RELIGION UNITY IS A MUST

" Sometime, between 3500 and 4000 years ago, a small Semitic tribe surrounded by highly sophisticated and literate ancient civilizations began to form its own theology. A theology that would shake the world and change the course of world history.

In forming this theology, the tribe redefined many of the myths and legends coming from the civilizations that had existed before it. It also added many of its own. Out of this grew a new and different view of the nature of GOD and man’s relationship to Him.

This new view saw a monotheistic God, not only as an all-powerful creator of our Universe, but also as a demanding God for a new kind of ethical order from His people. This ethical order extended far beyond the ethical order demanded by the Gods of the other religions.

The Garden of Eden and the Great Flood were not events to be viewed in mythical terms as they had been in Sumerian scriptures , which dated back another 1000 years or more. They were events that happened on earth and they were real.

The first man, Adam, was real. Abraham, their first patriarch, was real. The tablets brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses containing the Ten Commandments were real. Later in their history, King David was real.

These stories as well as the laws that grew out of them and were spelled out in their Hebraic language were from their own tribal God, Yahweh, and they were real.

The history of their belief and consciousness , would set the foundation of three great religions over the next 6000s years, and will distinguish the twenty first century Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism and orthodoxy.

As they looked inward in their search for the meaning of their existence, this small and unknown Semitic tribe also began to see themselves as unique among all other tribes. They saw themselves as being Chosen and the idea of being separate from others in GOD’S eyes was born.
At first they passed all of this on from generation to generation by word of mouth and then later in writing in their Torah.

According to one story, their Nation of Israel represented a favored brother, named Jacob, whom GOD loved. The other brother, named Esau, representing all other nations, GOD hated.

Why, no one ever tell.

With this Covenant came the call for obedience to their God. He told them what He expected from them and what they could expect from Him. He had chosen their nation to carry out His Word. He had chosen them to fulfill a special role in His great plan.

To do this, they must obey only Him.

He was their God alone. The Gods worshiped by the other nations were powerless and irrelevant. He told them: Thou shall have no other Gods before me.

Over the course of many generations, with this belief in a direct line of authority from GOD, came the seeds of argument, debate, and ultimately conflict.

The message was from GOD, but the interpretation of the message often had different meanings. The interpreter of the Word was always human.

Was the interpreter getting the message right?
What did the message of their God really mean?
Why were there ambiguities in interpretation?

These ambiguities became even greater when, 1500 years later, men began to write about the life and death of Jesus Christ, the long awaited Messiah, whose coming had been prophesied in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Now, for many, both the Hebrew Bible and the canon of new scriptures described the life and death of Jesus Christ were the WORD of GOD.

For the followers of Jesus Christ the cycle was now complete and the nature of GOD was revealed.

Most of the Jews did not accept Jesus and his teachings. The view of the nature of their God had suddenly become very different. And their relationship to Him had changed.

He was not the same God.

He was not a unforgiving judgmental God to be feared of as He was shown to be in the Hebrew Bible. He was now a God of love and compassion.

He was incapable of cause and impose punishment on His people. In fact He was a God who showed sorrow over the pain and suffering of His people. He had offered His own son as a sacrifice to show the depth of His love. And His covenant was now with all nations not just with the Nation of Israel.

This new concept of GOD clashed with the one that the Jews had accepted from the very beginning of their history. As a result, the argument over the interpretation of the WORD of GOD and HIS relationship to those interpreting HIS message became more complex and increased in intense.

Then came another change.
Six hundred and ten years after the appearance of Jesus Christ, in the ancient Arabian city of MAKKAH, angels began to speak to a illiterate man called Muhammad and a third interpretation of the nature of the God of both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles was declared.

A new religion from the descendents of Ishmael was born. The Prophet Muhammad proclaimed that the Hebrew and the Christian view of GOD had been corrupted, and the only true view of GOD was the one given to him by the Angel Gabriel.

If the view of the nature of GOD had changed, then how could all that had been written and said about Him be true? These questions did not find solutions in scholarly disputes. They gave rise to deeper issues.

But Islam was not the end of the search for GOD.
Fifteen hundred years after Jesus Christ came another catastrophic event that reshaped the view of the nature of GOD and how humans are meant to respond to HIM.

The Protestant Reformation had begun.
The Christian Church itself was split in two, leading to generations of bloody warfare.

Then, in 1945 a clay jar was found in Nag Hammadi , Egypt. In it were found early gospels, now known as the Nag Hammadi Library. These newly discovered lost Gospels pictured a Jesus very different from the one historically recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, so different in fact as to place into doubt two thousand years of Catholic, as well as the Protestan Church.

Who is right and who is wrong?
Who is Chosen and who is not?
Who is saved and who is not?
Who is predestined and who is not?

These became bloody contentious issues.

These many issues have not been resolved. They still irritate the followers of the three religions. As they have been in the past, they continue to be a major cause of conflict. Pointing to the authentically of their scriptures and their own interpretations of these scriptures, fanatics within nations and in some cases the nations themselves openly justify their actions as the will of GOD.

They claim to be Chosen to carry out His will. This fanaticism has developed into social and political conflict of such proportion and potential danger that it may now threaten civilization itself.

For the religions of Abraham, after over four thousand years of religious history, this is the dangerous and unstable path on which they find themselves as they enter the 21st century. It is a path spread with the corpses and parts of those who have rotten as a result of the primitive disregard of those fanatics toward the non-fanatics of Muslims, Jews and Christians .

It is a path of meaningless disobedience of respect for the idea that there are natural laws, laws that control our environment and determine the survival of the human species on Planet Earth.

How did we get to this path?
Where is it leading us to?
How much time do we have to change course?

The time has come to think about the human condition in the 21st century and in the centuries beyond to examine the foundations of the three religions of Abraham, and their unity.

The time has come to look at these religions with minds liberated from the load of past religious belief tied to the corruption of the fanatical scholars of the three religions and the theologies that have given us out of them.