World Religions 2 – Christianity – Beyond authoritarian and humanitarian religion to transcendence

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So are there any questions or comments? I spoke about Christianity from a historical perspective. And therein we started with how there are dharmic religions and there are abrahamic religions. In the abrahamic religions, the focus is on specific events in history.
In dharmic religions, the focus is more on specific or universal principles. Any categorization, it is never watertight. You have to know that it categorizes conceptual whereas the reality is much more nuanced.
So then I talked about how Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they come from the same roots with all abrahamic religions and the Messiah who was thought to be, those who accepted Jesus as Messiah, they became Christians, those who accepted Muhammad as Messiah, they became Muslims. Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus’ death was seen by his followers as his way of atoning for their sins. And that’s how they became vigorous in their preaching and then they eventually considered Jesus to be an incarnation.
He is God and not God. The divinity of God is manifested in the humanity of Jesus. That was their idea.
And then subsequently because Jesus’ teachings were not much philosophical, they adopted the teachings of the Greek tradition to make themselves more philosophical and robust. This gave them good philosophy but also led to problems later when some of the cosmology which they took from the Greeks, that came in confrontation with science. So we talked about God, God’s word and God’s teachers.
So the formation happened where because God’s teachers were, many of the God’s teachers were corrupt in the Catholic Church, they were rejected. And then Christianity spread to Catholics and Protestants. The Protestants, they said we can understand the word of God ourselves.
And then different people gave different interpretations and the Protestants also hugely mutated. There were more than 50,000 divisions of Protestants. So then eventually God’s word also was rejected by the scientific enlightenment because they saw that it was not actually God’s word, it was something which was added to God’s word.
Cosmology was rejected. And eventually evolutionary nationalism came up and the idea of God himself was rejected. So while Christianity was being challenged in Europe, they also spread to the rest of the world.
And they used the tools of science to conquer various world and they converted over there. So while interacting with other religions, they had three approaches. Condemnation, irrelevance and fulfilment.
So we talked about Saint Francis Xavier condemning other forms of worship. And then the primary idea was fulfilment where they said that other religions, whatever they teach, it ultimately culminates in the teachings of Jesus. Like the Jnana, Deepena, Bhasmata.
So while converting in India, they often foster hatred towards the parent tradition and that leads to people becoming intolerant. If they are helping people to rise to transcendence, that’s perfectly fine. That’s just one way to get closer to God.
But when it is not that way, then it becomes problematic. So if you focus on the philosophical presentation, I talked about how the concept, they try to internalize vertical relation, horizontal relation, internalize human relationships. That the idea that Jesus is the only way and his life is the only life.
These are literal impositions which do not stand logical scrutiny. Now if we focus on the philosophy, then it is because we are not sharing our philosophy, that’s why people are converting. And whenever we compare, we need to compare fairly.
The best of one tradition is the best of other tradition. The worst of one tradition is the worst of other tradition. So how do we categorize best and worst? Look at the typology of the modes.
So in goodness, people are moderate, they are philosophically inclined. In transcendence, they are just lovers of God. In passion, they are religious materialists.
And in ignorance, they are zealots. They are intolerant. So from fear, desire, duty and love.
So ultimately there is, Christianity was originally, to a large extent it was authoritarian. Pray, pay, obey. Then in today’s world, it’s mostly utilitarian and humanitarian.
It focuses on humanitarian help as a tool for conversion or self-help for inspiring people to. That is fine as a starting point, but ultimately people have to move towards developing love of God. And while interacting with Christians, rather than labeling them in a particular way, we need to interact in a way that helps them to raise their consciousness and helps us to raise our consciousness.
Thank you very much. Pray Krishna.