Welcome

Welcome to the Christ Enlight Blog! What I will outline here is a whole new approach to being a Follower of Jesus. I quite intentionally didn't say "Christian", because I truly believe that what passes for institutional Christianity is something that Jesus wouldn't recognize. In fact, I believe it would make him mighty angry.

What do you have to do to become a follower of Jesus? The first step is pretty simple, you just throw out everything you know and start from scratch. While I recognize that isn't really completely possible, you need to do the best job of it you can because we are going to re-examine everything and the more preconceived notions you hold on to the harder it will be for you to engage the process honestly.

There are a few things we are going to take for granted as a starting point. The first is that the Bible was written by men who lived at a particular time in history. They were inspired to write because of their experience of God. God did not dictate the Bible to anyone. How do we know this? We know this because nobody, not even the biblical writers, has ever claimed that God dictated anything to them. It's only in the last 200 years that anybody has claimed that the Bible was dictated - and unless they were very, very old, they didn't write any of the Bible. If you need to believe that it was, I wish you well but this is not the blog or the spirituality for you. Farewell!

All of this means that the Bible, while the product of inspired human beings, does in fact have contradictions and errors in it. The Bible can be used to prove and disprove just about anything when parts of it are taken out of context. We need to relax around the Bible and use our reason and common sense when interpreting it. Since we have forgotten everything we knew about doctrine and dogma, that shouldn't get in the way of the serious work we are going to do.

The second is that God doesn't have a physical body. God does not dwell in the heavens located just above the clouds because human beings have been beyond the clouds and beyond the atmosphere and not located either heaven or God. This doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. It means that God isn't some kind of super-person, or our little buddy with whom we can have a personal relationship. It means, as the Bible says, that God is Spirit, and the day is coming and now is when those who worship God will worship God in Spirit and Truth. Since God doesn't have a physical body as we understand physical bodies, God is neither male or female because God does not have genitals or DNA as we understand DNA. In this blog I will refer to God using personal pronouns at times, mostly because "it" is reserved in the English language for inanimate objects. If it wasn't, I would call Adam Lambert "it".

The third thing you need to take for granted is humor. I have a sense of humor, and if you don't you are going to have a rough go of it reading what I write!

The fourth thing is that most of Jesus' teachings are not about salvation or heaven as we usually think of heaven - the non-existent place beyond the clouds where God lives. The vast majority of Jesus teachings are best understood as wisdom and enlightenment teachings. I think it's fairly apparent what wisdom teachings are. In fact, one of the literary genres in the Bible is Wisdom literature. Enlightenment teachings, for the purposes of the Christ Enlight program, are teachings that are designed to help us see the truth and the reality of everything. They involve the stripping away of the ego, or the false self, or whatever other word you want to use for the part of us that gets in the way of our engaging reality completely. Since most of Jesus' teachings are wisdom and enlightenment teachings, it is these teachings we will focus on in Christ Enlight.

I do believe that if we throw out our doctrine and dogma and then equip ourselves with those four presuppositions: (1) that the Bible was written by human beings and is not perfect, (2) that God doesn't have a physical body or gender, (3) that you need a sense of humor, and (4) that most of Jesus' teachings are wisdom and enlightenment teachings, we are ready to begin!

I welcome your comments, but please be sure to sign them with your first and last name. I do not publish unsigned comments. I also do not publish hate filled comments. I welcome discussion, but if your purpose is to "save" me from anything or for any reason, save your energy because I will delete your comment.

I commit to you that I will publish at least three times a week, quite possibly more. There is a podcast on Christ Enlight available on Itunes. Just go to the Itunes store and search "Christ Enlight". If you don't have Itunes, you may also visit http://cbergland.libsyn.com to listen to the podcast. You may also visit the Christ Enlight website at www.ChristEnlight.org to learn more about the Christ Enlight program.