To Heaven Through Hell: A Book About Challenging and Changing Destructive Religious Beliefs

Sue Wilson

Description

Whether we're talking about eternal Heaven and Hell in Western religions or Reincarnation and Karma in religions of the East, Sue Wilson shares overwhelming evidence that what most religions teach about what happens when we die is totally wrong and fosters irrational fear and extreme codependency. She asserts that contrary to these unsubstantiated teachings, death is a positive experience for everyone!

Wilson is not an outsider looking in on this subject. She's a former minister's wife and missionary to Africa, a world traveler, and a retired world history and geography teacher. In To Heaven Through Hell, she shares an incredible journey into the invisible realm beyond the physical world through a number of spontaneous paranormal or sixth sense experiences, along with her extensive research from theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, scientists and a host of others in the helping professions... all of which refute religion's erroneous teachings concerning life after death.

Among her many sixth sense experiences are a powerful near-death experience in which she cries out to the God she has learned to fear in fundamental Christianity and is assured that God's love is unconditional not only for herself, but for all of us; the appearance of her father's ghost who tells her that when he died he went to God immediately and was fully immersed in love and understanding as we'll all be when we die; and an amazing regression experience which helps her understand that the purpose of reincarnation is opportunity, not karma.

Wilson encourages readers to formulate healthy beliefs about God and the universe. She shows how embracing positive beliefs about life after death, especially, removes the fear of dying and enables us to get on with the wonderful business of living. She helps readers tap their own sixth sense and gives a problem-solving model that incorporates all the senses...the five traditional ones, the controversial sixth, and a seventh sense we often overlook in our desperate search for answers...common sense!

And though she acknowledges that religious institutions have done much good in the world, she challenges them to admit to the damage they have also done with destructive teachings about life and death, and to replace them with better ones. To acknowledge that all religions are resources, not roadmaps, including their own. And to turn their buildings into lively classrooms where their members can find solutions to the real problems they face as human beings, using good ideas from all disciplines in society and rejecting the rest.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Spirituality
• parapsychology

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 13 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456621360
• Langue: English

Extrait

TO HEAVEN
THROUGH HELL
A BOOK ABOUT CHALLENGING AND
CHANGING DESTRUCTIVE
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
 
 
Sue Wilson, B.S.Ed.
 
Educator, World Traveler, Former Religious Leader
 
 
UNIVERSAL PERSPECTIVE
Willow Springs, Missouri

 
Copyright 2014 Sue Wilson,
All rights reserved.
 
Published by
UNIVERSAL PERSPECTIVE
P.O. 123
Willow Springs, Missouri 65793
417-252-7477
www.to-heaven-through-hell.com
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2136-0
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 00-134424
 
Special thanks to any and all publishers and authors whose books or materials have been referred to, paraphrased, or very briefly quoted herein. Bibliography and footnotes have duly noted these references so readers can obtain the complete works if they so desire. Also, readers have been informed that these references in no way indicate endorsement of this book by any other author or publisher.
Introduction
Millions of us on this planet suffer relentlessly throughout our entire lifetime because we neither recognize nor know how to meet our basic human needs. Or to put it another way, we don’t know how to evaluate and solve the problems we experience because we’re human beings.
According to Dr. William Glasser in his book, Reality Therapy , our basic needs are relatively simple and they’re the same for every one of us...physiological need for food, warmth and rest…and psychological need to give and receive love and feel we are worthwhile to ourselves and others. The latter includes having and trying to live up to a reasonable set of behavior standards as we relate to ourselves and others, and utilization of our unique talents to become valuable, contributing members of society. To quote Dr. Glasser, “Learning to fulfill our needs must begin early in infancy and continue all our lives. If we fail to learn we will suffer, and this suffering always drives us to try unrealistic means to fulfill our needs.” 1
For some children this process does begin in early childhood, as it should. They are loved and nurtured by wise and loving parents. They value themselves and others. They acquire a healthy attitude toward life’s problems and the skills necessary to tackle and solve them.They are self-confident and loving.
But according to Dr. Charles Whitfield in Healing the Child Within , as many as eighty to ninety-five percent of us are not so lucky. 2 Because our parents don’t know how to meet their needs and solve their problems effectively, they can’t teach us to do so either. We’re conditioned or programmed to think and act just like they do. We have no reasonable “code to live by” as Crosby, Stills and Nash lament in their song, “Teach the Children”. Therefore, we emerge from childhood lacking in self-esteem and self-confidence. We’re prone to depend too heavily on others for emotional support and protection from life’s problems; and we’re not capable of building loving, equal relationships or realizing our unique potential in life.We spend most of our waking hours trying to please or control those whose love we so desperately need because we cannot love ourselves, a condition modern psychologists call codependency.
This, alone, is enough of an obstacle to overcome, but when inadequate family conditioning is coupled with negative religious conditioning, the problem is compounded drastically. In the book The True Believer , Eric Hoffer shows repeatedly the tendency of fearful, frustrated, unhappy people to enter fanatical mass religious and political movements which promise all the answers to life’s problems. And these people, many of them our parents, subject us to the teachings of these movements they join.
Though many teachings within the various religions and philosophies of the world are universal laws which actually do help us meet our needs and solve our problems if we follow them, many teachings are extremely counterproductive, even devastating. They add to the problems instead of alleviating them.
For example, in Christian churches, given some denominations are more radical about it than others, we’re taught to fear a God who expects us to live righteously during this one and only lifetime we are allotted or we’ll face eternal hell when we die.Eternal. That’s forever! We’re told the Bible is the word of God, the place to look for His complete instructions on how to live our lives now and hopefully go to heaven instead of hell when we die.
Unfortunately, those of us who are the most dysfunctional already due to faulty family conditioning either find the most radical denominations of Christianity by ourselves or are sought out by conscientious members who take the Bible’s instruction to evangelize seriously. (I refer to this major branch of the Christian movement as fundamental Christianity in this book: conservative Christians who believe the whole Bible is the inspired word of God, all true, and must be taken literally for the most part. But remember, all denominations of Christianity teach the damaging, counterproductive doctrine of eternal hell, so this book is not just for those of us who find ourselves trapped on the fundamental side.)
Many of us accept our religious leaders’ interpretation of the Bible without question and don’t even try to read it for ourselves. Others study the Bible diligently but find it so confusing we finally give up and accept what our church teaches, even though a lot of it doesn’t make any sense and much of it contradicts what we have read in the Bible by ourselves.
In frustration, some of us leave our churches and try more moderate denominations of Christianity. When we see the huge discrepancies from one group to another, though they all claim their ideas stem from the same book, we can only say, “I don’t understand everything in the Bible, I just accept it by faith.”We finally buckle down under the religious leader whose doctrines and interpretations we like best and try to forget things in the Bible he and our church are leaving out.
Once we’ve been taught to fear God’s punishment in this life and the next if we don’t follow His instructions in the Bible, and we have allowed the church and its leaders to interpret them for us, we stop thinking for ourselves. Therefore, we can’t identify or solve our real problems. We are even more unable to love or live effectively than we were with just negative family conditioning. We are codependent beyond codependent!
The same principle holds true of four other religious groups whose roots lie in the Bible. Mormonism, Catholicism , Judaism, and Islam. Believing without question, what leaders in these groups teach, can be equally damaging. And when religion and politics are completely intertwined as in many Muslim nations, failing to adhere to destructive beliefs and behaviors can result not only in emotional and physical damage, but even loss of life!!
Some parents teach their children there is no God...that answers to life’s problems lie only in science…the systematic evaluation of all questions and answers using our five physical senses. Do human beings really have only five senses? Or is there a sixth sense, an invisible or spiritual dimension to all of us that we must not eliminate from our problem-solving resources? Once it has been eliminated as an option by early conditioning, it’s very hard to get it back as we strive to understand life’s challenges and deal with them.
A third major philosophy that is imposed on millions of children in the Eastern Hemisphere and an increasing number of children right here in America is the Hindu/Buddhist doctrine of Reincarnation and Karma or, as some New Age groups call it, Cosmic Justice…the idea that we are rewarded or punished in this life for our behavior in previous lifetimes. Talk about an obstacle to objective problem solving!
About three quarters of the world’s people subscribe to one or another of these three major philosophies, whether they are taught them as children or seek them out as troubled adults.Challenging and changing the destructive beliefs in these or any rigid philosophy is almost impossible once they have been ingrained on our subconscious minds when we’re vulnerable.
This is why. After we become involved in a fanatical religion, we usually isolate ourselves from the rest of the world except on a superficial basis. We feel guided and protected in our group, closed to what people outside it may have to offer concerning life and how to live it successfully. We also become totally dependent on fellow believers for emotional support. We love them. They love us. But we know deep down that the love is conditional even though we won’t admit it to ourselves. We’re really only “loved” if we conform. So we’re afraid to question what we’re being taught. Afraid of losing our support group and facing the unknown by ourselves. Therefore, we keep trying to live our lives within the framework of faulty family and religious conditioning. And we’re miserable, suppressing our intelligence, living a lie, or attempting to escape from our frustrations through a wide variety of addictive and other irrational behaviors with all the suffering this entails.
If you are struggling to sort out problems you have acquired because of negative family or religious conditioning, or both, To Heaven Through Hell can help you. Though it is primarily my life’s story, not a “how to” textbook, and the details may be quite different from yours (especially in the realm of paranormal or psychic experiences, a lively topic today), in it you will clearly see the elements from family and religious conditioning that can create a dysfunctional life in any of us.