Quote:

Typically, you, like every other adherent of religion, finds some way to justify your belief

---

Quote:

I will concede that Catholicism sometimes appears to be more catholic than Protestantism does in it's rigid Sola Fide way. Catholics form syncretisms with other faiths, even magickal-religious faiths like Vodun and Santeria. Yes, God is personified, but there are Neo-Platonic Christian theologians like Pseudo-Dionysus who spoke of the "Superessential Godhead" that transcended any attributes of God. People are personal, and most people take comfort in superego projections onto God - Big Daddy in the Sky. I have always sought to eliminate my own psychodynamics from the clear awareness of Presence. This requires an analytical temperament, which I have owing to my INTP typology (like Jung's) versus the Feeling types that are attracted to a devotional (Bhakti) spirituality. I am not trying to convince you of my path's superiority, it is superior for me owing to my typology. I am not a Feeling type, and I cannot enjoin strong devotional emotions. 'My God' is also tainted by the subjective pole of my particular temperament, and so it goes. In order to draw closer to That which transcends us, we must transcend our own biases.

---

Quote:

Jesus becomes a kind of narcissistic focal point if you look at Asian, Black, Caucasian Jesus images from around the world. Such art forms lend insight into what is occurring on personal and cultural levels of identification with Jesus. Everyone sees Jesus as a projection of their own idealized Self. I used to work for the Miami Catholic Archdiocese, evaluating whether young men in priest formation were truly fit to be priests. One in particular, left seminary to become a nurse instead, but as being a gay man (as all the young seminarians in my experience were), he explained his sexual attraction to Jesus, and that colored his projections of Jesus. People attribute all levels of extraneous elements to Jesus who is far more a symbol (symbols are living psychic realities, not dead images) than one man who lived two millennia ago.

---

Quote:

From J.S. Spong's astute observations and scholarly acumen, the entire New Testament simply co-opted the salvation themes from the Tenach, and allowed Gentile peoples to avail themselves of them without getting circumcised, changing their diets, or becoming part of the Jewish temple cultus.

---

Quote:

Personally, I may rely on pre-existing forms of prayer, like praying in Jesus' name, but not to Jesus. He was a man who died long ago. I do not believe in the transmogrified Resurrection body as described in the gospel myths as being literal, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in some kind of Resurrection, only the Resurrection Body is more like the Pleroma (Fullness) of the Godhead itself, and the ultimate Realization 'That Thou Art.'

What are you saying here? That no individuality is preserved beyond the physical body? If not, then what would be wrong with praying TO Jesus? Ramana Maharshi affirmed to devotees that they could pray to him both while he was embodied and afterwards. He maintained that he was not the body.

Quote:

Too many Psychic Christians imagine a personal immortality, an Elysian Field, an eternal church picnic with the family, not a non-corporeal Pleroma of Effulgent Love.

---

sometimes I get the feeling that you see yourself as superior to others. Especially, spiritually superior.

That's why what I have been trying to point out to you is that all these things you say in your posts are details. They are details which are interesting to those of us like you and me who are spiritual nerds. But the vast majority of the world does not know or care about these things.

That's why I can't help but look at churches as good, even heretical ones. Why? Because they are one of the few things in the world which reminds one of the path of self-realization. its very important to have something external reminding you of the path of virtue, because almost everything in our society is telling you to forget it. When I am driving, every time I pass by a church, even a protestant church, heck even a mormon church, I think of God. And that is a positive.

Icelander said:

God wanted to be represented by one man one earth for a while, because it would confuse people if they tried to conceive of a whole group of God-realized beings and they would not be able to see how God was one.

Sure if you want to negate/ignore the religious beliefs of much of the rest of the world.

---

Deviate said:

Icelander said:

God wanted to be represented by one man one earth for a while, because it would confuse people if they tried to conceive of a whole group of God-realized beings and they would not be able to see how God was one.

Sure if you want to negate/ignore the religious beliefs of much of the rest of the world.

---

How am I negating the religious beliefs of much the world? This is a small detail. God does not care very much about small details like this. What he cares about is righteousness. He wants people to treat each other well, with the utmost kindness and compassion. As Jesus says, love for God and neighbor sums up the whole law and the prophets. It's that simple. All the rest is details. What I am saying is, why bicker over details? I feel like doing so only makes one to be spiritually superior. "I know more more about Jesus than those ignorant Christians over there". Good for you. Maybe you will get more saved than they do.

---

Deviate said:

You're thinking of protestant christianity. Most protestant churches teach something like, you must just have faith in Jesus and then God will treat you as if you were a good person even while you remain a bad person and then out of gratefulness to Him for that unwarranted favor, you will hopefully start becoming a better person, but the favor is in no way dependent on how good a person you become.

---

Deviate said:

The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches however, have never taught this. They along the with Holy Bible (though protestants would disagree me on that based on a few verses which when taken out of context appear to support their heretical notions) teach that we must observe the moral law in order to be acceptable to God. In other words, you need to at least try to become a good person.

---

Deviate said:

Protestants teach that salvation is just something God does to certain people, completely independent of how worthy of it they are.

---

MarkostheGnostic said:

Gnosis in Greek is equivalent to Gyan (or Jnani) in Advaitist Non-Dualism. The Gnostics recognized 3 typologies among humans: Hylics (or Sarkics. Sarx means 'flesh'), Psychics, and Pneumatics. Hylics are just sensory-dominated materialistic people. End of story. They identify with what is strictly perishable, and perish. The Psychics live by faith, although there is upward mobility and a Psychic Christian can become a Pneumatic Christian by virtue of experiencing Gnosis. In Gnosis, like the Hindu Sat Chit Ananda, which is sometimes translated as Knowledge-Consciousness-Bliss, or Being-Consciousness-Bliss, is the condition in which Knower-Knowledge-Known have become ONE. It is the same ONE that everyone else on the planet speaks of: "Hear O Israel, the LORD thy God, the LORD is ONE."

For Gnostics, the written word is a record of those writers who have experienced varying degrees of Gnosis. Paul revealed his "Christ mysticism," while Iesous revealed his "God mysticism." The difference is profound, as Albert Schweitzer took great pains to explain in his book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Christianity in general has swallowed Paul's experience as THE Christian experience, but Paul's own visionary out-of-the-body experience in 2 Corinthians 12:2, "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter..." was still 'in form' as the Buddhists say. Paul had a Light experience on the road to Damascus and was left blind for some days as well.

Such experiences belong to a high Psychic realm (which I denote as Psychospiritual in my own system of classification), while the experience of Iesous belongs to what I call the Psychocosmic realm. Iesous experienced his identity as being the Ground of Being, Pure Identity, "I AM." Christianity then takes Iesous and creates a unique specie of being out of him which is to be worshipped, instead of endeavoring to experience what Iesous experienced. Faith is someone else's experience is what makes for a Psychic Christian in Gnostic terms. In fact, when a handful of Christian mystics did experience that, like Meister Eckhart. Eckhart (the name that Eckhart Tolle took as his own) said: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love,” he was condemned as a heretic, and had he not died of natural causes would have been burned at the stake outside of Cologne Cathedral for uttering such presumption. Anyone but Iesous who has had this Realization is condemned for such blasphemous presumption in Christendom. In Islam, the mystic al Hallaj said, similarly to Iesous, "I am the Truth," and for that, his hands and feet were amputated and he was then crucified!

Being too cosmic (or Psychocosmic) is too threatening for most people, especially those keepers of the tables in the temple who create the whole worldly game of power, and who maintain borders, and generally are opposed to higher unity but desire separation, self-interest, and cannot see past their animal or demonic proclivities.

---

MarkostheGnostic said:

www.gnosis.org. Knock yourself out (with reading)! Or, begin with Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels as an intro.

---