The Church's Guilty Secret

In truth the love of perfection and beauty is the root of all evil. We have been taught by many liars, not the least the orthodoxy of the organised religions (as opposed to people like Jesus, Mohommet, etc. whose message these organisations were designed to pervert) that we have a moral duty to pursue and love perfection. Thus we feel ashamed of our imperfections and plagued by guilt. We try to expiate this guilt by giving to charity, recycling our garbage, not eating meat and abstaining from what we have been misled to believe are "the sins of the flesh". And yet it is this guilt at not being perfect which causes us to do all the things which hurt us and others, from fighting with each other to feeling compelled to waste our time accumulating large quantities of junk, when we could, instead, be enjoying the wonders of the world and the fellowship of all other people.

The concept of God the wrathful father is a lie perpetrated by the false religions. God is Love. And Love loves all imperfections as the seeds of growth and wonders.

There is nothing wrong with eating, drinking and being merry. These things hurt us and others less than fighting and accumulating material possessions.

But this is not the only thing I'm talking about.

Take annorexia. Why do some adolescent girl's sometimes starve themselves? Because they have been taught that perfection is something to be pursued.

Why are there so many cases of paedophilia reported in the Catholic Church? Because worshipping innocence and beauty, instead of simply appreciating them as one more in life's many variations, can only lead to resenting innocence and beauty, because we are neither innocent nor beautiful ourselves. Hence some priests find themselves attacking innocent children.

Why do we use up so many of the earth's resources on buying new cars or new gadgets or clothes of various kinds? Because we are led to believe that we must strive for "something better", rather than appreciating and loving our beaten-up old possessions which have give us so much loyal support.

The applications are really endless.

Of course, the Biblical verse says, "The love of money is the root of all evil." But I believe that this is the New Testament equivalent of the "Satanic Verses" reputed to have been inserted into the Koran. I believe that teaching was inserted by the organised church afterwards to blackmail their flock into donating money. The church is not a charitable institution, as it accumulates more wealth than it distributes to the poor. It is in fact a leach on the poor and only serves to succour with aggrandisement the self-loathing egos of the church leaders.

If you read the "Gospel of Thomas" which was not included in the New Testament you will see that Jesus says that everyone can be as him if they will only let out that which is inside them. That what we don't let out is what will destroy us. Kindness, compassion, loving, caring and selflessness are not qualities which can be imposed by trying to force oneself to be perfect. They are liberated when we accept ourselves and give free expression to the things we keep bottled up - though in a non-destructive way preferably, such as cathartic speech, not doing things to hurt people. The act of trying to force yourself to be more like Jesus is an act of self-loathing and can only lead to behaviour which is destructive to yourself or others. This may take the form of intolerance of others as easily as it can take any other destructive form.

We have only what has been passed down to us to form our picture of Jesus. This consists of things he is reported to have said, and an account of how he responded to certain people and how certain people responded to him. There is much that would not have been considered relevant and thus has not been passed down to us, such as what games he liked to play as a child, what his sense of humour was like and what his sex life was like. All of this is a mystery, but perhaps is not terribly relevant to what we can learn from him.

Of course we can't know how accurately what he said was recorded. It's a bit like the question of whether Shakespeare really wrote all those plays. What matters is the words themselves and whether they form a consistent and useful philosophy of life. The reason I query the "love of money is the root of all evil" passage is that, unlike anything else I can find in his teachings, it is quite easy to disprove. The acts of a rapist and a thrill killer are clearly evil. In what way do these acts have their origin in a love of money? Many evil acts do originate in a love of money, but not all. And this is the weakness of an absolute statement. You have only to find one exception to disprove it.

As for Jesus being a mirror, this is a remarkably astute statement. Understanding the application of Jesus philosophy that we should love our neighbour as ourself and that we should love our enemies is, I believe, greatly helped by an understanding of what Carl Jung, himself a student of the gnostic tradition in Christianity, said about projection, our tendency to project our inner conflicts onto our assessment of others and the world around us. What we love in our friends is what we find most useful in ourselves, what we hate in our enemies is what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. (A common example of the application of this theory is the often expressed insight that men who bash homosexuals are at war with their own latent homosexuality.) So loving our neighbours requires an understanding that, in a way, they ARE us, in the sense that what we love about them is something we can find in ourselves and what we hate about them is something we can find in ourselves. Achieve individuation as Jung put it, that is find reconciliation between the warring elements of one's own psyche and one cannot help but have a Christ-like love for all one's fellows.

The one group of people Christ could really never find compassion for were liars and hypocrites like the Pharisees. This character-type were the ones who crucified him. And after they'd crucified him they did the best they could to crucify his teachings as well by turning Christianity into a religion. The root of the world religion is the Latin word religare, which means "to bind". Christ's message was not one intended to bind the human spirit, but to liberate it. As the Christian church became a centralised power structure it came to resemble the Jewish orthodoxy of the Pharisees against which Jesus had fought. Much of the writing about Jesus, including the Gospel of Thomas, was supressed as heretical by the Catholic Church. Gnostics - some Christian, some from other traditions - were killed or tortured, along with Jews, women who wouldn't submit to the church, pagans and early scientists who questioned the church's dogmatic views about the nature of the world and the solar system. All of this was a gross perversion of Christ's teaching that we should simply judge not that we be not judged and love our enemies and our neighbours as ourselves.

I believe the chief weapon the church used to attempt to crush Jesus teachings was by insisting that we have a duty to worship Jesus and God. I don't believe Jesus ever wanted to be worshipped. What selfless person would want this. It is only the selfish who want the world to bow down and kiss their feet. But somehow, consciously or unconsciously, the church planted this genuine heresy which would turn much of Christianity into a tool for the domination of the weak by the powerful. When we worship something it is the first step towards destroying it. But also, saying that we must worship the perfection of Jesus and God, is a powerful way of instilling guilt, and all pernicious religious cults from the Catholic Church to the People's Temple that drank the Kool-Aid in Jonestown have based their mind control on the instilling of guilt.

I believe the Gospel of Thomas is one of the most trustworthy of the gospels. It makes little reference to miracles, it is about simple psychology and it doesn't make any claim that Jesus was God or wanted to be worshipped. I think the Gospel of John is probably the least trustworthy gospel because it says that Jesus was God. This is ludicrous. If God is love and Jesus was a totally loving person, then his life was an expression of God. But no human being can be God. Caligula and Nero would have had us believe they were Gods, and look what they were like. Also the Gospel of John recommends that we live through our support of Jesus. I think this is the beginning of the great heresy of the church that we should submit to "Jesus" when what they really meant is that we should submit to them.

I think the time for questioning these things has now come. Look how popular the novel The Da Vinci Code is. Surely this can't be accounted for by its quality as a novel. I've only seen the movie, but it strikes me as a piece of very ordinary pulp fiction. One, however, which raises interesting questions about the orthodox church and its role in history.

Self-sacrifice is hatred of God. Jesus never practised self-sacrifice. He didn't commit suicide. It was others who made a sacrifice of him. A sacrifice to their own insecure egos.

I'm not saying that God is romantic or parental love specifically. These are really very limited, restrained forms of love, in that they are directed only towards certain people. And romantic love usually contains an element of sexual desire, which, though a wonderful healthy thing which a healthy individual feels towards many other individuals, is impermanent and often troublesome.

Love is nothing more than honest communication. That's it. There is nothing more. Speak or behave honestly towards anyone or anything and you are a conduit of love.

But to love others we must first love ourselves. This is not an egotistical thing. A big ego is founded on secret self-loathing. We must find acceptance of all our imperfections if we are to feel the same way about the imperfections of others.

I believe the concept that there is a God who wants to punish us for our imperfections is a lie used by the churches to oppress us. This was a part of the orthodox Jewish church of Jesus's day and would again return in the churches that perverted his teachings. But I believe this God is a fiction created by man in his own image as a tool for oppression.

It is true that being willing to lay down one's life for one's friends is the highest expression of love. But this is honest communication. Say a child falls onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train. We have two choices. We can jump in front of the train and save the child, possibly losing our life in the act, or we can just stand and watch the train kill the child. The latter is not honest communication with the child. Honest communication means responding to the needs of the other. Those needs are communicated to us, and responding to them is our honest communication back.

But self-sacrifice is another thing. Self-sacrifice is forcing ourselves to repress our own needs and desires for the sake of another. But this doesn't work, because we can only feel bitter about it and take that bitterness out on others, often in the form of judgement of them for doing what we won't allow ourselves to do.

Now I'm not saying we should just give in to our desires willy-nilly. That would be reckless and would most likely lead to damage to ourselves and others. But we have to take care of our own needs and find fulfillment of our desires in ways which do not harm us or others.

If, however, we can do as Jesus suggested in the Gospel of Thomas and bring out that which is within us fully, then we reach a state in which the fulfilling of others needs is the sweetest delight. And I'm sure this must have been true also for Jesus. I don't believe he overcame himself in order to serve others. I think he just understood that being a healing presence for others is better than sex.