This is a general summary only, details will be given in later pieces that I have to sit down and write. Most of the examples used here are Christian unless otherwise stated. Not that I have anything against Christianity, but I live in a nation that claims to be a Christian one. Since that is the majority of my audience, I'll address them in particular. My friends of other religions though, find me just as pointed at them when we discuss them. Remember, all the paths lead to the same destination, God and Truth.
Table of Contents
Religious Foundation
God and Man
What is Sin?
Scripture References
Religious Foundation
I seem to get accused of being a Secular Humanist by many religious adherents (particularly by more fundamentalist individuals) but as I understand the term, it is definitely not an accurate term for myself in that as a "Secularist" I would deny the existence of God or a Higher Power as well as anything supernatural, which is completely incorrect. I guess you could say that I might be a Religious Humanist in that I do believe in God and that which is beyond the physical (super/supra natural) but have become disillusioned by traditional "organized" religions.
There is truth in ALL scripture and religions and to exclude any one of them would be a mistake. The problem comes from the codifying of theologies and dogmas that exclude anything outside of their positions. For example, I was brought up a Southern Baptist (Christian) and those beliefs do not accept the Pentecostal (Christian) idea of "Speaking in Tongues" though the Pentecostals find it to be a "Gift of the Spirit". If found "Speaking in Tongues" in my house, I would have likely found myself in the office of either an exorcist (or the Southern Baptist equivalent) or a psychiatrist's office. Imagine what the response would be if I found Nirvana or found spiritual bliss through the Hari-Krishna Maha-Mantram...
When you get past the inserted egos of the followers and later teachers, strip out the cultural contexts and actually look at the subject of what teachers like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and many others were teaching, you find they are all talking about the same things from different perspectives or angles. Jesus and Krishna are so similar in many of their teachings, that I wouldn't be surprised to find Jesus had read the Bhagavad-gita (Jesus did grow up near major trading routes coming to and from India). Buddha doesn't worry about teaching about afterlives and heavens or hells, he just concerns himself with finding our true natures and experiencing life from that place.
Now with the above stated, do I deny the "deity" of Jesus or Krishna (some of the followers of Vishnu believe Krishna to be the incarnation of God's highest self) or were they just good to great men and teachers? That question is a lot more difficult to answer because of how we use language. To Christians, Jesus is the human incarnation (they don't call it that) of one aspect of the triune of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). In the way most Christians would mean the previous question, my answer would be "No" in that I don't see Jesus and his teachings as out of the grasp of the day to day person. Mainly because I see all people as part of God, just some are more aware of it than others, hence Jesus. So, from my perspective, the answers are Yes (because we all are aspects of deity) and Yes (since they spent their lives passing on knowledge).
I have several friends who have coined the term "Hindu-Buddhi-Christ" to describe my personal path as I see amazing harmony in their namesakes: Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma), Buddhism and Christianity. My personal view of my religious path could be called jnana-yoga after the idea of searching for knowledge.
God and Man
We are told by our elders that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. If this is correct, then the idea of separation that prevails through the majority of our religions, that God is outside our experience and reach, cannot be accurate and the idea that many people hold that God cannot be in the presence of sin is either wrong or our view of sin must be.
God is that which permeates and activates God's creation of thought that appears as the world around us. Paramahansa Yogananda put it beautifully when he said that creation is like a movie in a theatre, the illusion of light and form are projected upon the "screen" which is God. The screen can exist without the projection, but the projection would cease to be coherent without the screen and it would not be a movie without both.
The idea that God cannot be in the presence of wrongness is not supported in scripture. After Adam and Eve "sin" by eating of the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil", God speaks to them as if He were unaware they had sinned. In Job, there are scenes with the Devil in Heaven, apparently at the Throne of God, talking with God about Job. God speaks to Cain (a murderer), Noah (a drunkard), Moses (a murderer) and a whole host of prophets; their sins never seems to get in the way.
Mankind is the child of an eternal entity that can be seen in everyday events, if we are willing, and heard from in every moment if we will just open our ears and hearts to listen. As the children of God, we are part of him, inseparable.
What is Sin?
When asked, most Christians will tell you that Sin is either an old archery term that means to miss the point (accurate, but not for the reasons they think) or to go against the will of God (like that could be possible).
The first definition is correct but not because God said not to eat of the tree, but in what happens immediately afterwards. When you read Genesis, you find that the very first thing that happens after Adam and Eve eat, is that they become body conscious, they know they are naked. God even plays along and asks who told them about their nakedness. It is in this that true sin is shown. Not the eating of forbidden fruit (I suspect God set that up for other reasons) but in the forgetting of our true natures and our delusional fixation of the physical and corporeal. It is in forgetting our souls and living for our bodies that we are born into sin, not some pending judgment from on high.
The predominant world view that we are all under the watchful eye of a most high deity that watches and assesses the goodness or badness of every thought and deed comes from an idea that says we are separate from God. Because we believe that we are separate, we do God a disservice by bringing him down to our level of petty judgments, conditional love and general vindictiveness fit more for a bad Hollywood movie than an all powerful deity.
Scripture References
How does one choose from the plethora of Sacred Writings out there? The nice thing is that unless you want to, you don't have to. The secret is in the understanding of how it's particular representation of the truth is expressed. The Bible's Old testament (Tanakh: Torah, Prophets and Writings) is written from the perspective and culture of early Semitic nomadic tribes and there descendents. The Qur'an, the specific culture of the 7th century world of Arabia. The Bhagavad-gita is placed in the region of India and Buddha around the 5th century BCE.
Where I look everywhere for knowledge, the scripture I use most often are the Bible (KJV), The Bhagavad-gita, Upanishads and Bhagavata-Purana (Srimad-Bhagavatam) and the discourses of the Buddha (mainly the Sutta-Pitaka, for it's antiquity, and the Vinaya
for it's age as well in the early pre-differentiated status of its creation).
If I were to be dropped on a deserted island, I would take the Gospels of Matthew and John, the Yoga Sutras & the Bhagavad-gita. With those, I could still find the truth.
, in his "Conversations with God" series puts it better than anyone I know when he says, God knew himself to be the totality of all there is, creation is God experiencing himself as everything. To which I add, knowing something and experiencing it are two completely different things; for example, when you were a child, your mother told you not to touch the stove, it's hot and will burn you. Now you had that piece of data, but after the first time you actually touched it and had the experience of being burned, it was quite a bit more than a piece of datum.
