posted April 28, 2009 05:54 PM
By the same token,
the belief in heaven,
and that people will go to heaven
because God has "forgiven" them,
carries many souls to lighter places.
The belief in Hell creates it, but,
does not draw one towards it, of necessity.
It seems to arise, naturally,
as the obvious counter-balance to the vision of heaven.
This has always been the danger of idealism.
If there are gods and angels, one thinks,
there must also be devils and demons.
The one awakens, or is tied to, the other.
But you are SO right...
The Catholic Church needs to be reformed,
and the understanding of the law must
come to embrace compassion for all beings,
and the ultimate acceptance of the fact
that men are inseparable from the divine,
and, so, cannot but serve the will of God.
The Will of God is a question of primary importance,
because few seem to understand how it works out
that all things are God's will, yet, only the good is truly God's.
The answer is found in contemplating the spiritual hierarchy.
God's Will is active on many levels, but it is always God's will.
Those who do good are especially blessed,
for they are given the power (the "grace")
to do good by the generosity of God,
and not by virtue of their own efforts.
"Our own efforts"..
Technically, no efforts are our own.
We are agents of God's will,
all operating through relative degrees
and dimensions of unconsciousness.
These are the deeper mysteries that
Christianity can bring us to, if we
have the vision to pursue them,
and the inclination to pursue them
in the context of the Christian mythos.
Because many people do not have this vision,
they misinterpret the law and form false dogmas,
or are hamstrung by the dogmas formed by others.
They are not allowed to develop
because the ideology holds them in its grip,
and, by its nature, denies the free
and spontaneous life of consciousness.
But I do not think these religions should be overthrown.
I think they need to be redeemed and reinterpreted.
Particularly, from the starting point of a religion
like Catholicism, which has so much power over people,
and such a need of being reinterpreted.
It is a shame that those who would be good politicians
are generally too pure to enter the muddy waters of politics.
So people lose faith in politics, and try to change things
from the outside, in all sorts of random, undirected ways.
But if the good men are not in politics, who will listen to the people?
The only "solution" then will be violent revolution.
But revolutions are tedious, repetitive plagues of history.
Have they advanced us, or only shifted power around,
at the tip of a stone, a sword, or bayonet, as it appears?
Reform from within.
It is as needful for institutions,
as it is for individual aspirants.
If we tear it down from the outside,
having lost all faith or hope in its repair,
the Catholic Church will just rise up
in another, perhaps more vicious form.
People's minds are limited by dogmas, yes.
But it is also true that many people are not ready,
and that, given a choice between the truth and the lie,
they will choose the lie a thousand out of a thousand times.
If you remove the lie, they will gravitate to yet another lie.
It must be done with subtlety
and a power to convey new insights
through ancient symbols; to breathe new life
into the rigid idols of the past.
Until another, modern mythology appears
which can replace the Christian structure,
its mythos will continue to be the dominant theme
in the collective unconscious of the western world.