Good or Bad
In the beginning Adam and Eve broke the only law God decreed. For many, their disobedience, crime, sin tainted their entire progeny, meaning all humans. Despite that, the prevailing opinion of most ancient and Christian thinkers for centuries regarded man as basically “good”.
Religions, however, thrived on providing humans with eternal life despite their intrinsic contamination. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church and various forms of the Orthodox Church assuaged their members of the fear of eternal damnation by an elaborate array of rituals and rites. Performance of their obligatory sacraments and rituals, accompanied by sincere contrition could absolve all transgressions.
The various Protestant denominations and sects that Luther inspired after the second decade of the sixteenth century had in common a belief and practice based on the Bible. Both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox approaches to Christianity paid little attention to the Bible, but emphasized the role of Popes, saints and Church Councils. In their wisdom, they did not make the Bible available to uneducated, untrained laymen because they anticipated that uninformed perusal of the Bible might lead to bizarre practices based upon isolated snippets of Biblical text. Extremism in some elements of the Reformation proved the concerns well founded.
Most of the Protestant denominations and sects rejected any sacraments Jesus did not perform. Most adopted either Luther’s conclusion that salvation comes through ‘faith alone”. By this he meant faith that Christ’s death for the sins of man atoned for all who believed in the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice. Calvinists, generally, embraced a more stern belief that emphasized the blight of sin from the time of the Garden of Eden. Calvin’s emphasis upon the Bible for Christian theology and the practice of the early Christian congregation for church practice concluded that no one could earn salvation. God’s grace, as an unearned gift, was the only means to salvation.
Jewish belief varies, but generally does not emphasize an acknowledgement of eternal life. Jews are simply obligated to live in conformity with God’s law and atone for their transgressions on earth.
Islamic belief basically avoids any validity of original sin by recognizing that God forgave Adam and Eve, therefore, each person and each soul begins life unblemished. God will judge them upon Judgment Day by their Book of Life, in short, according to how well they kept the law of God as revealed in the Quran and followed the dictates of God’s Messenger, Muhammad.
The contemporary evolving religion of Political Correctness does not address the basic nature of man. It tends to disregard or disdain whatever preceded it. It chooses its saints, willy nilly, to suit its purposes. Individuals, groups and institutions are venerated or condemned existentially in a cascading stream of regulations, laws and public opprobrium. Its practitioners will inform us whether we are good or bad and thereby merit their earthly acceptance or virulent condemnation.
In the beginning Adam and Eve broke the only law God decreed. For many, their disobedience, crime, sin tainted their entire progeny, meaning all humans. Despite that, the prevailing opinion of most ancient and Christian thinkers for centuries regarded man as basically “good”.
Religions, however, thrived on providing humans with eternal life despite their intrinsic contamination. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church and various forms of the Orthodox Church assuaged their members of the fear of eternal damnation by an elaborate array of rituals and rites. Performance of their obligatory sacraments and rituals, accompanied by sincere contrition could absolve all transgressions.
The various Protestant denominations and sects that Luther inspired after the second decade of the sixteenth century had in common a belief and practice based on the Bible. Both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox approaches to Christianity paid little attention to the Bible, but emphasized the role of Popes, saints and Church Councils. In their wisdom, they did not make the Bible available to uneducated, untrained laymen because they anticipated that uninformed perusal of the Bible might lead to bizarre practices based upon isolated snippets of Biblical text. Extremism in some elements of the Reformation proved the concerns well founded.
Most of the Protestant denominations and sects rejected any sacraments Jesus did not perform. Most adopted either Luther’s conclusion that salvation comes through ‘faith alone”. By this he meant faith that Christ’s death for the sins of man atoned for all who believed in the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice. Calvinists, generally, embraced a more stern belief that emphasized the blight of sin from the time of the Garden of Eden. Calvin’s emphasis upon the Bible for Christian theology and the practice of the early Christian congregation for church practice concluded that no one could earn salvation. God’s grace, as an unearned gift, was the only means to salvation.
Jewish belief varies, but generally does not emphasize an acknowledgement of eternal life. Jews are simply obligated to live in conformity with God’s law and atone for their transgressions on earth.
Islamic belief basically avoids any validity of original sin by recognizing that God forgave Adam and Eve, therefore, each person and each soul begins life unblemished. God will judge them upon Judgment Day by their Book of Life, in short, according to how well they kept the law of God as revealed in the Quran and followed the dictates of God’s Messenger, Muhammad.
The contemporary evolving religion of Political Correctness does not address the basic nature of man. It tends to disregard or disdain whatever preceded it. It chooses its saints, willy nilly, to suit its purposes. Individuals, groups and institutions are venerated or condemned existentially in a cascading stream of regulations, laws and public opprobrium. Its practitioners will inform us whether we are good or bad and thereby merit their earthly acceptance or virulent condemnation.
Emory,
ReplyDeletePeter Rousseau here. It was good to run into you this morning at Ukrops. Having been raised Roman Catholic I agree with your assertion as to why the Catholic Church hid the bible from us most of the time. The fact that we now have thousands of sects of Christianity is ample evidence that one cannot depend upon the Bible alone. You will have millions of interpretations and hence the real truth, if discernible, will surely be lost; as it has obviously been. I am more in agreement with the Gnostics, that first splinter group from the original Christianity of Peter and Paul, in believing that any layman reading the Bible is reading in darkness, and, if the direct experience of Almighty God is not made available to the person examining Scripture then they will continue to remain in darkness indefinitely. The Gnostics believed that Jesus initiated the Apostles and some of the Disciples into specific meditation techniques that utilized the repetition of the Name of God as the key to expanding the mental capacity to the point where God could be directly experienced; and hence the essential light(consciousness)to read and understand Scripture properly could be developed, eliminating the threat of misinterpretation. Without this laboratory of the direct experience of God in meditation, I am afraid that the entire field of religion is destined to remain utterly obscure and the prevailing confusion in this most important department of life will continue to be the lot of religion, and the religious, in modern life.
Earlier in my life I spent 8 years with an Indian Holy man and I have practiced meditation for many years and it has given me a unique perspective on religion and the proper practice thereof. Without meditation to focus, strengthen and enlighten the mind, man's pursuit of God through religion is destined to be ineffective and riddled with confusion and misinterpretation. We should discuss this further sometime.
I must run now. Take care.