Turning to the Christian bible for comfort is like scratching
your back with an assault rifle. If you hold it just right you might be able to
reach your itch but that's not what it was designed for. It remains a weapon of war.
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If a person requires regular or frequent consultation
with their pastor they should find another one. Jesus got his point across to
uneducated people in minutes without a handbook to refer to. If your pastor
can't do that they obviously don't have a clue as to what Jesus was on about.
Anyone who points a person to Paul or John, the
self-proclaimed apostle and the self-proclaimed prophet in the New Testament,
for insight into anything other than Paul's or John's own imagination and
character is misdirecting them, whether knowingly so or not.
Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, and the later
John, the writer of Revelation, were self-aggrandising 1st century fantasists
who sought elevated status for themselves within a cult of worship and who made
careers out of dispensing false wisdom, in each case off the back of claiming a
"vision" of a dead man in order to hijack his reputation and spuriously
claim divine authority. Neither Paul nor John ever met, saw or heard the human
Jesus.
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Unless a person were predisposed to believe it, nothing
in Paul's or John's output would be taken seriously. Imagine if today a bloke walked into a pub and said
he had had a "vision" of a dead guy so now everyone should brown-nose
the government and suffer in silence for the rest of their lives so everything
would be great when they die.
Imagine if someone else came in another night claiming to
have had a more recent vision of the same dead bloke and started raving about
beasts and afterlives and torment and the world coming to an end when the dead bloke
came back.
It is no
great surprise that church-based Christianity only really took off when the
emperor Constantine enforced his own militarily backed version of it.
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According to the gospels, not long before Jesus died he
gathered his chums and told them he knew his number was going to be up soon. He
reassured them he had said everything there was to say, that his message really was that simple, and he warned them that after he had died there would inevitably be the
odd person appearing out of the woodwork and trying to complicate things in his
name but no one should be fooled.
Understandably, perhaps, for such superstitious times,
Jesus' pals needed further convincing that he would be gone for good so he
comes up with the surest and most reliable thing he can think of and tells them
that if the sun still comes up, if the world is still turning, anyone claiming to
have seen him or claiming he said anything but that which they themselves had
already heard him say would be lying. End of.
In a masterpiece of self-serving spin, John the prophet reimagined
this insistence by Jesus that he would be just as dead as anyone else and would
never ever be back into a "second coming" for everyone to wait for,
one that would bring about the end of the world. It was obviously a lot easier
to make stuff like that up while no one had the gospels to hand in which they
could read the reports of what Jesus had actually said.
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At this point you can either believe Jesus or you can
believe Paul and John. You can't believe both. Of course, if you don't believe
Jesus then you can't really believe Paul and John either, because if Jesus was
telling fibs at any time he can't possibly be the supernaturally perfect being Paul
and John insist he was to justify anyone taking any notice whatsoever of what
they say.
Thus it is that both logic and biology have it that the
chap who said he would be staying dead after his execution was telling the
truth and the two chaps who said he had appeared to them after he had died were
fibbing for their own purposes.
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If you read the New Testament as you would a regular book,
by the time you have read the four gospels one after the other you know that
all the books that follow can be dismissed. Not only will you have just read
four accounts of Jesus having told his disciples he hadn't forgotten to mention
anything, you will also have identified the character of Jesus the person, will
have seen through the fantasy elements and will probably have recognised what
it was the Romans' started their official church to hide.
The Roman Christianity rolled out by Constantine was
designed specifically to prevent people noticing that the "God" of
which Jesus spoke, the Jewish one who had inspired all the key biblical
characters from Abraham to Jesus to defy the status quo, the God that had given
them the courage to do whatever it is they are remembered for was their
conscience.
The key to understanding the Old Testament and the
gospels, the Jewish story, is to look not at whatever standout action it was the biblical heroes
took but instead to notice that immediately beforehand they each went off alone
into the wilderness, up mountains or for a stroll in the garden, anywhere they
were free from human distraction. There they stayed for as long as it took them
to be certain that they knew in their own heart that they should do whatever it
was they were considering, regardless of what anyone else on earth might think,
say or do.
So, unlike regular pastors, I always and only advise a
person to do the same thing, to find as natural a spot as is convenient for
some uninfluenced private thought and to look to their own conscience for
"God's" guidance. You won't find it anywhere else.
To make it easier for folk to know what to feel for I use the secular analogy of us each having our own bear inside us. It can't
tell us what to do but it can growl if we are going wrong. If your bear is
chilled just get on and enjoy being yourself. If your bear is growling work out
what you personally are doing or not doing that is making it growl and change
your ways.
Any advisor who directs a person seeking personal
guidance to focus their thoughts upon the detail of what anyone else was
inspired by their God / conscience to do in their own particular circumstance,
especially if it happened in a distant land somewhen in the blur of ancient
history, is simply distracting from their own ignorance to pretend a superior
wisdom.
In combination with using selective quotation from a
collection of wildly different and frequently conflicting books conveniently
bound together as if they are one contiguous work to confuse a person, to feed
their self-doubt and so foster a perpetual reliance upon their advisor, I think
the modern word for the practice is gaslighting.
______
The word "faith" is an interesting one. Faith
on its own doesn't really exist. You need to "have faith in"
something.
It is hypocritical to say you have faith in God if you go
to any third party (person / book / etc.) for God's advice. Whether you call it
God, your conscience, a bear or anything else, you already have a 24/7 direct
line to your internal counsel. Trust it. You will find that if you just avoid
lying, cheating, stealing or doing harm your conscience will be clear / your
God will be happy and you can stop worrying what other people think or thought
and can get on with being your peaceful happy self.
No one has ever been you before.
There is no book of instructions. [Po]
