Roberta Grimes

No Religion

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 05, 2026 • 3 Comments
Jesus, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Yoko Ono, from “Imagine” (1971)

My beloved friends, before you read any further, I must ask you first, if you are a devotee of any variant of the Christian religion, and happy with your religious choice, please don’t read what we will be writing today. I have no wish to disrupt your religious life! Today, my beloved spirit guide, Thomas, and I are speaking only to those who have once been Christians, but who are now feeling estranged from that religion, in all of its more than forty-nine thousand variations. (We are serious about that number! You can Google it!) Yet when I wrote The Fun of Dying, back in 2010, the number of Christian denominations estimated by Mr. Google was only ten thousand. And according to the article cited above, there will be sixty-four thousand Christian denominations in the world by the year 2050. Christianity is the world’s predominant religion. We take it as a given of human life that since there is a God, a Higher Power, a First Cause, then every society must have a religion, just as surely as it must have a government; and in the battle for sheer numbers, Christianity has long been the winner. But this endless worldwide splintering into pieces over minute doctrinal differences within the body of the faithful is not a sign of vigorous health in Christianity. Far from it. Rather, it is a sign of weakness and despair.

The history of any phenomenon is always written by its winners. And I have studied Christian history. It was even my college major. So I can personally attest, dear God in heaven, that Christian history has been the bloodiest mess that you can possibly imagine, for the greater part of its seventeen-hundred-year history. (And for those who prefer Islam, the story there is no better.) But what if, instead of standing here in 2026 and looking backward, we begin even before Jesus’s birth and consider how His work on earth might look to Him? To do that properly, I think, we will have to go even farther back, to whenever the whole notion of religions first began.

Very primitive people seem to have sensed very early on that there is Something Greater. And we know by the trinkets that they created that they invented or imagined gods that they mostly seem to have seen as being exaggerated caricatures of the most powerful people they could dream up. So, the whole history of humankind’s relationship with our imagined gods is drenched in fear and gore. And that entire miserable religious history continued until even not long before our dear Jesus was at last born on earth. The Middle East was full of fearsome gods, each of which induced terrors in the various tribes. There was Baal, for example, whose priests were sometimes required to burn their own sons alive; and Chemosh, Dagon, even Moloch, who might have had several names; and who required that all the firstborn infants must be thrown alive into the fire in his belly. All were powerful gods, and all of them required unimaginably terrible human sacrifices.

Then along came the twelve Hebrew tribes, who were the world’s first true monotheists, and the first people whose god did not reside in an idol. The Hebrew God also seems to have been the first human-invented god who never required any form of human sacrifice at all; but for this god, Yahweh, only unblemished heifers or other young animals killed cleanly in their temples would suffice. And it was among these people, and following this immediate history, that Jesus chose to be born. We won’t spend a lot of time here demonstrating who Jesus was, and still is, because He is as alive now as He ever has been. We have, after all, amply done that in many earlier posts in this blog’s thirteen-year history. We will simply state that Jesus is an eternally perfected Being Who had been driven to despair back then to see humankind’s suffering on earth down through the ages, but still to no purpose whatsoever, because people did not understand why they had been born on earth in the first place; and they still did not, in point of fact, know anything about anything. We know from Jesus’s teachings, and from His actions as they have been preserved for us in the canonical Gospels, that Jesus came to teach people how to raise their spiritual vibrations away from fear, anger, and hatred and toward ever more perfect love. And I submit to you today that we also know from those same teachings and actions that Jesus came to teach people how to dispense with the need for any religions anymore, and how to relate to God in a beautiful new way, individually and personally.

Jesus called this new way of relating to God “The Kingdom of God”. It was a difficult concept to teach to people who had a history of thinking of gods as basically scary; but easier, of course, for the Hebrew people to grasp, since their traditional God was much more benign than were all the awful gods that had come before. Jesus’s only struggle was with the clergy of the various sects within the Hebrews’ religion. And we see them sparring often during the period of Jesus’s brief public life. Jesus doesn’t go head-to-head with them, but what He generally does is to subtly agree, and then to go them even one better. Just watch Jesus do this beautifully in the masterful exchange that follows.  

At first, the leaders of the two primary schools of Hebrew learning tried to tag-team Jesus, addressing Him as the lay people did, but in their case sarcastically, by calling Him “Teacher”. “When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, ³⁵ and one of them, an expert in the law, asked Him a question, to test Him. ³⁶ “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷ Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:34-40)

Oh my God, how beautiful! That scholar of the religious law was trying to battle Jesus over some petty point within the Hebrew religious laws, and Jesus blew him away by saying that God’s law is Love, and it replaces all your old scrolls put together. Jesus was such a clever debater that things soon got to the point where none of the religious scholars would tangle with Him in public any longer.

But the people loved Him! Soon they were following Jesus, by the hundreds and then by the thousands. And Jesus told them more and more about this new God Who asks for no religion at all, this genuine God, this God of love, and God’s perfect Kingdom, which Jesus always told them was at hand. Jesus talked endlessly about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven; He use the terms interchangeably. But He clearly was not talking about either (a) some earthly monarchy, or (b) the afterlife, in any conventional sense. “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and He answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, ²¹ nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you’” (LK 17:20).

Aha, so there it is for us, in plain language. When we read Jesus’s words, not today but back then, when and where Jesus spoke those words, with all of us sitting on a Galilean hillside two thousand years ago, and with our only religious history one of Baal and Moloch and this recent, brief history of the Hebrew God that required only small and bearable sin-sacrifices of animals, we clearly can understand what Jesus is saying to us. This beautiful and charismatic Teacher does not practice any religion at all, not even the Hebrew religion, after all, does He? No, of course not. Because every religion, including even every religion in the year 2026, is fear- and shame-based, and clergy-ruled. No religion ever practiced on earth is only you and God! When Jesus prays, He goes off by Himself and talks with God alone, and he urges each of His followers to do the same. He says, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ⁶ But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (MT 6:6).

Jesus doesn’t make a big deal about sin, either, when He is talking to His followers, as in this example: “And some people were carrying to him a paralyzed man lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, child; your sins are forgiven.’ ³ Then some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” ⁴ But Jesus, perceiving their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? ⁵ For which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? ⁶ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic— “Stand up, take your bed, and go to your home.’ ⁷ And he stood up and went to his home” (MT 9:2-7).

Here is another example: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath; His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. ² When the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” ³ He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? ⁴ How he entered the house of God, and they ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests? ⁵ Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and yet are guiltless? ⁶ I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. ⁷ But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. ⁸ For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (MT 8:12 1-8).

We could go on, but you get the point. Religious rules, and even the very concept of sin, meant little, or I daresay they meant nothing to Jesus. In reading the Gospels closely, in HIS day, I am confident that by bringing “the Kingdom of God” on Earth, Jesus meant to dispense with religions altogether. And one thing should be said here emphatically: Jesus did not choose to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins! Nowhere in the Gospels does He tell us that was why He chose to die that way; and in fact, if He had died as a sacrifice, He would have been a pretty poor excuse for a sacrifice, since, after all, every animal sin-sacrifice stayed dead, while Jesus popped right back up, alive. And Jesus insisted to us in A Course in Miracles, which He channeled to us in the late nineteen-sixties, that, “I did not die for your sins. Those are on you.” No, Jesus’s real reason for dying such a public death, and then reanimating that already-decaying corpse three days later, was to prove to his followers that they were immortal. His rising was the whole point! “Ta-DA! See? I didn’t die, and neither will you.”

But what really mattered to Jesus was making certain that His teachings, and especially His elimination of the very concept of religions so humankind’s relationship with the Godhead could truly have a fresh start after the likes of Baal and Moloch, would be spread now over all the earth. He told His followers that the Holy Spirit would remain with them always, saying, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you” (JN 14:26). And then finally, after Jesus was resurrected and before His ascension, Jesus came to His disciples and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:18-20).

For three hundred years, which is longer even than the United States has been a nation, Jesus’s followers had no religion, but instead the gentle and beautifully spiritual Way of Jesus spread to millions of eager new followers,  all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. It was all as Jesus had envisioned it, not a religion at all, but rather a spiritual movement that bountifully embraced many threads and ideas, and all of them were based in deep love and charity and immediate forgiveness of every wrong. There was persecution of The Way, but they were used to that. They all loved and blessed the soldiers who were martyring them. And among all the hundreds of thousands of burials in the Roman Catacombs in those first three hundred years, there is not a single depiction of a cross to be found. 

But then, the Roman Emperor Constantine, who is now known as Saint Constantine the Great, if you please, thought that he saw a cross depicted in the clouds one day, and he thought he heard a voice say, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Well, Constantine was really into conquering! So he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, and under his guidance, the religion of Roman Catholicism was born. This is in fact the same Roman Catholic religion that is still being practiced, to this day. Constantine’s religion needed to be structured as an old-style, fear- and guilt-based religion, and turning Jesus’s death on the cross into a sin-sacrifice filled that bill nicely. There were seven more ecumenical councils called during that first millennium A.D., but substantially it has been Constantine’s Catholicism that serves as the theological basis of all of the nearly fifty thousand versions of Christianity, and counting, that are still being practiced today.  

So then, what happened to the original Way of Jesus? Well, really, you know, it simply came to nothing. The Romans wiped out every follower of The Way who would not convert to the Christian religion.  I know about The Way only because I studied early Christian history in college. I continue to read the Gospels; but even the most strictly “fundamental” churches don’t seem to care much about how Jesus saw the world, nor how He intended His teachings to be received. No, for most modern Christians, Jesus’s primary value seems to be not that He taught us how to grow spiritually so beautifully, but just that He ‘saved” them. And I find that fact to be frankly amazing. When Jesus is everything, Christianity seems to want so little of Him beyond His name.

By the way, many people seem to think that John Lennon’s Imagine is a heretical song, but I urge you to read our frame verse today. My goodness, what John and Yoko describe here is almost literally, word-for-word, what the afterlife is like! When our beloved John Lennon arrived in the Summerland in 1980, he likely looked around, and smiled that little smile of his, and said something like, “Finally, here is someplace where they’ve got it right.”

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

 You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
–John Lennon (1940-1980) & Yoko Ono, from “Imagine” (1971)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)