Religion After Christianity?

2 Comments | July 9, 2007 at 12:10 pm by mahud
Filed under Paganism, Sprituality, Buddhism, Christianity

I became a Christian around the age of twenty-one. My life before Jesus was not unlike many other Christians-to-be, whose testimonies you might of heard. I was very much a sinner. I cared about others, but I also placed my needs and desires above everyone else.

Christianity was there when I needed it

I took a lot of drugs and my life was falling apart, I was on the verge of becoming homeless, and I was a prisoner of my own messed up circumstances and very lost. My life was meaningless.

In my desperation for a normal life, I turned to Christianity. For people like me, without any religious education, whose lives have become an entangled mess, without any way of release, it was the perfect choice at the time.

The gospel is about setting us free from our past so we can move on with our future

Two important verses from the Old and New Testaments sum up what Jesus means to me. The first is a prophecy of Isaiah, that Jesus read aloud at the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, that Jesus believed was fulfilled in him.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Luke 4:8-18 (Jesus quoting Isaiah 61:1,2)

The second verse was a response to the Pharisees, who objected to his hanging out with ‘sinners’ and eating with them.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners… …Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing
Mark 2:17

Jesus very much saw his mission from God as the fulfillment of Jewish Prophecy. And it was a mission to set people free from their sins. Primarily, I think the people Jesus had in mind were prisoners of circumstances out of their control, and not so much people who were outside this circle of despair.

I can related to that. I needed Jesus, because I had transgressed my better nature, and wanted to be transformed back into the person I once was, and for the greater part it worked. I no longer willfully steal and cheat my friends, or my family. I want to live by a principle of love, and I owe this to Jesus. He had pointed me in the right direction.

Thank You Jesus, I need to move on, but where do I go?

Over the past few years my understanding of Christianity has changed radically, and I no longer believe that Christianity is the right religion for me. I am reluctant to read the Bible, because it makes me uncomfortable, and I cannot reconcile what I know about the true origins of scripture, with what the scriptures themselves claim. And yet, I still need to be transformed and set free from a lot of psychological crap.

And so I’m faced with a dilemma. Is there religion after Christianity? I’m unable to swap one tradition for another. Trading the Bible for another Holy Book, or believe another ‘god’, cosmology, or concept of an afterlife. All religions are false in a way, despite their power to transform us into better individuals. And so I was in a bit of a bind.

Looking at Religion from a New Perspective

I live bookmarked Jeff Lilly’s (druid journal) series How to Choose a Religion, last week, as part of some research I was working on in for my previous post A New Mythology. And I had a bit of an eureka moment:

It makes no sense to ask whether a religion is true! Instead, ask yourself what you’re going to use the religion for. Different religions are better at different things.
How to Choose a Religion VII: Languages of Spirit (Druid Journal)

It’s really so obvious, but I hadn’t made the connection between choosing a religion based on my own personal needs. I have been approaching the problem the wrong way. I thought I needed to choose the Right Religion, not the religion that’s Right for me! This is indeed a revelation to me!

So I need to choose a religion that will address my needs, but which one, I wondered? I looked for one of those online quiz things, as I thought that might help, but I couldn’t find anything that asked the right questions, and then it struck me. Recently, I have been drawn towards meditation, but I hadn’t pursued it much. But that’s definitely what I should be focusing on right now. My mind is still full of a lot of crap from my past that haunts me. I suffer from SA, my mind is constantly restless, and I often find myself fretting about some problem, big or small, real or imaginary. And so a religious tradition that emphasizes meditative practice is definitely the religion for me.

Mental (and hopefully spiritual) Transformation through Meditation

Of course, there exists a wide variety of different forms of meditation, from just about every religion, and so I have quite a bit of research ahead of me. Buddhism has always appealed to me. I’m drawn to the idea of mindfulness and karmic fruitfulness, although I’m not really attracted by Buddhist cosmology, the doctrine of Anatta (no-self), and Nirvana, but what ever form of meditation I engage in, I’ll be putting the bigger cosmical aspects on the shelf, and focus within, and see where things take me.