I would like to clarify a few things. Jesus is the one who said He was the only way. God says in the Ten Commandments that we should worship Him and no other. So, when I state that Jesus is the way to reach God, I am repeating what has already been said.
Further, there is no way that I could possibly compel anyone to believe in a particular fashion. That is way beyond my powers and abilities and I am not going to break my life by trying. I will present Jesus Christ and Him crucified and then leave the results in God’s hands. If He wants to bring about conversion, that is between Him and the other person.
I like to think that I do respect other people even when I disagree with them.
And lastly, a minor point in this conversation, but a major point to my children. I am a woman.
That is an allegorical statement, refering to the internal struggle of the soul to know itself, overcome the delusions of form and the ego-mind, and to reconnect with God. Jesus and Buddha were on the same page - theaching about the inner struggle against fear and delusion - but humans misunderstood a lot of what they taught and warped their words into tools of vengeance for one collective ego-mind cult to use against another. We are seeing the Islamic ego-mind cult's particular misunderstanding of the Truth peaking at the moment.
Mistranslation and misunderstanding rendered "I am the only way" into a "literal truth" allowing the Christian ego-mind cult to kill anyone who didn't believe that, and got a lot of people burned as witches and heretics.
i think in reviewing my last post that I came across as a little bit harsher than I meant to. I want to make it clear that I respect your views. But at the same time I think it should also be stated that ancient religions including Christianity had different levels of meaning. Many of the early Christians emphasized “the Mysteriesâ€. St clement and Origen pointed out that if anything seemed to harsh by God look for a deeper meaning. I think that Christ as a symbolic representation as the higher self in a person is in fact the way to spiritual evolution. And that is also true of the other religions who use a symbolic God like form to represent their higher selves.
I think Christianity has been a good fit for this country it is a system that works by causing the evolution of the Character. I think it got that from it’s Buddhist roots.