Andrew On: Reality Check (at Passover)

Reality Check

The Jewish Passover is now about a month away. Already the Armstrongites are busy ramping up for the most wonderful and labor-intensive time of their year. Everyone must sort through their entire home, automobile, and workspace, searching for crumbs. These crumbs represent the leaven of sin and must be painstakingly picked out, vacuumed up, or somehow thrown away. (As though that actually accomplished something besides spring cleaning). Meanwhile, as everyone is busy focusing on that, their internal spiritual bakeries keep pumping out thousands of fluffy loaves every day. Yet no one seems to notice that, let alone do anything about it, all the way through the Days of Unleavened Bread. Oh, the humanity.

Let’s be honest for a moment. Really, what’s the point of this cleaning exercise? Shouldn’t the Armstrongite focus on shutting down their internal spiritual bakeries, rather than focusing on each and every piddly physical crumb? But that’s how the bible got interpreted. It’s too late to change it now. Everyone already knows that’s what you have to do to please god for Passover. Still, Passovers come and Passovers go, and even though I am sure their homes are a little cleaner for it, Armstrongites never seem to benefit from the ritual in any other way.

The truth is, the only way that a person could know that their interpretation of the bible and the way they lived their life were pleasing to an omnipotent creator, in reality, not just in their imagination, is if He came down and spoke to them, the way the bible says he did to Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. Jesus Christ and all the writers of the bible were all dead and gone before the year 100AD. That means that for at least 1,912 years, the Christian God has been officially silent. Where did he go?

Whether or not God has come and spoken to anyone during the last 1,912 years (or at all, for that matter) is anyone’s guess. After all, today the quickest way to wind up with a new jacket and a padded apartment is to tell someone that God has been speaking to you.

It’s pretty easy to make a biblical case that the "true religion" of the Hebrews was momentarily restored by Ezra and Nehemiah following their return from captivity to rebuild Jerusalem approximately 2,450 years ago. After that, the Jews took the Tanakh (Old Testament), and embellished it with arcane, bizarre, and even contradictory traditions.

Judaism has little to do with scripture anymore and everything to do with the Talmud, which had already become its central text by the time Jesus walked the earth (even though it was still oral, and not yet written down). Rabbis have traditionally taught that the core of the Talmud is supposedly God’s own interpretation of scripture (a likely story). However, much of rabbinical law, not just that of rabbinical origin, such as the wearing of yarmulkes, but also that of biblical origin, such as the injunction not to mix meat and dairy, have both drifted so far from anything scriptural, or even anything sensible, that they could rightly said to be crazy.

When Jesus Christ came along, the establishment of Jewish religion had already gone off the deep end, and according to the gospel accounts he told them as much in rather direct terms. It is easy for the Christian to conclude that one of the purposes of Jesus Christ’s appearance in the first century AD was to get the "true religion" of the Hebrews "back on track" with a "reality check."

Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was the Jews killed Jesus and continued on without interruption. Meanwhile, the followers of Jesus would form a radical new sect based upon the same scriptures, minus the Talmud, plus some new writings now called the New Testament. Judaism and Christianity are really just two sects of the same religion, albeit with many huge disagreements. In the last 2,000 years, Christianity has gone a different direction than Judaism, but has still drifted into a similar type of territory.

The trouble is, none of these sects know where they’re going. Without any navigational aids, milemarkers, or guideposts, every sect will eventually descend into one sort of insanity and corruption or another. Over time they will fragment into innumerable different sects that each need to believe their trajectory is the one and only path that is pleasing to God. However, without a "reality check" to bring people back into line with something that at least makes sense, they just keep going further and further and further afield.

What’s more, as history has shown, organized religion does not even want any "reality checks." Religious leaders don’t really care if the course of their religion is true or not. They are satisfied so long as they are able to "lord it over" other people, command unquestioned respect, and extort an income. Accepting "reality checks" compromises religious leader’s abilities to do those other three things. It was true 2,000 years ago, and it’s just as true today.

With so much confusion, where is a sincere person to turn? If a human being really wants to live an "unleavened" life, to whom can he go for a "reality check"? Alas, there is no human being you can go to for that.

With this in mind, the bottom line for any religious person should be finding God for a personal "reality check." That should not mean finding him in some man’s church, no matter how historic. It should not mean finding him in some superstitious desire to believe, regardless of how many (or how few) people may share those beliefs. It means finding him in the reality in which you live, instead of just in the wishful thinking of either your own imagination, or else in the imaginations you’ve borrowed from others.

The biggest reason why there is so much religious difference and confusion is that for at least 1,912 years it seems that God hasn’t even permitted any "reality checks." Acts 17:27 states that God is not far from "each of us." Whether that was true then or not, I cannot now say. All the religious confusion is the evidence that suggests no one has heard from God for a long time. Today, individuals and ancient monolithic churches are all adrift in the same boat together. Neither individuals nor religious institutions seem to have any access to feedback from God.

What does this mean? What it means to me is that I cannot be so dogmatic about anything spiritual or religious. No one agrees on who the real God is or what will make him happy with you because - wait for it - nobody knows! Those who pretend they do and tell you so are just conning you.

I think many people don’t want to be honest about the true level of uncertainty we all face, so they just pretend the world is more certain than it is. As the Jewish spring holy days approach, both Jews and Armstrongites will hypocritically obsess over minutia of their living spaces in vain. Until we can get that "reality check," shouldn’t a good person just focus on what he doesn’t need to verify? Things such as the golden rule and helping the needy? Spending weeks looking for read crumbs? Seriously? Get real.

Andrew