Belief, faith and irrationality need not travel together as companions hopelessly chained together on the road to “salvation”. Evangelicals have a strong tendency to conform to worn out modes of thought and understanding, and are quite slow, as a religious culture, to adapt to the awakenings that are happening in the scientific, spiritual, artistic, and cultural communities. They still cling to the worn out theory that mankind is some sort of “fallen creature” who is a “sinner” and has no hope for “heaven” or “redemption” other than to believe the way that they believe. I remain incredulous that many believe that their political savior, Donald Trump, sits at the right hand of Jesus. And don’t forget that the woman is required to be subservient to the man in their backward, misogynistic understanding.
Where does a rational, spiritually motivated human being begin, when examining all of the religious fantasies associated with “God” and “his only begotten son, Jesus”? Those with spiritual discernment have little problem sorting through the stories of the Bible, separating the metaphor from the literal, and can learn some gems of wisdom. Those who interpret the Bible literally are truly the most dangerous of people.To think that one human being, all dressed up in “the Emperor’s New Clothes” of a divinity unattainable by “normal folk”, except through his “sacrifice” makes all of us party to a parade of illusion of epic proportions. Children, it is time to grow up, and move away from believing in the spiritual equivalent of Santa Claus (and all of that idolatry associated with the “blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy Jesus”, and the “rehabilitation and conversion” of his humanity by claiming a “divine birth, with no human father”). This idol also tends to serve as a conduit to the spiritually disfiguring thoughts of the white supremacy movement and the wayward sense of spiritual superiority, thus we witness the linkages between unenlightened Christianity and the neo-Nazi movement.
We are the ones to bring order out of chaos. When we have finally “grown up”, we can accept that we are PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for the life that we have created, and for the mind and attitudes that we have cultivated along the way of our life of lies, or pursuit of “the truth”. The only “God” that exists to save the “sinner”, is the image of one that the “sinner” created in his/her own mind to “save” their soul. God, whatever it is that God is, is beyond the comprehension and understanding of the human mind, which has an obsessive/compulsive disorder around trying to get a mental handle on a phenomenon that transcends all such attempts at defining or describing infinity.
Working a spiritual program that practices mindfulness, insight, and meditation, and understanding what prayer really is, reveals at last the “one true God” which becomes the only teacher and guide that one will ever need. We must not give a name to our “God”, lest it become just another idol, locked in time and space, with no spiritual heritage. We don’t have to embrace the idolatry and irrationality of evangelical Christianity to find our ‘salvation’. But, we also dare not create new structured movements around our updated understanding, lest we contribute to a new parade of dogma, social controls, and misunderstandings between human beings.
Only a minority of fundamentalist church-goers have any idea about this, so they have much more work to do in educating their peers. Their misunderstandings should have died out many centuries ago, but this religion has a real problem with its own institutionalized dogma and irrationality, especially around death and dying, and thus they carry almost two millennia of “religious illusions” with them, and worship those illusions as a part of the God of their own misunderstanding.
The fundamental problem is not so much the religion itself, but the abject poverty of imagination and creativity within this body of thought. They stay chained to the whipping posts of their own ignorance, and claim the view that they have from their own illusion of freedom is best for everybody. Their evangelism is nothing more than competition for attention, and is a distressed and confused call for love by that body of thought from the rest of the human race. Well, the rest of the human race has a real problem with those who claim to have all of the answers, so the answer to human connection, healing, and transcendence needs to go through a different route than through this avenue of religious pursuit, or this path needs an upgrade to Evangelical Christianity 2017, and not the Christianity of 317 AD.
Ignorance is not “bliss”. Ignorance is destructive to the heart and soul of mankind. The superstition, ignorance, and delusions embedded within this type of organized religion remains a threat against the sanity of the adherents of the religion, and a direct challenge to enhanced cooperation between all people on this planet. The “mark of the beast” is evident in the way this religion approaches their understanding of who they are, and how they are advised to act in this world that we share. There is so much potential for “goodness” for the religion known as Christianity. Evangelical Christianity misses the mark by a wide margin (to “miss the mark” was given the name SIN by the Old English archers, who used this term for a poor shot in archery).
Evangelical Christianity, please aim higher. You might someday at least miss your feet!
Please, save yourself
