Why I Choose to Live My Faith Outside of Organized Religion

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mick-mooney/why-i-choose-to-live-my-f_b_6339134.html

Mick Mooney
Author, 'An Outsider's Guide to the Gospel'

Posted: 12/17/2014 3:08 pm EST Updated: 12/17/2014 3:59 pm EST


getty

Let me start by making my premise clear: Believing in God doesn't mean I believe in religion, and believing in Jesus doesn't mean I believe in the religion of Christianity. While I accept I'll often be lumped into these groups because I believe in God and Jesus, I know that I myself don't subscribe to any organized religion. I have in the past, and I learned my lesson.

While some say only one religion leads to God, and others might say all religions lead to God, I would say the opposite: That no religion leads to God. They may talk of God, point to him even, and have some relevant points, but, in my opinion, they do not, and can not, lead fully to God; the various branches and denominations of Christianity are no exception.

The very structure religion confines itself within, along with its immovable dogmas, is proof enough that it will always fail to lead anyone to the full reality of our boundless, cosmic-sized God. It's clear to me that God is bigger than any box a religion can set up to put him in.

While it seems popular to think Jesus came to build an army of sorts for God, and to then organize his followers to build him an empire on earth, I personally don't subscribe to such a concept. In fact, I think Christ came to do the opposite; I believe he came to end empire thinking and bring each of us back to a personal, individual experience of God.

more at link

[mmonk]

1. I'll give this a recommend. He wasn't starting a religion.

He was an apocalyptic preacher that believed God would intervene and end oppressive rule but ended up executed by the Romans while deliverance never came.

[cbayer]

2. I think this author represents the position of many, but it is rarely expressed.

His perspective on the reason he thinks Jesus was sent is particularly interesting.

[mmonk]

3. I agree with that assessment.

[Sweeney]

7. That is bullshet, and this is not to demean you.

The Romans had a relationship with the Jews. In pushing for an informal and psychological relationship with God which has roots right back to the Decalogue, Jesus threatened the religious power structure of Jerusalem. And in three out of the four gospels Jesus is seen as attacking the money traders as the last act of his mission. He was correct to do so.

The coin of Israel which was the only coin that could be offered in the temple had to be recycled outside to the traders so that the traders got their cut before God got his. And it was all a racket. There was a people in that land so desperate and poor that they had to pledge their tunics for food on the hopes of having wages for supper, and Jesus the comedian told them, When they sue you for your tunics, offer them your pants.

There was so much gold in that city that when the Romans took it, it paid for the building of the Colosseum among other things. The place was not poor, but as in our own society, the people were poor because the rich wanted it all. Jesus threatened that wealth. Jerusalem would have died on the vine if people realized they could have an individual and unique relationship with their God that cut out the middle men. The Priests had Jesus killed, and they used the Romans to do it; and the Roman were happy to comply because they had a deal with Herod.

In the end it was the Romans who ended the monopoly of Jerusalem on the faith of the people, and in this they not only internationalized and freed the Jews of that irrational bondage, but at the same time, and through the Christians, they ended the power of their Roman paganism over the whole of the area. So, Christianity bought a victory with peace that could not have been bought with war for this offshoot of Judaism. This is not to say that Paul did not in some sense destroy the revolutionary aspect of Jesus in the attempt to Romanize it. Jesus was a destroyer of the old faith even while he denied this aim. Paul built up a new faith in the name of Jesus that in time became as bad for the people, and as obnoxious at Rome as Jerusalem was to the Jews.

[mmonk]

10. I consider your approach offensive.

That said, I did not address those issues as some of it would be under the umbrella of oppressive rule and governance and I was giving a shorter answer as to the question in general

[Sweeney]

14. I'll try to be more sinsitive in the future.

What do I know any way. Certainly not enough to judge.

[mmonk]

16. It was probably my fault.

My answer was based more on an academic opinion in which many people exercising good faith disagree.l should know better.

[Sweeney]

20. If you want to kick your self, I may as well join in

But I am really sore from a workout, and would rather not.

[Sweeney]

4. Religion is the search for God

A faith is God captured.

[trotsky]

5. I don't normally care much for gross oversimplifications...

but if anything, I think you've got that backwards. A religion believes it has captured god, with all its rules and liturgy and institutions. One would hope that faith would keep that search somewhat more open.

[Sweeney]

11. You may be correct

I took that explanation as fact before I knew the dictionary definition of religio as meaning a tie back, which would presume a tie bact to tradition; and ritual has that quality too, of recreating the past in the present and so carrying the past forward.

The fact remains that no one builds a church and hierarchy on guess work and suppostion. When people feel certain, they will lay the first stone. St. Paul had an understanding of Jesus. I doubt that it was correct, but it was certainly correct in the rejection of the law and of formality in the relationship with God; and this was not different from what many of the prophets said. But the answer to formality is not in the end, more formality. Jesus was pushing an informal and psychological relationship with God that will be by the nature of people different for each. How does one bring order to such anarchy short of orthodoxy? I would ask: Who need to? People think in terms of doing God's work. Why? If God cannot do his own work while we get out of the way, what are WE going to do?

[cbayer]

8. Captured? In what sense?

[Sweeney]

12. captured in the sense of Concept

I would point to Job, when Job says something like: I would dispute with God, and he gets no nice reply from God; and yet, in the end God did call off the dog.

If we think we can conceive of such an infinite as God we must be mistaken. We cannot accurately conceive of a maggot or else we could recreate one. And yet you find people do conceive of God as beings, and do build their dogma around these beings and invoke them. Some of this is a problem with translation. One can best translate the Greek into the Latin on the quality of the trinity as three somethings. The Latin thought to capture the sense without the exact meaning, as: three persons. We can relate to persons as we cannot relate to three somethings undefined or undefinable. The Muslims make better sense here in not defining God, but only in refering to God as The God, and when they have invoked Allah as God the merciful, they have said little enough.

[pinto]

6. Good read.

I like the perspective on Jesus in the historical context of the day, i.e. the Roman empire at one of its heights.

[cbayer]

9. I learned so much about this this past summer.

I never really knew much about the Roman empire or the transition from Roman gods to the abrahamic god.

I still have much to learn. I'm consistently amazed by what I don't know.

[Sweeney]

13. I am reading an excellent book on the subject

Called: The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, by Taylor, Henry Osborn.

Caesar and Christ; one of Will and Areal Durant's great work of scholarship is a wonderful piece of work as is the Age of Belief. The whole set is a remarkable achievement.

[cbayer]

15. I might enjoy this.

I prefer to be steeped in history rather than read about it, though.

I saw some amazing things in Italy.

[Sweeney]

17. I would bet the footprints alone are amazing.

Everybody and his brother have called that place home at one time or another. Cicily is worse.

[cbayer]

18. There is one place in Rome where they have an amazing dig.

They have covered it with glass floors so you are right in the middle of it. And they have used holograms to virtually rebuild parts of it.

The history of this one very small space would just blow you away. Even the trash is mesmerizing.

Le Domus Romane di Palazzo Valentini

http://www.palazzovalentini.it

[Sweeney]

19. Trash can be mesmerizing

I guess that is why they have porn sites.