500. Jesus, The Ultimate Fact-Checker!

Mike Parsons

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Just don’t accept anything from anybody as gospel truth without actually getting that truth from Jesus, the Truth.

And Jesus said to me, “I’m the best fact checker there is”. So I take anything that is dubious, or I’m concerned about, or thinking that can’t be true, or is that true? – I take it before him. And the more I hang out with the Truth, the more I pick up things that aren’t true because they carry the wrong frequency; they vibrate at a discordant frequency that is not harmonious with the truth.

And it becomes easier to discern what isn’t and is true because we practise by training our senses to discern, by hanging out with the Truth, who helps us discern what is true and what isn’t true.

And then love is always the backstop. It is always the backstop. Love is always going to be the thing that you ultimately use in that discernment process.

344. Training Your Senses to Engage

458. Spiritual Frequency | How God Hears Your Prayers

497. Escaping the Cult of Fear-Based Religion

Mike Parsons

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Deconstruction has continued to go on all the way through that period, so that I could be free from the religious perspectives that had kept me in bondage; kept me from knowing the true nature of God, the true nature of myself as a son of God and the true nature of creation and all of the wonderful things that we have embraced as being part of that. But it’s not an easy thing. You know, I’ve got to be honest, it is indoctrination.

People who have been in a cult and come out of that cult, it’s very difficult to get the cult out of them. They have to go through a process of deprogramming, which is not easy because the programs are based on reward and fear, which is exactly what the evangelical programming is based on. Fear of hell, fear of losing your salvation, fear of being punished, fear, fear, fear. But perfect love casts out fear. So where is God within that?

479. Unmasking Fear: How Religion Manipulates Belief

342. “God Punishes Those He Loves!”

254. Restored to Sonship

491. When I Let Go Of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Mike Parsons

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Penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) was the first to go. When I began to express my doubts about it to others, one woman involved in mystic and mentoring groups emailed me, saying I was trying to take away ‘the cornerstone of her faith’. She was serious and angry at me because she wanted to hold onto PSA as the cornerstone of her belief.

I told her that if that’s where she wanted to remain, that was her choice, but I was moving on. Naturally, that upset some people, but many others resonated with the idea that it didn’t make sense for God as Father to kill or punish His Son. And when you investigate further, you find that PSA is actually a doctrine that only emerged in the tenth century…

299. PSA Sounds Nothing Like Jesus! (Penal Substitutionary Atonement [1])

304. Wrath is not the solution | Penal Substitutionary Atonement [2]

 

490. Can Changing One Belief Change Everything?

Mike Parsons

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“Do you want me to remove these pillars from your mind?” asked the Father.

I believe six of them were religious pillars, and three were cultural or scientific. It was then that I realised these pillars were framing how I viewed the world and understood reality around me.

The first and strongest pillar was evangelicalism. He removed that one first, shaking me to the core by taking it away. Every evangelical thought I had was challenged, especially the idea of penal substitutionary atonement, which was the first belief to be questioned. God didn’t just take the pillar out; he shook it, challenging my beliefs and creating instability in my belief system around those topics. And penal substitutionary atonement was the first to go.

363. Deconstructing the Pillars of Your Mind

299. PSA Sounds Nothing Like Jesus! (Penal Substitutionary Atonement [1])

250. Pillars In My Mind

304. Wrath is not the solution | Penal Substitutionary Atonement [2]

 

489. Nine Pillars That Shaped (And Shook) My Beliefs

Mike Parsons

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I’m not going to go far wrong if I interpret everything through love. I might get some minor things a bit mixed up or twisted, but the bottom line is that love won’t lead me too far astray if I lean that way. On the other hand, if I lean towards judgment, condemnation or other negative interpretations, I’m stepping beyond the scope of love.

I don’t go there any more.

It took a long time for my mind to be deprogrammed from my religious upbringing and the programming of evangelicalism, along with the other pillars of my thinking. He asked me if I wanted him to remove these pillars from my mind. About six of them were religious, as I was brought up very religiously, and three were cultural or scientific, influenced by an education that included cultural relativism and similar ideas.

443. Unconditional Love – NO RECORD OF WRONGS

363. Deconstructing the Pillars of Your Mind

 

488. Do You Only See What You Expect To See?

Mike Parsons

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All those people who say they have been in hell for ten minutes, or whatever, are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell rather than the truth. They see what they expect to see. That is the problem. We can be confirmation-biased and create our own scenario around what God is really trying to show us.

This is why we need to let God renew our minds and trust him in that process, rather than resisting him. At the same time, we should not be naive enough to think that everything we are thinking is already correct, because we are all still in the process. Even so, I would rather err on the side of love in everything I think than lean towards anything else. If I interpret everything through love, I will not go far wrong.

243. Not Counting Their Trespasses

434. God’s Fiery Love

253. Framing Your Reality

 

487. My First Hand Experiences Of Hell

Mike Parsons

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So between 2005 and 2010, I had a number of experiences which I described at the time as hell-like, simply because I had no other reference point in my life. I thought I had encountered hell, and so my framework for understanding was the usual concept of hell. That’s what I believed the experience meant, because I couldn’t see it any other way; I had no other frame of reference.

Once I actually encountered God and encountered love, I was able to revisit those experiences and see what he had really been showing me through them. I came to realise that I had completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what had happened, just as many others do when they claim to have been in hell for a few minutes. They are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell.

404. Framing Hell in a New Light

244. The Hell Delusion

486. Take It Back To The Father

Mike Parsons

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We should weigh both what we feel and what we believe God has said. Does this align with love? If it does, we can wholeheartedly accept it. If it does not, then something has gone wrong in how we’ve understood it. In that case, we can take it back to the Father and ask why we misinterpreted it, recognising that often it is our own mindset that causes misunderstanding.

I had to do that many times when my experiences did not line up with what I thought to be true. When that happened, cognitive dissonance arose, and I was left with a choice: which should I trust—my experience, or my belief system? Over time I came to see that when my experience was aligned with love, that was what I needed to trust. And when it was not aligned with love, it was usually my interpretation of the experience that was the real issue.

330. Find Truth Within: Trust Your Own Connection with God

421. Belief to Reality | Living in the Truth

485. Having Our Minds Renewed

Mike Parsons

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We’re all in a process of having our minds renewed so that we won’t be moulded and shaped by the upbringing, conditioning and programming we’ve received. Our minds are renewed so we’re not pressed into that mould, but instead transformed into who He said we were from the beginning.

That process is relational. By experiencing Him, our minds are changed. We can’t make it happen by trying to use the Bible as a tool, since misunderstanding it was what created the problem in the first place. Our minds are changed when we let Him do it, as we submit ourselves to the relationship He gives us—always weighing everything with love as our measuring stick.

287. Unconditional Love, Grace, and the truth about salvation

431. Breaking Free from Deceptive Teaching | Rediscovering God’s Love

484. Measure Everything Against Love

Mike Parsons

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We should weigh the things that we feel and what we think God has said. We should weigh them. We shouldn’t just accept them carte blanche. We should weigh it.

What do we weigh it with? How do we measure it? I measure it with love. Is this loving? Is this going to help people experience God and experience His love? So I’m measuring it against that.

So I know that if I thought God told me to do something which was contradictory to love, I know it couldn’t be Him. And people say, but you’re now saying that God can’t do something! Yes, I am. He can’t contradict Himself as being love, and he wouldn’t ask us to contradict himself and contradict what love is either.

So whenever something we think God said is not aligned to true love – true unconditional love – then we’ve got to question it.

431. Breaking Free from Deceptive Teaching | Rediscovering God’s Love

365. I Don’t ‘Believe’ In Unconditional Love