The End of the Line (a)

Most mainstream Christians tend to agree in the remarkable similarities between their religion and Judaism. However, the similarities are not that much more striking between those two than the similarities between Christianity and Hinduism, and probably aren't as striking as those between Christianity and Islam. Now the question that this begs is, where is the line of respect to be drawn between "People of God" and "New-Age Heathens," the two seemingly being the only two plausible outlooks to many people. If it is all right for Christians to identify with Judaism without being seen as "off-the-deep-end-liberals" then where is the line between religions? In other words, when a person tells a mainstream Christian that s/he wants to celebrate Passover this Easter time with friends, they have no problem with this, because after all, Jesus celebrated Passover. However, if the same person tells the same mainstream Christian that they are meditating regularly on the divine vibrations of God, and chanting Aum to attune hirself with the cosmic consciousness, then s/he is immediately labeled a "new-age nut" by our mainstream Christian friend.

What I would like to know is why is the one idea seen as being more dangerous than the other? I would assert that if anything, at least in the interest of having a relationship with the divine, it is more dangerous to see a difference at all, than to seen nothing but differences. Christians share many rituals and observances in common with Judaism. Also, they share many similar central characters and places in their lexicon of stories. However, these similarities are merely surface. Christians have more in common as far as holidays and traditions with the Celtic pagans, and even with some of the stricter Gardenarian Wiccans than they do with most other religions, Judaism included. This is hardly seen as evidence of the similar natures of the two religions by mainstream Christians.

However, when one looks a bit closer at almost any religion, one starts to see that the guts of any of them looks remarkable similar to the guts of any other. The focus seems to be on a few basic themes. These include, death of the old self, rebirth of the new self, meditation, God-communion, helping others to evolve to the next spiritual plane, and being helped along by others. They tend to feature central characters that exemplify the more "evolved" prototype of the next faze of human existence. These include Jesus Christ, Buddha, Zarathustra, and Osiris/Dionysis, to name a few. These are characters that we are to attempt to emulate. These characters might be real, or they might be mythological parables trying to teach us how to grow to the next level, but that is really immaterial in the long run. The need for one's own set of characters, places, and events to be the one and only, exclusive reality is the part that makes no sense. Is it really necessary to have our idea of what happened to be the only idea? Especially when essentially everyone's idea of what happened is trying to get across the same basic "guts"? Doesn't the basic gist of the results matter more than whose terminology was applied to "sell it"?

When the Bible is translated for peoples who have had no contact at all with Christianity, the word "God" is typically replaced with the name of the chief deity of that particular culture. This is even recorded in the Bible its self. When Paul talks to the Greeks about Jesus and His view of God, he makes reference to their "unnamed god" and says, "That is the God that I serve." In other words, what this idea tells us is that the terminology we use doesn't make any difference to God. If we say, God, Krishna, Buddha Nature, Christ Consciousness, Jesus, or even in some instances Satan or Lucifer, or even if we create our own religion based a 1950 James Stewart move called "Harvey" (ahem…moving right along), the point is that the "guts" of the teachings are what matters, not whose terminology makes sense to the most people.

God is typically seen as our parental figure. Any good parent realizes that if you have more than one child, then you have to have more than one approach to raising that child. Is God really going to be a worse parent than even the best human parent? Each different mythology, or if you prefer, each set of factual events recorded in religious histories, are events that God inspired to happen, or inspired to be invented so that the greater Truth could be known. Each of these different views are just like each of the different people in all space and time. That is, they are different on the surface, because they each have to fill different roles in the continued survival and evolution of the species. To put it into Cherokee terminology, all the myths and all people fulfill a role in the hoop of life. But the inside of them all is the same.

It is a lot like the way I heard a Christian Comedian named Mike Warnkee explain the trinity. He explains that it is a lot like good cherry pie. When you cut a good cherry pie into slices, you create an idea of separateness of each of the pieces. There are separations cut between each piece. However, inside of the crust, all the goodness, all of the "guts" oozes back together. The separateness is only on the surface. This is not only applicable to the trinity, but also to all things in the universe. All the people, plants, stars, solar systems, animals, rocks, and even the myths that are created, either by means of writing fiction, or by events that are carried out and recorded, are all essentially the same oozing cherry pie filling, running together under distinctions that are only on the surface, and that are only there to assure that everyone is able to get a piece.

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