::::::::
Let me start by saying first, I would not question the sincerely of any person who holds to a religious faith and this is no atheist rant. Quite the contrary. But the vision which the New Testament holds out to the world remains unrealised after two thousand years. And if religious tradition can't deliver us to the 'promised land' by how it informs our ethics and values then it must be leading us in the wrong direction. And with the world heating up, that's a direction I don't want to go. So if God has nothing better to offer, it is understandable that churches are empty and so many are questioning whether such a reality even exists?
For that reason, many like myself have begun to question not the possibility of God, but those self appointed claims who ask us to accept, that they speak in his name. The failure of tradition to provide any means to ends leads to uncomfortable and necessarily hard questions. In my own mind, examining the origins of faith is the only way to query whether believers hold a justifiable trust in God or whether that faith has been subverted and corrupted by the institutional understanding of men.
What better place to start with than the Bible. The Bible is claimed to be a holy book, rubbish! Books aren't holy. They're paper and print. They may be a work of art in their construction, the ideas any book contains may have exceptional even extraordinary merit, but this one has yet to prove its worth. The history of this book may help explain why and is worth briefly examining. For a start it didn't 'arrive' as a whole and may not even be complete? After the fall of the second Jewish temple around 64 A.D., all scriptural materials were scattered or hidden. The discoveries of the last century, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic Gospels, demonstrates that scriptural material is still being unearthed. So any interpretation should only be provisional at best. To make any dogmatic claims of 'absolute' truth is highly suspect. And to accept those claims is to invest ones faith not in God, but in men.
Even in it's own time, the material chosen to become the Bible was created from a much greater collection. That selection was chosen by an early Roman church to enforce its own conception of orthodoxy. Too many people were drawing too many different conclusions from too many scriptural resources. Not good from an institutional standpoint. The bottom line is simple to understand. No intact 'Christian' revelation was ever passed on from anyone to anyone. The early church that finally emerged did so only by the secular, political authority of a Roman emperor knocking wannabe religious heads together. Yet instead of ending the questioning, it was only getting started. The entire history of the Christian church has been one of perpetual argument, division and schism, which continues even today with every new breakaway cult or sect that comes up with it's own ideas on the nature of both Christ and God.
At a discussion forum where I sometimes contribute, I use the signature: 'theology only exists because nothing has been revealed'. Scriptural interpretation didn't start with Christianity but from an earlier Jewish tradition. But the early Roman church making huge claims for itself had to offer something? With no self evident meaning to offer from its 'New Testament', interpretation was required to give meaning not only to itself but to those forced to accept its teaching. Over the course of history, theology has become a virtually mainstream academic subject. Yet this all too human intellectual attempt to comprehend the mind of God is at the very source of all historical division which has broken the first claim to speak in the name of Christ into thousands of smaller pieces. Not to mention the contradiction of three monotheistic claims all negating the legitimacy of each other. It seems the more men attempt to study God the more divisive the subject becomes! Thus the validity of theology as a valid human intellectual endeavour remains open to serious question. [unless your a theologian] It may yet prove to be no more then the highest of human intellectual vanities and hubris.
When the American founding fathers created the checks and balances within its new political democracy, checks to power even now being severely tried, there was already long European experience of the corruption leading to tyranny, both secular and religious. And the new system hoped to limit that dark potential by the accountability of the ballot box. Science must similarly live within the framework of accountability for the claims it makes to understanding. Things must work. But what of traditions that go on for hundreds, even thousands for years without checks and balances, without being accountable for the claims it makes, the promises never delivered? The dangers and contradictions of such an opaque organizational model should be obvious and thus are the abuses of religious institutions regularly manifest.
So upon a scriptural record incomplete, a partial Bible as their source, a dubious intellectual process inherently divisive and unable to demonstrate its own efficacy, and an organizational model nothing short of an open invitation to corruption and you have the foundations of religion, both the oldest and the newest. Founded on rock or sand, that is the question? The very word tradition, which conjures up such a cozy and secure vision is anything but, with its own dark side so well chronicled by others, I need say no more. It is no wonder that so many of those who do trust their faith to such institutions, do so either blindly or with their own private doubts.
Against the spirit and expectation of the scriptural record, generations of believers continue to accept without question the theological assumption of tradition, that no WAY exists by faith to confirm absolutely the reality of the living God. Has a theological counterfeit of purely human intellectual origin prevented the world knowing something much greater? There are just too may scriptural passages of an evidential character pointing toward something great and profound. Yet Christian institutional thought and their theological foundations start with views, assumptions and prejudices about man, truth and God at least two millennia past their sell by date. Questioning such long held assumptions is often where discovery and progress begins.
The path to enduring peace and sustainable values has proved beyond any historical or existing cultural development; no matter what religious claims, political ideals or ideologies have informed our understanding. To have a dream without the means is a fools game. Thus the religious quest remains unfinished, it may not have even started. What possibility for new spiritual and moral growth was rejected, ignored, discarded and lost by the early medieval mind which sent Jesus to the cross. What insight into the human condition still remains hidden among the scriptural jungle of metaphor, allegory and paradox, buried under the historical weight of tradition?
Where ever integrity is demanded, the accountability of living truth governs and judges the actions of men in every relationship and interaction with his fellow man. Yet in the worship of God, potentially the most valuable relationship of all, everything except living truth seems acceptable. Have perceptions of God been so wholly seduced by candy coated happy clappy spirituality or discredited by evolutionary biology and the atheist raves, have minds become so atrophied and conditioned by unquestioning, respectible orthodoxy and the impotence of scholastic theology, metaphysical fog and double-think, that after two thousand years of evolved human thought, humanity is no longer even capable of imagining anything greater then pagan ritual, hocus pocus, obscurantism, costume and theatre as the equivalent of revealed truth? What true God would leave his servants without the understanding to achieve his ends?
If natural reason was designed to understand the mind of God, why reveal anything? If man was ever meant to penetrate the secrets of scripture history has yet to judge, but one thing is clear. With dozens of references to false teaching, lying interpreters, anti-christs and don't forget the arch deceiver [unexposed and presumably at large] there must be in the world individuals, organizations, or institutions teaching falsely in the name of Christ. And what is there to distinguish one theological claim from another? Therefore who can be true if no one is false? So if any 'religious' truth is self evident, it must must be this: as in the beginning, it was not God who failed man, it is man who failed God, himself, and his fellow man. That is the way of the world.
If the living invisible God, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent within his own existence wishes to demonstrate his being perfectly and absolutely to the visible world, in such away that tests and judges the hearts of men and women of faith, what believer is fool enough to accept he cannot reveal the means?
I suspect God will have the last laugh and the last 'Word' on us all and that's when my religion begins. If God is true, there must be a living proof for faith and that would indeed be a potent catalyst for change and a monkey wrench in the gears of the established order. A few lines of Dante Alighieri from his epic poem The Divine Comedy say it all:
For as I turned there greeted mine likewise
What all behold who contemplate aright
That's Heaven's revolution through the skies.
