shankara
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- Apr 23, 2018
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“My Kingdom Is Not Of This World” (CHRISTOS)
It is difficult to communicate through the fog of irrational superstitions in which many religious people unquestioningly believe. They have internalised the doctrines so much that to hear any criticism only makes them panic and start praying for the soul of the one who criticises the doctrine. Anyway, what is the point of such criticism? “Why can’t you just let them be, you big meanie?”, I hear some cry…
Simply because institutional Christianity (and Abrahamic religion in general) has traumatized people to the point where they are averse to any sort of spirituality. This is a great tragedy and a problem to be resolved.
Nonetheless, let’s be clear, we are not saying that Christianity is a bad thing, and even less that there is something personally wrong with Christians. Their spirituality is good, it is beautiful, many Christians are genuine devotees of Christ and possess great love for humanity. What we want is the perfection of the doctrine, the resolution of it’s logical inconsistencies, not for people to cease being devotees of Christ but for them to understand more clearly His message and thus to end the division and conflict between religions. Because this division and conflict is what gets in the way of the INTERRELIGIOUS UNITY we need in order to resist the dark forces.
To clarify, the first two sections deal mostly with Protestant doctrine while the section “FREE WILL” deals equally with Catholic dogma.
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE (“SOLA FIDE”)
“Both read the Bible day and night,
But you read black where I read white”
(WILLIAM BLAKE)
Before we can get anywhere with a criticism of Christianity, it is necessary to finish with this doctrine, as it makes a lot of necessary discussion impossible to hold. The doctrine of “SOLA FIDE” denies that any works which a person makes can actually lead to their salvation. It holds that there is such an impassible gulf between God and Humanity, due to Original Sin, that our WORKS are meaningless and it is only our FAITH in Christ (i.e. His Death and Resurrection) that can save us by the process of Substitutionary Atonement.
Of course when you begin with a notion so far removed from any normal earthly standard of justice - people being punished for the bad they do and rewarded for the good they do - it’s not really possible to discuss what JUSTICE is. So let’s have a look at some of the more evident logical fallacies of this doctrine.
To begin, however, on a positive note, we will say that there is some Reason behind the notion of SOLA FIDE, it isn’t completely crazy. For example, it is true that in this world there are people who make mighty material labours, for example they earn a great deal of money and give a lot of it to charity. If we take “WORKS” in this sense then indeed a person cannot be truly spiritually exalted solely by such methods. Spirituality is about what we are within, we can throw money at things and that won’t change what we are, furthermore giving lots of money without calling for reform in the structure which perpetuates inequality (for the benefit of the rich) is one-sided and perhaps even counter-productive.
Yet when we look a little more closely at the doctrine we start to find problems. Part of the problem comes from the total importance given to FAITH (which is not FAITH in the sense of CONSCIOUS FAITH but we will come to that later…). Those who accept SOLA FIDE believe that a person can spend their whole life doing all kinds of evil but so long as they “Repent” at the end they will be saved. The word “Repent” is in speechmarks not because we necessarily doubt the sincerity of these peoples’ repentance but because Repentance is a process and not a single act, though a single act may begin it. On the other hand, the SOLA FIDE doctrine considers a person who has spent their life devoted to the good to be Eternallly Damned unless they make the act of affirming the salvific power of the Death and Resurrection of the Christ (“confessing Christ”). To anyone not caught up in the bizarre internal logic of such an idea, this would seem deeply injust.
Repentance is a process, a process which involves striving to undo all the evil we have done and the ways in which it has spiritually disfigured us, striving to become good. It is a process which, according to Eastern Religious Traditions, may take many lives. Repentance may be with the help of the Christ, as the Catholics affirm, but it is not “freely given” by the Christ, we have to make efforts. If a person passes their life in total debauchery, then they will have to clear all the negative energies they have created, it is through doing this that they can attain a higher spiritual level.
Anyway, were repentance a single act, what standard would it have to meet to be accepted? Would repentance out of fear be permitted? Or would it have to be based upon perfect love? Assuming it’s the latter, no-one is so pure and holy to as act based upon perfect love, at least, to come to act based upon perfect love would be the fruit and not the seed of a process of repentance.
When we start to look at things in this light, with some sanity, we can see that the whole notion of JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE stands upon some very shaky logical foundations. It was, after all, effectively an invention of Martin Luther, who was a deeply troubled individual, unsure whether he was a doing the work of God or possessed by the Devil.
As already stated, the doctrine of SOLA FIDE basically boils down to the notion that humanity is so intrinsically evil that we cannot by any means save ourselves from (eternal) hellfire, only Jesus can save us by means of His Death on the Cross and His Resurrection. All of our good works mean nothing. That is one side of the doctrinal equation. On the other side, we are saved by the “free gift” of God’s grace.
We can clearly see in this doctrine the internal crisis Martin Luther was going through, the chaotic products of his disturbed and confused mind. SOLA FIDE at once reduces humanity to being something absolutely evil and at the same time inflates us to the point that we are worthy of salvation as a “free gift”. This notion is extremely, visibly, dualistic and unbalanced. Any sensible person knows that no human is irredeemably evil (only the Devil himself) and there are no free gifts at all (only life itself).
Of course, as in the Christian doctrine generally, no explanation is given of how we are responsible for this evil which was purportedly created by our ancestors rather than ourselves. How can a person be responsible for the sins of their parents? They can only inherit their tendencies. It is clear that this whole business about Adam and Eve must be symbolic, a parable for the descent of each Being into the complication and harshness of material existence. Our wickedness isn’t literally inherited.
Furthermore, how can we place our own sins upon someone else’s shoulders, even those of the CHRIST? A person can guide another but cannot take on all the results of another’s wrongdoing, everyone is responsible for their own salvation. If this were not the case then it would be possible to buy a place in Heaven, to pay someone else to be saved on your behalf (this notion, ‘Indulgences’, being exactly what provoked Luther’s Reformation). This is not to say that there is no forgiveness, but that forgiveness is the result of a continual and unceasing process of repentance, of turning around, of walking the spiritual path.
The Bible, the New Testament, is quite clear. The CHRIST says:
“You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Bearing fruit is a question of manifesting what is within. If what is within us is good, decent, human, then we will bear good fruits. If what is in us is toxic, poisonous, cruel, then we will bear bad fruits. By making spiritual efforts we can become better, more decent, more human, therefore we will bear good fruit and we will not be “thrown into the fire”. This passage says nothing about another tree being cut down on our behalf.
What are these spiritual efforts? They consist of the aforementioned continual process of repentance, of abandoning sin and turning back towards divinity. They are bringing ourselves into harmony with Christ’s teachings. Prayer, meditation, worship, these are elements in this process. Just as importantly we need to act ethically, we don’t need to be fanatics but we should be to some extent ascetics, mystics. The mystic comes to understand God, to experience Him, and that sort of direct experience is the foundation of TRUE FAITH, CONSCIOUS FAITH.
In Galatians of the Apostle Paul it says:
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
There is no “get out of jail free”, “God is not mocked”, there is only an example to follow - CHRIST the LOGOS. CHRIST enacted externally the internal drama of Rebellion and Ego-Death followed by Spiritual Resurrection, the drama which we all enact within ourselves as we walk the Spiritual Path. If we follow His example we will set ourselves free.
PREDESTINATION
The Christians’ justification for the seeming unfairness of their Soteriology is the DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION. This is to say that God has decided in advance who will be saved (and effectively, therefore, who will be damned). They consider that God is Incomprehensible to us, we cannot apply any standard of JUSTICE to Him, even if this standard of JUSTICE is arrived at by REASON (which is the part of man which is “the image of God”). It is by his “MERCY”, not any efforts we ourselves make, that He saves some humans from hell. There is no reason why He should have to, He does it by His own sweet will. Every human being is guilty by birth, by the mere fact of existing, and deserving of Eternal Punishment. No-one deserves to be saved but God saves some anyway.
In truth whoever invented this doctrine must not have had a lot of love for themselves or for humanity. When we understand that WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF GOD (not just some of us), when we realize that GOD IS LOVE, it becomes clear that God would not want anyone to suffer. We may be imperfect, indeed to ascend spiritually we must rid ourselves of our imperfections, but we are not “EVIL” as such. PREDESTINATION is the belief that some souls are created better than others, more worthy than others. Some are created for heaven and some simply to be fuel for the fires of hell. Is God a tyrant who needs spirits to fuel hellfire, and thus creates people bound only to Eternal Suffering and with no choice whatsoever in the matter?
In passing, it is worth noting that the doctrine of the Catholic Church rejects both Sola Fide and absolute Predestination. Without going into much detail, however, we can say that it still isn’t by any means logically consistent, particularly in the matter dealt with in the next section...
FREE WILL
The doctrine of most Christian Churches is that PREDESTINATION exists simultaneously with FREE WILL. Being “saved” is a voluntary act, an act of FREE WILL. In fact the entire ABRAHAMIC edifice rests upon the notion of people having CHOICE, upon every person being able to choose between GOOD and BAD.
If we indeed had Total Free Will then this would make sense, if the situation was clear like we have to simply accept some particular voluntary suffering in order to go to Heaven. The Christians in fact deny this, they accept some voluntary asceticisms themselves but do not accept that non-Christians engaging in the same voluntary asceticisms would also arrive at Salvation. LIFE, anyway, is not so simple as a binary choice between two things, there are many choices, many shades in the ethical picture, what we are for GOOD or for BAD is complex and the struggle to be GOOD must be unceasing.
Still, were we all born with the same CONSCIENCE it would be possible to say that whatever situation a person is born into they know GOOD from BAD in the depths of their heart. This would go some way to resolving the paradox, however it is evident that different people have different standards of Conscience, that what is called Conscience is actually something based on conditioning and on what a person knows. The author’s conscience, for example, compels him to practise Buddhism rather than Christianity or Islam. Some people’s conscience makes them vegetarians, others makes them want to join a monastery. Only if the ultimate edict of every human Conscience was “believe in the Christ” would we find in the notion of conscience anything close to a solution of the problem.
What Christian Soteriology cannot account for is that our free will is limited by the possibilities of the situation we are in. Our WILL is conditioned also, so one can only speak of LIMITED FREE WILL. For example if I am born in an Amazonian Tribe who have had no contact with the outside world, I cannot become a “Christian”, I have no concept of what Christianity or Jesus is. If I am born in a family which values academic achievement and I possess sufficient intelligence, it is likely that I will go to university, whereas for an Australian Aboriginal this would be much more unlikely. It is not that we have no choice whatsoever, but the choices we make are conditioned by the body and the environment we are in.
A further example (which will be controversial to some), would be the case of a homosexual. Evidently some people are born with homosexual tendencies, with little desire for the opposite sex and a lot for their own. Some say that there do not exist “homosexuals by nature” but we can say that such a belief is an obvious example of Rationalization, trying to fit the facts to a theory. Furthermore let’s say that this homosexual is raised in a culture where homosexuality isn’t taboo and which is generally non-religious, and that they have no particular inclination towards Christian devotion.
On the other hand, we have someone who is born straight. They are raised in a Christian household and surrounded by Christian people, hearing Christian apologetics. Not only that, but they have a natural inclination to Christian devotion.
We can say that in the Christian view the first person will almost certainly not be “saved” whilst the second person almost certainly will be “saved”. If we look at things from the perspective of the Eastern Religions it seems to make some sense. The first person is here to learn a Karmic lesson, the second person to learn a different Karmic lesson, each based on their past Karma. They each have LIMITED FREE WILL within the framework of their conditioning and understanding, both of them can either descend or ascend spiritually depending on the choices they make. Some people have very little spiritual understanding and so are almost guaranteed to descend because they won’t understand what the right choices are, but this lack of understanding is also Karmic, the result of past actions, and can be purified (by fire, if necessary).
This makes a lot more sense than the Christian doctrine, which only multiplies the unanswerable questions… Why does one person have an easy life and one a hard life? Why is one person subject to intense temptation while another has it easier? Why does one person die young and another old? What about those who die in accidents, or who are killed whilst being “unbelievers”? These questions are unanswerable because they suggest that God makes Salvation easy for some, and nearly impossible for others, the only response to them is “God is Incomprehensible”, which is an evasion.
Again in this case we find ourselves confronted with same paradoxical idea as in Predestination, that GOD LOVES SOME MORE THAN OTHERS. For there to be perfect JUSTICE in the framework of One Life followed by Eternal Heaven or Hell, there would have to be an even playing field, the same level of difficulties and opportunities for every BEING. As this is not the case, it is impossible to say of the Christian God, “DIVINITY IS PERFECT LOVE”.
LET’S BE MORE RADICAL...
Perhaps we can simply eliminate FREE WILL, become like the Buddhists and regard all life as effectively totally conditioned? This would lead us back to the DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION, to a total form of Predestination. Buddhism, of course, wants us to overcome this conditioning, whilst Christianity’s PREDESTINATION regards it as Just and Benevolent. Which is like saying that lack of freedom is a good thing, that we are born, live and die as slaves of our conditioning and that this is necessary and good. Such a doctrine would be pure Satanism.
Nonetheless, we might be getting somewhere with this if we dispense with certain Christian or Abrahamic concepts such as Eternal Salvation/Damnation, One Earthly Life, Substitutionary Atonement. Seeing life not as one life but as one in many lives, we can come to understand how our Conditioning exists to lead us back to the Unconditioned, our Slavery to lead us to Freedom. In this way it will become clear that all suffering is for a reason and that Divinity doesn’t Love one Being more than another. The second article in this series will attempt to demonstrate how DIVINE LOVE can manifest itself both in the Conditioned and Unconditioned, in Constraint and Freedom, in Suffering and Joy, in a manner which we can call (in the best way that language allows): PROVIDENCE.
BELIEFS SUBJECTED TO LOGIC
One hopes that by this point in the discussion we have arrived at a point where the absurdity of the Churches’ Doctrines are pretty clear. It’s difficult to be totally comprehensive in a short essay like this and not easy to communicate the ideas being expressed, still we hope you have grasped the fundamentals of what is trying to be said.
We have dealt with the notion of “Salvation By Faith Alone” and shown it to be unbalanced. We have looked at the notion of “Predestination” and found it to be cruel and biased. Finally we have shown that human beings do not have Absolute Free Will, the kind of Free Will which it would be necessary for everyone to have in order for the Christian doctrine to conform to logic.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE WELL, MAY ALL BEINGS BE HAPPY, MAY ALL BEINGS BE AT PEACE
https://socialgnosis.org
It is difficult to communicate through the fog of irrational superstitions in which many religious people unquestioningly believe. They have internalised the doctrines so much that to hear any criticism only makes them panic and start praying for the soul of the one who criticises the doctrine. Anyway, what is the point of such criticism? “Why can’t you just let them be, you big meanie?”, I hear some cry…
Simply because institutional Christianity (and Abrahamic religion in general) has traumatized people to the point where they are averse to any sort of spirituality. This is a great tragedy and a problem to be resolved.
Nonetheless, let’s be clear, we are not saying that Christianity is a bad thing, and even less that there is something personally wrong with Christians. Their spirituality is good, it is beautiful, many Christians are genuine devotees of Christ and possess great love for humanity. What we want is the perfection of the doctrine, the resolution of it’s logical inconsistencies, not for people to cease being devotees of Christ but for them to understand more clearly His message and thus to end the division and conflict between religions. Because this division and conflict is what gets in the way of the INTERRELIGIOUS UNITY we need in order to resist the dark forces.
To clarify, the first two sections deal mostly with Protestant doctrine while the section “FREE WILL” deals equally with Catholic dogma.
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE (“SOLA FIDE”)
“Both read the Bible day and night,
But you read black where I read white”
(WILLIAM BLAKE)
Before we can get anywhere with a criticism of Christianity, it is necessary to finish with this doctrine, as it makes a lot of necessary discussion impossible to hold. The doctrine of “SOLA FIDE” denies that any works which a person makes can actually lead to their salvation. It holds that there is such an impassible gulf between God and Humanity, due to Original Sin, that our WORKS are meaningless and it is only our FAITH in Christ (i.e. His Death and Resurrection) that can save us by the process of Substitutionary Atonement.
Of course when you begin with a notion so far removed from any normal earthly standard of justice - people being punished for the bad they do and rewarded for the good they do - it’s not really possible to discuss what JUSTICE is. So let’s have a look at some of the more evident logical fallacies of this doctrine.
To begin, however, on a positive note, we will say that there is some Reason behind the notion of SOLA FIDE, it isn’t completely crazy. For example, it is true that in this world there are people who make mighty material labours, for example they earn a great deal of money and give a lot of it to charity. If we take “WORKS” in this sense then indeed a person cannot be truly spiritually exalted solely by such methods. Spirituality is about what we are within, we can throw money at things and that won’t change what we are, furthermore giving lots of money without calling for reform in the structure which perpetuates inequality (for the benefit of the rich) is one-sided and perhaps even counter-productive.
Yet when we look a little more closely at the doctrine we start to find problems. Part of the problem comes from the total importance given to FAITH (which is not FAITH in the sense of CONSCIOUS FAITH but we will come to that later…). Those who accept SOLA FIDE believe that a person can spend their whole life doing all kinds of evil but so long as they “Repent” at the end they will be saved. The word “Repent” is in speechmarks not because we necessarily doubt the sincerity of these peoples’ repentance but because Repentance is a process and not a single act, though a single act may begin it. On the other hand, the SOLA FIDE doctrine considers a person who has spent their life devoted to the good to be Eternallly Damned unless they make the act of affirming the salvific power of the Death and Resurrection of the Christ (“confessing Christ”). To anyone not caught up in the bizarre internal logic of such an idea, this would seem deeply injust.
Repentance is a process, a process which involves striving to undo all the evil we have done and the ways in which it has spiritually disfigured us, striving to become good. It is a process which, according to Eastern Religious Traditions, may take many lives. Repentance may be with the help of the Christ, as the Catholics affirm, but it is not “freely given” by the Christ, we have to make efforts. If a person passes their life in total debauchery, then they will have to clear all the negative energies they have created, it is through doing this that they can attain a higher spiritual level.
Anyway, were repentance a single act, what standard would it have to meet to be accepted? Would repentance out of fear be permitted? Or would it have to be based upon perfect love? Assuming it’s the latter, no-one is so pure and holy to as act based upon perfect love, at least, to come to act based upon perfect love would be the fruit and not the seed of a process of repentance.
When we start to look at things in this light, with some sanity, we can see that the whole notion of JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE stands upon some very shaky logical foundations. It was, after all, effectively an invention of Martin Luther, who was a deeply troubled individual, unsure whether he was a doing the work of God or possessed by the Devil.
As already stated, the doctrine of SOLA FIDE basically boils down to the notion that humanity is so intrinsically evil that we cannot by any means save ourselves from (eternal) hellfire, only Jesus can save us by means of His Death on the Cross and His Resurrection. All of our good works mean nothing. That is one side of the doctrinal equation. On the other side, we are saved by the “free gift” of God’s grace.
We can clearly see in this doctrine the internal crisis Martin Luther was going through, the chaotic products of his disturbed and confused mind. SOLA FIDE at once reduces humanity to being something absolutely evil and at the same time inflates us to the point that we are worthy of salvation as a “free gift”. This notion is extremely, visibly, dualistic and unbalanced. Any sensible person knows that no human is irredeemably evil (only the Devil himself) and there are no free gifts at all (only life itself).
Of course, as in the Christian doctrine generally, no explanation is given of how we are responsible for this evil which was purportedly created by our ancestors rather than ourselves. How can a person be responsible for the sins of their parents? They can only inherit their tendencies. It is clear that this whole business about Adam and Eve must be symbolic, a parable for the descent of each Being into the complication and harshness of material existence. Our wickedness isn’t literally inherited.
Furthermore, how can we place our own sins upon someone else’s shoulders, even those of the CHRIST? A person can guide another but cannot take on all the results of another’s wrongdoing, everyone is responsible for their own salvation. If this were not the case then it would be possible to buy a place in Heaven, to pay someone else to be saved on your behalf (this notion, ‘Indulgences’, being exactly what provoked Luther’s Reformation). This is not to say that there is no forgiveness, but that forgiveness is the result of a continual and unceasing process of repentance, of turning around, of walking the spiritual path.
The Bible, the New Testament, is quite clear. The CHRIST says:
“You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
Bearing fruit is a question of manifesting what is within. If what is within us is good, decent, human, then we will bear good fruits. If what is in us is toxic, poisonous, cruel, then we will bear bad fruits. By making spiritual efforts we can become better, more decent, more human, therefore we will bear good fruit and we will not be “thrown into the fire”. This passage says nothing about another tree being cut down on our behalf.
What are these spiritual efforts? They consist of the aforementioned continual process of repentance, of abandoning sin and turning back towards divinity. They are bringing ourselves into harmony with Christ’s teachings. Prayer, meditation, worship, these are elements in this process. Just as importantly we need to act ethically, we don’t need to be fanatics but we should be to some extent ascetics, mystics. The mystic comes to understand God, to experience Him, and that sort of direct experience is the foundation of TRUE FAITH, CONSCIOUS FAITH.
In Galatians of the Apostle Paul it says:
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
There is no “get out of jail free”, “God is not mocked”, there is only an example to follow - CHRIST the LOGOS. CHRIST enacted externally the internal drama of Rebellion and Ego-Death followed by Spiritual Resurrection, the drama which we all enact within ourselves as we walk the Spiritual Path. If we follow His example we will set ourselves free.
PREDESTINATION
The Christians’ justification for the seeming unfairness of their Soteriology is the DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION. This is to say that God has decided in advance who will be saved (and effectively, therefore, who will be damned). They consider that God is Incomprehensible to us, we cannot apply any standard of JUSTICE to Him, even if this standard of JUSTICE is arrived at by REASON (which is the part of man which is “the image of God”). It is by his “MERCY”, not any efforts we ourselves make, that He saves some humans from hell. There is no reason why He should have to, He does it by His own sweet will. Every human being is guilty by birth, by the mere fact of existing, and deserving of Eternal Punishment. No-one deserves to be saved but God saves some anyway.
In truth whoever invented this doctrine must not have had a lot of love for themselves or for humanity. When we understand that WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF GOD (not just some of us), when we realize that GOD IS LOVE, it becomes clear that God would not want anyone to suffer. We may be imperfect, indeed to ascend spiritually we must rid ourselves of our imperfections, but we are not “EVIL” as such. PREDESTINATION is the belief that some souls are created better than others, more worthy than others. Some are created for heaven and some simply to be fuel for the fires of hell. Is God a tyrant who needs spirits to fuel hellfire, and thus creates people bound only to Eternal Suffering and with no choice whatsoever in the matter?
In passing, it is worth noting that the doctrine of the Catholic Church rejects both Sola Fide and absolute Predestination. Without going into much detail, however, we can say that it still isn’t by any means logically consistent, particularly in the matter dealt with in the next section...
FREE WILL
The doctrine of most Christian Churches is that PREDESTINATION exists simultaneously with FREE WILL. Being “saved” is a voluntary act, an act of FREE WILL. In fact the entire ABRAHAMIC edifice rests upon the notion of people having CHOICE, upon every person being able to choose between GOOD and BAD.
If we indeed had Total Free Will then this would make sense, if the situation was clear like we have to simply accept some particular voluntary suffering in order to go to Heaven. The Christians in fact deny this, they accept some voluntary asceticisms themselves but do not accept that non-Christians engaging in the same voluntary asceticisms would also arrive at Salvation. LIFE, anyway, is not so simple as a binary choice between two things, there are many choices, many shades in the ethical picture, what we are for GOOD or for BAD is complex and the struggle to be GOOD must be unceasing.
Still, were we all born with the same CONSCIENCE it would be possible to say that whatever situation a person is born into they know GOOD from BAD in the depths of their heart. This would go some way to resolving the paradox, however it is evident that different people have different standards of Conscience, that what is called Conscience is actually something based on conditioning and on what a person knows. The author’s conscience, for example, compels him to practise Buddhism rather than Christianity or Islam. Some people’s conscience makes them vegetarians, others makes them want to join a monastery. Only if the ultimate edict of every human Conscience was “believe in the Christ” would we find in the notion of conscience anything close to a solution of the problem.
What Christian Soteriology cannot account for is that our free will is limited by the possibilities of the situation we are in. Our WILL is conditioned also, so one can only speak of LIMITED FREE WILL. For example if I am born in an Amazonian Tribe who have had no contact with the outside world, I cannot become a “Christian”, I have no concept of what Christianity or Jesus is. If I am born in a family which values academic achievement and I possess sufficient intelligence, it is likely that I will go to university, whereas for an Australian Aboriginal this would be much more unlikely. It is not that we have no choice whatsoever, but the choices we make are conditioned by the body and the environment we are in.
A further example (which will be controversial to some), would be the case of a homosexual. Evidently some people are born with homosexual tendencies, with little desire for the opposite sex and a lot for their own. Some say that there do not exist “homosexuals by nature” but we can say that such a belief is an obvious example of Rationalization, trying to fit the facts to a theory. Furthermore let’s say that this homosexual is raised in a culture where homosexuality isn’t taboo and which is generally non-religious, and that they have no particular inclination towards Christian devotion.
On the other hand, we have someone who is born straight. They are raised in a Christian household and surrounded by Christian people, hearing Christian apologetics. Not only that, but they have a natural inclination to Christian devotion.
We can say that in the Christian view the first person will almost certainly not be “saved” whilst the second person almost certainly will be “saved”. If we look at things from the perspective of the Eastern Religions it seems to make some sense. The first person is here to learn a Karmic lesson, the second person to learn a different Karmic lesson, each based on their past Karma. They each have LIMITED FREE WILL within the framework of their conditioning and understanding, both of them can either descend or ascend spiritually depending on the choices they make. Some people have very little spiritual understanding and so are almost guaranteed to descend because they won’t understand what the right choices are, but this lack of understanding is also Karmic, the result of past actions, and can be purified (by fire, if necessary).
This makes a lot more sense than the Christian doctrine, which only multiplies the unanswerable questions… Why does one person have an easy life and one a hard life? Why is one person subject to intense temptation while another has it easier? Why does one person die young and another old? What about those who die in accidents, or who are killed whilst being “unbelievers”? These questions are unanswerable because they suggest that God makes Salvation easy for some, and nearly impossible for others, the only response to them is “God is Incomprehensible”, which is an evasion.
Again in this case we find ourselves confronted with same paradoxical idea as in Predestination, that GOD LOVES SOME MORE THAN OTHERS. For there to be perfect JUSTICE in the framework of One Life followed by Eternal Heaven or Hell, there would have to be an even playing field, the same level of difficulties and opportunities for every BEING. As this is not the case, it is impossible to say of the Christian God, “DIVINITY IS PERFECT LOVE”.
LET’S BE MORE RADICAL...
Perhaps we can simply eliminate FREE WILL, become like the Buddhists and regard all life as effectively totally conditioned? This would lead us back to the DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION, to a total form of Predestination. Buddhism, of course, wants us to overcome this conditioning, whilst Christianity’s PREDESTINATION regards it as Just and Benevolent. Which is like saying that lack of freedom is a good thing, that we are born, live and die as slaves of our conditioning and that this is necessary and good. Such a doctrine would be pure Satanism.
Nonetheless, we might be getting somewhere with this if we dispense with certain Christian or Abrahamic concepts such as Eternal Salvation/Damnation, One Earthly Life, Substitutionary Atonement. Seeing life not as one life but as one in many lives, we can come to understand how our Conditioning exists to lead us back to the Unconditioned, our Slavery to lead us to Freedom. In this way it will become clear that all suffering is for a reason and that Divinity doesn’t Love one Being more than another. The second article in this series will attempt to demonstrate how DIVINE LOVE can manifest itself both in the Conditioned and Unconditioned, in Constraint and Freedom, in Suffering and Joy, in a manner which we can call (in the best way that language allows): PROVIDENCE.
BELIEFS SUBJECTED TO LOGIC
One hopes that by this point in the discussion we have arrived at a point where the absurdity of the Churches’ Doctrines are pretty clear. It’s difficult to be totally comprehensive in a short essay like this and not easy to communicate the ideas being expressed, still we hope you have grasped the fundamentals of what is trying to be said.
We have dealt with the notion of “Salvation By Faith Alone” and shown it to be unbalanced. We have looked at the notion of “Predestination” and found it to be cruel and biased. Finally we have shown that human beings do not have Absolute Free Will, the kind of Free Will which it would be necessary for everyone to have in order for the Christian doctrine to conform to logic.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE WELL, MAY ALL BEINGS BE HAPPY, MAY ALL BEINGS BE AT PEACE
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