Jesus himself said that he had come to set the captives free—but what is it that makes us captives? The answer from mainstream Christianity would be that he came to set us free from sin, but what if that is a deliberate distortion of Jesus' true message? What if Jesus actually came to set us free from religion—specifically a religion controlled by the power elite?

Who killed Jesus? The power elite!
The power elite of the Jewish religion provided the drive and the "justification," and the power elite of the Roman empire executed it. But why did the religious establishment want to silence Jesus so desperately that they were willing to kill him? Because Jesus' true teachings were the ultimate threat to the establishment's power over the people.

What did Jesus really teach that was such a threat to the establishment? The Jewish religion was based on the belief that people needed forgiveness of their sins, which they could obtain ONLY through the established religion and its hierarchy. As long as people believed this, the religious authorities had ultimate power over the people and their privileged positions were secure. Jesus attacked the very core of this religion by stating that the Living Christ has the power to forgive sins and that people can contact the Living Christ directly within themselves – "The kingdom of god is within you" – without going through an external religion. You obtain forgiveness from sin by finding the Living Christ within yourself and transcending the state of consciousness that IS sin, namely what Jesus called "death."

So think about this logically. Is it really plausible that Jesus came to start a religion that would become exactly like the religion that had him killed? Since the formation of an official Christian religion – and especially after the appearance of the Catholic Church – mainstream Christianity has made the exact same claim as the religion that had Jesus killed. How can this possibly be what Jesus wanted or wants today?

The stark reality here is that Jesus did not come to start a religion that would be dominated by the power elite and used to enslave people's minds in a rigid mental box defined by dogmas and doctrines. When Jesus told his apostles to go out into the world and make all people his disciples, he did NOT mean to make them members of a rigid, dogmatic religion that claims his name while suppressing his true message.

In reality, Jesus came to give us a set of universal teachings for transcending the state of consciousness in which we blindly follow the blind leaders that make up the power elite groups seen throughout history. Jesus came to set us free from the power elite, and in the first couple of centuries, this is what many Christian groups preached and lived. Jesus' early followers were not called Christians but "Followers of the Way," meaning the universal way of Christ that cannot be confined to a dogmatic religion. Then an official church emerged, it was taken over by the power elite, and now those who preached Jesus' true message were called Gnostics and later heretics that were burned at the stake.

It is high time to do away with the falsity and hypocrisy of the Christian religion and rediscover the true way of Christ, namely the inner way that does not rely on an external religion but only on our own willingness to follow Jesus' call to look at the beam in our own eye and transcend the human state of consciousness. ONLY by attaining the Christ consciousness will be truly overcome "sin."

..... from askrealjesus.com