Christianity

The teachings of Jesus touched a few people, not huge numbers but there were some who tried to live their lives in the way suggested by Jesus. My feeling is that the very early Christian church did not see Jesus as God, but just as one of the lucky ones who had had his own breakthrough and was trying to share that.

Then along came call Paul. Paul, after his after his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, became a great convert and this is often the way – when someone is totally against something, finally that extreme cannot be held and he swings to the opposite extreme, too much in favour of something. So Paul made Jesus into God and Christianity was born. This was really Paul’s doing and the whole of Christianity has more to do with Paul than with Jesus. It should really be called Paulism. He raised Jesus to the status of God and began worshipping Jesus. Now the whole effort of Jesus has been wasted, he was bringing spirituality back into the human domain and Paul has pushed it back into the godly domain. Now instead of just God there is God and Jesus, but nothing has been gained, the whole thing was a waste of time.

Of course the new religion Christianity was definitely no longer compatible with Judaism. Judaism has one God, Christianity

has two, kind of related, but two nonetheless, a big mess. But the mess was to get bigger still when Christianity was officially adopted by the failing Roman Empire, in a last ditch attempt at unification, and Christianity was by force effectively, spread throughout the Roman empire, throughout Europe. The empire collapsed leaving a huge power vacuum and that power vacuum was occupied by the Roman Catholic church. It has nothing to do with spirituality; it is politics, a political organisation. It always has been and always will be.

So Catholicism does not have much to offer us on our spiritual journey but later, seeing the absurdity of the situation, the Protestant movement came along. It returned to some of the principles of the early church, the significance of living a simple life, not being attached to material wealth and a more humane, personal touch. With this the Protestant church became a force for social reform, a humanitarian way. As with all big organised religions, it was still missing the point to a large extent but at least it had managed to break away from some of the absurdities of the Roman Catholic empire.

So it is today that some of the Christian churches provide a healthy enough social and humanitarian role. But few of the churches have managed to undo the damage that Paul did when he elevated Jesus to the divine and pushed him out of reach of the ordinary person. So at worst Christianity has been a total catastrophe, as during the years of the inquisition for example. At best it has been a noble attempt to bridge the gap between our humanity and our divinity. This is really what Jesus symbolises in Christianity, that we are both. We are here leaving a finite life in a manifest body and we are also eternal, divine. Unfortunately this message is often lost in Christianity but every now and again it comes through, that this is not just about Jesus, this is true of you too.