I try not to sound anti-Christian but of the many questionable utterances by the Christian church, this, from the Creed is without doubt the most presumptuous and misleading. Not only is it a blatant ploy to persuade people to allow the church to arrange for them to be favourably judged, in return for a ‘donation’ of course, but it simply will not withstand scrutiny by anyone with a reasonably open mind . The ‘He’ in this quotation is Jesus of Nazareth who because of his deification by the church, is claimed to sit upon the right hand of God, from “whence . . . .” Now I have little quarrel with the church initially personalising God, because most people at that time were unlearned and superstitious. By personalising God it made the Great Creator easier for people to approach in prayer – an avuncular figure is much more re-assuring in that way, than an impersonal power. However, to continue with the deception long after people became more educated, is an abuse of their influence and typifies why so many people have deserted the churches.
What I also find impossible to condone, because the church leaders undoubtedly knew better, is the transformation of the man Jesus into the god Christ. This undermines the whole of the teaching of that wonderful and gifted man when he was upon Earth. He went to great pains to stress that he was the ‘son of man’. The cornerstone of his ministry was that, because of this and the things he had trained himself to do; the spiritual power he had learned to exercise; the way in which he could link to the highest minds in the spiritual world; he was demonstrating “what I can do, you also can do.” Were he the god that Christianity made him, what he was able to do would clearly be beyond the capabilities of ordinary, common people and his ministry becomes meaningless. What would be the point of following his advice in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, if a god alone was capable of reaping the benefits? No, the church had and still has its own agenda in creating that creed, interpreting the writings in the bible in their own narrow way and claiming the church and only the church, can arrange the forgiveness of our sins.
My friends, as anyone who, like you, has studied other beliefs and philosophies will know, sins (and not everything claimed as a sin by the church is so) cannot be forgiven just like that, they must be atoned for. In other words the people you have hurt by your sins of omission or commission you must serve in a way that makes up for how you misused them. This applies after death just as much as during our lifetime. That is, any serious hurt, mental, physical or spiritual that you have inflicted on another must be paid for if you did not do so whilst on earth. It is not Jesus who does the judging however. Believe it or not, we are our own judges. We are shown various actions we took in our earthly life but see them through the eyes of the one we affected. This is true of all our earthly actions, not just the bad ones. We are then told that until we have atoned by helping those people we hurt, we will be able to progress no further in the spiritual world. Some of us choose to do nothing and languish until we are moved to act but eventually we all make atonement.
However, the Creed says “to judge the quick and the dead”. That is the living as well as the dead. This refers to the pernicious Christian doctrine that when we die, each of us must wait until a trumpet sounds to announce the Day of Judgement. On that day those no longer living, no matter for how long they have been gone, and those still on Earth will be judged by Christ and assigned to Heaven or Hell! One presumes it also means the end of the Earth. In the meantime where have all the people who died been waiting? The answer appears to be in “Limbo,” a place that is neither here nor there.
Despite what I have said about the need to atone before we can progress in spirit, there is a sense in which we are immediately judged. We are in reality beings of light; our physical bodies being temporary suits we need to be able to experience life on a physical world. When we arrive in spirit therefore, it is immediately apparent to others, from the light we emanate, what kind of people we have been whilst on earth. The brightness of our light is determined by how selfless and considerate of others we have been; how hard we have tried to conquer the urgings of our Ego and eschew more of this world’s possessions than we really need; how tolerant we have been; how much we have been willing to place the interests of others ahead of our own. Our light is the measure of the real us. There can be no fudging, no pretence; what we have become up to the present is clearly visible in the brilliance or otherwise of the light we emanate. The sphere in the spirit world we occupy, once we have settled into our new life in the Spiritual World, is the sphere whose light most closely resembles our own. As we progress, our light grows brighter and we automatically rise to the next brightest sphere and so on. Part of the work to make our light brighter in Spirit is the part I mentioned earlier about making up to those we damaged in the past by our actions, words and thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment