The Whole Truth

seeking the truth

While the apparent contradictions in Genesis are easily reconciled, the apparent contradictions between Christianity and Islam (was Christ the Son of God, for example) seem to bother people more. However, I remember that Muhammad was reacting to the very human failings of the Orthodox / Catholic churches which he encountered. It sometimes appears to me that Muhammad over reacted to these misunderstandings of Christian teachings by restricting any changes in Islam (e.g. innovators are described as a great threat to Islam), but then when you consider the horrible sectarian violence in Islam within just years of Muhammad's death, then the focus on unity and no new interpretations is understandable.

It is also true that we really don't know what Christ actually said. He almost certainly made his teachings in Aramaic, but the gospels we have readily available to us are all in Greek¹ and date from many years after his death. Further, when the gospels which we know as the canonical New Testament were selected from the hundreds of gospels which were written after the death of Christ, the men who chose those particular gospels seem to have been very concerned about the sectarian violenmce amongst Christian sects which prompted the development of this church doctrine.

It also sometimes seems to me that these men may have gone too far in the direction of centralized control for the Orthodox / Catholic churches which they helped found. While these men were certainly divinely inspired, I wonder how much their human failings influenced their choices. Of course the Orthodox / Catholic churches which we have today are², I believe, much improved by the challenges which Islam and the later Protestant movement presented. It may well be that these 'faults' were necessary to provide for the purification which resulted from the these very excesses.

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1 From the perspective of accurately understanding the teachings of Christ, the translation to Greek is unfortunate as Aramaic seems to be a much richer language for spiritual issues than Greek. It is likely that much of the richness of Christ's teachings was lost in the translation, but most of the world did not understand Aramaic so that a canonical translation was necessary if only to limit secatrian violence amongst Christians.

2 It is a little deceptive and counter productive to talk about the Catholic / Orthodox churches. For example, there is really no such thing as the Roman Catholic Church, there are simply groups of people, some of whom identify with that church and some of whom don't. However, each person is worthy of our love and compassion. There are many fine Christians in the Roman Catholic Church who would be great examples for any of us, and, of course, there are also many people in the church who are struggling with problems and who are worthy of our love and compassion (which is my way of saying that the Roman Catholic Church has its human failings). The problem with grouping people together is that it allows us to dehumanize them, becoming 'them' and 'us'. That is the fundamental cause of wars and much unnecessary conflict in my opinion. By considering each person separately and responding to them as they are we can each do our part in making this a better world.

This page was last updated on October 20, 2010