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Here are just a few of the distinctions:   

Excluding                                     Including   

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  Elements Common to All Humanity

If you are like most other wedding couples, you'll want to invite God / Creator/ Divinity to bless your marriage and be a part of your wedding ceremony.   Obviously, everyone has his/her own way to approach Creator/God.   

After many years as a minister, after officiating about fifteen-hundred wedding ceremonies, and after many years of studying religion, philosophy, and theology,  some common elements have become apparent.    They are shared with you here:   

    No matter what religion, or what culture, or what race, or what part of the world people live in,  most humans believe that the universe has an intelligent source behind it -- a source we commonly call God.   

    That  source, Creator/God,  is unknown and unknowable from the physical human perspective.   About the only thing we can say with degree of certainty, is that whatever it is, it has a profound affect upon us.

    Most people have never analyzed their religious beliefs.   They have simply accepted the religion of their parents.   A smaller number of people, with equal mindlessness, have simply rejected their parent's religion.   

    A third and fast-growing group consists of those people who are openly questioning their childhood religion and their relationship  to God.   In the process, they are finding and applying  a very different relationship to everything in their lives, including their relationship to themselves, to their family and friends, to our Earthly environment, and to Creator/God.

    Most people in the United States have been trained by their religious teachers to pray to God as if they were separate from God -- as if  God  were "out there" somewhere, up in the sky, separate from themselves and separate from nature.   

    This traditional perspective on prayer is often a hit or miss proposition.   When praying to an external God in the sky, one never seems to know if his/her prayers are answered.   All to often,  prayers just  don't appear to have much effect.    

    The overwhelming scientific evidence,  and the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, both  indicate that we as humans are an intimate and integral part of God/Creator.***1`     The Christian Bible has numerous passages the tell us the same thing. ***2`     When one stops and thinks clearly about where humans are in relation to God,  both common sense and our personal experiences tell us that humans are an intimate and integral part of God/Creator and intimately connected to and integral part of nature.  

    The traditional belief about life is that:   "There is an objective,  physical world 'out there'  --  that we simply come along and experience it."   The latest scientific evidence points to a very different hypothesis.***1`      The evidence indicates that each of us is a part of that infinite, non-physical  potential that we commonly call God.    The Christian Bible,***2`  the Eastern Religions and the teachings of thousands of Masters over the centuries all support that same conclusion.   

To state this on a personal level:    "Within the context of life on earth (co-created by and shared with billions of other humans)  we each, moment by moment, create our own personal experiences."

When one shifts his/her perspective from viewing God as "out there somewhere"    to understanding the    "I am an integral eternal part of God,"  this has a huge impact on the person making that shift.  

God is just as sacred, just as powerful, just an mysterious, and just as loving as before, but when one's perspective changes, God is seen as a partner in co-creating one's life here on  Earth.   The perspective that God is a fickle, vindictive, angry bearded superhuman being living in the sky is relegated to it's rightful position as an obsolete belief, placed gently and lovingly into one's personal history book.   Fearing God and begging for favors also becomes obsolete.   

When this internal perspective is understood and accepted, it alters one's relationship to God dramatically.   It's so new, and so beautiful, and so powerful, that many people simply cannot believe that it's real.   It's viewed as one of those often-heard,  too-good-to-be-true stories.    Speaking from personal experience and from associating with dozens of others who have successfully used this process, I can testify that it is, indeed, very real and very effective.    

When one first realizes his/her own inner power, many questions come up;  chief among them is "How do I fix the problems in my life?   That's what The Technology of Successful Prayer, is all about, but that's another story for another time.    ***3