So What Does "being Christian" Actually Mean To You>?

It's easy enough to say 'this is a religion of peace' - but according to Christian texts 'by their fruits shall ye know them'. And to judge from history, Christianity was certainly not a religion of peace. They even went as far as starting crusades against Islam and heretical groups in Europe. Maybe they were simply too stupid to realize that massacres of civilians and mass burnings are probably not the best way to promote peace on earth, or exactly what their Saviour had in mind.
But I think the religion was usurped early on by those holding power, and used in a political way. In Britain, this came to it's climax at the time of the reformation, when the monarch became head of the church. So you had a ruthless power elite who had now not only grabbed secular power(ultimately through violence), but presumably imagined they had the sanction of God for their continued mis-rule.
Under that regime, catholics and esp.catholic priests were deemed to be traitors, and if caught punished by being hung, drawn and quartered. The bits of the body were then par-boiled and hung in prominent public places to reinforce this idea of religious conformism, which had now become conformism to the state and a tool of political suppression. You weren't just required to obey civil laws, but to believe and practice religion in the state approved manner. Had Jesus turned up preaching in 16th c. Britain, I hate to think what they would have done to him.

I find it hard to reconcile all this with the teachings of Christ as presented in the gospels, so I assume they had lost touch completely with the meaning of teachings on loving thy neighbour, turning the other cheek and that kind of thing. Or perhaps they were merely cynical despots intent on maintaining their grip on power no matter what. A bit of both probably. Either way, these were hypocritical monsters who had no problem at all inflicting un-imaginably painful punishment on others simply to maintain their own position. They seem to have been devoid of conscience or any kind of common humanity. Heads of the church. Hmm....

The question remains as to whether they would have been any better without Christianity. Personally, I doubt it. One has only to look at other cultures of that era to see the same kind of barbarism enacted on a grand scale. That being so, one might conclude that at best Christianity was ineffective at changing people, at worst simply a tool in the hands of oppressive power holders.Even if the original intention may have been good, it soon got changed into something rather nasty.

As for the Romans - I assume that it was politically expedient in some ways to embrace Christianity as the official religion of the empire. I'd recommend the novel 'Julian' by Gore Vidal as an interesting and extremely well researched exploration of what happened under the 4th century emperor Julian the Apostate when he tried to bring Rome back to paganism.

 

How can we know what the Christ energy is? And how can we focus on it?

Without Christianity would we even have heard of such a thing?

 

What Christianity has become is what needs to be tossed out, in the same way that a Snake sheds its skin. Christianity can bring you to the Jesus puzzle, and from there, you need to figure out the rest yourself.

 

I agree with everything you've said. After Constantine turned Jesus Prince of Peace into General Jesus, official Christianity became the tool you describe. But this is nothing new. Borg discusses the conflict between the Hebrew Prophets and the Domination System as a continuing dialogue in the Old Testament. Religion was used to legitimate exploitation by the elite, as well as to challenge it through appeals to justice.

 

Just to make it clear that my criticism isn't aimed at the ordinary Christian, but at historical abuses of the religion which are indeed regrettable.

 

I know what you mean but the trouble is there is no one thing that 'Christianity has become'. Do we mean Thomas Merton or some TV evangelist or maybe those people in Syria who are having their ancient churches destroyed, open minded progressives like our own Oakie... the list goes on. There are in effect several different Christianities.

My own views on it are conditioned by my studies of Indian philosophy and yoga. From that perspective, Jesus was an Avatar, a being who came from a higher level to reveal That to those who were/are open.Hinduism has many such Avatars, such as Krishna, Rama and others. To me it seems that the thing became changed at an early stage. I don't believe in Jesus sacrificial death as a condition for salvation. I think he was killed by the authorities in order to shut him up. But even there it's not 100% clear, because maybe the sacrifice of Jesus helped to end animal sacrifices as practised by many different groups of pagans in pre-Christian Europe.And sometimes in human life, self sacrifice is a necessity.

The puzzle really is all in the conditioned mind. Shut that up,quiet it, stand back and observe it, and you may even see Jesus. That is, if that's your spiritual orientation. If one concentrates upon a thing enough, eventually one will get it. So I think those who are genuinely focused on Christ will eventually get to know Him even if they are embedded in a tradition that may be very far from perfect.
And actually, no tradition exists as far as I can tell where there isn't some revision, change, even perversion of the original teachings.

 

Original Christianity was a hard core mystical cult.

 

That's probably true, but what's the point? "Mystical", defined (Websters): "having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence <the mystical food of the sacrament> b : involving or having the nature of an individual's direct subjective communion with God or ultimate reality". Jesus and His followers appeared to meet those criteria. "Cult" (Websters): "a small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous." That would seem to fit Jesus and the early Christians. They would seem to qualify as "hard core" in both respects.

 

It's a point of itself. The first Christians practiced magic, although modern Christians would largely disagree. It's possible that early Christians used muscaria mushrooms. For all we know Christ even used cannabis. There are beliefs that Jesus traveled east during his missing years in the Bible. Lot's of Buddhist mystics that used cannabis around Afghanistan at that time. Probably all over the middle east. I doubt Jesus stayed in the 'holy land' the entire time of his life.

 

All this is speculative. It's quite possible Jesus stayed tin the holy land the entire time of his life. As for muscaria, John Allegro destroyed his scholarly reputation by arguing that Jesus was a mushroom--more accurately, a code name for the Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom. (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross). Fourteen British scholars denounced the work. An early pagan Roman critic of Christianity, Celsus, claimed that Jesus practiced Egyptian magic. In the 1970's these claims were revived by Morton Smith in Jesus the Magician, alleging that Jesus "sprang from a Galilean strain of Semitic paganism (p. 68). R.Joseph Hoffmann concludeded "that the early Christian mission was advanced by the use of magic is well attested."Celsus: On the True Doctrine (1987). Evidence of this may be found in Jesus' use of spittle in some of His healing miracles. (Mark 7:33, Mark 3:23, John 9:6.