partners in crime

Let me note at this juncture that the apple hasn't fallen far from that lofty pedestal with the fundamentalist Christians who are riding around in their four wheel drives and trucks draped in American flags who judge the entire world through the lenses of an absolute creed in a man who died for our sins.

One paradigm, one set of absolutes.

They and the Catholic Church who seem far more eager to expend energy defending their limited truth than to see its holy words for what they are—mere pointers towards a reality of the past which cannot be taken into our day and age in a literal way. The extent to which the Catholic Church has gone to keep information from the masses is riddled throughout history. It initially denied Charles Darwin’s argument for evolution with vigour and took 340 years to change its mind!!!
 

We are no longer being taught to think...only to count. With virtue and wisdom no longer of value. Once you stop asking questions, you loose the capability to generate the answers.  -  Decadence TV series

now I'm getting angry

This leads me to sinking the boot into what I feel is one of the biggest offenders, and one of the best examples of hypocrisy throughout history, Catholicism. The Catholic Church has been (and still is) in a position of influence. Despite this, it has historically, been willing to criticise, marginalise and even expel its most creative thinkers.

For example, Galileo dared to say that the Earth revolved around the sun, which (contrary to Catholic belief) meant the universe did not in fact revolve around us. Galileo was therefore condemned to death as a heretic. In order to save his life, he was given the opportunity to recant, which he decided to accept.

Perhaps the full acceptance of his idea was not complete until December 1991, when the Vatican finally admitted officially that Galileo had been right and that the Church, as well as its interpretation of the Bible, had been wrong all along. And, as if to prove that it inhabits another planet, this institution still even believes in Adam and Eve, Noah and his Ark and all those implausible (from a scientific perspective) bible stories as literal rather than symbolic. At least the Orthodox and Muslim religions who both share these same stories and also take them literally, simply believe God over Science—their inability to question may reveal they have no confidence their belief system would survive such an inquiry, but at least they still have their integrity and do not try to bend the facts to make their spiritual ideals match up with an incompatible post-modern word.

What if the Hokey-Pokey is REALLY what it's all about?

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