I was a hard sell, at first; I was reluctant to commit to what I was reading. But it's just so utterly different, better and higher than anything else I'd ever read. And I found myself becoming conscious, gradually, as well, of a kind of "presence" with me as I grew to know Christ. My friends began to tell me I was changing (I didn't believe them, at first.) Eventually, He was just much more persuasive and powerful than a reasonable person could resist. And I began to understand why, even among people who do not accept Christ as God, He is a celebrated figure for his extreme moral clarity, exemplarly pattern and mind-altering teaching.
If you get to know Him at all, it soon becomes the decisive experience of an entire life. He's not Somebody that you can have no opinion about, that's for sure. He makes you decide. And the only way you can avoid it is by stopping, and by closing mind and heart to the truth.
There are two faces to the Christian and to Christianity. One face is the “sincere confession” that situates the belief at such a personal level that one wishes not to be rude or insensitive and therefore can only say “I accept that this is your belief and I am happy for you”.
But there is another face as well: one not partly but totally intolerant. Yahweh, hence Jesus, is a possessive, indeed domineering entity. “Don’t believe in me!?! Then thou shalt fry in horrifying pain for ever and ever!”
The faith-declaration reveals what can only be taken at face-value: a man’s recounting of his spiritual life. All people, in all traditions (especially theistic ones) enter into a “relationship” with something on an inner plane. All recount tales of transformation; encounters that seem (are if you will) directed by a mysterious intelligence.
When asked, all will describe what their inner relationship brings them.
So it must not be taken that I — mere Alexis Jacobi — deny any man’s spiritual experience. No, because that is often the really most important thing a man has.
What I oppose — if that is the right word — is that Other Face that remains concealed until, for various reasons, it then appears baring demonic faces.
Doesn’t the allegory of the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” apply? The docile outward presentation falls away and something more wolfish appears.
Is this
really the /spiritual truth/ about our World? Is that what it is
really like?
I would not deny “spiritual consequences” in this or any other world. But I (seem to) have objections to both the Christian and the Jewish method.
Scratch the surface and there are all sorts of disturbing inconsistencies and an unsettled psychic territory.
Not to mention the bizarre realm of modern Christian Evangelical projection into world-events, present day Israel, “prophecies” and entire realms of hallucination and projection.
All this must be answered for.
