Hi Malcolm,

I understand what you're saying. There certainly has been a big fuss for two millennia.

In the West, we have thrust ourselves headlong into the conviction that anything real and of value is outside of the self or inner person. The only reason the self still exists is that it has to exist for us even to deny it. If we didn't need the self to function, Western society (both science and religion) would have eradicated it long ago, elevating the objective world as described by science and religion to the center and ground of all being.

But the self won't go away, so it has been coarsely denigrated. Science tells us that consciousness is a secretion of the brain just as the adrenal glands secrete adrenalin. Personal experience is considered to be naive, primitive, and childlike. Only scientifically verified objective reality and the esoteric knowledge the scientists have is worthwhile and valuable.

Western Christianity tells us that the individual is sinful and depraved. Thoughts that don't align with the Bible as interpreted by the church are inspired by the Devil. The self is depraved, weak, sinful, deceptive, and untrustworthy.

Jesus, then, is interpreted through that mindset today. Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, and God the Father have been established as material beings that live apart from people. 84% of Americans believe Jesus is God or the Son of God, but only 44% go to church, and far fewer follow Jesus' teachings or even know them. As long as religion is something outside of the inner person, it will not affect them. They will treat it as they do their Wednesday-night bowling team. They go to the church as they go to the bowling lanes, have a marvelous time intently involved in what they're doing with others while they're there, and leave without anything happening to make them different people. Today, turning inward and seeing how the inner self doesn't square with Jesus' teachings would be too threatening, so the external religion, put into it's little box, is convenient and comfortable. Religion, Carl Jung wrote, is a defense mechanism against having a religious experience.

The fuss over Jesus has been a fuss over how to create bigger and more grandiose religions, with huge cathedrals, huge attendance in mega-churches, awesome decorations, and exquisite music. The focus has been on creating a physical realm entity that is bigger and more spectacular than anything else that exists. But it's just a physical entity, no different from being the world's biggest bowling team.

What the fuss should have been over since 30 C.E. is how the inner person could become more Jesus-minded. The building should have been of compassionate, loving, forgiving people, not grandiose churches. And the fuss should have been against people, rulers, and institutions that are violent, hateful, and cruel. Christianity should have been unrelentingly intolerant of them. Instead, Christianity embraced them. The United States continued to do that through the twentieth century, becoming one of the prominent reasons our country has enemies today.

So today, the fuss over Jesus should be a fuss over what he said before 30 C.E. What follows that pivotal point in time in Jesus' name should not be the focus of the fuss. In fact, it should be abandoned. What we'll find is that Jesus wanted us to have confidence in the inner person, directly communicating with the Divine. He wanted us to be unconditionally loving, compassionate, and forgiving. The fuss over Jesus hasn't really started yet. But when it does start, the fuss will change humankind.

Craig