*Warning* Religiony ramble...

[breakinglight11]

I don't mean this as a polemic or criticism, but I was thinking about religious discussion recently...

Was thinking about what it’s like for Christians and Jews to discuss religion. The stumbling block, it seems to be, is Christ. Christ is so hard to discuss when he is everything to one side and nothing to the other. By this I mean Christ is SO MUCH to a Christian that he can’t imagine life without Him, and Christ is so little to a Jew that he can’t imagine what difference He makes.

To non-Christians, Christ is at best an abstraction, a theory, perhaps a decent and valid theory, but not one to which you personally subscribe. To a Christian… there isn’t time or space here to get into exactly what Christ is, but simply put, Christ is God, Christ is everything. And it makes all the difference. It makes life different. If you don’t feel that way… how can you know what it’s like to feel that way?

An example of where things break down, I think, is the two faith’s respective interpretations of the prophecy that the coming of the Messiah would usher in the next world. The Jewish argument against the divinity of Jesus is that the next world didn’t come. But see, there’s where the issue of beyond-the-personal-experience comes in. Christians believe yes, he did fulfill the prophecy— that when the world knew Christ, EVERYTHING CHANGED. We changed, life changed, all the world changed. Christ is SO MUCH that He makes all the difference. But a Jew doesn’t see a new world, because the new world is in Christ. Christ makes up the world in which a Christian lives, as much as the air and the light do. How can you imagine a world without air and light? How can you conceive of that, unless you feel it? How can you know, unless you know?

No wonder it’s so damn hard to understand one another.

Comments

[charoolz.livejournal.com]

I guess this is the time I let out my dirty little secret: My mom was Roman Catholic, but I was raised in my dad's religion of Judaism. Now, I know someone is going to ask, "But Chaz, how come you weren't raised as a Roman Catholic then?" I get asked this all the time. Some people even tell me that I need to convert to Judaism, but I'm not going to convert to my own religion after I've had a Bar Mitzvah and all that other Jewish upbringing.

I guess the thing is that after spending a summer in a pick-up truck with a Roman Catholic, and a Muslim, I've had quite a few discussions on religion. After all of this, I guess I've come to realize that it's not about what we can't understand about each other, but what we can. I mean, trying to understand what someone believes or why they believe in it is like trying to read their mind and we can't do that... yet. However, our actions that result from our beliefs have similar morals, such as putting education before everything. I could go on about this.

Anywho, I think what my mom was getting at was that it wasn't really too important what religion I was raised in, but that I was raised in a religion. I hear people say all the time that "it's all the same g-d," but when it really comes down to it, the key to understanding each other is that we all raise our kids the same way. Well, there's probably more to it than that, but it's a start I guess.

[zapf.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but I have to make my obligatory I'm-a-Jew-talking-about-Jesus comment:

"We believe he was a very well-programmed robot, but we don't believe he was the Robot Messiah."

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

And that, my friend, is exactly my point. :-)

[v-cat.livejournal.com]

you make an interesting point...the barrier that I stumble over frequently in my life though is that which is inherent in a discussion between anyone who believe in a higher power and an atheist (for a demonstration mention God sometime in the vicinity of myself and natbudin and see sparks fly). While a Jew and a Christian may lack mutual understanding regarding the role of Christ in the world, A religious (or spiritual if you will) person and an atheist cannot even speak the same language, because each side's understanding on the universe, and the nature and significance of God is so completely alien to the other. At least a Jew can say to himself that Christ holds a similar place in the life of his Christian friend as Hashem does in his own, and then he is able to understand it to some degree. An atheist and a religious man cannot even draw parallels.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

Very true. There aren't any parallels to draw between a theist and an atheist. The gap is even wider there.