MY OWN WALKING - Journal May 2024 ( 2nd Entry )

I've been reading the New Testament for about a month now. I started by reading an accompanying commentary alongside it, and to be honest this roughed up and aggravated my soul too much. I found some of the lite theological explanations for what Jesus was really saying or not saying,  a bit slippery. They appeared to me to be creating self justifying hoops to jump through, in order to explain it all as somehow making common religious sense. In short however cleverly convoluted it was, it was still bollocks.

To be honest, I find most of the New Testament easy enough to read and follow. Jesus comes across as a great deal more wild, wacky and off kilter than I expected. Though I can't see myself ever saying I am a Christian, when so much appears to be taken on faith. 

That the content has so far largely failed to connect and excite my imagination, is reflected in my deep absorption and fascination with the history and origins of how the New Testament came into being. Now I do find this wonderfully compelling. The similarities and differences in approach in documenting their founders teachings. Buddhism and Christianity both span that watershed moment when oral transmission morphs into the written word. With recognisible conversations about provenance and conjecture about authenticity. The outcome, the sort of books that are produced, could not be more different in content and structure.

The central, and I would say my primary difficulty, is the nature and status of God. I can understand God as a sacred creative principle within the universe, and hence also in us. Who by our coming into alignment with its fundamental nature within reality, we are fundamentally changed or Enlightened by. From a distance there is something in Christianity that draws me towards it. But looked at too closely, I can no longer get a sense for what that impulse might consist of.  The miracles, the prophetic and apocalyptic nature of it all, well, it just gets in the way.

An interventionist God, whom you can please or displease, who will help or hinder you in less rational ways in order to 'teach you a lesson' out of love for you. All of that strikes me as unlikely or questionable, not to mention patronising and cruel.The reasons why we suffer and God's supposed role in that, become just so clearly inexplicable, not to say inconsistent, that the idea of an interventionist God just cannot be how things really are. There are just too many contradictions for this to be left standing. And yet curiously it still does. Maybe we choose to anthropomorphise God, in order to make God easier to relate to. A sacred creative principle is, admittedly, not simple to just rub along with. Neither model maybe ultimately be correct, but an example of skillful means that may get you to somewhere that is.

Personifying God, gendering God, beseeching and making prayerful requests of God, all in a sense compound the delusional error. God, if he exists at all, is for me something you come into alignment with, and become 'born again' as the son and daughter of. If there is a creationist God, then I'd call into question why he would make the universe and us, at all. Are we really just a part of some divine version of Squid Game or a religious lab experiment, humanity as the play things of a God, who supposedly sent his Son to salvage the test from possible failure. This is either shameful or ludicrous, I can't make up my mind which.

The Buddha, more wisely than I, simply said the nature of the universe, and whether God or Gods exist or not, are imponderables. Things you will never ever resolve from an earthly perspective. Certainly not this side of Enlightenment. We will never grasp or get to the bottom of God or No God. And so we find ourselves having to resort constantly to conjecture. The whole subject is simply not a good use of ones mind or time, as The Buddha indicated. Its more than likely that I am entirely incorrect in my assessment.