Lesson 101: God’s will for me is perfect happiness
Hello, my name is Candace and I’m a Sinaholic.
Honestly, we need a good 12-step program to help us break our addiction to sin. If you were raised in a religious tradition such as the Southern Baptist church or Catholicism, you came by your addiction honestly. You may even have a genetic disposition to this disease as it has been passed down through the generations. Sin and guilt are the stock and trade of many religions.
I have seen a glimmer of hope, though. Several years ago, when I taught religion at a local community college, I had students in my comparative religion class create their own religion from scratch. Teaching here in the deep South I was ready to hear a chorus of objections, especially from my Christian students about the blasphemy of “inventing” a religion. Only one student, however, ever complained and he walked away in a thoughtful way when I asked him who had invented Christianity, since it didn’t drop from the heavens as a fully formed belief system.
My students created a bunch of funny and thoughtful religions which centered around everything from shopping, to money, to football. Interestingly enough, the one feature that every single one of those new religions lacked was a doctrine of eternal damnation. There literally was no hell in any of the systems the students devised.
When I asked them why, their answers were always the same, “If you don’t like our religion, go try someone else’s. There are plenty of options.”
It made perfect sense to me why this younger generation would omit hell from their religions – they’d had enough judgment and condemnation in their lives. They’ve watched the old-time religions shun, reject, condemn and block people they loved from being part of the flock. A Barna study several years ago found that the vast majority of Millennials say they view Christians in particular as judgmental, hypocritical, anti-LGBTQ and insensitive to others. Who would want to associate with such a group?
If your values, then, turn on non-judgment, integrity, inclusiveness and compassion toward others, it makes sense why you would gravitate to a belief system (or invent one) that doesn’t include the threat of eternal damnation. When “sin” was addressed in any of the students’ religions, it wasn’t something that would damn you to hell forever, instead, it was simply a mistake that needed to be corrected to restore you in wholeness to the community.
In short, my students invented A Course in Miracles over and over again – creating systems that had no sin, no eternal punishment and prized Love over fear every single time. The Course tells us that “Sin is insanity,” and my students saw this truth very clearly because they had recognized the insanity of a god that punishes us for simply making errors while we are here trying to learn and remember who we truly are.
My students taught me a deep lesson about my own addiction to sin and helped me see that the belief systems that I had been raised in were nothing more than the ego’s creations meant to keep us hooked on this illusion of fear. If sin is real, this lesson tells us, then happiness must be an illusion. The ego wants us to believe this, so it makes happiness fleeting and dependent on outside events.
This is a counterfeit form of happiness. The happiness God seeks to give us is an eternal joy that is not affected in any way by what is going on around us. This “perfect happiness” is outside the comprehension of the ego. It is not fleeting, but eternal, and gives us the peace we need to see through the illusions of the world and trade our fear for Love.
Hafiz joins the chorus today that urges us to ditch any form of religion that threatens our immortal soul.
He writes:
About Judgment Day.
I hope you have come to your senses
and stopped believing everything you
hear.
Photo by Shalone Cason on Unsplash