Where the road leads next

In a never ending goal to completely confuse myself about all things cultural, I grabbed a book in the library about religion. I only read the preface, so I can't recall the author, but I agreed with everything she had to say.

I figured if I could agree with the preface, why ruin it by diving into the 600 pages of her actual writing.

I know, but hey at least I am starting to read.

Anyway, as near as I can tell her motivation for the book was to save the world from eminent destruction. Did I mention I read the last 2 pages as well? Well I did. Her premise is that 1000 - 200 BC was a time when religion changed from actually killing stuff for God to figuratively killing ourselves for God. It may not be that simple, but that is what I think she was telling us, and like I said before, why would I ruin it for myself.

Even if she arrives at another conclusion, my conclusion is based on the fact that I agree with it and it lines up with my theology and world view.

One of the things she stated was that people used to get their state of nirvana, religious shivers, transcendental state of being because of the group conscience. Essentially, the effect of being around other like minded skulls of mush makes our mush resonate and not feel so stinking alone and vulnerable. Therefore, my quorum of like minded individuals that think the moon is god, would from time to time work ourselves up into a frenzy and kill your like minded group that think the sun is god. In fact, the act of killing you for our moon god actually makes us feel even better about our collective. Stupid sun people.

Apparently all that changed (mostly) during said time of enlightenment. I could actually research this, but I am having too much fun making my own sense of 6 pages of forward and 2 pages of conclusion. See how dangerous reading can be.

The deal is, I agree that most major religions feel that the way to God is self sacrifice. Jesus exemplified this and was the primary reason He came. "The Way" is simply to love God and love your neighbor the same way you love yourself. The authors assertion is that unless we get back to that thinking (she mentioned nothing about Jesus mind you, at least what I read) we will all revert back to killing each other to appease our blood lust for our particular resonate self identity thingy. A good example of this is sports. A better example is the war on terror.

But I digress.

The thing that really jumped out at me was the concept of God back then and the concept of God today. If you were to ask Buddha or the monotheistic Jews or a Hindu IF there is a God, the answer would be you are asking the wrong question. The question would never be if, but what are you doing to please him.

That is incredibly profound.

It got me thinking about Jesus Christ and the fact that He wasn't on the earth trying to convince people to believe in a God. He came to show God's people the true nature of a God they already had familiarity with. Everyone in the Jewish religion believed there was a God during the time of Christ. Jesus claiming He was God sort of threw them for a loop. Not to be outdone, they killed him. Take that God! I am sure there were exceptions outside of Judaism, but the question of "if" would have not been the first thing on the minds of most people. Other religions still believed in polytheism and even the Romans had a concept of God and left the matter to the Jews. Heck even pagans worshiped a form of God. It may have been a chicken, but it was a chicken with power!

You know what? The post modern world has no such fundamental grounding. In fact, I dare say that conventional wisdom is that there is no God.

We have gone from believing the sun was god and trying to please god by killing his creation, to self awareness and enlightenment, to self sacrifice and service, and now somehow we find ourselves all the way back to atheism. What is worse is that we are right back at "group nirvana" where the highest form of religion is conformity and association with other skulls of mush.

I personally think this new religion is government, but that is for another post.

For me, it makes sense why it is so difficult to get people to change their lives for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They simply don't believe there is a God! How can they ever believe in His Son? It is like asking me to have a relationship with a dead friend. He may have been "real" but if I can't make the physical connection how much of a relationship can I really have? If we ask people to make a spiritual connection to Jesus while ignoring the fact they may have no concept of the spiritual attributes of God, how successful can they be?

Its like a cell phone with no service.

There is so much more to this, but I wanted to get it down somewhere before it was sucked away.

Speaking of cell phones, is it just me or have you noticed that everyone seems to have those things permanently stuck to them?

I wonder when we will start the Sprint and AT&T holy war?