and who's there to help us?

The undercurrent therefore remains in that people are now searching for something more than the Church of antiquity is able to provide us. The eastern religions will continue to pick up this slack until these old deities use their influence to enhance life, rather than (as they have historically done) to bless the status quo, increase priestly power, and support those claims of state that have expanded the wealth and power of themselves and the ruling classes.

Now there's a man with an open mind ... you can feel the breeze from here!  -  Groucho Marx

how can we negotiate this?

So without the church to guide us any more, what do we do? And who do we look to for direction? Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who most likely is closer to Jesus than most church leaders, says it is much safer to approach God through the Holy Spirit than through theology. He says that if we touch the Holy Spirit, we touch God, not as a concept but as a living reality. This simplistic approach should in no way scare us as it is in essence the message the early church preached before it became lost in politics and obsessed with control. An approach that I argue is at the core of all faiths. It may not be often sprouted from the pulpit but I kid you not, the early Christian monks in fact meditated as a large part of their worship for many centuries before this internal relationship with God threatened the Church’s agenda for control of its members and its plans for world dominance. So meditation as a tool of worship, quietly and conveniently just faded away.

To look back at the gospels and especially the writings of Paul with fresh eyes, allows us to see that there was no such exclusivity. Jesus proclaimed an acceptance of EVERYONE, he replaced the rigid commandments of the torah with a simple call to ‘love your God and your neighbour’. We are told worship is a matter of practice and in fact we read in the Lord’s prayer that we do not go to the Kingdom of God when we die, but rather it comes to us—now: “Thy Kingdom come. . .” this parallels the other major religions on so many levels that I can’t believe how we could allow ourselves to be brainwashed over the years by a church who proclaims its word to be inerrant (which alone smacks of insecurity). This ‘us or them’ type attitude only arrived as the church gained power—and we all know how power corrupts! So lets strip the message back to the legacy as Jesus left it hey? I am very comfortable worshipping God, following Jesus and also abiding by the teachings of Buddha. I see no need for them to be mutually exclusive. In fact, if I had this same discussion with Jesus, I’m confident he’d say that he’s glad I’ve found my door to God, but I suggest he’d alliterate with a wry smile, that of course mine is not the only one. That’s indeed profound, and too left field for the church leaders of our era to comprehend.

Was not Jesus a radical in his day? I suggest that should he return now, he would be again.

Holy Spirit = mindfulness  -  Thich Nhat Hanh

getting with the times??

As this lazy approach continues, the church's audience will continue to dwindle. John Shelby Spong states: ‘Institutional Christianity seems fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge—indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda, which has its origins in a world that none of us any longer inhabits’.

No wonder we had to invent the term ‘blind faith’! Using scare tactics to ‘save souls’ is just plane underhanded and gaining heaven or nirvana or whatever you choose to call it, doesn’t have anything to do with reward or punishment, if this were our motivation, humanity then has yet to escape its self-centeredness and has a long way still to evolve!
Now this hard line approach was necessary in the pre-modern word to be sure, but we no longer inhabit that world. We now live in a post-modern age and simply can no longer blindly accept crude black and white answers to complex questions.

In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.  -  J.H. Newman

summing up

So biblical literalism arises out of a blindness created both by an ignorance of and a prejudice against the Jewish origins of our Christian faith—literalism therefore, is a direct result of the gentile attitude of society toward the Bible, and the regretful path which theologians (read: the ecclesiastical church) have taken when being entrusted to teach the ‘word of God’ to their members.

This narrow-mindedness is not showing any signs of slowing either. Just recently, before he was replaced by an even more conservative patriarch, Pope John Paul II said that “Christ is absolutely original and absolutely unique. He is the one mediator between God and humanity”. This attitude excludes dialogue and fosters religious intolerance. IT DOES NOT HELP. And here’s the kicker, I’m totally convinced that Jesus would agree with me on this one!

A great man shows his greatness by the way that he treats the little men.  -  K. Sri Dhammanda

putting it back together

The last entry's example is but one illustration of the Midrashic style of writing which is echoed time and time again throughout the old and new testaments. But luckily, since these stories were interpreted incorrectly well into Christian history, they can certainly be rectified in our modern age without destroying the core of the story. It has taken until the twenty first century to begin to go back and pick up on the symbols of the Jewish faith—and not before time I tells ya!

So we can now finally open our eyes to a whole new dimension of the gospel material.. the dimension were were meant to see!

One of the scribes who had listened to them debating, appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and so gave a further question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “This is the first: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself”. There is no commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:28–31

Midrash

So for a taste of how the Jewish writers operated, I would like to tell of their ‘Midrashic’ style (and I’m paraphrasing John Shelby Spong here). Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that everything to be venerated in the present must somehow be connected with a sacred moment in the past. It is recognition that the truth of God is not bound within the limits of time but that its eternal echoes can be and are heard anew in every generation. For example, the power of God working through Moses was seen in the parting of the waters to allow the Hebrew people to walk into God’s promised future beyond the Red Sea. But Moses died, and God’s people needed to validate God’s continuing presence in Moses’ successor, Joshua. That validation was established by retelling the parting of the waters story in the saga of Joshua. This time it was the waters of the Jordan River rather than the Red Sea, but the affirmation of the parting of the waters was equally real—God was still at work among God’s people in the time of Joshua, still calling them into God’s promised future. The Midrash tradition continued when Elijah was also said to have parted the waters of the Jordan River when he exercised his authority as the leader of God’s people. When Elijah died, the story was repeated in the cycle of stories about Elisha. The ability to part the waters told the Jewish people that Israel’s history was one continuous story.

This same Midrash tradition sought to tell the story of Jesus, who was believed by his followers to have both fulfilled and expanded the symbols of the Jewish tradition. The Gospel writers had Jesus begin his career by not only parting, but walking into the waters of the Jordan River and subsequently parting, not the waters, but the heavens themselves! so that the spirit of God, which was linked with heaven and water in both Jewish mythology and in the Gospel tradition, could visibly descend, rest on, and validate Jesus as the new expression of God in the ongoing story of God’s people.

The question then to ask of this Midrash tradition is not, did it really happen? That is a Western question tied to a Western mind-set that sets up a yes-or-no answer, for it either happened or it did not; it was either real or it was not.  A better approach would be to ask: what was the experience that led, or even compelled the compilers of sacred tradition to include this moment, this life, or this event inside the interpretative framework of their sacred past? And what was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through these Jewish stories of antiquity?

Our battle is not between good and evil.. but between ignorance and enlightenment - MiesterX

the root of anti-Semitism

Now the gospels were written at a time when the Romans were persecuting the Jewish people—in fact Jerusalem had just been destroyed by the Roman army! This meant that the Christians had to distance themselves from the Jewish people or they themselves would have been subject to the might of Rome. So their gospels which contain a combination of both oral tradition passed down through at least three generations (talk about Chinese whispers) and when you add to that the above-mentioned need to separate themselves from the Jews; a large amount of propaganda naturally crept in. So what have we done? We've taken those gospels out of context to become ‘the word of God’ and placed them flat bang into our day and age and then we wonder why it’s followers become anti-Semitic!

The first Christians of course, were converted Jews, thus the gospels were in fact written through Jewish eyes and by people who had detailed knowledge of the Old Testament and believed Jesus to be the fulfilment of these scriptures. But unfortunately, we Christians became gentiles just after the first century of this common era, and we began to read the scriptures as if they were gentile objective history books. We were so anti-semitic that we didn’t even raise the question of how these ex-Jews wrote their sacred stories. How can this, in essence Jewish work be understood if one ignores the Jewish context, the Jewish mind-set, the Jewish frame of reference, the Jewish vocabulary, and even the Jewish history that shaped and formed the writer? But this has been the reality of the Christian west for most of our history!

your wanting an example?? stay tuned..

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.  -  Jonathan Swift