Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Who is Saved and How
Conservative Greek Orthodox (Old Calenderists, a VERY small vanishing minority, who embody early centuries of thought) say that "the judgment of God is a mystery to man. They see their faith of the first seven ecumenical councils as an ARK or SHIP of salvation, BUT someone adrift on a plank in the ocean may also be saved. Moving to the Zoroastrians whose religion dominated Babylon (King Darius during the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews), the Zoroastrian/Parsi religion is the first to speak of a final judgment, and "a lake of fire" like purgatory, which the righteous find soothing but the wicked find torment... yet all will eventually be saved, perfected (though some as by fire.) Hindus/Buddhists/Taoists see their cosmology as vast cycles of creation, preservation, destruction of galaxies, universes, black holes, stretching across billions of years. Each soul, atman, jiva (or anatman for Buddhist) is sort of like a spark from the Paramatman light of Brahman and will be reborn countless times until it is purified and reabsorbed into the Brahmajoyti (divine light) . Plato's Republic speaks of the State or Society as a macrocosm of the soul written in large letters, the soul being a microcosm of the state/society. We can see a certain evolution and perfection of world government over the centuries. Some religions, including the Abrahamic Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions see only one cosmic creation, one birth, one death, one ressurection, one judgment, BUT acknowledge the possiblity that many souls rejoin the divinity and become part of the divinity. Gandhi made a careful study of Christianity while a law student in England but rejected it as a personal religion because he saw the British sin in the most casual of fashions and when he inquired they explained that they are constantly, mystically washed and cleansed and forgiven by their baptismal waters and the substitutional atonement of the crucifixion. Gandhi said "I do not seek merely to escape the consequences of my wrong doing but if possibly I want to extinguish wrong doing at its very source. Both the Protestant Reformation and Islam display a belief that IF one pays lip service to professing certain doctrines then one will be forgiven for an inherently wicked nature. Islam does value orthopraxy (correct action) over orthodoxy (correct dogma.)
