Five Minutes after the Crucifixion

     Do human beings need organized religion in order to know God?  The answer is an unequivocal no!  God has placed his Light into every soul who comes into this world.  The Light that speaks in the deepest quiet part of your soul is the only word of God that you need.  If God is out yonder somewhere in the vast cosmos and also in your deepest inner being, which path to God is the most direct path?  The path that is light years away or the path that is 18” from your head to your heart?  The path inward, of course.  The problem is that the path inward is dependent entirely upon you. You do not need to follow anyone else.  When you elect to search for God by intellectually looking outward to the teachings of some religious leader, instead of quietly listening to that inner voice, you honor that spark of God in another person (the religious leader) and deny the spark of God in yourself.  In truth, you actually grieve the Light of God that resides within your own soul to give you guidance.  Follow your own heart.

     There are as many paths to God as there are feet to walk them because every path is a personal path and yet the path is fundamentally the same – love and service to others.  How that plays out in your life is the individual part – the part you must find in your own heart.  Spiritual Individualism is the middle way – the Single Way - that does not depend upon Head Religion or Book Religion but merely asks seekers to follow their own heart and pursue God’s will in their own way.  One thing is certain; every one of those millions of individual paths to God is paved with love and service to others.  The degree with which you love and serve others is the clearest marker of the degree to which you are experiencing and fellowshipping with God.

     Likewise there are as many names for God as there are tongues to speak them.  In the end, what’s in a name anyway?  Do you think God is so petty that he will not love and commune with the soul that doesn’t know his proper name?  If you and I are walking along a path on the side of a mountain, and you slip and grab a branch to keep from falling to your death, do you think I wouldn’t reach down to help you even if you called me by something other than my given name?  It is ludicrous to charge God with such foolish childishness.  God looks upon the heart and intent of the individual soul – all the rest are meaningless trivialities.  The hungry heart will always find welcome with God regardless of whether he calls him God, Allah, Jesus, Krishna, Shiva, or even Bob, or John.  All wrangling about what to call God is meaningless semantics that divide humanity.  God was God before any human ever spoke his name and came up with the word God. 

     Paul’s Christianity made Jesus a God just like Mithras in the popular religion of the day, and the Gospel of John (written many years after Paul’s writings) reinforced that view, even referring to Jesus by some of the very same names and titles used for Mithras, but Jesus was not God.  In the early Gospel of Matthew, probably the first Gospel to be written, a very human Jesus was once approached and addressed as “Good Master” and his immediate reply was “Why do you call me good, there is no one who is good except God.” (Matthew 19:16, 17).   He was not omniscient but learned new things and grew in wisdom just like any other child (Luke 2:52).  When he was going to the Temple one day, he was hungry and saw a fig tree.  He went over to see if there were any figs on the tree to appease his hunger.  If he had been God, he would have certainly known whether or not there were figs on the tree.  When he found none, he got angry, just like you and I might, and he cursed the fig tree, even though it was not the time of the year for figs to be in season (Matthew 21:18-20).  When Jesus was talking about the Day of Judgment, he made it clear the he was not all knowing as God is when he said, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in Heaven, neither the son, but the Father." (Mark 13:32 and Matt. 24:36)   God is omniscient (all knowing) but Jesus was not because he was not God.  God is omnipotent (all powerful) but Jesus claimed that he could do nothing without the help of God when he said, "Truly, truly I say to you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do..." (John 5:19). Again he said, "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will but the will of the Father which has sent me." (John 5:30)

     Jesus was a man who called God his father but made it clear that he was your father and my father also when he said, "I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God." (John 20:17). He cried out on the cross, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46).  He called upon God.  God is God and does not have a God to call upon.  When in the garden of Gethsemane he prayed, "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt." (Matt. 26:36).  If Jesus were God why would he have said to the many people who were listening and looking at him, "No man has seen God at any time." (John 1:18). "Ye have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His shape." (John 5:37) He also said in John 4:24: "God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."  God is all powerful yet when Jesus spoke of God in John 14:28 he said: "My Father is greater than I."  Jesus was a human being like you and me, albeit a human being who had spiritually evolved to the point of allowing the Light of God to shine brightly through him.  As a baby his mother Mary changed his soiled diapers and wiped his dirty nose.  She wiped the tears from his eyes and cleaned his skinned knees.  She sang lullabies to him and rocked him to sleep.  He was just a little Jewish boy who learned obedience to the Light of God within him at a very early age, but he was not God.  There is only one God.

     The new Christianity that Paul developed bore little resemblance to the message of Jesus.  People were required to believe something, and before someone can believe something they must have knowledge of what it is they are to believe.  And even then, people cannot magically re-orient the neuron cells of their brains and make themselves believe a certain thing.  If you learned tomorrow that a firm belief in the Easter Bunny is the single acceptable requirement for eternal life, you would simply be damned, for no amount of intellectual wrestling would produce a firm belief in what you know is not true.  You can certainly quote creeds and pretend that you believe but at night, when you put your head on your pillow, you know in your heart that you can’t believe in the Easter Bunny.  That absurd allegory holds true for all so-called required religious dogma in every religion under the sun.  You must first and foremost be true to the Light of God that dwells within you – and not the Light that dwells in any other person.

     Suppose Paul was right.  Suppose that the blood that Jesus shed on the cross actually did appease an angry, vengeful God.  And suppose that the only acceptable way for anyone to find pardon from God is to believe that dogma.  The world is full of people who die daily, each and every minute of the day.  The day that Jesus died on the cross there were thousands of devout and godly people all over the known world.  These were people who followed God with a pure heart like Anna (Luke 2:36 -38) who served God night and day; and people like Simeon (Luke 2:25) who was just and devout; and men like Cornelius (Acts 10:1-2) who was a devout man who feared God with all his household and gave much to the poor and prayed to God always.  They were the children of God the minute that Jesus shed his blood on the cross.  Were they the enemies of God a minute after Jesus shed his blood?  I would ask the evangelical or the fundamentalist, when did these righteous people who loved God (and served him the best they knew how) become worthy of eternal damnation in hell?  Five minutes after Jesus died, were these children of God suddenly transformed into the children of Satan doomed to hell?  After all, they knew nothing of Jesus’ death on that fateful day so they could not have believed it.  If Cornelius had died one hour after Jesus died, would he have been rejected by God because he had not learned the new dogma and naturally could not have believed it?  If you sensibly answered, “No, of course not; that would be unjust!”  Well the obvious next question is, when would it become just for God to send people like Anna, and Simeon, and Cornelius (and millions of others across the world today) to hell for not having knowledge of and believing in the vicarious atonement of Jesus – one week, one month, one decade, or never?  I believe the answer is self evident.  People all over the world in every culture and among every tribe on the face of the earth can only be expected to look within themselves and quietly listen to the Light of God in their own hearts and try to serve and love God to the best of their understanding.  No other “plan of salvation” offers universal justice and if God is not just, then he is not God – at least not a God worth serving.  My search ended when I realized that the only path to God for me is the Single Way of love and service to others.  Now you must find your path.  The Single Way to God and World Peace begins where you are standing and you will find the directions in your heart.