"Return to Spirituality.  Forget about religion."

That statement is going to anger a lot of people.

"People will react to this entire book with anger...unless they do not."

Why do You say, forget religion?

"Because it is not good for you.  Understand that in order for organized religion to succeed, it has to make people believe that they need it.  In order for people to put their faith in something else, they must first lose faith in themselves.  So the first task of organized religion is to make you lose faith in yourself.  The second task is to make you see that it has all the answers you do not.  And the third and most important task is to make you accept its answers without question.

If you question, you start to think!  If you think, you start to go back to that Source Within.  Religion can't have you do that, because you're liable to come up with an answer different from what it has contrived.  So religion must make you doubt your Self; must make you doubt your own ability to think straight.

The problem for religion is that very often this backfires - for if you cannot accept without doubt your own thoughts, how can you not doubt the new ideas about God which religion has given you?

Pretty soon, you even doubt My existence - which ironically, you never doubted before.  When you were living by your intuitive knowing, you may not have had Me all figured out, but you definitely knew I was there!

It is religion which has created agnostics.

Any clear thinker who looks at what religion has done must assume religion has no God!  For it is religion that has filled the hearts of men with fear of God, where once man loved That Which Is in all its splendor.

It is religion which has ordered men to bow down before God, where once man rose up in joyful outreach.

It is religion which has burdened man with worries about God's wrath, where once man sought God to lighten his burden!

It is religion which told man to be ashamed of his body and its most natural functions, where once man celebrated those functions as the greatest gifts of life!

It is religion which taught you that you must have an intermediary in order to reach God, where once you thought yourself to be reaching God by the simple living of your life in goodness and in truth.

And it is religion which commands humans to adore God, where once humans adored God because it was impossible not to!

Everywhere religion has gone, it has created disunity which is the opposite of God.

Religion has separated man from God, man from man, man from woman, some religions actually telling man that he is above woman, even as it claims God is above man - thus setting the stage for the greatest travesties ever foisted upon half the human race.

I tell you this: God is not above man, and man is not above woman - that is not the 'natural order of things' but it is the way everyone who had power (namely, men) wished it was when they formed their male-worship religions, systematically editing out half the material from their final version of the "holy scriptures" and twisting the rest to fit the mold of their male model of the world.

It is religion which insists to this very day that woman are somehow less, somehow second-class spiritual citizens, somehow not "suited" to teach the Word of God, preach the Word of God, or minister to the people.

Like children, you are still arguing over which gender is ordained by Me to be My priests!  I tell you this, you are all priests.  Every single one of you.  There is no one class of people more "suited" to do My work than any other.

But so many of your men are just like your nations.  Power hungry.  They do not like to share power, merely exercise it.  They have constructed the same kind of God.  A power hungry God.  A God who does not like to share his power but merely exercise it.  Yet I tell you this: God's greatest gift is the sharing of God's power.

I would have you be like Me."

But we cannot be like You! That would be blasphemy.

"The blasphemy is you have been taught such things.  I tell you this: You have been made in the Image and the Likeness of God - it is the destiny you came to fulfill.  You did not come here to strive and struggle and to never 'get there.' Nor did I send you on a mission impossible to complete.  Believe in the goodness of God, and believe in the goodness of God's creation - namely, your holy Selves."

You said something earlier in this book which intrigued me.  I'd like you to go back as we come to the end of the volume.  You said: "Absolute Power demands absolutely nothing." Is this the true nature of God?

"You now have understood.  I have said, 'God is everything, and God becomes everything.  There is nothing which God is not, and all that God is experiencing of Itself, God is experiencing in, as, and through you.' In My purest form, I am the Absolute.  I am Absolutely Everything, and therefore, I need, want, and demand absolutely nothing.

From this absolutely pure form, I am as you make Me.  It is as if you were finally to see God and say, 'Well, what do you make of that?'  Yet no matter what you make of Me, I cannot forget, and will always return to My Purest Form.  All the rest is fiction.  It is something you are making up.

There are those who would make Me a jealous God; but who could be jealous when one has, and is, Everything?  There are those who would make Me a wrathful God; but what could cause Me to be angry when I cannot be hurt or damaged in any way?

There are those who would make me a vengeful God; but on whom would I take vengeance, since all that exists is Me?

And why would I punish Myself for simply creating?  Or, if you must think of us as separate, why would I create you, give you the power to create, give you the freedom of choice to create what you wish to experience, then punish you forever for making the 'wrong' choice?

I tell you this, I would not do such a thing - and in that truth lies your freedom from the tyranny of God.  In truth, there is no tyranny - except in your imagination.

You may come home whenever you wish.  We can be together again whenever you want.  The ecstasy of your union with Me is yours to know again.  At the drop of a hat.  At the fell of the wind on your face.  At the sound of a cricket under diamond skies on a summer night.  At first sight of a rainbow and the first cry of a newborne babe.  At the last ray of a spectacular sunset and the last breath of a spectacular life.

I am with you always, even unto the end of time.  Your union with Me is complete - it always was, always is, and always will be.  You and I are One - both now and forever more.

Go now, and make your life a statement of this truth.

Cause your days and nights to be relflections of the highest idea within you.  Allower your moments of Now to be filled with the spectacular ecstasy of God make manifest through you.  Do it through the expression of your Love, eternal and unconditional, for all those whose lives you touch.  Be a light unto the darkness, and curse it not.

Be a bringer of light.

You are that.

So be it."

excerpted from Conversations with God - Book 2 by Neale Donald Walsch