Nick_A wrote: ↑October 11th, 2022, 8:11 pm
JackDaydream wrote: ↑October 11th, 2022, 6:22 pm
The question of what is Christianity is such a large one because it would involve all the potential interpretations of the teachings of Christ, including the mainstream and esoteric ones. Christianity has been an extremely influential worldview for over 2000 years with so many diverse thinkers and interpretations. However, there are basics, such as ethics based on the teachings of Jesus, regarding love of neighbours and enemies, as well as ideals, such as not judging others. It is possible to see all the negative impacts, such as war against nonbelievers. However, the underlying basis of Christian teachings does offer a foundation for ethics, and there may be an overlap with perennial teachings, including those taught by the Buddha and other spiritual thinkers.
This is separate from ideas like life after death and the ideas about the supernatural, which may be more complex areas of philosophy, and even recognised as such by theologians. In particular, there is a split between the belief in life after death as the immortality of the soul and the belief in a resurrection at the end of the world. The metaphysical interpretations of Christian teachings may be the more complicated aspects of Christianity than the basic ethics and even amongst theologians there have been so many disagreements and the various interpretations have lead to so many separate churches and traditions. Christianity has had a widespread influence though, and the history of Western philosophy has arisen in connection with the establishment of Christendom and the conflicts between science and religion have arisen in the context of the centrality of Christianity in Western thought and civilisation.
Perhaps Christianity has two purposes. The first is external where Christianity serves as a kind of policeman concerned with the ethics of what we do. The second is concerned with what we are and our potential for conscious evolution.
The 'policeman side' of Christianity may be protective of human values but negative in the sense of leading to what Nietzsche spoke of as 'the herd morality'. On the positive side though it may have led to some kind of striving for higher values and human rights and ideals, with mixed consequences. Of course, the tensions in the world arose partly through Christianity but also many other sources of ideas, especially in the pluralism at the end of the twentieth and early twentieth first century.
As far as the idea of conscious evolution it may be that Christianity has this potential but whether people are able to see this may be variable. Somehow, when growing up some people did guide me to this possibility but that was before I became aware of some of the effects of religious fundamentalism and a negative shadow in that respect. Jung spoke of this shadow side of Christianity in his, 'Answer to Job' in which he spoke of the repressed dark side, in the human capacity for destruction. He saw the idea of the 'imitation of Christ' within history to have been based on perfectionism. He suggests that there was a more negative idea of picking up one's cross, as being one of a conformist trend within Christianity. However, he sees the genuine evolutionary path of authenticity as being following Christ as being about genuine individuation.
In that respect, it may be that the story of Jesus in the wilderness, facing temptations is symbolic of the human condition and the mystic idea of 'the dark night of the soul' may be about the existential aspects of this quest, on the brink of higher possibilities which may emerge.
