Did Jesus start a new religion? ...

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 we truly overcome
"sin."

..... from askrealjesus.com