Stop Clinging

I have been a tad cranky of late. I find that I am losing patience with those who try to remain anchored to the past. Thi is especially true regarding spiritual matters.

The Universe, God's Creation, is in a constant state of change. We humans change daily as we learn more and more. Yet, some, no, many, of us wish to remain tied to relics of beliefs.

Like it or not, we are not desert nomads herding sheep and fighting both empires seeking territory and neighbors we can't seem to get along with. We have gone too far and learned to much to continue those patterns of thought. No one in their right mind wants to live by Levitical law (by the way, that is all sharia law is).

Christians speak of 'The Blood of the Lamb' and the sacrificial atonement that Jesus brought. They don't understand that we now know that darn near every culture on Earth has practiced blood rights and scapegoating and it is fairly obvious that the desired results have never been found.

Christians speak of the Virgin Birth, yet we now know that the earliest Christians believed no such thing and that the entire concept is the result of a mistaken translation (the into Greek from the Hebrew word that really just means young girl). We also now that there was nor census at the time of Jesus' birth ( there was one earlier and each Jew was not required to go to the city of his birth) and no killing of babies by Herod. Oh, and Jesus was not from Nazareth because, at his time, there was no Nazareth (it shows up about the 2nd Century.

As far as older religions go, we have figured out, through historical and ancheological investigations, that they were, in ancient times, a mixed up mess, with each influencing and being absorbed by others.

India's Hinduism is a blend of the local Godess belief mixed with the Indo-aryan Vedic religions. Judaism imported beliefs from Egypt, Babylon and especially from Persia Zoroasterianism. Christianity stole from every indiginous belief system it came across, from the Greek neo-platonism to the Afro-Cuban systems of Voodoo.

The point is, we now know that all, and I mean all religions are a hodge-podge of beliefs, yet we continue to insist that ours, no matter where you are, is the right one. Add into that the fact that many beilefs have been shattered by scientific knowledge, and we have no basis for clinging so tightly to our religious beliefs (does any one still think that God stopped the Sun for Joshua. Oh, by the way, Jericho was rubble long before Joshua sounded the trumpet).

Now, we should not throw out these traditions completely. If we view them as mythology, they show deep truths about human psychology. And, especially in the Western Christian system ( which also contains elements from Greek, Roman, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers), we are given a profoundly human system of workable, ethical guidelines. But, we must, if man is to continue, stop all forms, repeat, all forms, of literal belief in any religious dogma.