Ratan:
When Pope came to India, I saw mostly ceremonies, but nobody seriously sat down with the assembled "priests" from other religions and tried to find a common ground. All the religious heads were talking about their own spiritual prescriptions to other religions.
I was recently reading a book by Joseph Cambell.
Let me give you some excerpts and notes.
Reverend Father H. Heras, a German Jesuit compared the ancient Hindu God Shiva and his very popular son Ganesha as equivalent in a way, to the Father and Son of the Christian Faith. It is not difficult......even the orthodox Christian will recognize the reflex of his own theology in the saints and gods of alien worlds. Mythologies and their dieties are projections of the psyche. ....forms of myth and figure of myth are of the nature essentially of DREAM..Mythological motifs are the same throughout the world........There are MYTHS and LEGENDS of VIRGIN BIRTH, of INCARNATIONS, SECOND COMINGS, JUDGMENTS, and the rest, in ALL GREAT TRADITIONS. These images are from psyche and tell us of its structure, and its forces, in SYMBOLIC TERMS. All the above cannot be interpreted properly as references.......historical events....The difficulty faced today by Christian thinkers ....follows from their doctrine of the NAZARENE AS THE UNIQUE HISTORICAL INCARNATION OF GOD; and in Judaism, likewise, there is NO LESS TROUBLESOME DOCTRINE OF A UNIVERSAL GOD WHOSE EYE IS ON BUT ONE CHOSEN PEOPLE OF ALL IN HIS CREATED WORLD......Ethnocentric spiritualism...poor fare.. not palatable. Good enough for our forefathers....local mythology to represent alien as inferior...Love for at home & project hatred outward....
We are passengers in one space ship Earth. Are we to allow a hijacker aboard? Ancient mythologies of India....entering in force in to European heritage. .....
The differences between the Literal, , the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical ( or mystical) senses of any scripture.
CHRIST JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD....
Literal: Jesus rose alive from the dead
Allegory: Likewise we should also rise from death to eternal life.
MoralLet our minds be turned from the contemplation of mortal things to abide in what is eternal.
Anagogy In death, there is eternal life.
Often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than the abstractly formulated official doctrines.
Sectarian theologicians hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives.
The lives of THREE INCARNATIONS, JESUS, KRISHNA, AND SHAKYAMUNI are the center point of a circle and to that point the symbols point. |
