YH March 2019 | Page 80

MIND MANAGEMENT her, her loved ones, her car, and her home! People have been invoking Archangel Michael to protect them for hundreds of years, and they are all still suffering and being hurt. Others have images of Archangel Raphael, who is the healing angel, carrying a sword. I tell you this right now, Archangel Michael hates the images we have portrayed of him holding a sword and shield because he supposedly slayed demons. He has never once battled or fought ‘evil’ or the devil the way people have portrayed and prayed for him to! The idea that guns, knives, or any weapons are acceptable while being a messenger of God stems partially from the concepts of God and other deities we have created. We humanized God and all the deities! First we give God and the angels human appearances—anthropomorphism. Fine, we did that to relate to them. However, we also gave them human traits—anger, vengefulness, intolerance, etc.! Throughout human history we have created ideas and images of God battling and killing for the righteous or chosen people, including the stories of Noah and the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the Angel of Death, and more. Those stories of God killing people gave permission for people to kill people- all in the name of God, of course. Think of the Crusades, Joan of Arc, the Spanish Inquisition, and present-day Arab terrorists. ALL kill because they claim God instructed them to. We have even put weapons like swords and shields in the hands of some of our spiritual icons and called these icons ‘Warriors’! That is SO un-God like. One Facebook posting I saw recently showed a picture of Archangel Michael with a sword and shield whom a woman was asking for protection- for 78 www.yogicherald.com March 2019 Use some critical thinking and common sense for one moment. The most important figure in Christianity, of course, is Jesus. He was a messenger of peace and love who SPECIFICALLY told Peter to lay down his sword when the Jewish temple soldiers came to arrest him in the Garden of Gethsemane.