When we hold grievances toward others, we forget who and what we are. What we are is an unconditionally loving part of what God is. This means we cannot condemn anyone, because all are a holy part of us, and we are a holy part of what God is. But to repeat, when we hold grievances of any kind and deny forgiveness in any form, we forget who we are.

We begin to deny our holiness and identify only as a physical “body” that our spirit is only temporarily inhabiting. As we do so, we begin to imagine and fashion a God in our minds that reflects those same vengeful attributes. Don’t miss this important point: That is why the lies of organized religion succeeded so well in our history…because they reflected a God in the image of mankind’s bigotry and vengeful grievances.

All religions, especially Christianity and Islam, that teach that all other beliefs are damned, have redefined God in a false man-made image, rather than the other way around. In a nutshell the message of Christianity and Islam (as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism) is: “I have such a grievance with all of humanity that I believe what the Bible/Koran says, that my God is going to not only just destroy them, but condemn and torment them for eternity if they don’t convert and believe the way I do.”

If you call yourself a Christian or a Muslim and you don’t believe that, you are ignoring a huge MAJORITY of what the Bible and the Koran both teach fundamentally. Why would you do that?

That would be like calling yourself a smoker, but saying you don’t “inhale”… or calling yourself a Catholic but saying you don’t believe in the virgin birth and you don’t believe you have to take the Eucharist…Or calling yourself a Klansman or a White Supremacist, but saying you don’t actually believe white people are a superior race.

Another very good example would be if you were a German citizen during World War 2, and you chose to proudly align yourself with Hitler and the Nazi party, but you did not believe in German superiority or cleansing the German society of the Jews and other undesirables. To do so, you would have to ignore the fundamental foundation of what it means to be a member of the Nazi Party.

So back to Christianity and Islam…my point is simply, why in GOD’s NAME would you continue to align and affiliate yourself with something that requires you to only “cherry pick” select scriptures, while ignoring the greater over-arching fundamental precepts of its condemning teachings of damnation for all others that are all over its scriptures?
Usually the answer to that question is that social conformity is more important than facing the truth…In other words, most Christians or Muslims don’t want to face what I am writing about, because it is more important to them “to fit in” because that is how they were raised.

I was raised on the Bible. You could say I “cut my teeth on it”. Even as a child studying it, I quickly recognized that the Bible is a seemingly endless stream of stories of God portrayed as holding grievances. But the truth is, it was written by vengeful, bigoted men who held grievances, and who sought to control the masses through fear, by creating a religion and a God “in their image”.

Everything from God’s initial unforgiving grievances with his children Adam and Eve, who made a childlike mistake in the Garden of Eden, but God would not forgive them and had to hold such an eternal grievance against them that he angrily cast them out of their peaceful home, condemning them to death for their mistake. (Can you imagine doing this to your child for secretly eating out of the cookie jar, or trying a cigarette behind your back, or taking the car without permission?)…

To the story of God wanting to bring plague after plague on the Egyptians for not letting the Jews go free, when if you read that story in Exodus, Pharaoh is shown deciding to let them go free MULTIPLE times, but God “hardens Pharaoh’s heart”(God changed Pharaoh’s mind) so that he can get to the next plague to torture the people, ultimately the final one being God KILLING EVERY FIRSTBORN CHILD of the Egyptians as vengeance by his “Angel of Death”.

Shame on all those over mankind’s history, especially the Jews, who have cherished this story for their “Passover” celebration every year! But Jews usually justify this story with the same kind of “supremacy beliefs” ironically that the Nazis used toward them, saying that they were “God’s CHOSEN PEOPLE”, and that the Egyptians were damned in the eyes of God as “pagans”, so the death of the firstborn children was completely “holy” and “justified” in their eyes.

It doesn’t get any sicker than to hold such beliefs. What did the children have to do with the enslavement of the Jews, or with God’s game of “hardening Pharaoh’s heart” when he had made up his mind to do what God and Moses wanted?…

To the many stories and scriptures in the Old Testament like Joshua Chapter 6, where God commands the Jews to commit genocide, and orders them to kill every man, woman and child of Jericho after they conquered the city, simply because they were not Jews…Oh and God coincidentally tells the Jews that they can also take all their gold and silver. (Sounds awfully familiar to what we know was the evil, monstrous actions of Hitler and the 3rd Reich.)…

To Jesus in Matthew 10:34 saying “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”, and that he came to turn a father against his son, etc. The verse before that Jesus is quoted saying all who do not profess his name he will reject on judgment day, and these kinds of verses are all over the Bible.

What makes it even worse is how often they are hypocritically inconsistent with passages that contradict, where Jesus also in the book of Matthew is quoted saying “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword”… or Jesus’ sermon on the mount where he is quoted contradicting Matt.10:34 saying “blessed are the peacemakers and the meek”. Are you not here to bring peace but a sword, or are you here to teach peacemaking? Make up your mind!

As stated above, what you are is an unconditionally loving part of what God is. But when you hold grievances of any kind, large or small, you forget who and what you really are. That is when serious pain and problems in your life begin. That is the root of them all. The false teachings in the Bible and the Koran that teach damnation of all other faiths do nothing but contribute to helping you forget what you really are spiritually.

Once you begin to believe that, you begin to split yourself off in your mind from your true spiritual nature, and begin to make yourself justify hate and a lack of forgiveness, based on arbitrary conditions and circumstances dictated by “religious beliefs”.

As it says in the helpful book “A Course in Miracles”: “It seems to split you off from your source and make you unlike Him(God). It makes you believe that He (God) is like what you have become, for no man can conceive of his creator as unlike himself…It is as sure that those who hold grievances will suffer guilt, as it is certain that those who forgive (unconditionally) will find peace…It is as sure that those who hold grievances will forget who they are, as it is certain that those who forgive will remember (who they are).”

It is our ONLY FUNCTION to be the love of God that our fellow brothers and sisters need here and now. That function is abandoned when you hold grievances, or decide there are limitations or conditions for who can be forgiven (meaning only if they are believers of your faith, etc).

It is our only function to save each other with love and forgiveness, and to do so UNCONDITIONALLY. That includes no conditions of religious teaching of condemnation. Diversity IS Divinity. That is to say “God” is the diversity of all living creation.
We are all brothers and sisters in spirit, and we bring salvation not only to ourselves, but to the world when we stop holding grievances, and stop believing we are exclusively “God’s Chosen People”, or exclusively “born again” and all others who believe differently are worthy of eternal damnation.

When you believe such bigoted religious teachings, you betray what you are, you betray your God-given function, and you only harm yourself in ways you can’t even imagine. You not only forget your true spiritual nature as an eternal part of what God is, but you adamantly identify only as a physical “body”, wrongly seeing yourself as SEPARATE from what God is. This is the cause of all the pain, suffering, disease and misery you begin to encounter in your life. Such condemning beliefs in grievances do not heal, they only harm the person who holds such a mindset, and keep them from the power of healing that is rightfully theirs as a part of God.

Do you want happiness and healing in your life? Do you want wisdom and true direction based on Divine Will in your life? Do you want to fulfill your responsibility to be a source of love, happiness and healing for others?

When you let all your grievances toward others go, and when you accept the truth that you are a holy part of what God is ALONG WITH ALL MANKIND, despite their religious affiliations, then and only then will you fulfill your only function of being God’s love, and creating miracles of healing in your life and others.

Then and only then will you find yourself, and the truth, which is that you have never been separate from what God is. Remember, as a part of what God is, your only function is to be the love of God that all others need, unconditionally.

Unconditionally means unconditionally…unconditionally NO MATTER WHAT their “religious beliefs” may or may not be. Love cannot condemn, it can only forgive unconditionally. Therein lies the proof that Christianity and Islam are entirely built on a lie that is keeping billions from remembering who they are spiritually, and fulfilling their only function here to create heaven on earth.

Connie Bryan
(Check out all of Connie Bryan’s editorials on her blog atwww.conniebryan.com)