Yes Paine was NOT an American but a Brit., but what he said was incredibly American. I call him an American because what he talked about wasn't really British. That "Common Sense" kindled such a response from American soldiers tells me Paine was more American than the Americans.
It's true that overall we don't see an angry Jesus, but the problem is that Jesus says he is a fulfillment of the OT and the prophets. That said, it means Jesus carries the burden of an angry God with him.
The Chrisitian God is MARKEDLY different from the Deist God. You CAN'T call yourself Christian unless you believe in the Trinity and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Deists didn't believe in that stuff. They believed in the watchmaker God who set it all in motion and let it run.
People often cite the words "In God We Trust" in courthouses and on the dollar bill as proof the founders believed in God. Yes they did, but their God wasn't the Christian God.
There's a picture of Washington laying the foundation stone of the capital wearing a masonic apron. He and many of the founders were masons, and many of the masons weren't Christian. They were Deist, but not Christian. So for people to say this country was founded by Christians isn't accurate. I once said that to someone, and the person got very offended, so I don't say it anymore. Read the literature on the founders and you'll see I'm right.
Anyway, I'm more of a spiritual person. I believe in the spirit of the law rather than the letter. All religions essentially adhere to the same principles. "Do unto others" is pretty universal. Even the pagan belief of 3x3 is the same: "Whatever you send out to the universe, positive or negative, comes back to you three times three." That's ALMOST the same as "Do unto others."
Another way to talk about it is to say that the purpose of any iconic symbol (such as the cross) is to go beyond the icon to reach the divine. The purpose of meditating on the cross is to shatter the cross (mentally). If you get hung up on the cross, you've lost the whole point. The same with Buddhism. The purpose of meditating on the Buddha is to get beyond the name and form of the Buddha. That is why yogis spend their whole life meditating and never reach satori (enlightenment)--because they haven't gone beyond the name and form of God.
I, for one, prefer Zen. It's a pragmatic way of looking at the world, living simply yet spiritually in the here and now and not expecting anything afterwards. And Zen is a philosophy, not a religion.
5 comments:
Well, you're partially right on some of these issues, and not quite right on others.
I'm not sure what you mean, for example when you say that what Paine said was "not British". Just because one does not hold the same views as the royal family or the gov't does not mean that they are not of the same nationality. It's like someone saying that I am not American because I don't agree with Bush.
I do agree with what you are saying when you say that Jesus carries the burden of an angry God. However, the whole idea of "one" Christian God is a bit problematic. Yes, it is a monotheistic religion (yet, as you point out, ironically clings to trinitarian beliefs); however, there are many different versions of the Christian God, depending on which book of the Bible you read, which translation you read, which books you include in your canon, and which interpretations you believe. Therefore, Jesus inherits a tradition of very conflicting and even contradictory versions of God (hence a lot of the problems we have now). It's a matter of which version of the Christian God you choose to believe in (if you choose to believe at all) and which versions you want to overlook. Same goes for Jesus...who, as your examples point out, was perhaps a bit more complex than he is sometimes made out to be.
You can indeed call yourself a Christian and not believe in the Trinity. In fact, you can call yourself anything you want (it's just a matter of who believes you).
One can likewise be "Christian" and "Deist" at the same time. One can follow the philosophy of Christ and still believe in a God that does not meddle in the everyday affairs of human life, the "watchmaker", if you will. One can indeed be Christian and not follow the doctrine of any particular official church. Or one can follow part of the doctrine but not all.
The "founders" were indeed a mix of Christian and Deist beliefs. Franklin's religion was rather ambivalent...at some points sounding like he repeats things from his Puritan upbringing, at others critiquing it, at some times sounding like a Quaker (and at others critiquing them), mostly practical, empirical, and Deist-leaning yet occasionally attending Christ Church. Jefferson was pretty Deist as you point out. But John Adams certainly was not a Deist, nor were many other men intimately associated with the founding of the nation. Take RI's Stephen Hopkins, for example: he was a Quaker. Check up on the signers of the Declaration and let me know what you find. I think you'll find that it's not nearly as cut and dry as you are making it sound.
The last two paragraphs: right on! I'm with you 100%.
How can you be a deist and a Christian? That's a contradiction. A Christian is a follower of Christ. Christ is God become flesh, dying as a sacrifice for the sins of people. That is not some "watchmaker God" winding up the universe and then going off to play 18 holes.
You can't be a Christian and not believe in the Trinity, either. Another contradiction. If Christ is God in flesh, then there is a Father and a Son. If Jesus is the Son of God, then he speaks truthfully of and through the Holy Spirit (Spirit of Holiness, in the Hebrew construction). The Father and the Holy Spirit are both apparent in the OT, but the Son is only foreshadowed.
Again, stormpilgrim, that view of Jesus only holds true if you hold to a particular dogmatic position held by a given church. One might be a follower of Jesus just as one might be a follower of MLK, Gandhi, or anyone else: i.e., becoming a disciple or practitioner of the man's philosophy without necessarily subscribing to the view that he is in fact a version of God in the flesh. One might also reject ethereal and mystical entities such as the "holy spirit" (something I've always had a hard time figuring out) and still consider oneself a Christian. Many of the "Deist founding fathers" might in fact consider themselves loosely "Christian", even if they did not agree with the dogma of the official churches, and even if they didn't hold to literalist views of the Bible.
There's no contradiction at all here, unless one assumes an all or nothing attitude.
Why do people patronize Jesus this way? He claimed to be God and performed miracles to demonstrate it. Even the Talmud and ancient writers corroborate the New Testament accounts, even if they propose some other explanation. The idea that Jesus was God wasn't made up in following centuries. If he wasn't God, then he did a profoundly evil thing by deluding his closest disciples to the point where all but John died gruesome deaths proclaiming a lie, not to mention the countless others killed by Roman emperors in subsequent years.
Would any of us call David Koresh a good teacher after what happened at Waco? Some of what he taught may well have been right because a cult leader has to mix truth with lies. You can call Gautama Buddha, Ghandi, and MLK good teachers because none of them claimed to be something they were not, but if you don't believe Jesus is God, you can't call him a good teacher. In this sense, it is an all-or-nothing proposition.
be clear on this: I'm not saying that Jesus wasn't God or that the miracles weren't true, or any of that. I'll leave that up to others to figure out for themselves. I'm just saying that one may be considered loosely "Christian" and still not believe every word in the Bible, a text, incidentally, not written by first hand witnesses but rather by people who wished to convert others to their fledgling religion.
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