Praise God! Deny Religion!

It is the nature of my faith to be critical towards religion whilst praising God. I shall try to explain why this is so.
Faith and religion are by many considered to be one and the same, and as a result, most religious people are blind, while most people critical of religion believe they must be atheists. I propose that faith and religion are two very different things, not to be confused.
While faith is the belief in God, and as such a spiritual matter, religion is the physical manifestation of this faith, just as a word is the physical manifestation of a thought. As all physical objects, religion will therefore be flawed. All religions are flawed, being people trying to express what cannot be expressed.
Any religious doctrine is in itself just a collection of words. Words are physical objects - attempts to express a thought which is, in essence, abstract. Our minds can percieve and understand perfection, but in the translation of abstract ideas into words something is lost.
This is the same as has been held by many philosophers through history, most notably (at least in european/western thought, which I am most familiar with) Plato and Wittgenstein, possibly Kant. As Wittgenstein held, any doctrine, including his own (and mine as well, for that matter), is nothing but a path towards understanding. True understanding can only come through surpassing the words of a doctrine, seeking the idea that the originator of that doctrine had in mind when creating it.
Thus, the doctrine itself, as written in a book or spoken by a priest, is not the actual truth, but, as I have already said, the physical manifestation of that truth and thus not entirely accurate.
All humans have access to the words of God through the innermost reaches of their minds, or the soul if you wish. This is a place where nothing is sharply defined, where there are no distinctions and no contradictions, no dichotomies. That is where the truth about God can be found.
Through the ages, many people, often called prophets or the like, have made it their speciality to venture into this world and try to bring back messages to their people from this place. The shamanic journey, the vision of the prophet, the meditative trance of the buddhist priest - all of these are expressions of the path inwards towards the understanding of the true essence of reality.
All of these people see the same truth! It is when they get back to the physical world that the confusion begins. Trying to make sense of what they have experienced, they will inevitably apply logic and reason, linguistic structures, the principles of time and space and the like to their experiences in trying to convey to the people around them what they have experienced.
As these categories do not apply in the spiritual world, there are bound to be inaccuracies. In addition, some might not have understood as well as others what they have seen, and some might not be as good at expressing what they have seen, as others. The greatest prophets are those who truly understand and have the gift of communicating their understanding in a simple and powerful way.
This is the origin of the difference between religions and the reason why religions, structures defined by their search for good, often end up causing suffering. No religious commandment or dogma should ever be read in its literal sense, no religion should ever be followed strictly.