Real Christians must always guard against religious indoctrination. The human mind in its fallen state is such that it has no reference to truth, no infrastructure toward a standard basis of spiritual knowledge and fact, and no ability to properly comprehend that which can only be spiritually discerned.

         We do have a conscience, of course. A healthy though natural mind does have the ability to differentiate between good and evil to an extent, but because human beings are also willful creatures and, short of a born-again experience, rebellious toward God and the things of God, it also possesses the ability to veto one’s moral conscience.

         In general terms, people always know in advance when they’re about to engage in wrong behavior if they follow a certain course their conscience is warning them against. Once doing the bad thing, one’s conscience confirms its earlier warning with an “I told you so” to further convict one, reinforce the fact that a wrong course was chosen, and warn further against the illicit action in the future.

         And if that’s not enough, there is always the fruit of evil behavior that sprouts up in one’s life to give an individual further proof that the activity was bad.

         Therefore, as the Word of God clearly states, even though unregenerate humanity is blinded by sin, human beings still have no excuses whatsoever for evil behavior and rebellion against God:

         For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

         Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.

         For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. [Romans 1:20-25]

         In this passage the apostle adds to the fact that we all possess a conscience with the further fact that the natural world all around us also reveals God and the difference between good and evil. One must remember that Paul wrote this long before what is now presented as fully accepted fact and believed wholeheartedly by most, including most “Christians”—the lie of human evolution—and that even then humanity had descended into a gross depravity regarding morality, truth, and mankind’s origins.

         Because the nature of such depravity goes unregistered in a sinful mind, one fails to see the nature of the advancing disease as one cannot see the forest for the trees. Because of such gross distortion and moral compasses out of whack, and because of the rapid nature of the sin disease metastasizing throughout the human family, the majority are lost within the matrix and deceived about reality.

         A faux reality has thus been constructed to deal with humanity’s distance from God which includes distance from God’s light, truth, and love. This very dark world is then made peace with, so to speak, and accepted as standard reality from which actual morality appears unreachable and impossible. The idea of evil remains, however, but evil is relegated to the realm of the grossly evil. Hence, regular human beings doing regular things according to this low denominational moral understanding are perceived as good and moral, though it is no such thing.

         In other words, God’s righteous standard, if we all obeyed and practiced it, would result in a truly wonderful and loving world, while mankind’s faux moral construct is equivalent to an extremely low moral common denominator in which almost everyone can feel good about themselves regardless of pesky moral consciences that are most often shunned and put aside.

         Picture a scale of ten in which the Lord’s holy life for all is seen as a 10 and mankind’s false moral standard as a 1. A 1 is relatively simple to achieve since it almost always involves no necessary attempt at achievement whatsoever, and one in which 95% are good people exhibiting moral behavior, as in, “Gimme a break. I’ve never killed anyone, dude. Back off,” meaning that murder and such sins cross the line but almost everything else is fine and dandy.

         This all came about for the same reason that all the little five year old soccer players started getting little individual trophies several years ago. First of all, little kids’ soccer is a faux sport in which all the little ones run around trying to kick a fat ball. Real hard. Then they all get a trophy for participating as if they achieved something when they actually achieved nothing.

         In contrast, the early days of Little League Baseball showcased the clear differential between those boys good enough to excel at the sport, often through very hard work, dedication, practice, and much playing time among themselves with no adults ever present, and those geeky ones who were quickly seen as possessing little or no talent and no passion for the game. Teams were formed, leagues were formed, and ONE team from each league received ONE team trophy, if anyone ever received a trophy at all. Most of the time there was no such thing. And there were certainly never any individual trophies.

         The point here is that winning a championship meant something and that only the winners achieved anything. Even those in second place were seen as losers. This resulted in a very high standard and something one must work very hard at to become a winner.

         Do we not see this almost exact dynamic in international Olympic sports? Only one person in each event wins the gold, and often by milliseconds. Imagine missing out on the gold by .001 of a second. You’re still a loser regardless of losing margin. Why even bother with silvers and bronzes? They didn’t win. There is no winning in placing second or third.

         Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.

         Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified. [1Corinthians 9:24-27]

         To sum up, the world’s standard of morality is actually no standard at all. Almost everyone considers himself or herself righteous. Pretty much everyone believes himself or herself to be a good, basically decent person whom God has no real problem with, if indeed there is a God. Everyone wins a trophy, whether they run around in circles doing nothing, sit on the field as a spectator watching the untoward activity around them, become distracted by butterflies, knowing or unknowingly join the other team, never touch the ball, whine and cry, or refuse to leave the sidelines. Everyone gets a juice box and a snack and a trophy and good wishes from doting parents though the majority never achieve squat.

         The above is this world in a nutshell. Most people are oblivious of the spiritual world all around them. They are spiritually blind and deaf.

         But some, a few, actually have spiritual ears and eyes that work, and they receive little radio signals they know must mean something but can’t quite figure out. They remain intrigued, wondering why they see things a tad differently, and is why the blindfolded majority perceive them as a tad off, or strange.

         These are the ones who can be reached by a parable.

         They do not respond to religious dogma or forced compliance to some hackneyed, subjective, incomplete, false, or fractured moral code. Though they don’t know what they’re looking for, they know what it is not. They reject faux substitutes. They travel on in search of the lost chord—the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—that unseen something they will know when they find it.

         This is why they reject religious indoctrination. They know that within their weakened state of being prior to discovering truth that they possess the potential to be force fed faux drivel and indoctrinated against the very truth they seek, and they intrinsically know they must shun such brainwashing efforts by the great faker controllers.

         Indeed, such religious controllers, especially those of the Unreal Christianity variety, are as much a part of the world’s faux moral low denominational construct as all other members, and are actually the most sinister of all in that they represent the devil’s last chance at stopping the searcher of truth on his or her path toward life.

         It’s like getting detoured a few yards short of the finish line on a winning run. Real Christians, both before and after their born again experience, can never allow themselves to be cut off at the pass by the religious chucklehead posse.

         They must press on toward truth and life. They must listen to their conscience, and respect their hearing ears and seeing eyes though the volume be low and the vision initially blurry.

         These are the ones who can be reached by a parable.

         “For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed; nor has anything been secret, but that it would come to light.

         “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” [Mark 4:22-23] [1]

         © 2014 by RJ Dawson. All Rights Reserved. [To Be Continued.]

[1] Unless otherwise noted all Scriptures are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

         Most Christians are taught what the Lord’s parables mean without actually receiving their meanings from God. At best, teachers teach what others have received from God. At worst, there are substandard and completely wrong interpretations passed off as genuine.

         This is the difference between religious dogma and divine revelation.

         In that light, it is said that spiritual knowledge is gained in two ways: (1) book knowledge, or head knowledge, or gaining data empirically, or reading our Bibles to gain facts, etc, and (2) divine revelation.

         The former is accessed by a working brain regardless of heart condition or spiritual proclivity. The latter, divine revelation, is gained through the Lord revealing something to our hearts—bypassing our heads (or possibly going through them).

         And speaking of brains, it should be obvious to most people with brains that divine revelation is the best method. One might even say it is actually the only method, and here’s why:

         We have millions of Christians who have been taught and dogmatized by the letter but actually have no understanding of the spirit (and much of the letter they are taught is not Biblical anyway). In fact, the majority of Christians worldwide are walking around in head knowledge, and the probable majority of those have very little head knowledge, (that’s what we pay the preacher/priest/minister for!), which means they have absolutely no spiritual knowledge whatsoever.

         How then are they Christians? One must understand the concept of cultural Christianity to understand that calling oneself a Christian because one identifies with some aspect of denominational Christianity makes one no more a Christian than so many proponents of other religions—those who are such only because of outside circumstances and cultural/family pressure. Many Buddhists, for example, do not actually practice the full teachings of the Buddha but still consider themselves Buddhists.

         It is no different with Christianity in the sense that most Christians do not practice or attempt to practice the full curriculum of the Lord Jesus and reject becoming real disciples.

         Real Christianity is different from all other belief systems and religions (including Unreal Christianity) simply because it is not a belief system or religion. It is based on an actual personal relationship with the God of the Universe who revealed Himself to us as one of us—God became a human being.

         Now, that in itself sounds completely weird to the natural mind and is thus summarily dismissed and denounced by most people right off the bat, which reveals something about the natural mind, of course.

         Further rejection by the natural mind of spiritual knowledge follows, and the idea that we can know God and God wants to know us and we can talk to God etc. is also thus placed in that place where the down to earth put belief in little green men and off-the-wall dark conspiracies and haunted houses and “I see dead people” and Ray’s hearing voices out in his field and in short, weird stuff that only weird people take a liking to.

         For non-believers this is understandable, but for all the so-called Christians who fall into this category it is beyond mind-boggling and completely proves my point: Most Christians want no part of all the “weird stuff” put forth in the Bible, but only the completely surface indoctrination and cultural low-denominational “refinement” that characterizes all dead forms of Christianity, much like the dead forms of Judaism during the Lord’s day which caused its proponents to reject the Lord Jesus outright.      

         Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.

         But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. [1Corinthians 2:12-14] [1]

         © 2014 by RJ Dawson. All Rights Reserved. [To Be Continued.]

[1] Unless otherwise noted all Scriptures are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.