inquisitions and suicide bombers to help clarify the great value of our efforts as a means of social progress.

In the more abstract spiritual sense, the religious community provides a jumping off point for spiritual understanding. While few formal religions, especially in the materialist West, will propose anything concrete about the afterlife, they all hint at something yet to come. As we cycle through repeated lifetimes, we eventually get the message that something more than sheer materiality is happening, and start looking for transcendent phenomena. This takes us out of and beyond the realm of orthodox priestcraft, and we enter a region in which we are responsible for our own spiritual development, usually leading us to a less organized group that is more fundamentally grounded in experiential fact. One example is the group of soul retrievers surroundng Bruce and his books.

The next step is to grow beond this by abandoning attachments to the materiality in which we were born, as we accept the spirituality that is our ultimate heritage. In terms of our ultimate transcendence we simply cease to be defined as "things" with attachments or as "bodies" with dependencies, and from the posture of "no-thing and no-body" we abandon attachments to any specific world view, and melt back into the undefinable nature of th Creator. At this level we can see that all the diverse roads at the bottom of the spiritual mountain do indeed join into one at the top - a fact that is generaly far from evident.

dave

dave_a_mbs wrote on Jul 19^th, 2007 at 4:25pm:

Dave you are the man!! Enuff said!! I agree, with you!

peace

My feeling is that we are here in the physical for a short stay, for whatever reason, and the hope is that we make the best of it, so things are as pleasant here as possible, and so the way we live while in the physical doesn't prevent us from moving on to a higher realm right away after our body dies.

People need different things. Some turn to organized religion.  If they read something like the words of Jesus in the gospels they can be inspired to live their lives in a positive way. They can also receive spiritual help from God and Christ. It is a matter of how a person applies his or her faith.

Regarding other religions, again, it is a matter of how a person applies his or her faith.

Some people don't need an organized religion. They just try to live according to love. Hopefully they don't do like some people do and be judgemental towards those who choose to follow an organized religion. Whether one realizes it or not, one limits one's self when they do so. I just described the way I used to be. Some energetic blocks cleared after I stopped doing so.