What I believe, part 4
Wrong Understanding of Christ's Teaching
I now understand that when Christ said, "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth', but I say for you not to fight against evil…" when he said that, he was saying, "You have learned from the time you were babies that it is smart, right and good to fight against evil with force, to hit back, to use courts, policemen, and armies to protect yourselves from your enemies; but I am saying for you not to do this, not even to do it to your 'enemies'."
I now understand that he was not only talking about a change that should happen in each person, and the effect that it would have on them for all time; but he was also talking about the effect it would have on the world around them right now. He wanted to make the whole world free from evil, and he alone knew the way to do it. He was saying, "You think that your laws are stopping evil, but they are only making it worse. There is only one way to end evil, and that is by returning good for evil. For thousands of years you have been doing it your way. Now try my way."
That is how I understand it; but others think differently.
I have talked to many different people about this law of Christ – that is, not fighting against evil people. At times people (not many) would agree with me. But there are two groups of people who would never give in to even the smallest piece of what I was saying. They always strongly argued for punishing evil people. And, strange to say, we often think of these two groups of people as being wholely opposite. They are the hard-line Christians and the hard-line Communists! They both argue strongly for the right to kill their enemies. The smartest of them will not agree to the simple truth that if you say it is right for you to kill your enemies, you are no better than your enemies, who say it is right for them to kill you. Why is it so difficult for people to understand what Christ is saying? It is because we have built our whole lives on the very things that he is against, and we do not want to change. The so-called believers say that Christ is God, and that he came to earth to show us how to live. They plan perfectly even the smallest actions to make their religious meetings run smoothly, to put up buildings, to send out missionaries, to make people priests, to lead their followers, and to make their teachings perfect. But they forget one little thing – and that is to do what he told us to do.
The people who are not believers also plan their lives without listening to the law of Christ, saying only that it will never work. What is most strange about all of this is that both sides, the believers and those who do not believe, have said that it is not possible to do it Christ's way, when no one on either side has even tried to do it his way!
Christ has said it so simply and clearly: The law that punishes evil is false, and will not work. And he gives another law which he says will work, and that is the law of not hitting back. He says, "You have tried it your way for thousands of years and still you have not destroyed evil. It is only getting worse. Do what I do and see if it isn't true."
He did more than teach this for others; for his whole life, and in his death, he himself lived by this law of not fighting against the evil person. Believers hear all this. They read it in their churches. They say the teachings are from God, and that Jesus was God. But they also say, "It will not work in this life. It would force us to change things that we do not want to change; so we will say that it is something we should pray for, but not something that we can do in our own strength."
Others, who do not believe – the free-thinkers – say most seriously that Christ's teaching was good enough for the poor uneducated people of the country that he lived in, but that it is only a sweet dream for today's world. They think that Christ was too stupid to understand things as they understand them. If he had been educated as well as these smart people have been educated then he would (they say) have understood that all his talk about the birds of the air, about turning the other cheek, about not worrying about the future, is just empty talk.
But these people are only mirroring the spirit of the so-called believers. Both sides have too much faith in our present way of life, with its prisons, companies, newspapers, prostitutes, and political leaders, to ever question it. So they only take from the teachings of Christ what they can take without changing the way they live. And because all that Christ said was against our way of life, they take nothing but empty words. The educated people see and hear what the church is saying, and as they are not forced to say that it is what God wants, they (rightly) laugh at the church and argue against it. But the end is that they too finish up believing that there never was anything in Christ's teachings that would work, because they never saw it working in the church.
Before judging Christ's teachings, these people should take time to understand what he said. And before saying that his teachings will not work, these same people should first agree that he did tell us what he did tell us. But that is what both the Church and the free-thinkers will not do, and we know why they will not do it too.
We know that in all of his teachings, Christ was against the gods of this world, the empty idols that we try to make into something real by giving them names like church, country, science, art, and progress. And Christ was not the only one who was against these things. All of the prophets before him called on people not to put their faith in such empty idols too.
| The picture of the new house will seem… only a dream. |
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Think of it this way: A builder says to a man, "Your house is bad, and it must be taken down so that we can build a new house in its place." Then the builder gives the man a plan for how the house must be taken apart, and where the new pieces will go. The man does not listen to the words about the house being bad, and the need to take it down, but, in trying to show that he likes the builder, he says many good things about the plan for the new house. Yet in the end, if the man is not willing to take down the old house, the picture of the new house will seem to him and to those who listen to him talking about the picture, only a dream by a stupid builder… a dream that can never be. And this is what has happened with the way people think about Christ's teachings.
Christ said much the same thing to the builders of religion in his day; and because of what he said, they believed that they had heard him say, "I will destroy your temple, and in three days build a new one." And for this they killed him.
If people are going to judge a teaching, surely the right thing to do is to judge it in the way that the teacher himself was teaching it. Jesus did not think his teaching was impossible to obey, and he did not think of it as a dream, or as a lie to control people. He understood it as a tool to save the world, if only people would obey him. He was not dreaming when he died for this teaching; and the same can be said for others who died for it after Jesus, and for people who are still dying for it today. It is not right to say that such a teaching is a dream.
Every true teaching is a dream to those who do not re-ceive it. The world says (and I was one with them in the past) that the teaching of Jesus is a dream, because it goes against the way we were made, and the way that people feel.
They say that it is not "natural" for people to turn the other cheek when someone hits them; it is not natural to give what you own to another person; it is not natural to work for others when you could be working for yourself. What is natural, they say, is for a man to fight to keep his family, himself, and his wealth safe. The most educated lawyers will argue that they can prove that our most holy job is to fight for our freedom to do what we want to do.
But I would say that there are equally strong arguments to prove that the way people now act is not "natural" either. Who could say that people just naturally like to see others go through pain or death? No, the truth is that we just naturally turn away from such evil. (I know of people who live on farms who have stopped eating meat just because they themselves were forced to kill their own animals to do so.)
But we live in a world where pain and death are the price that some must pay for others to grow rich. The whole world works because some people do the hurting and killing so that others can live a comfortable life. Is this "natural"? The truth is that this way of doing things only works if we can hide the truth about all the pain that others are going through, from ourselves and from others. We do this because the truth is so opposite to what we would naturally choose.
How many judges would say that the prisoner must be killed, if the judge himself or herself had to kill the prisoner with his or her own hands? How many judges would themselves pull a poor worker away from his crying wife and children to put him in prison? How many soldiers would themselves choose to kill other people like themselves if there were not a hundred rules and laws squeezing and forcing them into doing what very few of us would choose to do on our own?
All this killing and hurting only happens because we are each a part of a big machine that forces us to go against our natural feelings, in the name of "God" or the "King" or just our "country". We are each told to just do our job, and not to ask questions. And if we each do that, no one person is forced to live with all the guilt we would feel if we ourselves were to chose for it to happen this way. Some write the laws; others use the laws; a third group teaches people to obey the laws; and the last group has the job of punishing people who do not obey the laws. Even when people feel a natural desire to love and forgive the person who was wrong (as most of us do when we know the prisoner), they are forced by the big machine to act against what comes naturally.
Start to question the law of the land, and it will not take long to see that the law of Christ is the one that most of us would naturally lean toward if we were to hear an evil person asking for forgiveness. And if we could see all the people in the world who must go without so that we can have money in the bank and the best food on our tables, being rich would stop being so "naturally" easy for us too. If we could see how many lives have been destroyed in prisons, and how the souls of the police and soldiers themselves have been destroyed by their line of work, we would start to question such a high price just to protect the few things we own.
There is the animal part of us that will naturally hit back; but there is more to us than that. There is our reason too, which only needs to understand the law of Christ in its full meaning, with all of the effects that would come from following it, to know that Christ was teaching us to stop what is not natural for us, and to put an end to the sad dream that two wrongs will make one right.
How can people say that Christ's teaching about not hitting back is an impossible dream, when they see men and women destroying the spirit of love that God put into them, just because their jobs tell them that they must be part of the killings, the wars, and the cruel prisons that we are told are so important to life as we know it today? If people will not look at the truth about what is happening in the world, then I must say that they are the ones who are living in a dream. And it is a very cruel dream from which we should all awake.
God came to earth; and this God, we were taught to think, said things that were so difficult to understand that we needed miracles and the help of the Church to open up the secret truth behind them. But now I see that the Word of God is not so difficult to understand at all. All he says is to stop returning evil for evil and in time there will be no evil. Is it possible that what God wants to tell the world is as easy to understand as that? It is like our hearts have been telling us this all along, but we have just not been listening.
If you see changes for the better in the world, ask yourself if those changes came from the people who hit back, or if they came from the people who turned the other cheek. Did changes that give us kinder prisons, fewer killings through the courts, more honest police, and a desire to hold off on starting wars come from the people who argued for the law of the land, or from those who argued for the law of Christ? Can all the soldiers in the world equal the good that was done by one Man dying on a cross in love for the world? Fire does not destroy fire, and evil does not destroy evil. Only good can destroy evil, and it does this by meeting evil without being changed by it. No law of science could be more true than that. People may try to hide the truth of it from others, but that will never stop it from working each time a person turns the other cheek. Each step forward in true progress for the world has been on the road where people who choose not to hit back are walking. In the face of the cruelest actions against us, all true followers of Christ can say with more confidence than any scientist has in any of the laws of science: "Evil will only be changed by turning the other cheek and not by hitting back."
If progress is slow, it is only because the simple truth of what Christ taught has been covered by some of the most evil and dangerous teachings… teachings that the church has falsely told people are Christ's teachings.