The world’s religions no longer meet the needs of humanity. We are not advocating abandoning religion—that has already happened. “The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with the world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.”
In recommending a paradigm shift to Simple Reality, we are not advocating transcending an institution that continues to be effective, but rather one that must be transformed to be relevant in today’s world. Understanding that the Church had its genesis as an expression of dysfunctional false-self behaviors will aid us in finally accepting that such a self-deluded institution cannot be a healthy influence for a humanity ready to wake up and live within a context of beauty, truth and compassion.
It is important to understand how the human community has reached this important point with regard to the evolution of the world’s major religions. We will focus on Christianity in this essay. Combining the unconscious nature of humanity in P-B with the vagaries of history and legend we have nothing less than a cascading human tragedy. Many books have been written on the nexus of religion and history but we will, for simplicity’s sake, limit this example to early Christianity. We will come to understand how the early evangelists twisted the story of the crucifixion to get on the good side of the Romans. Needless to say, the behavior of the false self looms large in this historical narrative.
The Christian evangelists who came along later, who had stopped identifying with the Jewish community, wanted to curry Roman favor to increase their own power, in which case the story of the crucifixion had to be altered. They succeeded in shifting the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews. This politically motivated telling of what was to become the “legend” of the Christian passion started a regrettable chain reaction stretching all the way to the holocaust and up to today. The ignorance that exists because of this New Testament deception must be corrected because it still fuels anti-Semitism today at both the conscious and unconscious levels among Christians and others.
Our story begins in the Middle East and during the period surrounding Jesus’ life, the whole area around Jerusalem was in a constant state of turmoil with one rebellion or war after another. The Jews fought sixty-two “wars of independence” between 165 B.C. and 135 A.D. It is important to note that sixty-one of these wars began in Galilee. Jesus was a Galilean and was condemned by the Roman Pontius Pilate as a dangerous revolutionary insurgent. From the Roman point of view he was just one of the hundreds of Zealots (a group of what we would call today “terrorists”) who had caused the Romans tremendous problems for almost two centuries before Jesus and would continue to do so for over a century after his death.
One way to become a scapegoat within a culture or an empire is to resist assimilation thereby adding fuel to the illusion that being different is the same as being threatening. The history of the Jews is the most striking example of this dynamic in human fear-driven behavior. “This religious and racial separation combined with economic rivalries to arouse, towards the end of this period [3rd century B.C.], an anti-Semitic movement in Alexandria.
“The Greeks and Egyptians alike were habituated to the union of church and state, and frowned upon the cultural independence of the Jews … The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia—their social separation—and their success.” Unfortunately at this time, the Jews entered a very dark unfolding of their history which has continued into modern times. Reactions of the false self are frighteningly powerful without a countervailing narrative to oppose them.
Since many of the early “Christians” were also in fact Jews, they had an image problem with the Roman authorities. We know that the problem persisted long after Jesus’ death in spite of the Gospels when we read that the most important Roman historian, Tacitus (who died in 120 A.D.) describes Christians being blamed for the burning of Rome. “Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.” This is one of the reasons Christians wanted to encourage the Romans to distinguish them from the Jewish “terrorists.” They would strive for the reputation of being good and loyal citizens of Rome.
Improving public relations with such a potentially powerful ally only made good sense and the evangelists set about doing this with considerable skill in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) as well as the Gospel according to John. Their task was to put a spin on what had actually happened regarding the birth of what was to become Christianity. Again from the Roman point of view we have Tacitus’ version, “Christus, the name of the founder, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself.”
For their own political purposes, the Evangelists in their four Gospels—written between A.D. 70 and 95—were attempting to shift the responsibility for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews. “The anti-Semitic tenor of Matthew’s Gospel reflects the tension between Jews and Christians during the 80s.” As those of us who spent time in Sunday school can attest, the story we heard was that Jesus was an innocent man, betrayed by his fellow Jews, and a man that Pilate found innocent and tried to set free. In a tragic twisting of the facts the Jews became the “Christ-killers” and because of this they suffered horrendously from that time until today.
Ironically, the Christian religion which taught “love thy neighbor as thyself” has a poor record in practicing that precept and yielded all too often to the illusion of the other. “The resurgence of Christianity, particularly marked after the pontificate of Leo IX (1048-54), was a disaster for the Jewish communities which had spread throughout Europe before and after the suppression of the Jewish revolts in Palestine by the Romans in AD 66 and 132. The Jews suffered no restrictions in the Roman Empire and, with their widespread international connections, were welcomed as traders by the Carolingians and other early medieval kings [but] they became the scapegoats for the economic setbacks of the fourteenth century. The result was a series of expulsions, beginning in England in 1290. In 1492 the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain, in 1497 from Portugal. The Ashkenazi in the German lands took refuge in Poland and Lithuania where they formed tight communities in what later was called “the Pale.”
During the Middle Ages in the Holy Roman Empire city of Toulouse Jews were publicly beaten with the rationalization that “It is just that the Jews must bend their necks beneath the blows of the Christians, because they were not willing to submit to Christ.” The Jews were also victims of the Christian/Muslim conflicts during the period of the Crusades. “As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his [Jesus] death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been a part of Pope Urban II’s original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had—or so they thought—actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorstep.”
The New Testament narrative was even exploited by Hitler (not exactly a fervent Christian) when he supported the Oberammergau Festival’s retelling of the Passion to promote his anti-Semitism propaganda. Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962 began the process that all religions must engage in and that is the aggiomamento, or updating. The Roman Catholic Church engaged in a great “confession.” After centuries of the most horrible kind of “scapegoating,” the council finally admitted that it was not the Jews who had killed Jesus.
That the New Testament itself contains the seeds of anti-Semitism is not acceptable for a transcendent Christianity. To be fair all religions are guilty of projecting their dark sides on the other. The authors of the Synoptic Gospels could not have known that their distortions of the historical facts surrounding Jesus’ death would lead to the nightmare of Auschwitz. However, they were guilty of violating the principles of compassion and inclusiveness advocated by the very teacher they sought to promote. All religions would do well to wake up to their self-destructive beliefs and practices and if necessary, rewrite their histories to more faithfully reflect the true vision of their founders.
From an historical perspective there are two ways that religions fail to preserve the content and the spirit of the original founder or spirit of the founding wisdom. First, the original teaching may be misunderstood or misinterpreted. Secondly, the original listeners or followers were not themselves “awake,” hence the original teachings were distorted by their false-self behaviors or their inability to comprehend the often profound truths. “The warp often is due to the fact that the ego has a tendency to be literal in its hearing of the word rather than the spirit or essence of a teaching. Any translation that teaches anything other than peace or love is in error. This is a basic rule and easy to spot.” This observation by David Hawkins would be a good departure point for religious reformers to begin writing a new narrative for their faith. Thomas Jefferson, who compiled his own “book” of Jesus’ teachings wrote that the authentic sayings of Jesus were as easy to distinguish from those not authentic as it would be to pick out diamonds in a dunghill.
Church doctrine fabricated by those such as St. Augustine who had become politically influential but not necessarily in touch with the spirit of the original teachings radically distorted the original Gospel. “It was disturbing for many of the faithful to see that fundamental dogmas about the nature of God and Christ had developed over centuries and were not present in the New Testament.”
Another way in which the message of Jesus was lost as Christianity became a more strident expression of P-B has to do with the appearance of competing cults within the church. “The medieval cult of Mary and of the saints increased alongside the growing devotion to Jesus the man. Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary. People seemed to be concentrating on anything but God.”
The church was engaged unconsciously in distracting the faithful from the divine present within each person and becoming corrupt itself. Many of the faithful looking for distractions from their existential suffering happily cooperated with this process. Not all of the faithful were happy with the direction the church was taking, however. When they began to awaken to this development a revolution began to develop as pent up rage within the resentful masses. The Protestant Reformation resulted in a break with the past and, of course, relatively healthy reforms within the new churches. The American philosopher William James notes that: “Christians were ‘born again’ to a new faith in God and a rejection of the host of intermediaries that had stood between them and the divine in the medieval church.”
These reforms were not, however, the needed paradigm shift. They were limited by the general unconscious state of both the church leadership and the general Christian population still captivated by the narrative of the old paradigm. Interestingly enough, the worldview of the Christian community was backward compared to the newest “religion of the Book,” namely Islam. “At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated Catholic churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists [Jewish mystics] were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail.”
The American scholar Albert C. Outler pointed out that in the 18th century a new religion of the heart was developing and like the nationalism of the Enlightenment it was “anti-establishment and both mistrusted external authority; both ranged themselves with the moderns against the ancients, and both shared a hatred of inhumanity and an enthusiasm for philanthropy. There was an Inner Light within each individual, and once it had been discovered and nurtured, everybody, irrespective of class or status, could achieve salvation on earth.” Outler was stating fundamental principles of Simple Reality as well as Jesus’ Gospel such as “the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Unfortunately, Christians were not ready at that time in the evolution of their history to engage in a profound awakening.
Our brief excursion into the history of Christianity and the behavior of the human false self is simply to illustrate that religion is embedded in the unconscious worldview that is universal on our planet today. A radically transformed religion could be enormously helpful to an awakening humanity and in the next essay we will look at just what such a transformation would entail.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
