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The Forum > Article Comments > Take time before judging God > Comments

Take time before judging God : Comments

By Mark Christensen, published 27/1/2005

Mark Christensen ponders some of the questions posed by religion and secularism.

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Man Called Christ was NOT crucified

God did not sacrifice his dearly beloved son allowing that son to be physical. The Christ ENTITY desired to be born in space and time, and to straddle creaturehood in order to serve as a leader, and to translate certain truths in physical terms.

Each of you survives death. The man who was crucified knew this beyond all doubt, and he sacrificed nothing.

Judas arranged for a substitute to be crucified in place of Christ himself. The "substitute was a personality seemingly deluded, but in his delusion he knew each person is resurrected. He took it upon himself to become the SYMBOL of this knowledge.

The man called Christ was not crucified. In the overall drama however it makes little difference what was fact, in your terms and what was not - for the greater reality transcends facts and creates them You have free will. You could interpret the drama as you wished.

It was given to you. Its great creative power still exists and you use it in your own way, even changing your symbolism as your beliefs change. But the main idea is the affirmation that the physical being, the self you know, is NOT annihilated with death.
This comes through in distortions.

The whole concept of God the father, as given by Christ, was indeed a "new testament". The male image of God was used because of the sex orientation of the times, but beyond this the Christ personality said, ....the kingdom of God is within (among) you. (Luke 17:21)

Another Bible quote states:
“Know you not that you are the temple of God and Almighty God dwells within you

In a certain way the Christ personality was a manifestation of the evolution of consciousness, leading the race beyond the violent concepts of the times, and altering behaviours that had prevailed at that time
Posted by mwt, Friday, 25 February 2005 12:16:01 PM
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Every culture seems to have had religion – Pre-Christian ones included. It seems to me that the question of how an ideology/religion develops and why people need it is complex as is the question of why Christianity has been so successful as a faith.

Perhaps every culture creates myths and legends and moral parables as way of …
…”Leading the race beyond the violent concepts of the times, and altering behaviors that had prevailed at that time”.
I really like this line mwt

Many wars have been waged in its name but then people use anything at hand to wage war… probably not religions fault but rather peoples. I have to say as an aside though that moral absolutes created by religion, which are unable to change and adapt could be dangerous. Seeing things in black and white is never a good thing and it’s this fact that often starts wars in the first place.

The notion of the afterlife and the soul is all very nice but… well… I can’t help but agree with comments here:
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/qa2.html
For example:
…“If one starts talking about soul, one's arguing that there is a principle which is involved with brain in some way, and which carries personal information about you when the brain dies. Now from the point of view of our current science, that's an impossibility”

And yes I know - we non-believers do death a little poorly. Sorry bout that.
Posted by Beno, Friday, 25 February 2005 3:34:39 PM
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This is a comment on solitude, its nature, its development and its present expression in my life. One of the statements in this thread was on solitude and I wanted to extend the theme. I thank Anthony Storr for his book "Solitude."
_____________________________
THE ARENA

Another week of talking and listening—24 hours worth. Family, friends and community activities—all essential and unavoidable parts of my social constellation. In this my 63rd year this extent of social interaction is about as “heavy” as it gets. I sleep it off and in two days my psyche gradually gets back to normal, to a working order, to the tranquillity of silence and creativity’s somewhat overwhelming forces. Where did my former social enthusiasms go? Rubbed out by degrees over half a century from the age of 5 to 55? The roles of: student, teacher, friend, associate, colleague, husband, father, step-father, uncle, cousin, taxi-driver, milkman, steel-worker, editor, writer, tutor, lecturer, union secretary, Baha’i chairman/secretary/committee member, book and vacuum-cleaner salesman, clerk, patient, truck-driver, researcher and more-- roles that filled the air with words to varying extents all drawing forth my social energies, some social quotient and leaving me, by temperament and circumstances at the age of 55, preoccupied with internal processes of integration, with a desire for repose not activity and with a passion for study.

This latter, this academic, activity which now supplies each hour and each day with perpetual pleasure and an equal passion for coherence and order in the realm of thought and writing have turned the source of my happiness away from the social domain, outside the arena of human interaction. And so it is that I avoid the social and the emotional and their respective entanglements–Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 19 February 2007.
Posted by Bahaichap, Wednesday, 21 February 2007 11:21:49 PM
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GOD’S GRANDEUR

On February 23rd 1877 Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote his famous poem God’s Grandeur. About one hundred days before the termination of the confinement of Baha’u’llah in the prison city of Akka, Gerald Manley Hopkins, then in his last year of training for the Jesuit priesthood, wrote what for me has always been one of the great poems of the last two centuries. This poem resonated for me much more as I got older after first coming across it in the first year I was a Baha’i, at the age of fifteen; but during my Baha’i pilgrimage in Haifa the penny really dropped insofar as the meaning of this poem is concerned. I will leave it to the reader to follow up and reread Hopkins’ poem God’s Grandeur. What follows is my own translation, transformation, reworking of this poem as I apply it to Baha’u’llah and the Baha’i experience. Of course for Hopkins “the central fact of the world is the mystery of the Incarnation, Christ the Word become flesh.”1 This is the centre of his theological perspective just as the Baha’i concept of Baha’u’llah as the manifestation of God is at the centre of mine.-Ron Price with thansk to 1Paul Mariani, A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Cornell UP, London, 1970, p.91.

The world was charged with the grandeur of God.
It flamed out1, like that shining from shook foil.
Yes, it gathered to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.
Crushed it was-and lit in the Siyah-Chal-and lit, lit.
And while the last lights off the black West went,
oh morning light, westward swings, oh morning light.
And now the whole world broods with warm breast
and with, ah, bright wings.

But still men do not see His dearest freshness
the deep down things. After generations have
trod, trod, trod and the world is smeared with
blood oozing, drop by drop, God, God
our hearts now can barely feel, nor our feet, being shod,
anesthetized before these iron feet of God.

1 Baha’u’llah’s release from confinement
Posted by Bahaichap, Wednesday, 21 February 2007 11:25:05 PM
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