What Is A Christian?

08/14/2008

I've been plagued throughout my life, well, at least until a few years ago, with one thought: I must be a good Christian. My upbringing was not in a religious home. My stepfather was brought up as a Seventh Day Adventist and my mother was not even encouraged to go to church, but when she did, it was a Baptist church (she was born in the South, you know). Yet, my mother did encourage me to go to church, but not until I was old enough to cross the street by myself. There was a non-denominational church across the street.

As a young boy, I learned that to be a good Christian all one had to do was to follow the Ten Commandments. Some of it was a piece of cake Ð I never intended to kill anyone and I wasn't married. Honoring my mother and father was a little difficult at times. Stealing was a bit too easy to get away with, but it eventually caught up with me and I changed my ways. But how in the world could I ever be a good Christian with all the thoughts of sex that was always on my mind? The only calming aspect to me at that time was that nowhere in the Ten Commandments did it say that sex was a no-no Ð in any form. But that understanding would change as I got older.

As a teenager, someone read this to me from the Bible: ÒIt is better to cast the sperm into the belly of a whore than to cast it upon the ground.Ó That was interpreted to mean that masturbation is a big no-no. All of a sudden, 75% of all males were doomed to Hell-fire, including me. But what about whoring? Did that mean it was really okay to fornicate with a prostitute? Well, there's another Bible verse that covers that, and a lot more verses to cover a multitude of other Òsins.Ó In time, I was to learn there was no one left in this world that could escape Hell-fire. So what about all those devout Christians? And what about all those devout Jews? And the devout Buddhists? The Muslims? Any devout religious person? Anywhere? Are there any that can really claim to be pure enough to enter the Kingdom of God? We would certainly hope that the Pope would qualify Ð that is, until we learned that some of them were gay, some were simply power hungry, some of them had one or more concubines, and the rest, well, who really knows?

Struggling with the obvious paradoxes that I encountered with some of the tenets of the Ten Commandments, the good Christian churches I attended piled on even more to ponder. Like, it's okay to worship in church calling everyone there your good friends but it wasn't okay to think of the Russians as friends. It wasn't okay to think of the serial killer as a friend. It wasn't okay to befriend a street beggar. The enemy and anyone who wasn't in your little circle, the circle of the church you attend (by denomination, not physical location), were not friends. And as I got older and lifestyles of certain people became more apparent Ð I'm talking about the Gay community here Ð there was no way they would even be tolerated on the same block as a good Christian. The byword was Òchase the unholy and the unclean out of sight.Ó And if they wouldn't go away, kill them. That's what the good Christians in white robes carrying burning crosses did.

Now things were getting really tight. Thank goodness the one thing my mother taught me was that anyone can be your friend, just don't let your friends pick you. So, being wary and always on the lookout for those who would take advantage of me, I soon discovered that I had very few close friends, and some of those were discarded when I discovered their ÒtrueÓ nature as being outside the Ògood Christian ethicsÓ, not that mine were shining examples.

We have Ògood ChristiansÓ everywhere and in all walks of life. But, how many of them really follow the example that Jesus gave by inviting the beggars and prostitutes and all that lot to dinner when his regular invited guests did not attend?

Even in the Bible, before and after the four New Testament books that gave us a fair accounting of the life of Jesus, the one that matters most anyway, we still find shining examples of how to do good to some but not to others. What is wrong with that picture?

In today's world (at the time of this writing), we find ourselves involved in deep discussions as to whether or not a black man who's father was raised in a Muslim culture is fit to be a President of the United States. The cry of the Christians is that this nation is a Christian nation. No, it isn't. There is nothing in the Constitution that declares that a Christian religion or lifestyles is to be promoted above all else, despite the fact that all the founders were Christian by faith. The founders specifically allow in the Constitution the freedom of religion, so where is written that a Muslim cannot be a President, or a Jew (and keep in mind that we did have a Jew for a Vice President), or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or an Atheist? What does it matter that a person, man or woman, is of one faith or another or none? Did not Ghandi guide his followers in peace, and was Ghandi a Christian? Did not Buddha guide his followers in peace, and was he a Christian? Are all the followers of Jesus living the example of Jesus? Isn't it so that no matter how ÒtrueÓ a religion is at the outset, there are always some who disagree with the interpretation of the leader's instructions and actually go to war over those differences? Is that in any way a live and let live doctrine?

The faction of the faithful of any religion who do not live and let live in peace are those who believe that there can be only one religion and only one way to worship that religion Ð theirs. Not yours or mine or no religion. Their religion, period. This also includes those who have no religion and want to keep their world without any vestige of any religion.

So, I still ask, what is a Christian? The short answer is anyone who believes that Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior. The implied answer is anyone who lives the way Jesus taught. But, is that life any different than the life that Buddha talked about? Is that life any different than the one that Loa Tse talked about? The term Christian is applied to both Catholic and Protestant worshippers, because they both adhere to the central theme that Jesus is God, that the only way to enter the Kingdom of God is through Jesus, and that his birth is of a virgin. And a lot of other stuff. Paul, the New Testament follower of Jesus's teachings, added a lot to those teachings with his own thoughts on how to worship. Woman should keep their heads covered in worship. It was never recorded that Jesus ever said anything like that, yet it was accepted as a cardinal rule in the Catholic church for centuries. There are other examples of ÒteachingsÓ and ÒrulesÓ that crept into the Christian doctrine, or should I say dogma, that have never been attributed to anything Jesus ever said.

In one shining example, a book called A Course In Miracles came out in 1976 that is supposedly written by the hand of a Jewish psychologist who says she wrote what was dictated to her by Jesus. At the outset she had no idea who the voice in her head was besides her own thoughts, but it became abundantly clear in due time. In this book, Jesus declared that many of his teachings have been written down wrong and are currently gravely misunderstood. To me, that is entirely plausible, even without ACIM to make the point. But to a devout Christian, it is impossible for the true Word of God to be misinterpreted because God guide's the hand of the true believer.

And what about the ego in all this? Do we ignore the fact that the ego is the one aspect of human nature that is so completely in opposition to all that smacks of a God-centered lifestyle? Do we ignore everything that we are taught as Christians about Satan, the Devil, that he is the one misguiding us Ð not our ego? Or is it that the ego is really Satan in disguise?