The Truth About Jesus - Great Article!

^ Seems rather strange then that some of the greatest masters of modern India have held a quite sympathetic view towards Christianity. Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Paramhansa Yogananda being good examples. They agreed that Christianity needs to become more contemplative, and that Christians might benefit from meditation. Sri Aurobindo refers to Christ in his epic poem 'Savitri'. When asked if Christians should change their religion, Vivekananda replied 'God forbid!'.

And within some Christian traditions such as Catholicism and Anglicanism, there is a small but significant movement towards recovering the Christian contemplative traditions. Others such as Thomas Merton experimented with eastern forms of meditation to try to enrich their own tradition.

To me that seems much better than this 'my religion is better than your religion' line, which is narrow, divisive and pointless, and seems indicative of a lack of a universal vision of spirituality.

I'm sure that most of us here, Christian or not, are well acquainted with the history of abuses that took place in past times - the Inquisition, the politicization of the Papacy etc. I don't think you'll find many modern Christians who would support any of that. Just as many modern Hindu saints have spoken out against the abusive caste system in India. It took the British Empire to eliminate the practice of widow burning.

Pretty much every human culture has had it's dark side. That doesn't excuse the abuses carried out in the name of Jesus, but perhaps helps put them into perspective. Cruelty and ignorance are unfortunate facets of human nature, but no culture has a monopoly on them.

 

I agree with your basic thesis but might quibble on the details. The way you present it, it sounds like all of the modification came directly from the Romans according to some plan. I think it was a little more complicated than that. Christianity began in Galilee and Judea. The latter was under Roman occupation, the former was a Roman protectorate under the Jewish King Herod Antipas. By the time of Jesus, rebellion was in the air. There was the rebellion led by Judas of Galillee when Jesus was two years old, and a series of similar outbreaks before and after Jesus' death, leading to the Great Revolt of Judea in 66-73, followed not long afterwards by two other successive wars against the Romans ending with Bar Kochbas's revolt in 132-36 A.D. At first, the leadership of the Christian Church was Jewish Christians with their base in Jerusalem, and was called Nazerene, not Chrsitian. . Some scholars suspect that the Jerusalem Christians led by Jesus' brother James were involved with the zealots and rebels than the sanitized scriptures made out.

The Jewish Christians in Jerusalem were practically wiped out by the Romans during these encounters. Fortunately, Paul's missionary work among the Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles along the Mediterranean had added another component to the Christian population, and the Christians outside of Palestine survived by trying to convince the Romans they weren't Jewish and didn't like the Jews much.. I mentioned Paul's letter to the Romans stressing obedience to Caesar (at that time, Nero). These measures weren't just for the benefit of Romans but for the Hellenized Gentiles who had their own reasons for being Antisemitic. The first Gospel, thought to be Mark's, was written during the early part of the first Jewish War, about the time the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and when Nero's persecution of Christians was at their height.(66-70 A.D. And it was written outside of Rome, in Greek, and to a Gentile audience. It explains how a man crucified by the Romans as a troublemaker was a Good Ol' Boy never meanin' no harm, and how Jews were the ones responisble for his death. That theme was amplified by the later three gospels, epescially Matthew and John. The Christian Scriptures were complete by 110 A.D., and became canonical by the middle of the 2nd century.

By the fourth century Rome was in turmoil. The warlord who triumphed, Constantine, attributed his victory to a sign from the Christian God. Whether this was so, or he saw advantages in bringing the alienated Christians into his support base is still debated. Anyhow, his decision to embrace Christianity helped to transform the religion from a persecuted though growing minority to the dominant faith of the Mediterranean. Christianity was never the same in other respects. The Prince of Peace became General Jesus, Lord of Battles. And by bestowing patronage on the bishops who truly represented the new faith, Constantine set in motion the doctrinal wrangling to define what the true faith was--opening a sad chapter in the history of the faith. The important event was the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., which developed the basis creed of doctrines defining what a true Christian was supposed to believe. Constantine presided over the event, but didn't seem to care what the participants came up with, so long as they got it settled. He was a little annoyed at the continued wrangling over the Arians who refused to accept the consensus on the Trinity. When Constantine himself finally converted to Christianity toward the end of his life, it was by an Arian priest, and his son who succeeded him was an Arian.

 

Where did you get the inference that I am trying to point out that Christianity is an inferior religion and hence should be abandoned for an another one !

 

So we can see that Constantine converted to the religion not in consideration of its spiritual attributes or significance but merely because of what he saw as victory in war due to divine grace. Hence he was not particular about how Christianity was presented as a state religion , only that it ought to be compiled and disseminated, as a way of showing his devotion to it.

 

Here are some more stuff Vivekananda said with respect to Christianity and Christian Missionaries....

“They joined,” reported Vivekananda in a speech at Madras soon after his return from the United States, “the other opposition – the Christian missionaries. There is not one black lie imaginable that these latter did not invent against me. They blackened my character from city to city, poor and friendless though I was in a foreign country. They tried to oust me from every house and make every man who became my friend my enemy. They tried to starve me out.”

“What support, has Christianity ever lent to the spread of civilisation, either spiritual or secular? What reward did the Christian religion offer to the European Pandit who sought to prove for the first time that the Earth is a revolving planet? What scientist has ever been hailed with approval and enthusiasm by the Christian Church?”

“The great thinkers of Europe Voltaire, Darwin, Buchner, Flammarion, Victor Hugo and a host of others like him – are in the present time denounced by Christianity and are victims of vituperative tongues of its orthodox community.”


“Whatever heights of progress Europe has attained,” continued Vivekananda, “every one of them has been gained by its revolt against Christianity – by its rising against the Gospel. If Christianity had its old paramount sway in Europe today, it would have lighted the fire of the Inquisition against such modern scientists as Pasteur and Koch, and burnt Darwin and others of his school at the stake.
In modern Europe Christianity and civilization are two different things. Civilization has now girded up her loins to destroy her old enemy, Christianity, to overthrow the clergy and to wring educational and charitable institutions from their hands. But for the ignorance-ridden rustic masses, Christianity would never have been able for a moment to support its present despised existence, and would have been pulled out by its roots; for the urban poor are, even now, enemies of the Christian Church!”


“You train and educate and pay men to do what? To come over to my country to curse and abuse all my forefathers, my religion, and everything.
They walk near a temple and say, ‘You idolators, you will go to hell.’ But they dare not do that to the Mohammedans of India; the sword would be out. But the Hindu is too mild… And then you who train men to abuse and criticise, if I just touch you with the least bit of criticism, with the kindest purpose, you shrink and cry: ‘Don’t touch us; we are Americans. We criticise all the people in the world, curse them and abuse them, say anything, but do not touch us, we are sensitive plants?’… And whenever your ministers criticise us let them remember this:

If all India stands up and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us. And what for? Did we ever send one missionary to convert anybody in the world? We say to you: ‘Welcome to your religion, but allow me to have mine?’… With all your brags and boastings, where has Christianity succeeded without the sword? Show me one place in the whole world. One I say, throughout the history of the Christian religion – one; I do not want two. I know how your forefathers were converted. They had to be converted or killed; that was all. What can you do better than Mohammedanism, with all your bragging?”



Here is what Mahatma Gandhi said with respect to Christianity....

“Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It is just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ”.

“You Christians, especially missionaries, should begin to live more like Christ. You should spread more of the gospel of love and you should study non-Christian faiths to have more sympathetic understanding of their faiths.”

I regard Jesus as a great teacher of humanity, but I do not regard him as the only begotten son of God. That epithet in its material interpretation is quite unacceptable. Metaphorically we are all sons of God, but for each of us there may be different sons of God in a special sense. Thus for me Chaitanya may be the only begotten son of God. God cannot be the exclusive Father and I cannot ascribe exclusive divinity to Jesus.

I consider western Christianity in its practical working a negation of Christ's Christianity. I cannot conceive Jesus, if he was living in flesh in our midst, approving of modern Christian organizations, public worship, or ministry.

Why should I change my religion because the doctor who professes Christianity as his religion has cured me of some disease, or why should the doctor expect me to change whilst I am under his influence?

Here is what Desmond Tutu had to say with respect to Christianity...

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Sati or widow burning among the upper castes came to an end through Raja Rammohan Roy's movement against it citing the scriptures which did not back the practice. The movement enabled the british administration at that time in colonial India to ban it.

However that did not mean that they were an ethical and moral lot when it came to systematically destroying India's domestic industries of cloth and textiles to promote its own products instead in the Indian market, plunging many thousands of India's female weavers and workers into poverty and starvation and death.

You can consider this thread as well a similar perspective building exercise.

 

Maybe I have misunderstood, but you do seem somewhat hostile to it.

Anyway, it would be interesting to know what you do think that Christians should do given the flaws in the religion.

Note that I'm not a church going Christian myself, and my interest is mainly in the mystical side of it, and the art and culture produced in the past under its influence, as I recall we discussed elsewhere.

My view is that often, modern Christianity is mainly based upon emotionalism. Whilst I think the idea of trying to do good in this world is a worthy thing, I also think that it's weak when it comes to personal experience of the Divine. Without that, it seems to be failing as a religion in the most basic sense.

 

I might balk at the "only" but my guess is that's essentially correct, Also, his mother Helena was Christian, and she was a formidable woman. Constantine retained a pagan view of religion and never quite got the exclusivity of Christianity.