Osho, in the book "What Now, Adam?: The Book of Men, " says that Christian priests and ministers peddle fear of hell and the greed of paradise to manipulate people to stay in the church.
Osho retells the story of Adam and Eve saying that God wanted Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. Here's what Osho says:
"No, Adam has not committed any sin; Adam is the first saint. He disobeyed God, and God wanted it. That is exactly what God wanted - that Adam should disobey. Disobeying God, Adam will go far away into the world; he will lose his first childhood (of innocence). Then he will suffer many, many mistakes and from those mistakes he will learn.
And one day he will come back - as Christ, as Buddha, as Mahavira, as Krishna, he will come back.
This going away is a must for coming back. This is not against God, really, this is precisely what God wanted to happen. It was absolutely planned by God himself. So don't call it a sin. Why is Adam called a sinner? He is called a sinner because your religions depend on calling you sinners, on condemning you. "p.13
I was taught as a Roamin Catholic that God created human beings because God wanted a loving creature like God. In order to accomplish this, God had to give human beings free will.
What good is free will if it is not used?
To really love, human beings had to separate themselves from the Oneness of God so they could gain consciousness and activate their free will. This led, as it is taught in A Course In Miracles, to the "tiny mad idea" that human beings can totally separate themselves from God. Having gone far astray there is still the Divine Spark deep within.
After suffering on the path of the ego, it dawns on us that there must be a better way, and this better way triggers the search which in Unitarian Universalism is called the "free and responsible search for truth and meaning." The search takes us back to God voluntarily and feely. God wants us back because we want to be back. God does not force us, but quietly calls us. The choice to return to God is all ours.
Responding to this call is what Osho calls true religion which is based on Love and has nothing at all to do with fear and greed.
The God of religions is dead. The mainline religions around the world are dying. Nietzche declared that God is dead. Nietzche was referring to the God of fear and greed. The Tao, the Spirit of Life, the ground of existence, of course, cannot die because it animates all life.
We can't choose Life unless we wander away from it and reject it first. When we recognize our mistakes, it dawns on us that there is a better way, we begin our search for what is genuinely Life giving, and we go back home from whence we came, but now we are consciously aware and have chosen Love freely.
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