Loehr-Daniels Life Reading Reports
Christian Abuse
You may have read the title “Christian Abuse” and wondered if I am referring to the abuse of Christians or the abuse by Christians. Actually, this article is about both, for there have been many Christians in history who have been abused and there have also been many who have abused others in the name of Christianity. The same is true of other religions. God has been the “excuse” for many horrible crimes. Last week a good friend of mine--an agnostic--said to me that all of the wars in history are caused by religion in some way. I believe this is an exaggeration, but certainly we can see that many wars have had their genesis in religion. Look at the bloodshed between the Catholics and Protestants, the Muslims and the Hindus, the Jews and the Arabs, the Christians and the Muslims--to name a few. I remember several life readings in which Dr. John spoke of lifetimes in tribes of primitive societies and how the natives derived their sense of significance from believing their religion was the religion. Tribal warfare was often justified by that belief.
I am going to set aside the issue of charlatans who use religion only as a means to obtain profit or power. Con artists are found in every segment of society, and one of their targets will be people who are searching for a way to God. This is true whether we are referring to a fundamental religion or a very liberal one.
However, religious abuse by well-meaning individuals is the topic I choose because these people often do not realize what they are doing and how their actions can hurt others. This is an insidious form of evil, abuse by people who believe they have God’s truth and that it is their duty to force it on others.
Whether we are referring to bloody religious wars, human sacrifices in the name of God, or simple prejudice against anyone with different beliefs, the story is still the same. All too often religion is an institution filled with closed minds. Whatever the faith, behind religious abuse is what I call the “tunnel vision” of those who think their view of God is the only one.
Recently I watched a movie about a teacher in the 1930s who was on trial for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Several of the townspeople were extreme fanatics. They refused to listen to anything that might possibly go against the literal interpretation of the Holy Christian Bible.
The defense lawyer questioned the most respected man among the zealots about his understanding of the Bible. It was obvious that this bigot was sure he knew everything about the mind of God. By pointing out scientific facts that seemed to contradict the Bible, the lawyer managed to gain the interest--if not complete agreement --of the spectators. The prosecutor fell apart when the trial verdict did not support his very rigid views. Over and over he repeated, “They didn’t believe me. He made a fool out of me.” His sense of significance was based on thinking he was big enough (or God was small enough) to have all of God’s truth. When that belief was shaken, he crumbled, had a stroke and died.
I am saddened to see that Missouri is having a big debate about evolution. Dr. Loehr’s study course (published both in the Journal and on our website) talks about emergent evolution in the two chapters called Incarnation and Reincarnation. In my opinion, the big debate about evolution is solved when we accept that God (through His Co-Creators) used evolution as the method to create the body that the soul was to inhabit. The “missing link” will not be found until we understand that the entrance of the soul into incarnation is that “missing link.”
This is one more example of how discord can occur when man tries to limit God by thinking he has all of God’s answers. Not even Jesus professed to have all of God’s truth. Science is bringing us more of that truth and showing God to be even more magnificent than our limited minds can comprehend.
Man’s search for significance and his need to feel more important than others promotes tunnel vision. “If my religion is the only true religion, then I am better (more important) than those who do not believe as I do.”
Fear is another driving force of the type of tunnel vision that causes man to abuse those who do not believe as he does. I once had a job in which I reported to a very religious man. He also had a scientific background and we had many ideas in common. However, his Christian sect was very fundamental, with little room for even the slightest deviation. Once I started to tell him a little about my religious views, carefully avoiding anything that might be offensive. I did not mention reincarnation or my belief that all religions have their value. Very quickly he said, “I don’t want to hear it! Just keep your beliefs to yourself!” I was shocked to hear fear in his voice. This man who worked every day with scientific data was afraid he might hear something that would contradict his rigid religious views.
I grew up in a church that taught “hellfire, and brimstone” for those who did not believe what they preached. Recently several people have admitted to me that they were afraid not to believe what their preacher said, because they did not want to take the chance of going to hell. Belief based on fear. Over the years, some religious leaders have promoted rigidity in order to protect religion. It has been religion’s mission to bring man to God, and some theologians believe they must protect their theology from the slightest variation. They feel that even a small discrepancy will jeopardize their entire belief system. This type of thinking builds congregations with tunnel vision.
It also causes science and its discoveries to become a threat. However, for the most part, science is neither trying to prove nor disprove religious matters. It is only concerned with the facts about our Creator and His universe. Religion should be involved with the values of our Creator God.
What is seldom realized is that science can bring man closer to God and support religion. The touchstone of science is cause and effect. Whenever there is an effect, we find that behind that effect is a cause. To illustrate, when I look at my wristwatch, I know only one thing. Not the time of day, because my watch could be slow or fast or even not working at all. What I do know is that behind my watch is a watchmaker. It did not just appear out of thin air. Someone/something created it. The same is true of the Universe. When science proved the big bang theory, it proved an act of creation. Whoever or Whatever caused the big bang that resulted in that act of creation is the Creator/God—whatever you choose to call Him. Without trying to, science has actually proved the existence of God. As science learns more about the facts of creation, we learn more about the Force behind that creation--the Creator/God.
For example, science has shown that wherever we find extensive patterning, we find a purpose behind that pattern. Just as the big bang proved the universe to have a Creator, the extensive patterning that is evidenced in the entire physical world shows purpose. Does it really matter if it took seven 24-hour days to create planet Earth? Isn’t it vastly more important to know that, because patterning implies purpose, this planet was created by a purposeful Creator? It would behoove religion to leave the facts to science and concentrate on learning the values of God. Or better still, use the method of science to learn more about the values of our Creator.
After all, science is the best method we now have of getting information, so why not use it to get knowledge about our own Source? More and more organizations are doing just that. Religious Research has been doing that for more than 50 years. Indeed “adding facts to faith” was the motto of Religious Research throughout Dr. Loehr’s lifetime.
Sometimes theology is formed by religious leaders to fill a need of man at that particular time. “Be fruitful and multiply” in the Christian Bible was written at a time when the world was vastly unpopulated. It does not make sense in today’s world of over-population. I am told that in India, many years ago, the cow was made sacred because there was a famine. The priests realized the children would die without the milk of the cows that were being slaughtered for food. There is a theory that the Jewish law prohibiting the eating of pork was given in ancient days to prevent the people from contracting trichinosis. Although the priests of that day probably did not understand the connection between pork and disease, this law was given to them by their God, to prevent the Israelites from becoming ill and dying.
I do not criticize religion. It has been a tremendous help in bringing man closer to God over the centuries. It is the distortion of religion that causes religious abuse. This distortion will be based on fear, a need for significance or some other human need of that period, but it always presents a limited picture of God.
Stella
Life Reading #7046
In Christianity, the crusades present a prime example that demonstrates how religious distortion has tempted souls. Many people suffered when certain leaders of Christianity tried to capture the Holy Land of Palestine from infidels. Their sense of significance was tied in with their belief that they were messengers of God. They didn’t care how many they killed or abused, because they were on a “mission from God” to bring the area under Christian rule. How similar this is to the mission of today’s Muslim terrorists.
In England, in the early 1400s, Stella was a man who joined a crusade. He was a lieutenant enlisted by a Duke who organized a force to join a crusade. The efficiency of the young lieutenant over-rode human values. He was ambitious and had little patience with incompetence. He wasn’t cruel to those under him, but he was heavy-handed with them. However, he was cruel when he came in contact with the infidels. The “holy zeal” of the crusaders incited them to be brutal to the people they came in contact with, including civilians. They captured women, treating them inhumanly.
Stella is from a feminine soul who is nearing the 4th stage of soulhood. At the time of the Crusades life, she must have been an old-middle soul. The soul should have known better, but it got caught up in the religious fervor of that time. The fervor that told the young lieutenant that he was fighting for God and, therefore, whatever he did was justified.
After this lifetime was over, the person was shown the harm he had done and wanted to make amends. For this reason, the soul came into France in the 1500s, as a nun. She took a vow of poverty and entered an order of service. Much of her long life was spent helping victims of plagues and epidemics. Then, in her present life, the soul chose a father who was an incarnation from the soul of one of the female victims of the young lieutenant. Stella’s father repeatedly raped her and beat her. This started when she was eleven and continued until she left home at age sixteen.
The anger and hurt and humiliation of the woman of the 1400s were feeding into the father’s subconscious, and he struck back at his former tormentor. However, he did not have the right to vengeance. This is one of the harder lessons for all souls: that God is the only One to judge souls and certainly the only One to punish them.
Since Dr. John was giving a life reading to Stella, not the father, we do not know what will happen to the father soul, only that he will have to account for his actions. Stella was told to forget him and continue her life. At the time of the reading, she was doing this, in a happy family situation of her own.
Bessie
Life Reading #7262
Bessie didn’t go on a crusade in a past life. Nor did she build up any heavy negative karma. However, she is suffering from a karmic condition in that she has an attitude problem resulting from past lives. This attitude is what Dr. John called an “ambivalence toward authority.” On the one hand, she has all the answers and tries to get others to accept them. On the other hand, she resents it when others tell her anything.
I came to know Bessie quite well, and she is a very sweet person. She is also quite pretty, very artistic and capable. She has a caring concern for others and genuinely tries to help people. However, she also has a tendency to be bossy.
Bessie told people what to do and/or how to feel. Not to hurt anyone, but to help, because she felt she knew what was best. She had learned to be careful about who she tried to help, because people who did not appreciate her interference had hurt her. One of her questions was, “What constitutes minding one’s own business when one can see clearly a need exists? I really do not intend to annoy or alienate people and when I do, I feel awful about it.” She could not see that she tried to control people.
Bessie was over 40 when she got her life reading, and her mother was still trying to tell Bessie what to do. This upset Bessie. On the other hand, she was sure that her mother would be happier if she would just take Bessie’s advice. A vicious circle. Each trying to run the other’s life.
In contrast, she felt her father never gave her anything: “No affection, no touching, no comfort, no discipline.” Her mother once made him discipline her, so he took her in the basement and whispered for her to make a sound like he was spanking her. Then he pretended to do so. She had very little respect or love for her father because he never tried to tell her what to do. She had no respect for her mother because she did try to tell her what to do.
Bessie’s ambivalence toward authority actually started in 1700s France with a lifetime as a nun. The young girl was only nine when she entered the order, and the convent had a very zealous and strong Mother Superior. The girl fell in love with the system of authority and the teaching of God’s values. She was very acceptive, never questioning orders, striving to advance. However, she died when she was only 29. The early death left the soul with a strong desire to finish that lifetime and become a Mother Superior. So in her next lifetime, she came into Italy in the 1800s. Quoting Dr. John about that life:
Dr. John: She was the Mother Superior of a small convent. She attained this position fairly early in her life and had aspirations toward ascending in the organizational hierarchy of her order. Her superiors had brought her into the Mother Superior function earlier year-wise than was normal, but they soon discovered that when she got there she had qualities that they very definitely did not want expressed on any higher or wider level.
She would probe the private thinking of the nuns in her convent and try to correct them when they varied from her concepts by even a hairbreadth. This would make for some rather tiresome sessions, and the sisters did become tired of her probing. She would want to know what was their concept of the Third Person of the Trinity, for example. Now her concept was pretty orthodox and this was why she felt it held such validity. This is what had been taught her in her training within that order, and this is what she was teaching them, and this was the truth, and she was the dispenser of the truth!
So she probed and really attempted to dictate the thinking of the novitiates and the sisters under her. When it came to their actions and their values she was fully as zealous that they be completely correct.
This particular convent had trouble holding sisters. They would usually apply for transfer elsewhere, and the more intelligent and more capable of the entrants often would indicate they would not take their final vows. At this point, a visiting sister of the order would come, talk with them and perhaps quietly transfer them to a more congenial convent where most of them were saved to the order.
The very zealous Mother Superior did not comprehend what she was doing at all, and she felt she should be commended and appreciated for everything. But she received appreciation and commendation in very small quantities (and rightly so) from her superiors. The sisters who remained under her jurisdiction and did not leave were on the whole of a lesser intelligence and of less self-assertiveness. They had to be such to be browbeaten by her into acceptance of her as their ultimate interpreter of God and reality and the right way of living.
Several of her superiors rather tactfully tried to let her know that her zeal had become dogmatic and she was limiting herself, but they got nowhere. If she began to comprehend what they were driving at, she would bristle emotionally and let her emotions take over from her intellect (which intellect was not too high) so the supervisors got nowhere and did not press the issue.
The Mother Superior of the 1800s still lives in the subconscious of Bessie, and this is what creates her ambivalence to authority. This is an emotional problem that should be spent during this lifetime. It manifests in the form of her wanting to tell others what to do and not understanding why they resent her interference. It also manifests in her resenting anyone else giving her advice.
The Mother Superior was not a bad person; she suffered from tunnel vision. She believed she had all of God’s truth and it was up to her to see that her nuns did too. The Bessie soul had to learn to be less dogmatic, so the soul was given this lifetime to help her get through this hang-up.
First of all, she had a father who was one of the Mother Superior’s nuns in that last life—one who followed her every order without question. Bessie could see how her domineering ways in that past life have created within her father the inability to assert himself in even the smallest of ways.
Secondly, the present mother was a parishioner in that last life, who admired and respected the Mother Superior. What she did and said was right. In this life, the mother is emulating that Mother Superior, and Bessie is getting, in this life, the results of her own teaching in the 1800s.
Lastly, she incarnated in a very intelligent personality, at a time when man is less rigid in his thinking. The twentieth century provided a number of interesting breakthroughs in human thinking. Scientific discoveries have shed light in areas previously surrounded by darkness. Public education has added another dimension. Better communication is certainly a step to opening new doors, and psychology gives man a better understanding of himself. The explosion of knowledge and intelligence continues to expand.
Along with this, spiritual thinking has emerged with considerable new enlightenment. Universities offer courses in religious history, studying the roots and general beliefs of a number of religions. Books have been written on many different religious philosophies and are now easily available, which would have been forbidden in the past. New spiritual ideas are taught from the pulpits of many different churches. Although there are still those who think they have all the answers, there are also many people who are less inclined to think their particular religion holds all the keys to understanding the spiritual, all of God’s values.
It is up to Bessie herself to do the major work of changing her attitudes, but she is in the right place and at the right time to do just that.
Morticia
Morticia is suffering this lifetime because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time during her last incarnation. She was a woman in Austria in the late 1800s, but the problem came from her religion. Morticia was born into a family who belonged to a very strict protestant Christian sect. Their church stressed evil and sin. The congregation was constantly hounded with threats of going to hell and living eternally in the fire of damnation.
She was an impressionable young girl and constantly worried about whether or not she was worthy of getting into heaven. The girl was terrified of dying and going to hell. In her early twenties she died in childbirth. Actually, her fear promoted her death, which otherwise might not have occurred.
One of the things that religion does for us is to make us aware that we can have a spirit life after our earthly life. This is a very necessary step in consciousness: to believe in the possibility of life after death. This step allows our spirit guides and deceased loved ones to lead us through the transition from life on earth to life on the astral. It is not unusual for someone to die and not realize what has happened or refuse to believe they are dead. However, in time most dead people will accept the change in their existence and come to understand the beauty of life after death.
But Morticia did not. She was so very afraid that she could never go to heaven and would burn in hell for eternity that she never accepted her own death. Loved ones tried to reach her but she refused to let them. More advanced beings were called in to help reach her but it was impossible, and the personality simply went to sleep and was no more. This meant that the terror remained within the soul.
The only way to release that fear was by working with the soul--not the person, because the person was gone. So the soul was taught on the other side and then it was given another personality in the mid-1900s when it could learn more positive religious beliefs, thereby ridding itself of fear.
At the time of the life reading, Morticia had been unable to leave her home for several years because her fears were paralyzing her. The most important relationship in her life was her husband. He is an older cosmic family member who was her father in several happy past lifetimes. On the soul level he is aware that her purpose is to get rid of her fears, and he is very helpful. He brought her to get a life reading. Hopefully, this lifetime will clear out the negative force of her fear, because it has not been an easy life for Morticia.
It may seem unfair that Morticia, because of the actions of others in a past life, should have to suffer, but sometimes life is not fair. Her growth from this experience will build strength for the soul and happier times will come. It is a difficult job that the soul takes on in coming to earth, but souls are aware of this and know that the goal they are seeking is worth the price they sometimes have to pay.
Laurie
Life Reading #7260
What happens to a religious leader who preaches such fears as were taught to Morticia? It will vary according to the individual soul, its age and its intent, but Laurie was one such leader in 1700s Italy. She was a Roman Catholic Priest whose ambitions had been thwarted by his own inabilities. Like Bessie, the Priest felt that he was held down from rising in the church hierarchy.
His superiors had judged him correctly as not really being of a caliber that could successfully handle the more sophisticated urban parishes. In fact, the more sophisticated parishioners didn’t even want to associate with him. Therefore, he was given parishes in small villages with rural people, rather than urban. These parishioners were not very educated or artistic. They were simple farmers, and the Priest resented them because he felt he was superior to them.
He preached the philosophy of the church at that time, but he emphasized hell with a vengeance. This was his way of taking out his own bitterness on the people. He felt them stupid and would often tell them so. The Priest heaped heavy guilt upon his congregation. He was sure he had the ticket to heaven. Causing his parishioners to feel guilty made him feel superior. It increased his sense of significance.
The priest wasn’t an evil man. He was a product of his time. However, he had no consideration for the results of negative preaching. Rather than consider the feelings of his flock, he vented his own bitterness on them. The evil of it was in the nature of the times, but the priest needed to learn that God is more than what he was taught. He also needed to realize the effect his preaching could have on others.
What better way to see the effect his preaching in the 1700s had on others than to incarnate as the daughter of a woman who had been one of his parishioners? Laurie’s mother raised her in what Laurie called “dark Christianity.” Exactly what the Priest had taught in that past life. Laurie received a dose of her own medicine--medicine that could heal her soul from that past negative viewpoint.
It took her a number of years to rise above the strict, gloomy religion of her home. These were hard years for Laurie. As she rose from this negativity, she saw an expanded view of God. The new knowledge available to people in this enlightened century has aided her and a number of other souls to climb out of the darkness surrounding many religions.
In general, I believe religious abuse to be less common than in the past, but it is far too prevalent. We see extremists in the Muslim faith who want to kill those who “defiled” their Holy Land. We see extremists in the Christian faith who would penalize all Muslims for the actions of terrorists. Abortion clinics are blown up and people killed in God’s name. Every day we observe the popularity of laws that try to force people to live up to someone else’s idea of what God wants.
We cannot force people to live by something they don’t believe in. If you disagree, look at how prohibition was never effective; illegal abortions were performed before they were legal; countless people cheat on their income tax forms; traffic laws are often ignored.
In the 21st Century we still have many people who suffer from tunnel vision. People who have the audacity to believe that God is small enough for them to have all of His answers. People like Bessie and Laurie, who (in past lives) elevated their own significance by belittling the ideas of others. Even people like Stella who slaughtered and physically abused others in the name of God. And people like Morticia who suffer at the hands of misguided religious leaders.
Let us be thankful for the progress that has been made and pray for that day when all people can worship God in their individual way without abuse and without fear.