Mr. Sellick's verbose essay is a fine example of how egotism can be subtle and hidden within the blanket of ostentatious intellectualizing about something that transcends the limitations of ordinary human consciousness.
Why do most Christians -- or dogmatists of any religion -- not even consider the POSSIBILITY that we can be more than what we presently are? Why do we almost never hear these people talk about the possibility of an EVOLUTIONARY consciousness . . . a consciousness which is transcendent . . . a spark of consciousness, a "divine child", which holds in itself the potential to reach the maturity of cosmic divinity in it's own right? Is not that the goal of every mystery school throughout history, however distorted or misguided their understanding might have become at certain times?
Those who call themselves "true" Christians always seem to talk about "salvation", meaning "let Jesus do it for you". Yet, they never seem to talk about "enlightenment", the actual expansion of individual cosmic consciousness itself. Why?

We can continue to exchange words about "sacrifice", "emptiness" and "suffering" ad nauseum. They are only words but around those words, empires are built and with power struggles to impose the will of the "saved" from the others (infidels, heathens, pagans or gentiles etc - the "unsaved".

What if the answer lies within? What if we dont have to sacrifice our own lives to help the "unsaved". What if it is simply a con by the institutions who have built their empires around the need for spiritualy as corrupted and misinterpreted it has become. Look inside. Look not from a third person's persona, dogma or some book, but from inside one's heart. It is perhaps the insecure that have to look at a two thousand year old book for answers where they are as close as a finger pointing right back, at oneself.

Self righteous power brokers combining with the insecure afraid to use their own convictions and wishing to impose hollow diatribes on others. Empty mythologies, gods to create subservience, gods to go to war on, gods to fill space on the Internet as here. Words to distract from living in love and care.

Sounds very much 1984 to me. Brainwashing doesn't make people better, it simply brainwashes them.

I've always found that reality is the best place to be in, not caught up with some imaginary being in an imaginary game.

I also wonder how the resurrection can play a part in anyone's life when they can't even set a consistent date every year. The closet Friday to the full moon sounds a tad pagan to me :-( What date did he die ? What day was this imaginary Jesus born ? Where is his life recorded outside of the bible ? Did he actually exist ?

I really think that people need reality, not illusion to lead better lives.

You would think that a freethinker with access to the internet, and a basic grasp of the English language, would not only be able to find out the answers to those basic questions, but would be free enough to do a little helpful research, for themselves too.

Freethinker by name only, I would suggest. Not so free in practise.

Free Thinker: There is little doubt that Jesus existed and was a mystic. The rest is conjecture based on anecdotes written three centuries on when few were litterate. But all of this irrelevant as it becomes a war of words.

The whole debate on this topic is about mythology that some will attempt to elevate without a smidgen of proof other than a feeling in the heart. That feeling could be occupied by another feeling - of love for fellow beings and the world around without the deprivations and impositions that religious dogma requires.

Sells, you try to see everything through your particular Christian prism. I’m asking you to look at reality, as it is, not filtered through a particular conceptual lens. The Buddha taught a way to do that. Luther’s failure to free himself from ego was in the absence of that guidance, without knowing that to break the cycle you have to find what feeds it, the constant reaction to the sensations which arise in and on our body from moment to moment as a result of the arising and passing away of phsyical and mental phenomena, and how to stop feeding it.

The Pali language in which the Buddha taught had great depth and subtley in expressing aspects of spirituality. “Vipassana” means to see things as they really are, not only as they seem to be. It’s a way of putting aside the concepts and conditionings which normally distort our perception. We are blinded not by sin but by ignorance and delusion, which can be dispelled. So of course the Buddha’s teaching was “limited to spiritual advice,” on how to purify oneself and come out of suffering through one’s own efforts, through self-reliance rather than relying on real or imaginary outside forces. Time and again he refused to be drawn on matters beyond this simple and direct teaching – this thread is a good example of what happens when you extend outside that, as now in OLO, so at the time of the Buddha, people engaged in great and inconclusive debates rather than engaging in actions which would lead them to the truth.

(I’m engaging in debates in large part because after several years of serious illness I became too gross to practise Vipassana, I haven’t sat much in recent times and this is an outlet while I recover – I’ll sit a short retreat from Friday.) (MF)