"It is within a human's personality matrix to go beyond their current reality, where they come upon and then use some method of actualization."
-- Rev. Larry James Stevens

According to a recent Gallop Poll, a purported 46 percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, or so.

Is it possible to be highly educated and academically gifted, and yet be spiritually illiterate? Have you dedicated as much time to your spiritual education as you have your academic education? Have you asked yourself the deepest "how" and "why" questions and compared various spiritual practices, philosophies, and ideologies as you would for researching for mid-terms, or your dissertation?
According to Bettye Johnson, author of Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls, and writer of a blog entry entitled: "The Origins of Religion," "The origins of religion began when God was placed outside the human, meaning the human was to worship a god, or gods, that was not within. Religion is a format for control and to keep the human in slave mentality."

Here's another interesting and stinging question: Have you put equal study into your own spiritual evolution, or have you settled for a weekly message from a tithe-motivated messenger that temporarily satiates you without growing or challenging you?

Many academically accomplished individuals have the hardest times expanding their spiritual views and adopting new spiritual insights-they've been taught to be right and successful in their business, career, and academically competitive world.

Is it possible that some of the most academically brilliant minds can be as spiritually literate as a grade-school dropout such as myself? Yes, it is possible, but most frightening when spiritually illiterate academes are given the power to set moral laws that are fundamentally based on corrupted and manipulated doctrine.

Forty-year theologian and faculty member of The SHOCKphilosophy Institute of Advanced Manifestation, Dr. Miceal Ledwith, had this to say about the corruption of scripture.

"Most fervent Christians of all varieties believe the Bible, especially the New Testament, contains the inspired, written words of God. They believe God sent those words, in some shape or form, directly down from Heaven, via the equivalent of e-mail or fax, or communicated through the direct inspiration of every word written down by the authors of the biblical books.

Unfortunately, we do not have those original copies of any of the books of the Bible, not even of the New Testament. What we do have: multiple generations of error-ridden, edited, censored copies of those originals.

For the first three centuries of its existence Christianity promoted a religion judged illegal and criminal. Christians, themselves, were considered fugitives and renegades. Copying the Bible's original documents was carried out by amateurs, in far-from-ideal circumstances, no matter their diligence and devotion.

The original versions of the books of the New Testament were written in Greek, and they were unprofessionally copied throughout the first 300 years before Christianity became the state religion under Constantine. Approximately 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the Bible survive today, even though some manuscripts contain only small fragments of the texts. Of these texts, only ten contain the full Bible as we know it today, and only four of these originated earlier than the tenth century!

Some scholars estimate that in that collection of manuscripts, as many as 400,000 entries differ with all other manuscript entries. To put that in context, as one noted biblical scholar expressed it, more variations exist in the text of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament.
So, in what sense can we claim the scriptures express the inspired, written words of God, since so much uncertainty exists about the accuracy of those words?

Some of these variations in the text are simply accidents of scribal copying. Some were deliberate changes to accommodate different theological points of view, or to ensure that sacred scripture corresponded to the teachings of the early church-the reverse of what one would think the correct procedure! Good examples of these changes, among many others: any change regarding whether Jesus was divine or human, or a combination of both; or the status of women in the early Church.

For centuries, Christian believers all throughout the English-speaking world have loved The King James Version of the Bible, especially for its classically beautiful English prose. Unfortunately, the King James Bible translates one of the most corrupted of the surviving Greek texts.

Many of our most-cherished beliefs-the divinity of Jesus, the nature of the Holy Trinity, and many central Bible stories we remember from childhood-were based on either deliberate changes to, or accidental copying of, biblical text. Obviously, knowledge of these very matters proves essential for anyone wishing an in-depth understanding of fundamental matters concerning human life and destiny before God.

To give you an example of acute spiritually illiteracy, I was once speaking to a lady named Mary, who was an engineer, and happened to greet her with, "Buddha bless you." She immediately blurted out, "I'm not blessed by anyone but Jesus! Buddha can't do anything for me." I suppose she didn't know about the corruption of scripture mentioned by Dr Ledwith, or the fact that Jesus went to India to study with the great spiritual masters of that time-Buddha being one of them.