Religion is just another form of the duality or diversity that we experience while we inhabit our physical bodies. We experience "duality" so that we can identify the "self". Everything in this physical universe exists in duality, hot/cold, good/bad, tall/short, black/white, smart/dumb, etc.
Most religions, once they start soon split into "dual" (or diverse) denominations. Christianity started with the gnostics and non-gnostics, then Catholics and protestants, and now exists in hundreds of different denominations. Islam is split into Sunni and Shiite camps, and even Buddhism exists in Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, plus probably slightly different interpretations in Japan and other countries.
Every single thing that exists in the physical universe, including wealth, race, weight, religion, height, skin color, socio-economic status, etc., exists for the sole purpose of instilling in us a sense of identity, to teach us what it feels like to be "seperate", to teach us what it feels like to an individual. There is nothing in this physical universe that doesn't have it's opposite. Hot/cold, good/bad, rich/poor, short/tall, fat/thin, male/female, etc. Even religions, something that exists to bring us together, soon fragment into groups, and teach us what it means to be an individual and instill in us an identity. That's why we we're here.
On the other side everything is so connected and "one", and the sense of being connected is so strong, that becoming an individual is the only thing that can't be learned when we are on the other side. We live in this physical universe just long enough to become seperate individuals than we are allowed to cross back over to Paradise.
Excerpt from Randy Gehlings NDE:
"She (an angel) said that we would enter the light and become one with it. Before I could ask what that meant, she just gave my hand a little tug, and then we were inside the light.
"That was really cool! I kind of felt as though my body exploded - in a nice way - and became a million different atoms - and each single atom could think its own thoughts and have its own feelings. All at once I seemed to feel like I was a boy, a girl, a dog, a cat, a fish. Then I felt like I was an old man, an old woman - and then a little tiny baby."
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/animals04.html
"This was very pleasant and comforting and went on for microseconds or billions of years, I have no idea since time just wasn't an operative construct and had no meaning or relevance to existence. I literally had the feeling that I was everywhere in the universe simultaneously."
Excerpt from Mark Horton's NDE
http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/markh.html
"Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. . . . .
At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
Excerpt from the Holographic Universe
http://earthportals.com/hologram.html
http://www.near-death.com/
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"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein
"the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
- Albert Einstein