I know many good Christians. I would never attack them for their personal spiritual beliefs. But coming from an environmental activist background, I tend to verbally attack perceived Institutions. I know many churches are doing good work these days. I agree that people who just go 'thumbs down' you're a christian are bigots! It's all to me about what your personal values and your relationship to God are.

What I simply want to communicate, for understanding and greater Love, is why someone like me has such an inbuilt mistrust of 'the Church' as a generalised concept of institution and wielding of power.
Some of 'attacks' may come through pain and suffering. Open your hearts.

If you can Project and walk with the Love of Christ, it all might be less of a misunderstanding.
As a Christian, if you call yourself that, you set the example, the tone, for others' perceptions of you (as a group) which is stereotyping, but that's the mainstream.

This is why, for me personally, without going into my personal friends and background.You didn't do this, but people saying they come with the Lord did.

I forgive them in the end. Forgive others if you think they do not understand.

This is what another institution, the Government eventually said.

Let us all heal.
Love to you.

Yes thank you Phyllode. What we need is Reconciliation. And Love.

Agreed, though I'm confused, as a you're a full member, doesn't this belong in the spirituality and mysticism setion?

As an organized religion, I'm not quite sure that a thread on Christianity should belong in the spirituality and mysticism section. The contemporary practice of Christianity seems like much the antithesis to either spirituality or mysticism.

but that is the thing, there is still aspects of christianity that would be very much mystical.

it is just that fear-mongering made its way into the mainstream.

i think it would be interesting to have a cool, collected discussion contrasting "mainstream fundamentalism" (for lack of better terms) with more mystical/gnostic (as in the literal gnosis) aspects of christianity.

i believe all religions and all kinds of spiritual ways are truly excellent ,

its far better than worshiping money , celebrities and fast cars as many do these days

i believe all spiritual practices in their core essence are designed to push us towards positivity and help us respect and worship the supreme spirit ,

to not be blinded by greed , envy , and mistrust and not focus so much on the material aspect of life

sure sometimes many organised religious institutions have their own issues , afterall they are run by human beings , so there can be a number of human issues in the mix

yet we all can respect , honour and praise the supreme spirit and the core essence of all spiritual teachings , all of them are pointing towards the same absolute supreme truth

I agree, and that's why I referred to the "contemporary practice"

There's a long history of christian anarchism going back to Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. Henry Thoreau, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, some of the most influential writers of the environmental movement...The whole idea that all christians must be brainwashed by this institution of power is ridiculous. No, some of the greatest writings on simple sustainable living, pacifism, civil disobedience against the state, have come out of the christian anarchist tradition...

Not saying you are doing this mate. I feel that there is still much confusion here about your first statement. One is that people cant seem to separate the person from the persons belief.

The second is that the word attack gets thrown around a lot more than is always accurate. Questioned, challenged does not mean attacked and asking somebody why they believe something isnt at all attacking them. It is challenging their ideas and in a way choices.

In the end I feel we do choose what we believe pertaining to things such as faith and morality. Even if its something we feel very deeply within. Its still a choice to listen to it, question or reject it, or supress it ext. We dont choose to believe a red apple is red but deeper more meaninglful things I think we do choose even if subconsciously.

I wouldnt ever claim somebody attacked me verbaly if they asked me to defend why I voted for the green party. I may or may not want to answer them but would only feel they challenegd my choices and actions not me personaly. I dont think God or faith should be beyond this same rational and so often is seen and expected to be.

Your second statement in my eyes is easy. Its because you are clearly a very moral, good, loving person and its not hard to see straight through the B.S. of the institutions your talking about.

Here the real issue..and some will not like it, as always but I am entitled to my own experiences and this is mine.

The majority of christians I have met in my life have been extremely dogmatic and another(smaller but not insignificant) portion of those people have shown themselves to be closet bigots, racists etc and just perpetuate ideas that are the foundation of the Roman Catholic church that fueled it's war on any and every opposition.

Now, all my other arguements have been based around the faults of the Establishment of the catholic church and the pope and the wars they carried out..not on christian people as individuals.

I dont beleive that the teachings of Christ were wrong. I have nothing to dispute with those who follow a christian path that is not linked to the establishment of the Catholic Church or a few of the other manifestations of the christian church in the mainstream.

I do have a right to feel at odds with those who support the Catholic Chruch though..just as I do with those who support any other established party who have risen to power due to genocide and dominance.

This should NEVER..and I mean NEVER be used as a silly straw man arguement to make someone out to be predjudice against true christian peoples. This is what often happens though..

I can't help that my experience with 3 different churches in the past..the pentacost, catholic and protestant(I think, it was long ago) all left me somewhat discusted with the whole thing. My experience with all of them was an environment rich with fear, moral suppremecy, hippocracy, extremely dogmatic dissmissal of certain questions I had(like why dinosaurs did not exist, where god came from etc, why evolution is fake) and a sort of vibe of inner acceptance based on who will accept beliefs blindly without asking any more questions.

I was told at about 10 years old by a priest strait up that I was going to go to hell if I did not start attending church weekly and publicly claim to accept jesus into my heart becasue "the word" of God says so.

2 of these churches I attended weekly for a period of time longer than 12 months each...so I was definatly there long enough to figure out what was going on.

This is just how it is. I cant pretend I dont feel this way or hold my tounge becasue others dont like what I experienced. This is just my reality.

I watched my best friend for the first 18 years of my life(literally since I was 1 year old) laugh in my face with our new church friends after a year of brainwashing for my belief in the process of evolution, the existance of dinosaurs and the possability that life exists outside of just earth.

I spent 2 weeks at a pentacost chuch camp once. All I can say is that my opinion now of what goes on in those places comes close to child abuse.

This is not about rebelling against my family either. Neither one of my parents are christian nor did they attend church in my life more than maybe once a year with my aunt and grandmother..and my grandmother is one of the purest christians I know and no longer wants to be associated with the church.

Basically any affiliations I have had with various churches was of my own doing. I was brought into those circles by other friends through youth groups etc.

The last time I ever stepped into a church was when I was about 19..nearly 10 years ago now. After I watched my best friend basically become a brainwashed dummy who really cared more about this elitist mocking of people for being able to think instead of trying to cultivate the love he claimed jesus had to offer I had to really sit down and rethink the whole situation. The whole time I just became more and more skeptical of these people. I was never christian anyway..I never "believed". There was nothing of substance in any of the churches I attended to believe in. It was all just twisted ideas and strange programming essentially cultivating a cult like circle of extremely narrow minded, judgemental people.

I went on a weeklong trip to oregon with that church when I was 18 and ended up one night around a campfire being attcked for be belief that god can be found within every person. The idea that god is not some seperate judgemental diety that you have to please in order to be saved just really bothers some of these people.

So I left and never went back to any church. I cut off contact with these people. I began to avoid people who called themselves "christian" in general becasue at least 95% of the time that meant affiliation with one of the various church denominations and seemed pushy about their ideas and generally believed they were somehow better. This has continued to be the majority of my experience with people who claim to be "christain" to this day. They dont seem to exhibit this same love that they preach about.

I knew an ex-priest 3 years ago as well for a brief time through another friend. This guy was a devout christian(or at least still believed in god and teaching of jesus) but he seemed to have grown a great distain for the church community and so left the priesthood. i dunno how long he was a priest the guy was like 40-45 years old. His eventual outlook on the whole thing just mirrored my own basically.

At the same time I had one youth group leader when I was 16 that radiated in full the type of love that most "christians" speak of yet fail to ever exemplify. She is what I imagine a true picture of a christian to be..I always knew she was a bit of a free person or a hippy..only later I found out she regularily attended drum circles on the beach as well and had a house full of cannabis plants..incidentally that chuch group was one of the first places I ever smoked cannabis. Still, outside of that youth group that this one women ran that church itself was made up of just as much weird dogmatism as any other I encountered. I am not even sure she runs that group any longer..I think I heard they took that privilege away from her.

So..when people come back to say "most of them are good people!"..all I can really relate to that is so? What do you mean by "good people"? I can say that of many people who believe all kinds of weird things. I dont think being brainwashed into cultish dogmatism makes people into "bad" people. It just is what it is.

Just becasue people are not "bad people" does not mean that the ideaologies they buy into are not destructive. I really do feel bad for people that indoctrinated into some of these ways of thinking from birth. They have a hard time thinking for themselves later on, and often if they do start to ask real questions they are rediculed and rejected by their family on some level and left parcially isolated. It causes a lot of damage. I know. I live with someone who was raised by a mother who was a Catholic school teacher and sunday school teacher, who was an extremely abusive religious nutcase who would try to preferom exorcisms on her 13 year old daughter for talking about astral projection. Nothing about this is okay. I cant respect peoples belief systems when this is the result.

I am not attcking christianity..and certainly not the teaching of Christ. Many other religious institutions have these same problems..but I do not have direct experience with other faiths to the same degree..so I do not comment on that in these discussions.

My whole point is this(to stay on topic-I had to get all that out so people understand where I am comming from).. These people in my mind are not christian. They do not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. They follow the teachings of some seriousily disturbed people and thats it.

I think it is likely Jesus was a gnostic..most people I think dont even know what a gnostic is. The sort of love that is spoken of by people of Jesus is what I just dont see. I see hippocracy.

There are people out there who are true followers of a path of love and compassion for others and are true christians, and I have met them and they have my upmost respect. For me though, these people are a very very small minority of those who use the term "christian".

For the people I am speaking of that I have met..I dont even think they care about the word that much..it is just a term. Did jesus go around calling himself a Christian? No. What matters in your heart is what matters. Not what church you go to, who you publically give your heart to, what you do on sunday morning or what book you read when you go to sleep.

Im sorry if my own disillusionment with the established order of mainstream "christian" churches bothers people..but it is based on my own direct experiences. I just base it on what I have observed. What I observe is a lack of love, respect, acceptance and open mindedness. It is not what I observe in people who seem to grasp a deeper meaning of what it was all origionally about. Those are the ones who should be listened to and not many of the preachers who only preach fear.

Jamie,
That was a long and perfect exposition of your personal experience which is reflected less articulately in many of us others' experience, I could not put it better and it mirrors what I feel about my own path from the culture that I was brought up in (I was born in 1952 to an Irish catholic father and a lapsed methodist mother). My personal spiritual journey started at Sunday school when I asked a simple question..."Why is it OK for our soldiers to kill in a war when the commandments say 'Thou shalt not kill'?). This, at the age of maybe 9 yrs old was the moment I began to question EVERYTHING.

I won't go into it in depth but I just want to point out some AUTHENTIC Christianity. When, in 1986 at the age of 34 I was hospitalized for alcoholism it was a Catholic Nun who presented me with a book by Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk in Gethseminae, Kentucky whose writings (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, The Desert Fathers, etc) got him into such hot water from the Holy See in Rome that he was forced NOT to publish anything for several years. They removed the "imprimatur" and the other designation of approval "nihil obstat" from his writings.

Well Thomas Merton exemplifies, at least to me, the highest example of Jesus' "Christianity" that I can imagine. This led me to some of the Christian mystics, e.g. St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, another German woman saint I can't remember, and then to Elaine Pagels work translating the Gospel of Thomas I think and the gnostic gospels etc.

I am 60 and have read for a lifetime everything I could get my hands on Alan Watts, Zen, Buddhism, Taoism, etc and modern works like the Urantia Book , A Course in Miracles etc. Christianity opened the door for me to other faiths and religions. It served as a starting point and launching pad for further exploration in a similar way that Marx used Capitalism to discover its "internal contradictions" to explore and propose alternatives.

We can only start from where we are at, and a young person has to grow and hopefully transcend the conditioning from where he started. In that way any and all religions may serve as a launching pad for those who SEEK a DEEPER UNDERSTANDING.

Peace and blessings to all from Spangles.

I looked up the German Christian mystics, Hildegard of Bingen and especially, which I read over and over, Meister Echart. I have moved and been displaced many times, so I have lost all my books over the years...far as I can remember, Meister Eckhart alwaysa referred to God as SHE. I guess he was burned at the stake, I don't remember. Maybe his diet included lots of Morning Glory seeds, who knows?

..thank you phyllode..
much of our collective human knowledge of plant medicine has been or almost been wiped out by an unfortunate sector of the Christian world..
phyllode wrote: ..my position as well..my analogy would be this - if someone says to me they really like 'x' genre of music (& and i don't) i say 'hey, i respect that..not my thing but respect..' ..but then if someone starts preaching to me that, e.g. 'x' is the only real, true good music'..then i will confront such extroverted monotheism..
if they then form a club to start burning genre 'y', which i like, well then that's a bit like some of these acts which are still being reconciled..if anything, i think we can all learn from the past for the better..

Spangles wrote:
..i'm a real Hildergard von Bingen fan!
she..! ..was a visionary mystic and head of an order of healer nuns in..she died peacefully of old age in 1179..
..she came from an era just prior to the horrific inquisitions and witch burnings..in fact, quite a light era of european christianity, when chants to the Black Madonna were also common..this is also just before the rule of celibacy came into the church..in this era bishops and nuns could be married..she in fact dated two bishops at different points in her long and illuminating career..
{i'm about to post a music video of hers in the acacia info thread}
[Schipperges, Heinrich. Hildegard of Bingen: Healing and the Nature of the Cosmos (New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997)]

..if she'd been born a couple of centuries later..she'd probably have been burned at the stake by age 22..!

last up, i really relate to jamie's story..thank you for this post jamie..i deliberately attended scripture classes and went to christian fellowships as a teenager to learn/debate..i've always had respect, but also a soul and mind of my own that the Lord gave me..
.
below, an image of Hildergaard from her day..

Thanks for the great responses everyone! Especially the long and sincere ones.

And thanks haeratic, you came to the table, and i hadn't pondered Christian Anarchists before. Excellent image.