Give Me That Old Time Religion

It’s about 2:00 PM here in Mexico as I start writing this post. I’m not used to doing this much writing anymore. When I first started writing my blog, I was incredibly productive in terms of writing, but as time went on I became less and less enchanted with writing until I got to the point that I didn’t post anything on a regular basis.

I’m not sure, but based on the amount of writing I’ve been doing and the sheer volume of all the thoughts bouncing around inside of my head lately — I think I’m going to miss those days.

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Give Me That Old Time Religion is a traditional Gospel/American folk song that has been covered by countless musical artists dating back to 1873. Perhaps the best known recording of the song was done by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Or maybe Elvis Presley. Or Johnny Cash. Or Billy Bob Thornton. Take your pick.

From what I can tell in my research, it must have an incredibly easy song to write. The title of the song is repeated ad nauseam, and comprises the majority of the lyrics.

I think it’s a stupid song, but it’s perfect as the title for this post because I’d like to take a semi-detailed look at the five major religions in the world and explore some of the truths they hold. And it’s okay if you don’t agree with anything I have to say about the topic at hand. I’m not gonna get all butt-hurt if you think I’m full of shit. When it comes to this subject, I’m pretty sure you’re full of shit, too.

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Just in cases you were wondering, the Five Major World Religions are: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In terms of the numbers of believers claiming to be a member of the Big Five, the results look like this: #1. Christianity. #2. Islam. #3. Hinduism. #4. Buddhism. #5. Judaism.

Buddhism and Hinduism have a lots of commonalities in their belief systems. They both originated in India. The main difference is Buddhism was founded by a guy named Guatama Buddha, and is perhaps the only religion that doesn’t have a god.

Hinduism is believed to be the world’s oldest religion. No one knows who is responsible for creating this religion, and unlike any of all of other major religions Hinduism doesn’t have one god or even the lack thereof: Hinduism has a multitude of gods. And, it has a caste system. If you don’t what that is you can Google it. In essence, it’s a religiously based system of bigotry and segregation that ensures the rich get to stay rich and the poor get to stay poor.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam also have a lots of commonalities. They are all monotheistic: there is only one God. There are notable similarities between the three religions in the concepts of sacrifice, good works, hospitality, peace, justice, an afterlife, a God that loves us, and loving God with all one’s heart and soul in return.

The main differences between them appears to be the name of the God they worship, name of the major prophet responsible for announcing His presence to the world, and who the Messiah will be.

In Judaism, God’s name is Yahweh, and the founder of Judaism is a guy named Abraham. He doesn’t appear to be the guy that actually created a religion, but he did make a deal with God, and the Jews consider him to be the Father of their Faith.

If you thought Moses was the founder, you were close. Moses is easily the most important prophet of the Jewish religion and is thought to be the author of the Torah — the first five books of the Bible. Moses was the guy that brought the Ten Commandments to his people. And all of the 613 laws of Judaism are named after him, too.

In Christianity, God’s name is also Yahweh. Or Jehovah. The major prophet of Christianity is a Jewish guy named Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of Yahweh/Jehovah/God. I don’t believe Jesus wanted to create a new religion — he was more interested in reforming his old religion.

Jesus said God the Father wanted a make new covenant with His people. The New Covenant, according to Christians, is the promise that God will forgive sin and restore communion/fellowship with those whose hearts believe in His Son, Jesus Christ. 

And Jesus replaced the Ten Commandments and all of the 613 Mosaic laws with Two Commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.

After his crucifixion and resurrection, his followers created a new religion that has become the most popular religion on the planet. And that probably wouldn’t have happened if not for a Jew that converted to the Cult of Jesus named Paul of Tarsus.

In Islam, God’s name is Allah. He also has ninety-eight other names, and if you’re interested in more information, you’re going to have to Google them. The major prophet of Islam is a guy named Muhammad, peace be upon him.

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This is not going to be an in-depth examination of any of these religions. If you have suddenly become interested in this subject, there are a few million books that have been written about all of them. Or you could watch a YouTube video. There appear to be more than a few of those, too.

I don’t believe there is One, True Religion, even though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have laid claims to being exactly that. I do believe each of these religions contain one or more kernels of Truth. And that’s a good thing. It’d be a shame if all of these building blocks of our collective ethos were nothing more than a pile of manure.

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Buddhism and Hinduism both believe in Cause and Effect, Enlightenment, Moral Order, and Rebirth/Reincarnation. They might have different terms for these beliefs, but the most common titles for them appear to be: Karma, Nirvana, Dharma, and Samsara.

To the best of my knowledge, I don’t know anyone that claims to be a Buddhist, and I know of only one person that claims to be a Hindu, yet almost everyone I know that claims to be a Christian, Jew, or Muslim also believes in all four of these principles to a greater or lesser degree.

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Cause and Effect, Enlightenment, Moral Order, and Rebirth/Reincarnation. These are the first four Universal Truths — they exist whether you believe in them or not.

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Judaism was the first of the major religions to believe in one God — a God who not only created the universe and everything in it, but also a God that each and every Jew can have an individual and personal relationship with. Jews believe that God appointed them to be His chosen people. The word the Jews use to describe this special relationship with their God is covenant.

Judaism may or may not have invented the concept of salvation, but they had to be the first religion to believe that their unique, One and Only God was the sole source of spiritual salvation. Originally, this was more of collective belief — as God’s chosen people they were the only people on Earth that God was interested in saving.

As this belief evolved into a more singular belief, salvation was based on a person’s ability to keep God’s laws, and to bring holiness into every aspect of their lives. Almost anything a Jew does can be considered an act of worship.

Judaism also invented the concept of a messiah, or savior. In Jewish eschatology, the Messiah is a future king from the Davidic line, who is anointed with holy oil, and will rule God’s chosen people during the Messianic Age and world to come. The Jewish Messiah will be a great political leader who will usher in the end of this world, and rebuild the Great Temple.

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The original Great Temple of God in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon in 957 BCE, and it was the religious center of worship for all of the Jews living in the area generally known as Judea back then. The First Temple was subsequently totally destroyed by Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylonia around 586 BCE.

Cyrus the Great, the King of Persia, conquered Babylonia and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their Great Temple. Known as the Second Temple, it was rebuilt around 515 BCE. This temple was renovated and modified for hundreds of years until Herod the Great completed the final reconstruction around 26 AD, and then it was totally destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, ending the First Great Jewish Revolt. It wouldn’t be the last great Jewish revolt…

The Great Temple of the Jews was never rebuilt after it was destroyed by the Romans. And where the Great Temple used to sit is now the site of the Al Aqsa mosque. The only portion of the Great Temple that remains is the Western Wall. It’s a very small part of a very huge retaining wall that was built by Herod the Great when he was rebuilding the Great Temple. Sometimes referred to as the Wailing Wall, it is the holiest place in the world to the Jews.

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In addition, the Messiah will judge the living and the dead — something called the resurrection. I’m guessing this is where being a good and righteous person will be a serious advantage because the righteous will be resurrected to eternal life. And the not-so-righteous possibly/probably will suffer a fate of more or less eternal death.

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Um, excuse me, but aren’t rebirth/reincarnation/resurrection pretty much all the same thing?

That’s a good question. I don’t think so. Rebirth/reincarnation seems to imply that in each life you live you are a different person. None of us is ever reborn as the same person, time after time after time, are we? Resurrection seems to be something more like unto the reanimation of every person you may or may not have ever been.

And I think it’s hilarious that every person that has ever claimed to be another person in a previous lifetime was always someone famous, like, Cleopatra. Or William Shakespeare. Or George Washington. No one ever says, “I used to be Bill Berditzman. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he had the largest herd of pigs in North Dakota back 1857. He was the Pig King of Minot!”

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In the Old Testament of the Bible, a guy named Malachi prophesied that another Jewish prophet named Elijah would return before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD. Elijah will be the precursor of the coming of the Messiah, and then everyone will know that they better get right with God in a hurry.

All Jews celebrate something they call Passover. It roughly coincides with the Christian holiday of Easter. This Jewish holiday commemorates the Biblical story of Exodus when God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

Every Passover is celebrated with a ritual feast called a seder. At this meal, every Jewish family sets an extra cup of wine on the dinner table, and opens the front door for Elijah, hoping he will walk in. I’m guessing that will turn into one helluva party when it happens, eh.

As for the actual identity of the Messiah, the Jews don’t appear to have any idea who this guy is going to be. The one thing they do appear to be sure of is his name isn’t Jesus.

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God is an Interpersonal God. Salvation is an Act of God. The Coming of the Messiah. The Resurrection of the Dead. These are also Universal Truths. We now have eight of them.

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Little Known Fact About Eschatology: it is a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world and/or of humankind. It always stuck me as an incongruous word. To me, it sounds something more like unto the science of collecting stool samples and looking at shit under a microscope.

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Christianity. If you were to dissect this religious system down to its roots, Christianity is nothing more than a offshoot sect of Judaism that believes Jesus is the Messiah. The Christian God is the same God of the Jewish faith.

Well, there is this one, small, insignificant difference: The One, True God of Christianity is a three-in-one Trinity consisting of God the Father — He is still the same God as the Jewish God that created the universe and everything in it — Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and future King of Heaven and Earth — and an enigmatic third person called the Holy Spirit. And they are somehow all the same person even though they are all distinctly different from one another.

As near as I can tell by talking to other Christians, I’m not sure anyone truly understands exactly who or what the Holy Spirit really is. Unfortunately, that is not a joke. I’ve written about who and what I believe the Holy Spirit to be. I shared my ideas with several pastors I knew when we were living in the Greater Phoenix Metro Area.

I think most of them are still laughing, and that was almost ten years ago…

If you want to know what Jesus had to say about the Holy Spirit, read the story of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John, Chapters 13-16. That’s where I got all of my ideas from…

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The concept of the Holy Trinity was invented by a guy named Tertullian. I have no idea where he got the idea of the Trinity from, because God is never described as a trinity anywhere in the Bible. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and read the Bible for yourself. I’ll wait.

Yes, Tertullian was a Christian, and he appears to have been a prolific writer. He also must have been incredibly persuasive because most his ideas have been accepted as Christian dogma for centuries.

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If you were to ask me, I’d have to classify myself as a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ; that makes me a Christian, does it not? I was raised as a Catholic, but I disagree with almost everything the teachers of my faith taught me. We need a priest to mediate on our behalf because the Catholic God doesn’t want to have anything to do with His adherents. Seriously?? Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin! Jesus is my savior because his death on the cross freed me from sin? I have no idea what that means.

Catholicism isn’t the only fucked up Christian sect. There’s also the Baptists. These are Christians that claim to love Jesus, but hate almost everyone else — especially homosexuals, people of color, and people of other faiths and religions. Because that’s what Jesus told all of his followers to do, isn’t it?

As far as I’m concerned, the Christian religion is the greatest promulgator of bullshit on this planet. Given the state of world affairs as they exist today, that is truly saying a lot.

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Jesus is the King of Heaven and Earth. As near as I can tell, that’s the only thing Christians believe that is a Universal Truth. And now we have nine.

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The Muslim Faith. If you were to dissect this religious system down to its roots, this religion is nothing more than an offshoot sect of Judaism and Christianity that believes Muhammad, peace be upon him, was the last prophet that will ever be inspired by God.

Allah, the name of God in the Islamic faith, is the Creator of the universe and everything in it. He certainly appears to be the same Creator God worshipped by both the Jews and the Christians. Jesus is mentioned more often in the Qur’an than Muhammad, peace be upon him. Jesus is revered in the Muslim religion, and so his mother. Oddly enough, Muslims also believe that Mary was virgin…

In Islam, Jesus isn’t considered to be the literal Son of God in the way that Christians do, nor do Muslims believe that Jesus was crucified — he was bodily taken up to Heaven by God before he died on the cross. Muslims believe Jesus is a great prophet, and he is acknowledged to be the Messiah, but Muhammad is a greater prophet because he is the last prophet, and therefore received the latest updates from God about He wants from His mortal children.

Don’t believe me? You can look it up.

Islam is an Arabic word that means submission to the Will of God. Submission to God is not simply obedience or servitude to God; submission to God also means aspiring to and seeking the goodness of God — liberating one’s soul and being from a state of godlessness in order to attain a state of Godliness.

That statement is so deeply profound you should really spend a few minutes contemplating it. Or years. You should examine that statement from every angle and lighting spectrum. If you can’t understand this statement, you have no chance in Hell of understanding anything else I’ll have to say.

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We must all, every one of us, submit to the Will of God. That is the tenth Universal Truth about God, the Universe, and Everything. You might wonder why I keep repeating that phrase. There is a reason for that, of course.

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God is Every Thing in the Universe. Every Thing in the Universe is God.

That’s the eleventh Universal Truth. There might be a few more of them, but these are the only Truths that I consider to be universal at this precise moment in time.

Oh, and there’s this: we should all take a moment to deeply consider the fact that everything we think we know about God, the Universe, and Everything, and our relationship to all of the above — there’s a very good possibility that everything we think we know about that — is wrong.

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Depending on the scientist or researcher you ask, the world we live in has gone through any number of ages and/or eras to get us to this point in history. The Precambrian Era. The Jurassic Era. The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Rock and Roll Era. The Age of Aquarius…

In terms of Religious Ages, I have come to believe there are three very distinct and different ages that we as the human race have gone through. I don’t know if anyone else has ever conceived this idea either, so you may not find any evidence that corroborates anything I’m about say.

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I call the First Age the Age of Legends. This is the time period from when mankind first developed civilizations, up to the time of the Great Flood. Almost nothing is known about this age — the only remnants of knowledge we have about it are found in the legends of our more recent, ancient ancestors. And the pyramids.

These are the stories about the mythic heroes of yore: Hercules, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Beowulf — and don’t forget all of the epic monsters from hell they battled.

Damayanti, Shakuntala, Pururava, and Urvashi from the Mahabharata. If you’re not familiar with them, you have a lots of reading to do. The Mahabharata is the longest epic poem ever written, and it’s almost as complicated as the rules of Cricket.

This age could also be called the Golden Age of the Gods because they were legion at that time. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of major deities, and hundreds of thousands of minor deities. There were so many gods you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a dozen gods in the back of the head, and then you were likely to be in a whole heap of trouble, son.

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After the Great Flood, there weren’t quite so many gods anymore. And that’s when the Second Age began. Many people don’t believe the stories about the First Age are true. All myths and legends are based on the truth. So yeah, all of those mighty men and gods really walked the earth. And they probably did all of those incredible deeds — that’s why the stories are so entertaining.

The Second Age covers the time period after the Great Flood to the appearance of Jesus. I don’t have a really cool name for this age. It is the Age of The One God for lack of any other title.

If nothing else, we have a pretty good idea what happened during this time period because people started writing stuff down so they wouldn’t forget about it, possibly just in cases there was going to be another Great Flood…

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The Third Age covers the time period from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the present day. I call this time period the Age of the Two Prophets.

Jesus and Muhammad both claimed to have been sent by God to preach the messages they had received from God — The Kingdom of Heaven is upon/within you, and submission to the Will of God is the only path to salvation — and their messages ended up changing the world. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if the world is a better place or not because of them.

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If you can’t understand anything that I’ve laid out in this post, try to wrap your mind around this: At the end of each of the Three Ages of Man, a significant paradigm shift occurred that changed the way we viewed God and our relationship to Him.

We, and by that I mean all of humanity, went from believing in a plethora of gods and goddesses to believing mostly in one God, or no God at all, and from there we received special messages from his two most spectacular prophets/messengers.

Um, excuse me, but are you trying to say that we’re at the end of this Third Age?

That’s another good question. I wish I had a definitive answer for you. The best I can say is I’m not sure. I can’t honestly say this was something I saw when the domino effect kicked in last Christmas Eve, cascading from from one mind-blowing impression to the next in rapid-fire sequence. I received a whole lots of impressions that I’m still trying to sort out, but the end of the world wasn’t one of them. At least, I don’t think it was…

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In my heart of hearts, I sincerely believe that if there was ever a world that needs to be shaken up until it gets its goddamn mind right, we are living on that world. I honestly don’t know how God has been able to put up with all of our collective stupidity for as long as He has.

If I were God, I wouldn’t have stopped with one flood.

When I was a working as a psychiatric nurse, I met people that were so reprehensibly repugnant that if I were God, I would have killed them to death ten times ten thousand times. As they say in Texas, “Them sumbitches needed killing.”

Um. excuse me, again, but do you think you’re some kind of special messenger or prophet sent from God?

Hahaha! Well, if you’ve read my blog, you’d know that my most sincere desire has always been to be a prophet. And my greatest disappointment has been the fact that I didn’t think God had any interest in granting that desire.

I can’t say with any degree of certainty that He has changed His mind about that, even if I may or may not have received His latest updates on His plans for humanity as a whole. And there’s this: given my views on Organized Religion, I have no desire to have my name associated with anything even remotely related to any part of any religion.

If that is God’s plan, I think He could have chosen a much more qualified person than myself, like, you know, Jack Van Impe.

Just in cases you’ve never heard of him, Jack was an American televangelist that knew more about the end of the world than everyone else on the planet, combined. I used to watch his show whenever I needed a laugh because he was a joke of truly epic proportions. He used to rattle off scripture and verse like a has-been actor dropping the names of the A List celebrities they used to hang out with.

I’d be willing to bet there are more than a few of his videos on the YouTube… They’re worth a couple of minutes of your time.

Unfortunately, Jack had the incredible stupidity of dying to death two years ago, so that might be one reason why God, the Universe, and Everything didn’t reveal any of my visions to him…

I am a retired old guy, living in a little village in the Chinese Mountains of South Central Mexico. I write a blog that maybe a dozen people read on a regular basis, and it might be fewer than that now, considering the content of what I’ve been writing lately.

I have no desire to change the world. I wouldn’t know where to begin or how to accomplish Step One, even if God were to give me verbal instructions, which doesn’t appear to be a method He employs.

But what if that is His plan? Then what?

I hope His instructions don’t look like the assembly instructions from Ikea…