I don’t think it ever occurred to my parents what impact these experiences would have on me or my brothers.  I visited countries and witnessed cultures where the Christian faith is anything but the primary religious tradition.  For instance, I met scores of people who were devoted practitioners of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.  While most of their spiritual practices were foreign to me, even weird at times, the one question that haunted me on many occasions was this:  If my religion is right—Christianity—and their religion is false or, at best, incomplete or misguided—which is precisely what most Christians still believe today—why has it taken them thousands of years to discover their error?  Furthermore, if their religious practices were not rewarding them with a life-changing experience of the Divine, why would they keep doing them for centuries?  Are they just slow to learn?  What’s the problem here?

So, I made it my practice, not only to know the efficacy of my own faith tradition, but to study and know what other religions teach, too.

Here are a couple of conclusions to which I’ve come.  There has only ever been one spiritual truth.  It is known, experienced, and expressed in multiple languages and through a variety of cultures and traditions.

The other is this:  There is far more that all religions share in common than there has ever been that distinguishes or separates them.  The future of humanity is at stake and the Dalai lama is so correct in saying, “Until there is peace among the religions, there will be no peace in the world.”  We are at a crucial time in human history.  Many thinkers and visionaries do not believe humanity will survive if the religions of this world do not share together their similar commitments and work together to bring harmony between people and nations.

What many Christians do not realize is that the world views much of their message as a conflagration of contradiction.  For example, Christians say the gospel they preach is powerful enough to change the world. Yet, in recent years, there’s been an enormous interest among Christians in what they call the Rapture or Return of Jesus Christ.  Many of them are even praying for it.  One of the most popular and money-making fictional series in the history of Christian publishing has been the “Left Behind” series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.  Their entire storyline is based on this hugely complex system of the Rapture—of how the world will come to an end.  What many Christians seem to have forgotten is the one caveat Jesus gave as to when he would NOT return—that’s when everyone was expecting it. Jesus said that his return would be as a thief in the night, when everyone was least expecting it.  Since the majority of Christians are looking for his imminent return, they would do well to recognize they’re just as likely responsible for his delay.

Of course, I say all of this with tongue-in-cheek.  I no longer subscribe to any of these apocalyptic views of the culmination of human history.  Had God wanted us to understand how the world would end, he’d have sobered up Saint John long enough to write something a little more intelligible than the Revelation he gave us.  What Jesus did give us, around which there is no confusion, is the clear admonition, “Take no thought of tomorrow.”  Words do not get much clearer than this. Yet, most Christians seem interested in talking more about tomorrow than in how they’re living today.

Recently, my wife and I saw the movie 2012. It reminded me of the doomsday nonsense that fundamentalist Christians (and I was once one of them) have been saying about the RAPTURE – the return of Jesus to catch-up all his followers into the clouds and whisk them away to a kind of benign judgment while those LEFT BEHIND reel in the madness of a world that spirals out of control – necessitating the appearance of an Antichrist who rules the world.
What do they have in common? Both are fiction and for entertainment purposes only.
There two fundamental reasons why the Christians and Christian leaders become rigid and narrow in their beliefs, separated from others and the world, and develop a neurotic obsession with future events. First, the church has failed in fulfilling its mission. Furthermore, the longer this failure is denied, the closer to radical fundamentalism these churches and their followers become. If the church’s failure is not faced, and very, very soon, the church will continue its present spiral downward and become more isolated, marginalized, and eccentric in its beliefs, as well as more violent than it is already toward perceived enemies.
Already, there is very little difference between radical, Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and some branches of Christianity in the U.S. The only real difference is in the methods each uses to express displeasure toward a world—a world each has failed to convert to its own way of thinking and living. The former use weapons, the latter use words. Some Christians would prefer to use weapons, too, and, were it not for the laws in this land that forbid it, they likely would.
So, instead, it has been the history of these radical little egos to turn to the government to give them the world their evangelical efforts have failed to create. Over the years, church and church leaders have sought to influence government to take action against its perceived enemies. I recently read in The Christian Post that, among all the varied interests groups in the U.S., the one group most supportive of the war in Iraq or, at a minimum, interested in a continued military presence there, are the Christians.
A second reason for the rigidity in beliefs, the separateness from the world, and the obsession of the church with future world events is that the collective church ego feeds on fear. Since Christians are afraid the world is out-of-control, their appetite for prophecies pertaining to the end of the world is voracious. The appetite is most prevalent whenever there is moral unrest, as well as social, political, and international discord and tension. That is to say, there is a direct correlation between the degree of moral chaos and political unrest in the world and the frequency with which churches and church leaders talk about the end of the world, especially in terms of the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus.
The Rapture is a belief system about how human history will end. At its core, it proponents believe that believers in Jesus, or the church, will be “raptured,” or snatched up from the surface of the earth and gathered together in the clouds, just prior to the Great Tribulation and the rise of the Antichrist. What “Rapturist” proponents do not tell you, however, most likely because they do not know, is that the Rapture is not taught anywhere in Bible.
Nowhere. Nada. The only vague reference to anything remotely close to the idea of Rapture is found in Saint Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians. But there Saint Paul is trying to reassure people that they were eternal, since most of them had grown up in a world that had little or no confidence in an afterlife.
Given the preoccupation of people in the west with thoughts about and a belief in an afterlife, it is impossible to imagine living in a culture that did not believe in such things. But, this was the situation Saint Paul addresses. His purpose in writing these words was to reassure the Thessalonian followers of Jesus that there is life beyond this one.
Apart from this purpose, however, the differences in interpretations about future events, known as eschatology, as well as the type and timing of those events, quickly morphs into an incomprehensible pattern of nonsense. There are those, for example, who are known as Pre-millennialists, others who are Post-millennialists, and still others who identify themselves as Amillennialists.
But, even this only scratches the surface of eschatological conjecture. Among the Pre-millennialists, there are Historic Pre-millennialists and Dispensational Pre-millennialists. And, if that were not confusing enough, among the Dispensational Pre-millennialists, there are Progressive Dispensational Pre-millennialists as well as the Pre-Tribulation Dispensational Pre-millennialists.
It’s confusing. It’s nonsense. And, it is insane.