I preach a lot about how people don’t need religion to get connected to God; and I stick to that. However, it is crucial that we understand that the enemy will take advantage of that, every moment that they can, using your ignorance to coerce you into thoughts and actions, and inaction, to keep you from God. Religion is not the end goal, which is what I really mean when I say to be an individual and not to worship the religion itself over the God it is about. Keeping your self aligned with your end goal is easy if you stay focused and diligent. It’s hard when you put your faith and attention on misplaced fictitious concepts, rituals, etc that confuse the mind and spirit.

It is true that religion can be a sanctuary for our emotions, in other words, a place that makes us feel better; but that is not its actual purpose. The purpose is to teach you about God and how to connect to Him, period. That is not always a pleasant experience, in fact, it can be quite arduous over the process. It’s a lifetime pursuit, not a set it and forget operation, a misconception that has kept the multitude of people across thousands of years from achieving true understanding and genuine connection. You must keep that phrase “true understanding and genuine connection” close to you, as close as possible; that should be your mantra above all else; used as your measuring stick to test all things spiritual; because if you don’t have that, you have nothing but empty worship and time wasted pursuing something that will lead you into a room with no furniture or windows. Jesus said he will be waiting and prepare a room, a place for us all. That other place is the nightmare room. Enter and the door closes and disappears. You’re stuck in there with nothing; a mental and spiritual prison of nothingness. It may not be an actual room, but the reality is pretty close.

Why believe in God or bother pursuing a relationship with Him? Why not just be normal and live out your days? We’re honing in on the question of God’s existence, even the scientists are in on the game, having been persuaded by the philosophers that it’s a worthwhile question that must be included in the top pursuits of inquiry. What we haven’t agreed upon is how to get to God. Even if we don’t know exactly what God is, and never will, we still want a relationship with the creator, as we should. The prevailing question is, how do we do that? One of the ways philosophers try to answer questions about God is by answering what God is not. Rudimentary logic will determine that God is not evil and so on; this process whittles away the illogical to nudge us closer to what may be possible. The same goes for what works and what doesn’t work to get closer to God.

I’m staunchly against rituals, ceremonies, and the like, from all religions. They’re distractions and misdirections; some we created, hoping and expecting that they’d work, but it can be argued, that many are created by the enemy to steer the weak minded to placebos, or worse, to worshiping what should not be worshiped. I’m particularly against what I call “Gift Shop Spiritualism,” objects like crystals and sage sticks or tarot cards; we’ve all seen them in peoples homes and sold at tourist towns. They are fine as objects in and of themselves. They’re harmless, except when people believe in their “powers,” which is precisely the same as rituals and ceremonies in established mainstream religions. It’s all nonsense; all of it. When you make proclamations that rituals will magically change you spiritually, you’re actually being steered away from God.

You may be thinking the classic rebuttal, “what makes someone like me right and others wrong; who’s to say?” I get it. One of the reasons they’re convincing is because a genuinely connected person who performs the rituals or uses the trinkets in question gives a supposedly firsthand impression of their validity. The truth is that they’re connected not because of the nonsense practices but because some part of them actually believes in God and the spirit that dwells in each of us. If you take that same person and switch rituals and objects, chances are they’d still be connected to God because it’s the person themselves that connects, regardless of their religion and practices. People all over the world have cultural practices that bring love and unity to their personal lives and their groups, but Shakespeare said it correctly when he said that a rose by any other color is still a rose. You want to be a gift shop hippy spiritualist or a vow to silence monk or a weekend church goer, go right ahead, but you’ll get nowhere without actually believing in God, for real, and only if God actually lets you. He knows bullshit from flowers and the genuine from the phonies.

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©2026 Pastor Robert Perez