The word “religion” carries some ambiguity. Religion is generally defined as our personal response to a spiritual calling somewhere in our souls. Yes, there are enforced religions that don’t meet that test, but that’s not what I mean. Something isn’t really your religion if it doesn’t hold you by itself; it’s more of a cultural milieu. Your religion is a collection of habits and organized thoughts seeking to answer that spiritual call.
There are plenty of fakes, often called cults. Something in the context is fake, as if you were manipulated into claiming a longing that you really don’t have. You have joined for some reason other than your own internal drive to connect on that other level.
If I use Linux very much, it gets to be like that. I’m just about forced to deal with a very large number of people who operate as if using Linux is a form of idolatry. I take periods when I’ll stick my nose deep into the latest Linux technology, but then it gets too confining and almost perverse in the cult-like orthodoxy. I have to back off or I lose contact with the real world of ordinary people, the folks God called me to help. In the main, Linux arises from a community of folks who aren’t all that good with reality outside of computers, and their mindset can be rather contagious. It grates on my nerves after awhile, so I don’t use it all the time.
I’ve lost a friend to the full blown social communism. You know, that utopian religion that asserts all the world’s ills would be solved if we could just enforce the right social orthodoxy. The guy lived in the Pacific Northwest, where political correctness feeds the Church of the Perpetually Offended. They are always offended if you don’t get upset at the right collection of things. It would be about the same as the Tea Party cult, but the two cults have a different psychology. Communists are extremely materialistic, while righties are simply greedy.
Something in the dark storm clouds on the horizon speak to me about what the wind carries. Not much, mind you, just a whiff on the breeze now and then. It’s one of the gossamer threads of spiritual apprehension that can’t qualify as full-blown word of prophecy. A significant portion of American Christian religion is idolatrous, even blasphemous in a sense. The storms hint that I’ll be busy once they get to work, that a surprising number of people will somehow discover elements of what I teach as meeting a need. No, I won’t suddenly become famous, but I won’t be so completely alien to them as I am now. And I am wondering what it is in the storm that will cause that change, that will bring a broader credibility to my work here.
Your guess is as good as mine.
I feel the Holy Spirit moving in myself and others moreso than ever before. The changes in my reality are intense and serious. My interactions with my family and friends are manifestations of these changes. My attitude/actions with my husband has changed. All for the better, more in sync with Father’s reality. And, all because I found clearer answers thru your blessed works. So, yeah, don’t be surprised if more of us “show up on your doorstep”. You are a good teacher, Ed, and Father manifests His Reality through your works to us.