I don’t put many boundaries on my reveries: I just sort of let them go. One I have from time to time is reimagining the actual history of Christ. In evaluating Christianity, we have to remember that the canon was not put together for several centuries after the death of Christ, and that when it was done, it was a politically important enterprise, since the Romans had embraced the faith.
In evaluating the history of Christianity, the intersection of the Roman Empire and the Roman Universal (Catholic) Church is pivotal. Roman never fell. Its institutions morphed into a political apparatus appropriated by the Catholic Church, with the most important being tax collection.
Here is a short summary from Wikipedia that jibes with my own understanding:
“In the later organization of the Roman Empire, the increasingly subdivided provinces were administratively associated in a larger unit, the diocese (Latin dioecesis, from the Greek term διοίκησις, meaning “administration”).
With the adoption of Christianity as the Empire’s official religion in the 4th century, the clergy assumed official positions of authority alongside the civil governors. A formal church hierarchy was set up, parallel to the civil administration, whose areas of responsibility often coincided.
With the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th century, the bishops in Western Europe assumed a large part of the role of the former Roman governors. A similar, though less pronounced, development occurred in the East, where the Roman administrative apparatus was largely retained by the Byzantine Empire. In modern times, many diocese, though later subdivided, have preserved the boundaries of a long-vanished Roman administrative division. For Gaul, Bruce Eagles has observed that “it has long been an academic commonplace in France that the medieval dioceses, and their constituent pagi, were the direct territorial successors of the Roman civitates.”
The point here is that it a matter of historical accident that Christianity survived. One can, of course, posit God’s will, but if you look at what was actually done in the name of Christianity–the Cathar repressions, the Crusades, the Inquisition–it is hard to see the hand of God in those events; at least not if we posit a loving God.
Making a short story long, I wonder about key events in the Bible. What if Jesus washed his disciples feet because he realized he was getting too full of himself? What if that was for his own growth, as well as didactic purposes? What if he never actually intended to get crucified, but could not figure out how to avoid it without snuffing out the groundswell of social change he had catalyzed?
As far as miracles, everything Christ reportedly did is contained in formal writings from India (and other places) that predate him, and which have been reported many times since. These would include walking on water, healing the sick, resurrecting the dead, and producing objects from nothing. There is an Indian guru who lived recently who according to many witnesses could produce sacred ash from his hands. I have not investigated the details, but plainly the stories are there, some of them much more evidential, being recent, than those of the Bible.
Daniel Dunglas Home was seen by witnesses to levitate, whose word on any other matter would have been accepted without question. It was in regard to his case that the word “psychic” was coined.
To my mind, the conclusion to be reached in regards to formal Christianity is that to the extent it encourages people to live with pleasure, and to love one another, it is a life affirming doctrine; and to the extent it is used to separate people, and to render judgements, it is life denying.
I feel the world is much too interesting to be packaged within a single unchanging creed dedicated to the proposition that non-conformists are tortured forever, and that the only means to avoid this is a slavish (“But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life”) devotion to the creed.
What needs to be made clear here is that “God” is not speaking, as one human to another, to anyone. What are being expressed are intuitive understandings that are different between people, and a set of verbal teachings which were put down by MEN, not God. This was Muhammad’s innovation, to claim that his teachings were taken verbatim from Allah’s chosen spokesperson, in a direct connection with the larger universe.
I might put it this way: to the extent a creed encourages playfulness within a context of fidelity to core values of honesty, sincerity, thoughtfulness and personal responsibility, among others, it is valid. To the extent it fosters hate and unreasoning fear, it is in my view wrong.
Here is a nice poem from Rabindranath Tagore I have always liked, and not infrequently quoted:
On the Seashore
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.
They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.
The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play.
On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.