Free Will and the Right to Choose - How are we going to use them?

Before we go any further here, I need to emphasize something. 

I think that humankind has an inherent need, an instinct if you will, for a relationship with God or whatever Higher Being you believe in. Organized religions can and do meet that need and satisfy that instinct - there are enough of them out there that a person can choose whichever best suits. 

I happen to believe that there has been, is, and will only ever be One God  (Trinity or no, God is One) and that God is the SAME GOD for each and all of us - any conflicts among us on the issue are of our own making, for our own purposes, and are not of God. 

When we judge, condemn, harm one another, we are doing likewise to the bit of God that belongs to each and all of us equally by birthright ... that's the spiritual part of us, which balances the physical and intellectual parts. Harming one another in any way is counter-productive at best and an abomination when done under the guise of 'serving God'.

We've all of us got individual tempers, you can take that to the bank. How we choose to use them is up to us.

Nobody's perfect and nobody expects anybody else to be, but we should at least try to avoid harming one another as much as possible.

Call me naive and idealistic - it won't be the first time.

That having been said ...

NOW:

Here's a hypothetical situation and an equally hypothetical question:

What if, back in the day, it dawned on 'leadership' that the peace, love, and obedience taught by Jesus and His followers would provide an ideal population-mindset for the peoples said leadership wanted to dominate? Everyone, whether they had a choice in the matter or not at first, would eventually just fall into line (almost everyone) and go with it because it's mainly a matter of being Nice to everyone, except when the Boss says otherwise. Tweak it a little and you're the Boss of the whole thing with the Powers of God Almighty, get 10% of everyone's income and generations born into the mindset to provide even more ... and what if it worked like a charm for hundreds of years?

Now what if, back in the day, it dawned on someone else's leadership that this system was working pretty darned well, with generations of pliant and obedient people donating of their own free will to the 'cause' - these people born and bred into this mindset would be easy pickings (considering they were supposed to love and forgive everyone, especially those who did them wrong) so these other leaders did a little creative writing and tweaking - and brought a whole different but perhaps even more numerous population to THEIR way of thinking and believing - but the tweaking was to include the clause that you don't necessarily have to be Nice about stuff, and if someone believes differently than you do it's perfectly all right (expected even?) to do them harm if they won't agree with you - and you get bonus points for expanding the territory controlled by this mindset.

Wrap them both up in nice pretty packages, add plenty of sugar so they're easy to swallow, butter it up with the promise of eternal happiness (so your current misery or even your death doesn't really count), destroy anything left over from before, silence anything/one that might possibly cause someone to question your authority to Speak for God, and you're good to go.

Never mind that God gave humankind a free will and the right to choose. What people don't know doesn't matter.  Just keep those obedient and generous generations coming, the bigger the families the better and who cares what the brood mares think or feel or want or need; duty is duty.

Hmmm ... I could take this in any number of directions, couldn't I? Perhaps I'll explore all of those directions one of these days.

For now I'll just leave it as is for you to make of it what you will, as you choose.

You've got a mind: use it. Figure out what makes sense to you and let me know what you think. I'm not hard to find - just watch the spelling of S-H-I-E-L-A :)