In the short but powerful book Snap Out of It, author Barry Bragg invites you to examine traditional religious ideas and exchange them for a spontaneous, personal, free-fl owing, natural spirituality. Through analysis of the Bible, interviews with former fundamentalists, and his own cartoons, Bragg presents an alternative path to those wanting freedom from unexamined religious teaching. He proposes that we are all part of one vast, creative energy, and that humanity is innately good. In walking a spiritual path, you must ask, with unwavering courage, "What is really true?"

One of the basic principles given in this book is to question assumptions you have been trusting in. Bergen Evans, in The Natural History of Nonsense, says:

"An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis. For in the last analysis all tyranny rests on fraud, getting someone to accept false assumptions, and any man who for one minute abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity."

Have you placed yourself under spiritual tyranny because you failed to love God with your mind, as well as your heart, soul, and strength? Evans also noted that "...belief is the antithesis of thinking. A refusal to come to an unjustified conclusion is an element of an honest man's religion...Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts."

Is it all right to believe whatever you want to believe, or whatever someone thought was true a long time ago? If certain "unquestionable" ideas cause people self-hatred, or create division in families and between societies, do you accept that as the price of holding on to "inspired" truth?

Traditional religion tells us "the word of God is true." However, if you begin with the idea that "whatever is true is the word of God," and begin to make that search for yourself, you begin the journey to inner freedom. As you begin to drop false ideas, you lose guilt and fear, live less from the "shoulds" coming at you from others, and become more aware of habitual thinking patterns. You tune in more to your authentic self, develop a spiritual path based in contemplation and intuition instead of dogma and ritual, and see the source of the universe as a guiding presence, not something judging or threatening.

May this book be a source of light and liberation. Reclaim your spiritual sanity and integrity, and know that the true will set you free.