Gospel & Universe 🌎 Many Tribes

The Creation of Outcasts

In seeing the Universal Spirit in a specific form, no major religion can match Christianity. I don’t mean that Christianity is in general more closed or exclusive than the other religions. Rather, I mean that Christianity contains a very particular type of exclusivity, one that I think can be dissociated from Christianity in order to make it a better religion. I do this as a person who was taught as a child that Jesus walked on water, and who went through the confusing process of having to dissociate myself from my own religion because it didn’t leave room for doubt — or for doubters. My hope is that ultimately Christianity will get off the path it has taken in the last two thousand years, and finally claim brotherhood and sisterhood with the other religions of the world. Not fatherhood or motherhood or priesthood or mastery, but equality, which seems to me the only solid basis for community, fraternity, sorority, & liberty, and for seeing eye-to-eye rather than taking an eye for an eye.

For traditional Christians, Jesus is not only an exemplar; Jesus is also the one and only incarnation (or child) of God Himself. This is perhaps why Christians often divide into two categories: 1. traditional Christians who stick close to this idea of the Son of God or Jesus is Lord and 2. liberal Christians who focus on the qualities of the exemplar and not on his unique status as the Son of God. Yet in general there’s a tendency for Christians to view the former as traditional or fundamentalist and the latter as nominal or heretical, the terms secular and liberal thus taking on a pejorative sense. Often, preachers and believers focus so forcefully on Jesus as God’s only son or incarnation (although they wouldn’t use the word incarnation) that they force potential believers to separate themselves from Christianity simply because they can’t confess a metaphysical belief that they can’t correlate to anything in this physical world. They’re not willing to make the leap of faith to believe in such a deification or incarnation, even though they may have no problem believing in a more abstract God and in the moral virtues that Christ championed.

A similar problem arises when religions insist on the unique and holy nature of their scriptures, forcing those with philological or literary reservations into the camp of unbelievers. Yet with Christianity the problem lies at a very personal level: no matter what one reads or does, one must – according to the dominant traditionalists – believe in one particular incarnation of God in one historical person: Jesus. Yet this isn’t all: you must also accept this particular incarnation as your personal saviour.

This is a tremendous ask. And because it’s so extreme, I find fault with it in itself, yet even more so when we see it’s inevitable outcome: the alienation of a huge percentage of people who might otherwise find a source of wisdom, strength, and consolation in the religion of their own culture.