The Myth of Christianity
By William Bezanson
About 3,000 years ago, the people of Greece believed that twelve immortal gods and goddesses lived up high, out of sight, on Mount Olympus, and that they monitored and influenced everyday life for normal mortals.
Those were the Olympians, the divine pantheon of ancient Greek culture. Zeus was the chief god, Hera was his wife, and the other ten were all related to them. Belief in this pantheon and its meddling in human affairs comprised the ancient Greek religion.
And these gods really did meddle in human affairs, according to the Greek myths. For example, during the Trojan War, as related by Homer in The Iliad, there were many direct interferences with the course of the war. When Paris shot an arrow at Achilles (a Greek leader) Apollo, the god of light, music, and enlightenment, being angry with Achilles, deliberately influenced the arrow to strike him in his heel, his only vulnerable body part (his “Achilles heel”), thereby killing him.
The common people took these stories seriously; they prayed to the gods, offered sacrifices to them, and looked to them for guidance in conducting their affairs and for defeating their enemies.
Now, in our modern era, some 3,000 years later, we enlightened and sophisticated folk look back in amusement at those simple Greeks. How juvenile they were! Imagine believing that there existed a pantheon of deities that deserved worship and interfered with human lives!
Well … let us stop and consider our own situation. Imagine 3,000 years from now, in our future. What will the even more enlightened folk at that time think of our own religions?
Let’s just consider Christianity, our current main religion in the Western world. It proclaims a divine pantheon of three gods (or four, if you count Mary, as the Roman Catholics now do, since 1950) somehow united into one God, residing up high, out of sight, in Heaven, monitoring and influencing everyday life for normal mortals.
Yes, that is the Christian myth, just as the Greek myths comprised the religion for the ancient Greeks. In our case, we pray to our God, we worship It, we plead with It to interfere with life here on earth, we attribute certain “miracles” to It’s intervention, and in many ways we firmly believe that we are under the influence of God.
What will those future observers think of us? How silly those earlier people were, they will perhaps think, to believe superstitiously in some divinity or divinities in some ethereal domain, responding to some petitioners, ignoring others, and pulling the strings of their naïve, subservient, human puppets! Did they not learn from the ancient Greek religion of some 3,000 years earlier?
What I am critical of is not the notion or study of religion, but of organized religions, such as the way the organized Christian Church evolved, with dogmas, creeds, rules, restrictions, boundaries, rituals, scriptural interpretations, canons, and other forms of structure on how people must think in order to be members of their religious institutions.
Note that “myth” does not mean “false.” Myths are not just stories or artificial, childish delusions. Myths are conveyers of spiritual truths. A myth is a public dream; a dream is a private myth, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell. What a dream is to an individual person, a myth is to a culture or clan or society. The Dream Maker (that is, our deep psyche, or the collective unconscious) sends us dreams for compensation, as observations of what it sees, and for guidance. The Myth Maker (that is, the deep psyche of a culture, or the collective unconscious of a group) inspires poets, artists, and writers to record stories that through wide acceptance evolve into myths, for compensation, as observations of what it sees, and for guidance for a society or culture.
In the case of Christianity, the main documentation for its pantheon is in the New Testament of the Bible. The Bible is to be interpreted not literally or historically, but symbolically, poetically, and mythologically.
It is not worshipping the God/Man Jesus that is important, but in developing and nurturing the esoteric Christ-consciousness within each of us, so that we can grow, and our species can evolve, to full (spiritual) maturity.
A universal belief system based on myth and allegory gradually evolved into a ritualistic institution headed by ultraconservative literalists who were desperate to preserve their power. The Church leadership wanted passive obedience, not karmic self-responsibility. But now, blind faith in literalism is killing Christianity. By returning to an inclusive religion in which Christ lives within each of us, we can gain a true understanding of who we are and who we are intended to become. And our religions will evolve as we gradually become more ready for our spiritual evolution.
If only our spiritual leaders and teachers would loosen up and teach us to treat Christianity as mythology! What beautiful, occult Truth remains hidden esoterically in the teachings of that great religion! What amazing spiritual growth remains to be experienced by people as they meditate on those myths, relate their own dreams to the myths, and receive their teachings directly from God!
It is hard to see what a situation looks like when one is embedded within it. It is hard to imagine that 3,000 years from now people (including us, in future incarnations) might look back on us as immature and naïve to have allowed a myth such as Christianity to flourish. The Greeks who followed their religion fervently, some 3,000 years earlier, would likely never consider that their views were wrong and that within a few millennia a whole new view of divinity would emerge. Similarly, we find it very difficult to step outside our organized religious model of Christianity and to envision that we might be wrong, and that before too long in the future, a whole new model might emerge for us to adopt as a religion.
In my own case, I prefer to look beyond the reality of a religious model to the actuality that I have glimpses of during my mystical moments. I prefer to urge the major organized religious institutions to rebalance their teachings by adopting an equitable share of half-religion, half-mysticism for their adherents. I prefer to honour the beauty of a religious tradition at the same time as exploring the awesomeness of a mystical attunement with God. I promote a reasonable balance between religion and mysticism in the spiritual lives of humankind, for the purpose of evolving mankind’s spirit and saving the world.
Thank you for reading this article. My hope is that it will be helpful for you in examining what spiritual path to follow, as you try to understand Truth.
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About the Author
William Bezanson writes a monthly column for OMTimes, and books on world stewardship and systems design. His latest book, published in September 2014 is I Believe: A Rosicrucian Looks at Christianity and Spirituality. The above article was adapted from that book, with permission. To read about his books, see his website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/bezanson1 . Bezanson lives with his wife in Ottawa, Canada.
That’s just it! To your point, mythology is still alive today, and it’s second nature. I don’t look back and think, “those Greeks and their myths, what loons!” I think, “Wow, look how us Christians, and those Greeks, with entirely different backgrounds, came to the same conclusion.” We both believe in a higher power and we both have stories that express how that higher power helps us in our lives. It doesn’t make either false, or even merely symbolic. It just means that as humans, we naturally see God in our lives, and then tell people stories about it. That’s how omnipresent God is. He is everywhere, even to the Greeks, even to us Christians, even to the people 3000 years from now, even if we’re completely secluded and no one tells us anything about Him, we all have experiences of Him.