It's everywhere. Few of us lack some form of religious belief. But why so much conflict? Is Christianity any better?
Even Communism has been dubbed a religion, with its icons and martyrs and secular high priests and sacred texts. Those who avoid overt religion often fabricate one from a hobby or other activity - like the car or sport or shopping! It has been described as a superstition, a neurosis, the 'opium of the people' and as divine revelation. Religion is a cement that can bind and unify a nation and it can kill.
The last few decades have witnessed an upsurge in religious interest. World faiths asleep for centuries have awakened to a new awareness of their place in the world. Hindu temples have been financed with missionary zeal. Islamic-sponsored expansionism is not far from our daily headlines. The West has been swept by a rising tide of interest in Eastern philosophies and religions - often popularized by show-biz icons. Temples and mosques spring up in most towns and cities, and the numbers of 'non-Christians' multiply.
Faith Wars
Yet human history is a saga of religious conflict. Hindus conduct an on-going 50-year battle with Pakistani Muslims in Kashmir. Muslims seek to oust Christians and Jews. Christians claim sole religious authority and have a centuries-long blood-stained history sustained into our day - even in the United Kingdom. Roman Christians have through the centuries murdered and massacred Jews and Muslims and pagans and Protestants of all hues - who have returned the same with interest. In a recent blood-lust millions of Jews were hideously 'cleansed' from Europe by a power-crazed German leadership motivated by a twisted and demonic perversion of Christianity.
The Muslim faith, too, has become a focus of world attention, as its ancient tenets are interpreted through extremist eyes. And Islamic clerics perceive the Western retaliation for September 11, 2001, as an anti-Muslim Christian crusade akin to the medieval papal Crusades. The world over - and through time - religion has been at the heart of conflict.
Roots of Terror
Religion, then, cannot be seen as a force for peace! From the streets of West Belfast to New York's Twin Towers to the dark caves of Afghanistan, human nature takes its bloody sectarian toll.
The minority Wahhabi Muslims, funded largely from Saudi Arabian oil, propagate their fundamentalist view of Islam in an attempt at global domination. From them stem the Taliban and its al-Qaeda masters. The majority Shi'ite Muslims (based in Iran) meanwhile foment hatred of 'the Great Satan' - the West, but mainly the United States. [Islam is not a monolithic faith but, like Christianity, is a volatile mix of myriad conflicting sects.]
In the eyes of some Islamic leaders, the West deserves all it gets. The notorious (in the West) and still hugely influential late Ayatollah Khomeini - of the Shi'ite sect - wrote: "Islam's holy war is a struggle against idolatry, sexual deviation, plunder, repression and cruelty. ... Those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war". Islamic scholars, in the words of one, foresee that "...the day will come when the whole of mankind will live united under the banner of Islam... But that day must be hastened through our Jihad, through our readiness to offer our lives and to shed the unclean blood of [the non-Muslim]."
Who can quarrel with their motives! Western civilization - 'Christian' civilization - has plummetted to the depths of degradation and prurience. Every level of violence, immorality, disrupted families, abortion, corruption in every corner of society - dominates Western society. Our 'Christian' religion increasingly fails to produces noble, safe and upright nations. Inevitably, the hand of God would fall sooner or later, administered by human agency and by nature. Christians, especially, anticipate judgment to come!
Ancient Source
Western society - especially Anglo-Saxon society - was founded on Biblical principles. Our laws are - were - Biblical laws, reflecting the Ten Commandments and their attendant statutes. Our civilization has been ethically shaped - despite liberal denials - by the Hebrew Scriptures and by the words of Jesus Christ, largely through the widespread dissemination of the Bible.
British Law - now being ruthlessly dismantled with disastrous effect in submission to humanistic rule from Europe - is rooted in the legal system introduced by the 10th century King Alfred. It was virtually a rewrite of the Ten Commandments and selections from the Mosaic code recorded in the Biblical book of Exodus. The same laws were enshrined in the foundation documents of the United States of America.
Three centuries or so ago the rediscovery of Biblical principles - long submerged in the squalor of medieval Christian dogma - led to improving health and hygiene, justice and civility. Now, however, we live off the stored past. The larder has been all but emptied, and our material and spiritual reserves are drained.
In Biblical terms: "The whole head has become diseased, and the whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot up to the head there is nothing sound in it" (Isaiah 1:5, 6).
Parallel Christianity
Can we, however, blame Western failures on Christianity? For there is within Christianity also a 'conflict of religion'. There are, in fact, two parallel faiths named 'Christianity' - one never nationally implemented! Consider.
Overwhelmingly, there is the Christianity you see on the street corner or the high place of a town or village. It's the Anglican or Roman church - or any one of myriad denominations large and small calling themselves Christian. It's the British State religion. It is all pervasive in the United States. Its devotees go to church on Sunday and at Easter and Christmas and on 'saint's days'.
They form a third of the world's population. They don't agree too much doctrinally nor do they overmuch like one another. Historically they have persecuted one another, roasted one another, tortured one another. They have launched Crusades and wars leading to millions of deaths. The current sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland is a snapshot of that past.
Thankfully, the liberal spirit of our times has - at least for now, but not for long - tamed the former grotesque excesses of this form of the Christian religion! Ironically, this same liberal spirit stems from the ethical teachings of Jesus!
For the most part Christians are sincere people. Good people, too, with high ethical standards and enthusiastic in service to the needy and to their church. But sadly misled.from the pulpit. For Christianity has been torn from its Biblical roots and bears only superficial resemblance to the religion of Jesus.
It has been observed that the Christianity which surfaced following the late first century State persecutions is the faith of Jesus only in name.
It changed. No longer were the apostolic admonitions heeded by the established church. The Emperor Constantine [325 A.D.] enshrined this form of distorted Christianity as the State religion of the Roman Empire, persisting to this day.
Warning
Jude (a brother of Jesus) urged his readers to 'earnestly contend for the faith once for all entrusted to God's people'. That faith was summed up by the apostle Paul writing to Timothy: "But you must stand by what you have learned and been convinced of, and remember from whom you have learned it, and from childhood you have known the Scriptures [i.e., the writings in our Old Testament] which can give you the wisdom that through faith in Christ Jesus leads to salvation. All Scripture is divinely inspired and useful in teaching... " (II Timothy 3:14-17)
Some believe that 'the faith once delivered' began with King Henry VIII or John Wesley or some more recent Christian guru! The Bible writers, however, put a clamp on what they had learned - from Jesus, from the Old Testament Scriptures, from the apostles and prophets. The church enshrined those teachings in our Bible.
That Bible - the writings of the Old and the New Testaments - is the only adequate source for Christian belief. Not the 'church fathers', not tradition.
So - can you find your cherished beliefs there, in the Scriptures? Or will you blindly follow your inherited religious tradition? The morality of the Christianity of Jesus and the apostles has over centuries imperceptibly left its mark on world morality. But the 'original' has a minority following. It is not influential. It is despised, rejected - even by most students of the Bible.
Religion is increasingly in conflict. Expect escalating extreme and violent religious conflict!
The apostle John was inspired to record a prophecy of Jesus enshrined in symbolic language. He envisioned a scroll with a sevenfold seal each guarding a sequence of unfolding end-time events in the years leading to the return of Jesus Christ.
The first of these 'seven seals' revealed the 'first horseman of the apocalypse': an end-time aggressively conquering religious movement which 'rode forth as a victor to conquer' (Revelation 6:2). It's a time detailed by Jesus in one of his final addresses to his disciples. He told them: "Take heed that no-one misleads you. For many will come under my name and will say 'I am the Christ [Messiah], and many will be misled by them" (Matthew 24:5). That conflict, said Jesus will herald a time of worldwide bloodshed, disease, famine. Millions will die, Many who tenaciously hold to the teachings of Jesus will be persecuted by the religious authorities which are prophesied to dominate the end-time.
Careful study and application of the Word of God will protect us from that deception.
To comment on this article or request more information, please contact James McBride by e-mail at the comment form below.
For PDF or mailed copy, see CGOM. Excerpt from New Horizons Volume 6 No. 2, March/April 2002. Edited by James McBride of the Churches of God, United Kingdom.
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