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We see the book as immensely
important because it says that
Christianity as a teaching and a
way of life is real with a
reality that has been known and
believed in for thousands upon
thousands of years in
civilization after civilization.
Christianity is the product of
humankind's most dominant
religious and philophical
beliefs. Islam and every religion
have their roots in the one
ancient source.
It is because we are not book
burners. It is because we, and
the historic Unity movement, are
real Truth students.
This means we are real
students of Truth and students of
the real Truth, Truth that sees
the cosmos as evidencing that
life, all life, is
scientifically-based, verifiable,
and worthy of trust, faith,
religion.
We are not among those who say
that Jesus of Nazareth had no
historical existence, but we are
willing to deal with the evidence
that his existence has not been
established. What the scholars in
large numbers tell us about the
story of the Christian church is
not a pretty story!
Here is some positive
information from the book: "The
ancients placed at the myth's
centre an ideal person who would
symbolize humanity itself in its
dual nature of human and divine.
This ideal person - the names
were Tammuz, Adonis, Mithras,
Dionysus, Krishna, Christ, and
many others symbolized the divine
spark incarnate in every human
being, the element 'destined
ultimately to deify humankind.'
Rooting their religion firmly in
the bedrock of nature itself, the
ancient sages saw the successive
phases of our divinization being
enacted daily, monthly, and
yearly in the solar allegories of
rising and setting, waxing and
waning (of the moon, which
mirrors the sun's movements), and
on the larger scale, in the
precession of solar equinoxes and
solstices. Ancient religion was
solar and lunar based. It is
called sun worship, but it was
much more spiritual than this
suggests or sounds. The ancient
sages of Egypt, Chaldea, and
Sumeria were wise and spiritual
enough not to wholly identify
their deity with even so glorious
a manifestation as the sun. God,
they understood, was far beyond
the sun in glorious reality; but
since one can speak of God only
by means of metaphor in the end,
the solar disk was the 'mpst
powerful, most fitting symbol
they could conceive of. What's
crucial to remember is that when
they extolled the sun's
splendour, they saw it as
symbolic not only of God but
ultimately of our own divinity as
well. The sun god was the
embodiment, or model, of what
each of us, through spiritual
evolution, was finally to
become."
This is what the Christian
church has always intended to
convey, but the evidence seems to
make it clear that there is no
support for presenting the Christ
(the God nature in every human
being) in terms of our gaining
this status through the sacrifice
of one man known as the only Son
of God.
Somehow the idea of sacrifice
has been practiced by many
civilizations. In the case of
Jesus on the Cross, I have always
found it strange that God would
be portrayed as demanding the
appeasement of sacrifice when God
has already told Abraham in the
Genesis story that it is not
necessary for him to sacrifice
his son Isaac. In Unity's
Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, we
find the following:
Divine sonship.
Isaac, meaning laughter,
signifies the joy of the new
birth and the new life in
Christ, which is the spiritual
consciousness of relationship
to God the Father. Man
rejoices greatly in his
privilege of expressing as the
son of God.
How I love to live by the
interpretation that everyone of
us is the only begotten; that God
created only Christ beings for
the purpose of bringing God's
complete, whole, and perfect
nature into manifestation. Mother
Teresa had it right! Her
acceptance of the Truth of Jesus
Christ teachings found her
beholding Jesus Christ on the
face of every person she met on
the streets of Calcutta. She was
seeing the Jesus Christ Truth as
the Truth in and of every person.
Essentially this is what Unity
has taught me.
The teachings, the Way of Life
of the Christ, the I AM of
everyone of us, is absolutely
true. Christianity is the
greatest teaching we could live
by.
The Jesus I have always loved
and sought to emulate teaches God
as loving Father. I couldn't
imagine a greater ideal for
humankind than the loving,
compassionate, forgiving, healing
Jesus of Nazareth. If this is
myth, it is the best, and it
deserves our devoted practice.
And I believe the greatest
practice of all is to rise
totally out of ego, knowing that
it is God that is doing the
works!
Don
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