Seduction of Spirituality

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I grew up in a Christian home and was taught to accept that Jesus was the one and only son of God that came to earth to die for my sins on the cross. If I chose to believe that and accept Jesus as my personal savior, I would go to heaven when I die. If however I do not accept him as my personal savior the day before I die, the consequences would be dire. Not only would I go to hell to burn, but I would do so forever. That struck me as an extremely unloving act from a God that was supposedly unconditionally loving. This was only one of many contradictions of the Christian church I grew up going to.

Another one was that God should be feared. Why fear a God that was unconditional in his love? I never could get my mind wrapped around that one. According to Christianity, God was unlimited in his forgiveness, but only as long as you were alive. As soon as you died, God’s forgiveness would expire, and if by then you have not accepted Jesus as your personal savior, Satan was somehow strong enough to wrench your soul from God and torture it for all eternity. Again that seemed pretty weak for a God who according to the same church was all powerful.

But, the Christian church argued, I had free will, and it was my choice whether I would go to hell or not. Yeah right, as if I would choose to burn in hell forever. But the church argued that no choice is also a choice. So if by the end of your life you were undecided as to whether you believe in all these countless contradictions, you would go to hell by default. How convenient. I guess it never occurred to the church that free will is not free will if one of your choices is to burn for all eternity. I mean which person in their right mind would choose to burn in hell for all eternity if they had the choice, right?

There is a word for this kind of treatment. It’s called blackmail. Because I knew intuitively that all these ideas that the church were trying to sell me was complete nonsense, I stopped going to church as soon as the choice was mine and started looking for my own answers. After all, God, if there was one, gave me a brain and I was going to use it. One of the first things I was going to figure out was whether this guy called Jesus was in fact the one and only son of God. Since Muslims and Buddhists, or any other religion for that matter, did not believe this, it already seemed suspect to me.

Why would Christianity be the one true religion? Because a book written by men said so? I don’t think so. After all, every other religion thought the same thing; that they were the one true religion. Therefore religion in general could not be trusted. Anyone with a healthy, unconditioned mind could see this truth as well. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good things about religion. But why not take the good from each religion and do away with the bad? I had free will after all So I decided not to subscribe to any one religion. I would take only the good from each religion, and in that way I would have almost a perfect religion.

Only it won’t be religion, it would be spirituality in its purist form. And in spirituality Jesus was simply a man who became enlightened. Why not? Jesus was made of flesh and blood just like you and me, but he was given God status because he could do things that ordinary humans could not do, called miracles. He was also completely selfless, forgiving, and loving, all the things that the Christian church was not. Ironically so, because Jesus was the example that the Christian church was supposedly trying to live up to. And importantly, these were not qualities that were unique to Jesus alone.

Bodhisattvas, for instance, displayed the same qualities. Bodhisattvas were enlightened beings in Buddhism. One such Bodhisattva was Buddha, who the Buddhist faith is based around, just like Christianity is based around Christ. So why is Christianity the right religion, or why is Jesus the one and only son of God, if the Buddha or Bodhisattvas existed? There has been many accounts throughout history of enlightened beings and people who could do miracles. So the only real proof that Jesus is the one and only son of God is the Bible, written by fallible men.

And even in the Bible Jesus says to his disciples that all this and more you shall be able to do. As far as I’m concerned, Jesus was a man who achieved enlightenment, after which a religion was started around him. But instead of seeing Jesus’ real message, which was that anyone can be like him, they put him on a pedestal and worshiped him. In doing this they defeated the whole purpose of Christ. By calling Jesus the one and only son of God, they made it impossible to be like Christ. One could strive to be like Chirst, but one could never actually be like Christ. In fact it would be blasphemous to assume one could.

So is Jesus really the son of God? No, not unless all of us are the sons and daughters of God. It is the nature of men to worship and put special people on a pedestal, thereby making it impossible to be like them. But that was not the nature of Jesus. Jesus taught that anyone can be like him because we all came from the same Source. We all have the same ability to love and heal like Jesus did, but as long as we believe that Jesus is the one and only son of God, that would be impossible. First we have to realize and admit that we come from the same Source Jesus did and that we have the exact same potential.

We can do all the things Jesus did and more, because we all have access to the same Source that Jesus did. It is a question of realizing your own God potential and living from the soul, as opposed to the ego. When Jesus did miracles he never took the credit and he was reluctant to perform them. This is because he realized he could only perform miracles to the extent that God did it through him. In other words his ego was non existent. Only to the extent that we give up our own ego’s importance, will we be able to miracles in our own lives. We have the same unlimited potential that Jesus had, but first we have to get out of our own way.

Tags: bodhisattvas, buddha, buddhism, jesus son of god, jesus the son of god, teachings of jesus, was jesus the son of god, who was jesus

This entry was posted by on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.