Different groups of people and different cults may use the same terms, but each attaches different meanings to them. If you assemble a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Pentecostal and a Jew in the same room you will hear the word “Grace” used frequently, but each would have to admit to a different use and application of the word. Before we go much further, I suggest that we define Religion. For the purpose of this discussion let us define Religion as a system of belief which relies more upon faith than fact, and whose faith must stand even if reason, logic, history and order stand contrary to the tenets of that faith. For purpose of this discussion, Religion will not include that which can be validated by logic, reason, historical review AND evidence from outside the believer's own circle of influence. In some cases Religion even requires that you accept things without even the slightest shred of evidence from either scientific investigation or historical record. Sometimes these religions have immediate a nd dangerous effects such as in Jonestown, Waco and more recently in the case of the Heaven's Gate group. In these kinds of cults the result has been a visible and well publicize display of death. More often, however, there are enough immediate benefits that the long term picture of greater realities is missed or ignored.

The most obvious case is the influence of Hinduism in the West. Karma has become a part of our language along with reincarnation. Virtually everyone has heard these terms and has some understanding of their definition. To put a nutshell on it though, let’s define reincarnation as having life in some physical plane again and again. It may be seen by some as always returning as human, and by others as sometimes including a return as animal life, but always returning until one does well enough to become a part of the Great Soul, the Is or more recently the Christ Consciousness. Regardless of the term you end up being melted into the god understood by this religion. Karma is defined as one’s destiny. In this kind of faith one must complete this current life and its conditions in a satisfactory manner or when one returns he or she will be a less progressed position. Here’s the worst part: If you do anything to alter the condition of another then you can lose the improvement of condition that you have found alo ng the way. The result of this religion in places where it has been prevalent for many centuries has been poverty and wealth to extremes that make America seem like a “share the wealth” state. In India, the home of this faith, nearly one fourth of today’s deaths due to malnutrition will happen before you enjoy your next three meals. About a hundred people will die of hunger in India before you finish your next snack. Think about it. If your religion forbids you to improve the lot of others, how can you contribute to the masses? How can you give something to your neighbor in need? How can you even really be a doctor? If you cannot improve the lot of others, how can you even offer a profit sharing plan for your company, sponsor a future employee through college, give a man a raise or testify against a political injustice?

This wouldn’t be so bad if it had a hope of being a practical reality in the spiritual realm, but even on a simple mathematical level, it doesn't work. For example, part of the faith is that people always come back until they are elevated to the higher plane, but that all the people that are have always been. Even if we figure that many of them began as insects and livestock, we must remember that today’s insects and livestock have either already been people or have always been as they are and never progressed. This being the case, what do we do with the fact that there are five or ten times as many creatures and more than twenty times as many people as there were just a thousand years ago? Now, before we fire up all those evolutionists or tree huggers and bird lovers, we are talking about more creatures, not species.

Yes, there are less species. That is just a fact of life in the world as it is and has been. Even with the encroachment of the cities into the wilderness and man into the wild, man is responsible for less than one tenth of the extinctions of species that we know of, much less the ones we do not know of. Still, in all that extinction, whenever there is an extinction another animal or group of animals has always managed to take up the slack. Even though we have lost literal thousands of species the world still works. That can be the subject of a later page. Apparently, the concept of reincarnation won’t work if only for the matter of mathematics. And if there is creation of new souls for the world, then that immediately implies an active and personal creator. This being the case, we must again make an approach to the subject with logic.

But logic is something that too many throw out the window (especially in Western culture) when they look at the subject of a creator. If you believe that you can think logically on the subject of a creator, click here. &&& This brings up another subject: Active and ongoing personal creation of souls.

The very idea that souls are being brought into existence destroys the concept of Deism. Deism is the belief that the world and life was created by a greater being and put into motion and left alone without any direct influence or interference along the way. Well, the simple idea of more people tends to be grounds to disbelieve this idea. Still, this is the idea that most Government Schools teach was the faith of the founding fathers of the United States. In reality though only two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and/or Constitution of the United States of America were deists, and all but three of the rest we re active members of fairly fundamental Christian churches, and most were pastors, elders and teachers in those churches.

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