This-essay is a7807031.htm which is available at the web-site www.essayz.com. See more notes at the bottom. Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay By-Months By-Years By-Words Webs of Like-&-Un-Like ESSAYS <==> Like-&-UN-Like This-One ========================================================== %BORN SPIRITUALLY DEAD 780703 Some preachers teach that we are born spiritually dead. Such a view is self-serving to such preachers---it promotes our need for their services. Those of us who accept such a view of ourselves tend to become dependent upon the teachers of that view. The view promotes our dependence upon individuals and institutions that claim to have the power to breathe the breath of life into spiritually dead people. Such dependence does not promote freedom, but enslavement to the preachers. Preachers of original sin and of birth into death tend to have a negative view of life. They doubt our intuitions, instincts, feelings, and emotions. Their preaching promotes the substitution of legalistic preoccupations in place of those human realities of which they are so doubtful. The preachers who teach that we are born spiritually dead often presume to have the power to breathe life into us, just as God did into Adam and Eve. Their emotionally insecure arrogance suggests that they have not experienced the meaning of life---and therefore are so emotionally insecure that they are pretentious and arrogant in an effort to compensate. They preach that we should be dependent upon their religious name-sake, and then offer to give us the only reliable information about their religious name-sakes way! If we do not follow in the way that they point, they excommunicate us for not following their guidance---as if their words were the words of God. Their false humility, or lack of humility, betrays them and reveals their self-serving biases. Those who believe that we are born spiritually dead are unlikely to trust the insights of children who see through the games which people play. Because they do not trust the simple insights of children, they cut themselves off from a major way that God uses to speak to us. They come to trust only those of us who are so old as to have become active participants in human collusions. They then busy themselves trying to breathe their religious laws into the children whom they regard as spiritually dead--- and in the process tend to kill the profound spiritual visions which God has given to simple children. Their God is a God of Law, not of Love. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in www.essayz.com Search for Integrity and Honesty (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================
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