Without question, Love is the highest religious priority.

In fact, this is inarguable among the major world religions. They all believe love is the mightiest of ideals; that love and acceptance are the only valid basis for faith and morality. It’s what the prophets came to tell the world in their own ways across history. Love is the dovetail in the big Venn diagram.

It’s not that simple though.

Jesus threatened those in power because he insisted there was a direct path to God that did not require taxes, guilt, or bowing to any mortal. Jesus called out elite-appointed intermediaries and their magical ability to create business models.

Jesus was the original dis-intermediator, knowing internal motives constituted spiritual faithfulness (being Love). Calling out the fallacy that external beliefs and behaviors (knowing Love) mattered most to the Almighty.

It’s no wonder religious authorities of all stripes appear removed from the original word of love, based in tolerance and acceptance. They’re vested in sustaining the man-made organizations (jobs, power) notsomuch the faith itself. That’s how humans work: create livelihoods and protect them feverishly…

Instead of going deeper on love and acceptance through religion, the prism for knowing the unknown, we’ve “territorialized” it.

It’s hard to see through all the compounding, but what happened is that the original truth, Love, was distorted and retold by groups to grow their own territories.

Religion has taken us on a long ride through non-understanding the truth of Love, created barriers dividing us across epochs, pushing beliefs to the margins, using their “word” to justify dominance over another.

By this logic, we now know little about Love.

We know violence, terror, passion, fear, poetry, revenge, but not justice, forgiveness or acceptance.

We know how to Like and Friend, but not really how to Love.

Really loving is loving a stranger, for example, or not judging or resenting.

Now, love is mostly private, an important flavor but not the basis to life….totally outside of policy, left mystery by science – mostly just sexual or parental. We look at our own love, read about others, maybe we create our love. We understand it in our own context.

Generally muted is this all-powerful thing.

So deep it’s almost indecipherable. A driver of how much in each of us? Something you just know in your heart.

Why don’t we abide by it, aspire to grow it like money, fame, status, security?

We wonder how to fix today’s challenges.

Love and acceptance is what we need. More than ever if we’ve never really known it.

If love wasn’t trapped all these years, not the untapped reservoir it is today, would we even face such challenges at all?

What might the world be like if, instead of the thousands of years distorting original truth, we studied and mined love so it enlarged all our other concepts making us tolerant, giving and content.

Instead of creating borders and limits – what might we have built instead?

Where would we be now?

/// 2017 KJS