a2m - religion

in the meantime

2013-04-29T17:17:00.000+10:00

The church of the future therefore, needs to go back to the first century and try again. Back to when we had the teachings of Jesus in its infancy— before His stories became exaggerated and before new stories were created by the new testament writers to further their cause—which however, was totally justifiable at the time as it was the only way for their religion to survive in that era.

The problem is, we are no longer living in that era, so we need to go back to that time and discover ‘Jesus the person’ once again, keeping in mind that the gospel writers were merely painting a portrait, not using a camera. If we can do this, we will go a long way in finding the ‘church of the future’—one that rejects a religion of fear, close-mindedness, and self-deception of the past, and replaces it with an honest and living faith of the future.

Jesus said there were higher understandings to be realised at a later time when, in John's account of his life, he told his listeners that he had "much more to say to you, more than you can now bear." (John 16:12) therefore implying that there would be a later time when such understanding would be possible, that time will be, when human growth has finally learned to respond to inside prompting and no longer feels constrained to parrot and conform to the socially familiar.

I believe this is a natural progression and we will get there, but until then, I won’t have much to do with the churches of today. We will always of course, still go to celebrate and validate friends and relatives rights of passage—where people are ‘hatched, matched, or dispatched’ through its ceremonies to be sure, but the ritual of going each and every week to worship as we have done in the past, I do not think will survive.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace

- Sri Chinmony Ghose

we need religion however

2013-04-16T17:21:00.001+10:00

Huston Smith says. ‘Historically, religion has given people another world to live in, a world more adaptive to the human spirit. Of course, not everything about these religions is wise. Their social patterns, for example—master -slave, caste, and gender relations—have been adopted from the mores of their time. But in their view of the nature of reality, there is nothing in either modernity or postmodernity that rivals them."

spirituality = religion – prejudice

therefore

spirituality + prejudice = religion

- MiesterX

breaking up from within

2013-04-12T17:22:00.002+10:00

Along with the eastern religions which I mentioned earlier, other Christian churches have also sprung up to fill this void, with many people moving toward Protestantism. The Catholic Church has in response made some token concessions (rather than risk losing the rest of it’s population base) to place the bible into some sort of context that we can recognise in today’s world. It has even acknowledged some of its many contradictions and straight out falsities from days gone by, but continues to be preoccupied in giving black and white answers in an ultimately grey world. This may work for the right wing believers who need to fill their insecurity with certainty (by the way, why is it these churches who claim to have the answers don’t allow any questions?) anyhow, while they refuse to progress, they will never reach secular society as a whole, let alone my liberal viewpoint.

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

partners in crime

2013-02-21T17:11:00.000+11:00

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

2013-02-06T17:47:00.000+11:00

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?

2011-10-28T12:44:00.001+11:00

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?

2011-10-07T15:53:00.002+11:00

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??

2011-09-28T13:18:00.001+10:00

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

2011-09-20T13:00:00.000+10:00

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

2011-08-29T16:39:00.001+10:00

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

2011-08-24T13:06:00.000+10:00

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

2011-08-18T15:41:00.000+10:00

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

a simple message distorted

2011-08-02T13:29:00.000+10:00

The disciples I mentioned in the last blog went on to establish the Christian religion we know of today. One which I will argue later on, has refused to renew itself since its humble beginnings in the first century. As Paul Davies observed ‘The trivial God we meet in church is no longer big enough to be able to be the God of this world anymore’. ‘After religion, try Jesus’ is now the cry as the church continues to refuse to budge on fundamental dogma. In messing with the simple and central theme of ‘There's nothing you can do and nothing you can be that would place you outside the boundaries of the love of God’, the church only succeeds in muddying the waters by adding unnecessary layers.

The church needs to realise that the Bible cannot be taken literally or assumed inerrant anymore as its words and images are limited by the age that produced them. Our 20th century vision of this God of antiquity has been culturally conditioned, socially moulded as well as linguistically restrained. We need to journey beyond these restrictions and into the experience that shaped the bible and put it into a context that we can understand in our day and age.

A summary of Jesus by the early Christians:

The coming of Christ has fulfilled the ancient prophecies. He was born of David's family, died according to the Scriptures in order to deliver us from the present evil age. He was buried, rose again on the 3rd day as Scripture foretold, and is now exalted at God's right hand as the Son of God and Lord of the living and the dead. He has given His Holy Spirit to His followers as an assurance of His Lordship and as a foretaste of his return to be the Judge and Saviour of men at the Last Day.

real or not?

2011-07-29T13:35:00.000+10:00

So let's begin with the New Testament: I have problems with the accuracy of the bulk of the latter part of this collection of books, however the earlier writings such as Paul's letters and to a lesser extent, the gospel of Mark, I believe are sincere. This is because they (Paul in particular) were writing about Jesus the person. The latter books tend to use Jesus as justification for the early church’s doings by stretching and in fact inventing many of His stories to suit their needs.

But while I'm here, to dispel the argument that Jesus was not an historical person, I tell you; if they were to create a myth, the early writers of the Gospels would not have had Jesus come from Nazareth, a place they despised—with doctrine stating ‘nothing good could ever come out of Nazareth’. And further, their message surely spells history as there is no other explanation for the writers to create a story so unheard of in their time, a story they would need to bend and twist to fit into the framework of their pre-modern ways for decades. If you were looking for something that isn’t historical, start at the stories invented later to try and rectify what didn’t sit well with early Christian prejudices—Jesus was born in Bethlehem, during a census and in a stable—now that may be a lot of things, but it’s certainly not history.

And the resurrection story—which is the crux of the Christian message. What gives it merit is not whether Jesus was crucified or raised from the dead, it is in the transformation that occurred within the disciples shortly afterwards—they had forsaken Jesus in fear and abandoned him in cowardice but suddenly became fearless, heroic people ready to die for the truth which now possessed them, becoming the most influential movement the world has ever known—no vision or hallucination I believe is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.

Perhaps they saw the love of God incarnate within him… he was betrayed, denied, persecuted, forsaken, tortured and killed yet he still loved the perpetrators. That’s why I believe God is in Christ—I don’t see it possible in any human to have this much capacity to love. I find in this Jesus a life fully lived and a love wastefully given.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg––or else he would be the Devil. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. - C. S. Lewis

kernel of truth

2011-07-25T15:04:00.000+10:00

So if we then head back to when each religion was in its infancy, you find a common thread they all share, that of compassion, wisdom and being. Interestingly, if you dig deeper, you’ll also discover the same common thread in philosophy—Plato in my opinion was not all that revolutionary, he was just the first recorded person to tap into this primordial need, thereby giving an alternative to the faith based religions and arguing the same fundamental truth but through logical rationale. Anyway, this common thread I speak of, although eternal, expresses itself in the time it was written and through the mind of man; therefore every scripture must necessarily contain two elements, one temporary, perishable, belonging to the ideas of the period and country in which it was produced, with the other eternal and imperishable and applicable in all ages and countries. Each also has undergone 2000 years of humanity and therefore added 2000 years of self serving dogma to this ‘common thread’. So to find fulfillment now, we need to peel back the layers, right back to the kernel of the message and remember what kindled this belief process in the first place.

My personal opinion is that a shortcut lies in the Buddhist faith which has no hierarchy and therefore no power struggles which results in fewer layers to wade through.

But my emphasis here however, will be through the Christian coloured pane of that multi-coloured lantern, as it is from within this Christian tradition on which I was raised.

So with my next entry, I'll use broad brush strokes for my take on the ancient faith of Christianity which broke upon the scene in Judea in the first century and then moved on to conquer the Roman empire in the fourth century, dominate Western civilisation in the thirteenth century, endure the face-lifting reformation of the sixteenth century, follow the flag of European colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, and shrink dramatically in the twentieth century.

I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian.

- Mahatma Gandhi

the highest source (well second ;)

2011-07-25T11:07:00.001+10:00

If the previous blog were to be accepted as profound, it would need to be opened up to academics and philosophers alike. I sent this to the most authoritative source I know—John Shelby Spong, and received this reply:

Dear Mark:
Thanks for your letter. Your argument is as good as any. It is not new. It responds to the question why is there something and not nothing.
In the last analysis whether there is God or not doesn't really matter. The real question is: does this God relate to me?
My best,
John S. Spong

The latter part of this reply alludes to what Bonhoeffer recognised (where so many religious people fail to) that anything we say about God is subjective. We cannot capture and fully embrace God. Our words point to and our images interact with God, but our words and our images are products of our world and our cultural realities. They are not objective and they will not endure forever. So therefore we must ask ourselves ‘who is God for us today?’ and ‘how does this God relate to me personally’. The former part of his reply however adds a certain amount of validity to my statement and subsequently gives further strength to my conviction.

So even though I believe all religion to be ultimately man-made, I treat God as axiom and Jesus as simply one of the many doorways to that God—like a candle inside a multicoloured lantern, everyone looks through a particular colour, but the candle is always there. Ultimately, we must learn that in respect to the different religions out there, it is not by which road we travel, but how we conduct ourselves on the road we choose to take that is crucial. To suggest otherwise is to continue to play outdated religious games.

My mind is my own church. - Thomas Paine

that was then..

2011-07-25T11:04:00.000+10:00

One night close to a decade later, I had a thought process which married cosmology and transcendence into a statement which was so simplistic that it may have some element of truth:

Either (via the big bang) the universe came into existence out of nothing, with matter and energy being created out of emptiness and for no reason.

or

A power we cannot yet comprehend set the big bang and the universe into motion by divine intervention and for a purpose we are not yet privy to.

Although the later is difficult to humanly comprehend, the former is simply impossible!

So as scientists can never explain what happened before the big bang, it seems rational to think that something irrational is out there and I guess all the different religions are trying to fill in that hole.

Maybe the human mind is not capable of understanding universal truths? - Anon

the gospel according to not that Mark but this one

2011-07-20T17:19:00.001+10:00

sooooo....... like many, in my late teens, I grappled long and hard as to the existence of God, believing it to be the most important question you have to answer in your lifetime—since your eternity depends on the answer. I figured at the time that as medical advances continue to a point where each person may be able to be kept alive forever, the question may ultimately become a choice between immortality and God.

The more I read and pondered the likelihood of such a God, the more I was convinced of It’s presence. I had resigned myself to the fact that for those who do believe, no explanation is necessary while for those who do not, no explanation is possible. To recall Alan Watts; ‘defining God is like trying to wrap up the wind in apackage and post it’. Anyhow, if I were able to give you total proof of the existence of God, would we not all be believers?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says “A God who let us prove his existence would be only an idol”. We therefore need a certain amount of that faith element. And besides, if there were no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?

Your God is too small. - J B Phillips

Intentions

2011-07-20T13:40:00.000+10:00

My intention is to write in a simple manner wherever possible in this blog, but I fear I may fail a little. My shortcomings in expressing myself will be due partly to the complex subject matter and partly (probably mostly) by my inability to articulate myself on certain points. To clear up or indeed expand on many of the issues I raise, you could do a lot worse than to read some of “John Shelby Spong’s” work (you can find them online here).

Bishop Spong is widely recognised in this field and is the inspiration for many of my own thoughts. In fact I challenge anyone to read his work and find fault with it. His arguments are researched comprehensibly, analysed critically and explained so beautifully that one could say it's almost divinely inspired.

So if you are at all familiar with his work, you will see the irony of that last statement and of course I say it with my tongue placed firmly in my cheek. His secret however, lies in the fact that the only agenda he has is that of the truth, that's what he doggedly followed as it led the direction of his journey and with the truth in his arsenal, he had the most powerful backing on which to base his claims and take on the church and its prehistoric notions.

Contrary to first impressions of his work, his message is in fact complimentary to that of the church's and it's only the truth (plus pair of mighty big stones) which has saved him the fate of being slayed as a heretic. Had he arrived on the scene 20 years earlier, he most probably would have suffered the same fate which fell on many of his vocal predecessors.

Alright, so time to strap yourself in, I plan to go deep. There's just no other way to tackle religion. I intend to go in boots and all and take no prisoners. Commit yourself to either reading this properly or skip through to my other blog because this one will need your full attention.

Now my thoughts on this subject continually change....no, they progress. With the only thing static being that the ideas remain dynamic. So I could only ever see this part as a snapshot of my thoughts in time. For them to become set in stone would make them dogmatic in nature—and as you will see, I hate dogma!!

Please also remember as you read the following that these are my personal beliefs and I don’t pretend them to be a definitive account of religion in any way.

The call of Christ for me is an eternal call to love, to live, and to be - John Shelby Spong

so lets now have a look at the gospel according to not that Mark but this one..