07/30/07

Why I am Not A Christian

Apologies to Bertrand Russell, from whom I stole the title of this article.

Look at the history of Christianity, which after about 100 AD is the history of the Christian church, and you’ll see that it is bloodstained, political, power-hungry and full of conflict. Among the first things that happens is that the Roman emperor, Constantine, appropriates Christianity as the state religion and turns the empire from persecuting Christians to persecuting non-Christians.

Ever since then, the holy Roman Catholic church has been acquiring as much wealth, power and prestige as possible, in spectacular defiance of Christ’s injunction that our real treasure is in heaven, and His advice to the rich man to sell all he had, give to the poor, and follow Him.

Skip forward a few hundred years and you have the Crusades, in which the English, French and other Europeans invaded the Middle East in order to turn the heathen Muslims into Christians, and reclaim the Holy Land for Christ by means of murder, rape and pillage.

Let’s hear it for the Christian soldiers! According to the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, they committed atrocities not just against Muslims but also against Jews and other Christians. For example the Fourth Crusade never made it to Palestine, but instead sacked Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Many religious relics and artefacts taken from Constantinople are still in the hands of Roman Catholics, in the Vatican and elsewhere. This crusade served to deepen the already hard feelings between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity.

The Crusades also earned Christianity the enduring hatred of the Muslims, a hatred which continues among many of them (on both sides) to this day. The very idea of a crusade (holy war) is as fearful to the Muslims as is the idea of a jihad (holy war) to the Western world.

Following almost directly on from the atrocities of the Crusades was the next infamous chapter in the history of the church, the inquisition. The Roman Catholic Church established what was acceptable doctrine and anything else was branded heresy. Confessions of heresy were extracted by torture, failure to recant was punished by burning at the stake, those charged had no right to counsel and there was no right of appeal. No wonder we still call this the dark ages.

Heresy was not the only crime against the church punishable by torture and death. During the 14^th century the church eagerly prosecuted witches and those engaged in magical practices, especially in the south of France. In one trial, at Toulouse, 8  people out of 63 accused were handed over to secular authorities to be burned and the rest imprisoned, some of them for life. Two elderly women under torture confessed they had sex with the devil and ate the flesh of human babies.

The Reformation, considered by many to have been the rescue of the church from the excesses of Roman Catholicism and the re-establishment of a Christianity founded on Christ’s teachings, did not prevent the  practice of witch-hunting, which even the great Martin Luther, founder of Lutheranism, approved. On the whole, greater activity in hunting down witches was shown in the Protestant districts of Germany than in the Catholic provinces. In Osnabrück, in 1583, 121 persons were burned in three months. At Wolfenbüttel in 1593 as many as ten witches were often burned in one day. In England and Scotland thousands of those accused of witchcraft were hanged during the 16^th  and 17^th centuries.

As we move into more modern times, and the discovery of the New World, the practice of persecuting witches was still not entirely abandoned. Arthur Miller’s famous play, The Crucible, was based on the true story of the persecution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

But much greater atrocities, amounting to genocide, were committed in the 16^th century in South America, particularly by the Spanish Christians (conquistadors) as they swept into the country, killing the natives, looting their gold, and converting those that remained to Christianity.

The English church sanctioned the cruel and barbaric treatment of those transported from the home country to the colonies. Ministers of the Church of England were sent with the fleets of wretches who travelled in miserable conditions, often for petty crimes, and were treated abominably, especially if they misbehaved, with floggings and other punishments regularly meted out. Most of them never saw their homeland again.

Less than a century and a half ago, in the 1860s, a great civil war was fought between the southern states of the US, which used Christianity to justify slavery, and the northern states, which did not.

This century, the atrocities have hardly abated, as the Aboriginals of Australia was first decimated, and then subjected to the wrenching of children away from their families in a largely successful attempt to eradicate the native culture and a less successful campaign to force Christianity onto the black population. In Northern Ireland, two factions of the Christian religion, aided and abetted by various governments, have been at each other’s throats continually.

Do we live in enlightened times yet? Not while the United States, a nominally Christian country, thinly disguises its war on Muslim extremism as a war against terror, and England and Australia, who also open their parliamentary sittings with the Lord’s Prayer, join in. Not while Protestants and Catholics in Ireland bomb and shoot and kill each other over religious rivalry that goes back hundreds of years. 

What are we to make of this history? It seems Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness was almost completely ignored by the organised church, which quickly established itself as a political vehicle and continually used force and violence to maintain itself.

Does that negate what he said? Are we to judge his message by what his followers made of it?

New light and understanding on Jesus’ real message, only hinted at in the New Testament, has finally been shed by the master Himself in a message of love to you that explains what His death and crucifixion really meant. Jesus was demonstrating that he was not a body, and therefore he could not die. He was showing you that the same applies to you. He did not say that he was the light of the world, but that you are the light of the world.

What he could not say in those primitive times is that we are living a dream, that the world we think we see every day is literally not there, and that the great mistake has been corrected. The great mistake was not that we rebelled against God, meriting punishment, but that we believed we had somehow separated ourselves from Him, felt guilty and have been punishing ourselves ever since.

But the hell we created for ourselves, where everything suffers and dies, can and does come to an end as we realise that Jesus was not unique in his perfection, that His perfection stemmed not from a virgin birth but is shared by every living thing God created, and which is innate in you. That there is nothing to forgive because nothing ever happened. All your so-called sins were just mistakes.

You have been tried in the highest court of the universe and found not guilty without possibility of appeal. That’s the lovely message Christ came to teach, and to show us that in our brother’s innocence we will see our own, that heaven is for all who decide in favour of it, that everyone decides for heaven sooner or later, and that in fact the whole space-time continuum has already ended and the kingdom of heaven is established inside of us, the only establishment that is eternal.

Fortunately for me, Jesus’ new message that has taken root in my heart, supplanting the violence, power hunger, greed and vengefulness that I had hidden there for centuries, for lifetimes. The new message of forgiveness speaks to me directly, telling me that I was responsible for everything that happened, but that it was a figment of my imagination, a dream of violence, torture and death that has now come to an end as I accept His guidance out of the pit of hell into the radiant sunlight of divine love.

None of it was true! It was all my misunderstanding of Christ’s teaching that led me to do things in His name that He would never sanction as the light of the world. This results in my instantaneous, rapturous conversion to my natural state of grace, and the conversion of the world, including all of history, into a forgiven world where everyone and everything is fresh and clean and new, pure and holy and a beautiful reminder of God’s love for me.

Nothing in this negates the natural love I have for Jesus from hearing Bible stories at my mother’s knee. It’s not a different Jesus, just a clearer statement of His message, which was always one of love and forgiveness. I am now even more liberated as I realize that salvation is for everyone, that the Muslim, the Hindu and the Buddhist are my brothers in Christ, that Christ is the Sonship of God, unlimited in its communion with the Father and in co-creation with Him. It’s the ultimate fulfilment of all that the church promised but also compromised, trying to use fear as a means of declaring God when in fact God is love. The church taught that, too, of course, but tried to have it both ways.

No, I’m not a Christian anymore, unless I’m a new Christian and Christ Himself is born in me. I represent the Christ mind. And I offer you everlasting peace.