My Contention with Christianity

I like Jesus. I have been and am inspired by Jesus. As a young man when I came to my midlife crisis I was inspired by Jesus to seek a way out of my feelings of being trapped in a meaningless world. I realized I wanted what Jesus had. I did not know what that was at the time, I just knew that I wanted whatever it was that he had had.

I also knew from previous experience that I could not go to Christians for help in this regard. I say this because my experience of Christians and Christianity was perfectly reflected by Gandhi when he said, “I like your Christ but I don’t care for your Christians; for your Christians are so unlike their Christ.”

Here is the crux, Christians don’t follow Jesus’ way, truth or life, they follow the apostles, particularly Paul. In the bible Paul admits that when he started out his mission was to turn people away from Jesus’ way and, as he puts it, bring that back to sound doctrine.

I sought to find what Jesus found and found it. I did not follow the Christian way; I pretty much followed Jesus’ way. When I went to share this with the Christians all I got was resistance and rejection. As I looked into why Christians resisted my way (and Jesus’ way) I found several particular points that Christianity teaches AGAINST Jesus’ way.

First, Jesus did not think of himself as a sinner and taught that neither should we (Matt 5:48, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”) Being perfect means to be whole and complete, lacking nothing, without flaw. Perfection, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If we actually try to do what the bible tells us then we will NOT take of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; in other words, we will not think we know what is good and what is evil, what is righteous and what is sinful. Or, to put it as Jesus did, we would be innocent as children to enter the kingdom of heaven. I also feel he was saying the same thing when he said, “Great is the God that reveals the truth unto babes but hides it from the wise and learned one (Mt 11:25).” The learned ones are those who think they know what is righteous and what is sinful.

The one who called himself the Apostle Paul taught that “all have sinned.” Christians who follow Paul’s faithless doctrine think that no one can perfect as Jesus was perfect. This is NOT true. Paul’s statement is obviously false (to me) for if ALL have sinned then that all must include Jesus. Yet most, if not all Christians than confess that Jesus was without sin. Therefore that proves that ALL have not sinned. But because Christians have been taught to treasure scriptures as inerrant they get trapped in a bind when shown that this is not true, so they cannot talk about it further.

Jesus started his ministry by telling people to “repent” or completely change their ways of thinking. It is in our ways of thinking that effects the quality of our life experience. If we think like Jesus thought and how he suggested we think than we can experience that Kingdom of Heaven that is AT HAND, here, now, today.

I will try to point out more examples of the differences between Jesus' way and the apostles way (Christian way) in the future.

Love Yourself First

“The measure you give is the measure you shall receive.” Jesus

If you love yourself then you are loved. If the whole world loves you but you do not love yourself then you will not know love. If the whole world hates you but you love yourself then you will know love.

It does not matter whether or not God loves you or Jesus loves you or anybody loves you, if YOU do not love yourself then you will not be loved. If you love yourself then you will have the experience of love.

Do we want to love ourselves all the time? No, not really. We might think we want to be loved all the time, we might think we want to be accepted unconditionally no matter what we do, but the reality is we do not, for we use the idea of none acceptance to motivate ourselves to do something. And if we do not ‘do something’ then we will not even take care of ourselves, our bodies and our world. So this loving yourself will sometimes be conditional and sometimes it will be unconditional.

In order for our love to be perfect it must embrace the all, accept all reality. That means we must accept, enjoy and even love conditional love, which is part of the all. There is a time to accept and a time to not accept. There is a time to love and a time to hate. Without both there cannot be embracing of the all.

The Virtue of Laziness

Jesus was lazy and so was the Buddha. Both of them could read and presumable write but neither of them wrote anything down; probably because they were lazy. They were too lazy to be industrious and they did not ‘create’ anything. They just enjoyed talking and that is all they really did. They had no home to support or take care of. They had no bank account. Their possessions were only what they could carry. They were beggars.

It is true that they lived in climates that did not require much in the way of protection from the elements. In my world, America, I find that the elements, including society and its governments, do not allow me to live the way that Jesus or the Buddha lived.

But I am just as lazy.

I have short passions that motivate me to get up off my lazy butt and do something, but it only lasts for a short time. Then the drive falls away.

I love to talk to people, and I think I have something to offer them. But America does not have ‘public market places’ the way they had in Jesus’ or the Buddha’s time. America has become a nation isolated from its self. People here spend all their time at home or at works and very little in public places.

Today, to reach out to people you ‘have to’ write something, and I am really too lazy to write anything, except short little topics like this.

We Buddhas and Christs have found a peace with the world and this peace kills our productivity. Being not productive we have no desire to hurt any one or anything; we have no inner “dis-ease”. With this peace there is no busyness or business in our world. No business, no work. We Buddhas and Christs tend to live off the charity of others; we beg for our food.

Lazy people tend to be healthier for they do not stress themselves out by working so hard. We just sit around and enjoy what life offers. I will walk or hike ten miles in a day just for the joy of it, but I will not walk a mile to look for work.

We Buddhas and Christs are so lazy we do not create wars. We Buddhas and Christs are so lazy we have a very low impact on the environment. Yet we tend to have a tremendous impact on the human environment. About half of the planets population plays lip service to Buddhas or Christs, but that is about all they do in regard to Buddhas and Christs.

I have too many possessions. I live in a small motor home that I have to maintain and support, and in this day of high fuel prices that takes a lot of work. I have this computer which I use to communicate with people. But it is probably time to get up off my lazy or cowardly ass and go out and talk to people, wherever I can find them. I know I have something to offer, I just find it hard to find people to offer it to.

So in conclusion, lazy people do not hurt anybody and they have a low impact on the environment. How much better would the world be if everybody was at least a little bit lazier?

Unholy Religion

From a web page titled “All Have Sinned” (http://www.santacruzbible.org/findingGod/allHaveSinned.php)

Man is SINFUL and SEPARATED from God, so we cannot know Him personally or experience His love

Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

Romans 6:23 "The wages of sin is death" [spiritual separation from God].

Romans 8:6-8 "The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God."

A great gulf separates man from God. Man is continually trying to reach God and establish a personal relationship with Him through human efforts, such as living a good life, philosophy, attending church or religion. But he inevitably fails.

I find this as a sick attitude or should I say, following a sick doctrine from a sick individual. The apostle Paul who wrote the above mentioned doctrine admitted that he did not get it (Philippians 3:12) so he was what Jesus called the “blind leading the blind” who “neither enters the kingdom of heaven nor allows others to”. (Matthew 15:14, 23:13)

From a more intelligent perspective, to tell people that they are ‘fallen’ or separate from God or failures or sinners or anything like that is to destroy any faith they might find in themselves to be good and healthy beings.

This doctrine is “of the sick, by the sick, for the sick” and adds nothing to humanity. It does not come from a place of love (God), but instead comes from a place of fear (Satan) and judgment.

This is NOT Jesus’ teachings but the teachings of one who used to identify with those that diabolically opposed Jesus in his time (the Pharisees). Pharisees like Saul of Tarsus (the one called the apostle Paul) wanted to rout out any who would actually follow Jesus’ suggestion and came instead to bring them back to “sound doctrine”. But Paul’s doctrine is not sound or health, at least not today by today’s standards. It might have been better for people then what they had back in his day, but today only the sickest would consider it healthy doctrine.

And yet, it is taught here in an educated society as ‘sound doctrine’. I find that this is possible only because we have a taboo about questioning people’s “faith”, even if that is not faith but faithlessness. The only reason somebody would believe Paul’s faithless doctrine is because they DO NOT have faith in Jesus’ more faithful doctrine or ways of thinking. Where Jesus advocated that people “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), which means they NOT think of themselves as sinners, Paul encourages people to think of themselves as sinner. These are diabolically opposed positions and any church that follows Paul’s way is following the way of the antichrist, or what we call today Christ-anti; Christianity.

To the Christian mind this is ridiculous because they have been programmed all their lives to see themselves and everybody as sinners. But to a healthy mind this is obvious.

Of course, Jesus came to save the sinners, for they were the ones who are still gullible enough to believe they are sinners. Those of us who are righteous do not need to be saved, for we can see that we were never imperiled.

Self Judgment = God's Judgment

We all judge ourself and we are our harshest critic. Judgment can be good and even fun until we start to believe that it is true. We are the "God" that judges ourselves when we "die" to our busyness.