Dear Allan and cohorts,
My apologies for the delay in responding to your posts. I’ve had so many irons in the fire of late, as well as partying and beaching and family obligations over the New Year, that I’ve only now found the time to write the (lengthy) response I would like to give.
Firstly, you’ve misinterpreted me. You fundamentalists could really use a lesson in reading comprehension.
You said: “…your theology…appears to be a mixture of diametrically opposed beliefs. One cannot embrace the teachings of Christ….and at the same time embrace the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism…”
Nowhere did I say I believed in the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, pantheism, paganism, or any other religion for that matter. (And correction to another poster: Buddhists do know of the supreme invisible universal intelligence [God], they just don’t ascribe to it/him/her any ‘deity name’ or human attributes which most religions, including Christianity, do).
Nor did I say I believed in more than one God. And I, too, am intimately acquainted with Jesus and the power of his name. Your perception of beliefs being ‘diametrically opposed’ could only be those you hold dear.
I said : “….Then I accidentally stumbled on a devoted Hindu who was extremely Christ-like, then some devoted Buddhists with the same Christ-like spirit, whose prayers were being answered. They had found the kingdom of God within themselves, just as Jesus taught us to do…But when I looked further into their traditional religions, I found the same dysfunctions I earlier ascribed to the Christian churches….I've found that the 'original core essence' at the heart of most other religions I’ve studied thus far, before the formation of all men's stories and cultural dogmas around it, was the truth of 'the seed of the kingdom of God within' being birthed and nurtured by both divinity and one's own devotion.
I’m saying that all religion is a human construct (it does not exist outside the human mind and human experience) and is false – because of not representing the Whole Truth, while claiming to. Christ, on the other hand, is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end - far bigger than any human construct or religious paradigm, including Christianity. I’m saying that the seed of all religion - before it mutates into a ‘doctrine’ and a religion - is the revelation of God to the human heart - which would not be possible if the human heart did not have a seed of God within it (the kingdom of God within) which could recognize and open to the God without.
Its amusing to watch you fundamentalists go into a panic when any other religion or way of looking at Christ (which is outside of the four walls of your own dogmas) is mentioned. You jump to meaningless conclusions and those well-worn ‘Bible verse catch phrase-defenses’ that are looping around in your minds, instead of listening to the still small voice in your hearts whispering Truth from the eternal Christ.
I would like to insist that you go back and re-read what I wrote, this time with the open heart and open mind of Christ (which is limitless openness, boundless insight and ever-expanding understanding), instead of with the closed mind of a Bible co-dependent who is afraid to step outside of the safe, rigid doctrinal walls of your chosen ‘group belief system’ and take a peek into other more all-encompassing Christ-oriented perspectives. (After all, isn’t God all-encompassing? Then don’t you think he’d have an all-encompassing perspective on humanity and its attempts to worship him?)
I want you to awaken the ‘inner witness’ within you and observe yourself and your thought processes as you re-read what I wrote, and watch how certain words or phrases in my text trigger something in you that will cause your mind to jump to ‘the appropriate doctrinal answer’ to oppose it with. That something that gets triggered in you is actually fear. Fear of incoming information which is conflicting with already established beliefs.
However, the Truth (Jesus) living in your heart is never afraid of conflicting incoming information. Truth loves it and never has to defend its stance. Truth has no ‘stance’ (doctrine). The Truth in your heart (if you could only trust it) is a living thing, all powerful and all-encompassing. The Truth in your heart (if you let it) relaxes and opens and lets conflicting information in like a mother lovingly gathering and embracing her unruly children. That which ‘sticks to it’ becomes clarified and refined, thereby expanding one’s insight and understanding of Christ and spiritual reality to a whole nother level. The rest falls away of itself.
You said: My Bible says that God is not the author of confusion.
So does mine. What’s the confusion? Jesus also said he came not to bring peace but a sword. What is the sword? Truth. When one who already has a rigid belief construct is confronted with new truth it can cause a great deal of confusion, which is quite normal, as Jesus himself pointed out. Remember when you started to entertain other possible ‘beliefs’ and ‘understandings’ outside of TF’s doctrines? Weren’t you a little confronted and confused at first? Weren’t you a little defensive and disturbed? When that first happened to me while still in TF, I defensively parroted off our/my current doctrinal stance for personal reinforcement. Now, is that any different to your reaction to my introduction of new ideas here?
What I was really saying was that I have found from personal experience that some people can access the spirit of Christ and the seed of the kingdom of God within them, regardless of what false religion they belong to, be it a dead church, The Family, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. The spirit of Christ is available to anyone of any religion or cult, which is exactly what Paul’s big argument was with the Jerusalem apostles! ‘I go to the Gentiles (pagan religions).’
I am not negating the name and the power of Jesus. I’m just ‘confessing Christ’ on a grander scale than what the historical cult of fundamentalist Christianity based on Paul’s doctrines permits or understands. I’m saying that the sacred innermost part of the human spirit can open to and recognize and respond to and embrace the ‘Divine Beloved’ (the spirit of Christ) without knowing him in the image of his bodily manifestation as Jesus.
The passage of scripture Farmer quoted proves my point exactly. The Athenians already knew about ‘the invisible God’. They were already acquainted with him and worshipped him. They just didn’t know of him in his bodily manifestation as Jesus.
You have to understand. I didn’t arrive at these conclusions out of the blue. I was a devoted church goer (up to several times a week) and avid Bible scholar for 5 -6 years. I have about 10 different versions of the Bible in my research library and they are all marked up, not to speak of dozens and dozens of Christian books and Bible commentaries and histories of the original Christians, etc, etc, - and they’re all marked up, too. – Along with many other books containing ancient religious texts and enlightened teachings.
The difference between the way I study human spirituality and the way a fundamentalist does, is that the fundamentalist already has his mind made up and doesn’t want to be confused with the facts. They are always only looking for what’s wrong with another belief instead of what they have in common. Whereas, I study with an open heart and an open mind, looking for the common threads, knowing that the spirit of Christ in me will lead me into all truth, just so long as I don’t start getting religiously addictive and begin fanatically embracing one narrow viewpoint, as the Apostle Paul ultimately ended up doing.
Paul started out by realizing that people in other pagan religions were also able to experience the spirit of Christ without having to adhere to all the fundamentalist doctrines and practices the early Jewish Christians were already formulating. As you recall, that’s what the huge debate was about in Jerusalem. Finally all the apostles agreed to let the people of pagan religions worship Jesus in whatever way they deemed fit, without them having to adhere to the Jerusalem apostles’ already established Judeo-Christian doctrines and practices, just as long as they refrained from polluting themselves spiritually by eating food offered to idols or having sex with cult prostitutes (which is the true meaning of the word translated as ‘fornication’ in the new testament).
Then over the years, as is the case with many spiritual leaders, Paul’s views began to rigidify into a specific set of doctrines that became more and more exclusive of others worshipping Christ in more open, not so rigidly-defined ways. There were many apostles and great Christian leaders of Paul’s era who did not totally agree with Paul doctrinally. And, unlike most of them, Paul had never even met Jesus! How do we know for sure that we’ve inherited the ‘right version’ of Christianity? Look at its fruits. Throughout the dark ages and middle ages the church that formed out of Paul’s doctrines became one of the most murderously abusive, delusional, government-sanctioned religious cults of all time. Millions of people, mostly women, (remember Paul’s view of women) were slaughtered and burned at the stake.
History documents over and over the corruption and politics that were happening in the church for centuries and centuries, up until the present day. And yet these same corrupt church politicians (who were most probably ‘unsaved’ and ‘un-spirit-filled’) were the ones that decided which books should go into the Bible and how each passage should be ‘translated’ (all translation is, by its very nature, subject to interpretation), and they then declared every word of the collection of books to be ‘the undisputed word of God’. Where did Paul say that every word he wrote was the undisputed word of God and could never be challenged? In fact he even said, ‘This is my gospel (ie: my understanding of Christ) for which I’m suffering…’ (2 Tim 2.8-9).
Martin Luther is looked upon as one of the greatest apostles of the faith in church history. Yet many of his writings were extreme, fanatical and murderous. He condoned the slaughter of peasants who’d risen up against the Catholic church as a response to his own teachings! He was rabidly anti-Semitic - (I remember Berg re-printing some passages written by Luther in a GN in about 1982, where Luther was going ape-shit over the Jews) – and some say these writings of Luther’s inspired Hitler. After all, the fundamentalist Christian churches of Germany fully supported Hitler and thought he was ‘just the greatest’ right up until he started his violent elimination of the Jews. And yet, as a fundamentalist, Luther is your spiritual predecessor and it is his ‘version’ of Christianity you have inherited. Now what if some church father had added all of Luther’s teachings to the Bible and declared them to be the undisputed word of God, as they did with Paul’s teachings? It’s possible.
If you’ve studied the Bible in depth with an honest, inquiring heart, you will have found (as I did) there are actually many contradictions and inaccuracies in its historical accounts, and innumerable omissions and mistranslations. When these began to add up I began to realize that my belief that the Bible was ‘undisputable’ was actually just ‘religious magical thinking’ passed down to me as ‘historical spiritual law’, just like the bogus ‘spiritual laws’ we had in TF.
Can you prove to me beyond the shadow of a doubt that your version of Christianity is exactly what Jesus had in mind? Most fundamentalists would reply: ‘Well, God wouldn’t lie to his children.’ No, but men do – and have – throughout Judeo-Christian history. ‘Oh, but he loves us. He wouldn’t allow us (fundamentalists) to be deceived.’ No? Then why does he allow everyone else to be ‘deceived’ that don’t adhere to fundamentalist Christian doctrines? Does he only love Christian fundamentalists and no-one else?
Why did God allow you to be deceived while in TF? – Not to speak of the billions throughout history who’ve been permitted to be ‘deceived’ by other cults and false religions? In fact, if you were honest with yourself you’d have to admit that God has let most of the human race be ‘deceived’ doctrinally and religiously throughout all of history. How do you know for sure that you are not one of them? In reality, it would seem that God is not nearly as concerned with the content of human belief systems as we are. He doesn’t seem to care what paradigm of spiritual reality we are currently subscribing to – or how right we think it is – just so long as we commune with him. Because ultimately, if we continue to stay open, and don’t close ourselves off to new truth (which most do once they’ve found a ‘safe doctrinal harbor’), he will continue to ‘lead us into all truth’ ad infinitum, until we are ‘filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’. (Eph: 3.19)
God is the universal being. Truth can only be universal. If it is exclusive, then it can only be partial Truth. Christ is universal. Fundamentalist Christianity is doctrinally very exclusive.
When Jesus said ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ and “I am in you, and you are in me’, he wasn’t talking to a prayer meeting of born again, spirit-filled Christians. (Remember they didn’t yet exist back then. Jesus was not yet glorified). He was talking to regular people of different religious backgrounds and understandings of God and reality. So how is it that they could have ‘the kingdom of God within them’?
Let me give you a little Bible class (using the NIV):
John 1 says ‘In the beginning was the word…(etc)…and in him was life and that life was the light of men’ - before ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us’. Christ is the eternal ‘living word’ that humankind has always tapped into and always will. Many religions understand and have the concept of ‘the living word’ in their teachings. (Again, I’m talking about ‘different semantics but common threads’ and ‘the invisible god’ concept. I’m not condoning these religions).
When the Bible says ‘in his name/in my name’, the concept of a persons ‘name’ meant ‘who they were, their essence, their unique way of being, and what they represented’. It did not necessarily mean the ‘fanatical use’ of the group of letters that spelled their name. Also the term ‘I am’ was loaded with 100 times more spiritual meaning than our English version. When Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth and the life..(etc)..’ he was saying, ‘the eternal living word that I am is the way, the truth and the life. No-one can come to the Father (commune with the supreme being) except via the living word that I am (that my bodily form is filled with).’ Jn 3.16
Jesus said ‘the kingdom of God is within you’. He also told us we are to ‘enter the kingdom of God’ (the God within us) - (Mt 19.23-4). So who is able to enter the kingdom of God? Only ‘born again’ fundamentalist Christians with the ‘right’ doctrine? Not according to Jesus. In Matthew 5 he tells us that the ‘poor in spirit’, ‘the meek’, ‘the merciful’, ‘the pure in heart’, and ‘the peace-makers’ will all inherit the kingdom of God (no mention of religious affiliation or ‘doctrinal correctness’ here).
Then he went on to rail at the religious dogmatists of his day to whom he said, ‘You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.’ (Mt 23.13) (Remember, this means to ‘enter the kingdom of God within’). Hang on! How could these Pharisees even ‘enter the kingdom of God’ at all if they were not ‘born again Christians’ – or the other people who were ‘trying to’ that Jesus mentioned? - Unless being a ‘born again Christian’ wasn’t the ‘exclusive requirement’! ‘I tell you the truth’ Jesus says in Mk 10.14, ‘anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it.’ Little children aren’t renowned for their understanding of the fundamentalist doctrine of salvation.
I’ve made this way longer than I intended so I’d better end it here. May your eyes and your heart be opened.
Peace and love, Eva