The "Holy" Pope (from "Perceval Press")

The following, recently published quote from the current pope tells us all we need to know about the damage done for centuries by the hardening of official doctrines of the major religions originating in the Near East - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - with their gradual rejection of the potential for individual spiritual experience and personal transformation in favour of an insistence on our thinking of ourselves as separate from anything we might call God, Goddess, or Holy. An insistence that we believe ourselves separate, therefore, from one another and from the world we live in. This rigid and alienating teaching that the greatest meaning or mystery of life is unknowable and forever out of our reach keeps in place a serious obstacle to our potential for truthful and profound communion with Nature, for interpreting and understanding, in our time, the personal meaning and application of received symbols and metaphors. This emphasis on our seeing ourselves as separate from God is the real stumbling block standing in the way of our individual spiritual journeys. It would doom us to be ignorant of our shared experiences, irresponsible and unconscious in our lives among others:

"People who trust in themselves and in their own merits are, as it were, blinded by their own 'I', and their hearts harden in sin."-Pope Benedict XVI (Found in USA Today, on Good Friday 2008)