The 2 ^nd Step: Universal Salvation & Beyond

A few weeks after taking my FIRST STEP ("willing sacrifice") back down to the 'real world', I started reading my Bible with a different eye. I was no longer interpreting the Bible according to the doctrinal bias of what I had been 'told' it said, but rather I simply allowed the Bible to 'speak' for itself. I was amazed at what I found. Where before I saw judgment and anger and pettiness—"You must believe this way or you'll go to Hell!"—I now saw unconditional love, universal salvation, and the abolishment of eternal damnation. *

I did not know it at the time, but my suspicion that all may eventually be 'saved'—there could still be punishment, but not eternal punishment, which seemed a grotesque case of overkill—opened another 'door' in me and became my SECOND STEP ("universal salvation") back to the 'real world'.

This realization was ultimately LIBERATING.

It removed from me completely any fear of death, the threat of judgment, and the concern that I might do something or read something or believe something 'wrong'. I saw that through the grace of God, I was (like Gnossos Pappadopoulis) exempt and free to ask questions, examine evidence I might have otherwise considered 'unchristian', 'naturalistic', 'unorthodox', even 'heretical', and explore new paths. Because I was no longer afraid of 'upsetting' God (as if I, a mere mortal, might upset an omnipotent and omniscient God) I could consider religious topics with an open mind and place the search for 'truth' above the need to 'toe the line' for the sake of narrow religious 'belief'. Instead of listening to one pastor (or a select few dogmatic elders) explain to me what God wanted or what was 'right' and what was 'wrong', I was freed to think for myself, look for myself, search for myself, and make up my own mind. I no longer acquiesced to a single voice or narrow point-of-view but was permitted to pursue a thousand avenues of inquiry. It was no longer a question of 'right or wrong' or 'true or false' or 'belief or disbelief' but what does the evidence actually show? What are the facts? How do religious claims add up to the way we know the 'real world' works? Do such claims coincide with reality or exist only as words on paper, exhortations from the pulpit, solely within the confines of language? Can I point to Hell or can I only point to the word 'Hell'? Heaven? Soul? Afterlife? God? Do words make reality or is reality what remains after you silence the words?

I remembered what Tesia said to me from years previous: "Truth is the silence, don't you see? Anything that is spoken, written, read is not real at all."

And for the first time I knew exactly what she meant.

I deliberated for weeks on the notion of universal salvation. I also knew that if there wasn't universal salvation then there was something else I needed to do, but I wouldn't be able to do it until the timing was right. I had to get my head around it first—and strengthen my resolve—if I was to make the pronouncement that might cost me my soul. This would come to fruition a few months later in the form of my THIRD STEP.

I went out into the world a new creature, my eyes filled with awe and wonder. I had taken Jesus' admonition of Matthew 18:3-4 to heart and become again as a little child. Everything seemed novel and untested, vibrant and alive. I had been unloosed newsprung from coercion and submission, the distraction of guilt, the threat of damnation, and freed to search for 'truth' (whatever it may be) with inexhaustible energy.

The first thing I really wanted to drill into was how religion—religious thought, traditions, practices—got started. I always assumed it all happened pretty much the way conveyed in the world's sacred books, but I realized this couldn't be the case. They couldn't all be correct, even though each sect and denomination believed that theirs' was, in fact, the only true and bona fide religious institution. I realized that most believers, regardless of their denomination or sect, had not been given information contrary to or unsupportive of the articles of their faith—and that was understandable. Religious groups had an insulated agenda motivated both by separatism and doctrinal bias, an exact and prepossessed interpretation of scriptures that disunited them from other disciplines. Most often this bias began arbitrarily at birth, decided by the continent, country, and culture into which the believer was born. Indoctrinated by parental partisanship, reinforced through social setting, the believer was raised to believe a certain way, embrace a certain ideology, conditioned and cocooned from unrealized alternatives and the inability to consider these alternatives as anything other than evil, human foolishness, or the demonic perversion of some supernatural 'truth'. For the most part a person born in Riyadh will become a Muslim, a person born in Tel-Aviv a Jew, in Salt Lake City a Mormon, in Milan a Roman Catholic, and so on from country to country, city to city, household to household all around the world. Statistically most people embraced the faith of their parents who in turn embraced their parents' faith, receding further back in a long generational queue. Believers traditionally believed the way they did simply because of where and how they were raised, and most conversion experiences were nothing more than an acceptance of the god of their childhoods and the sacred book used to extol that god. Simply put, if I had been born in India, Iraq, or China would I have been as sure, confident, and defensive of my religious traditions there as I was in Seattle?

I meant to find out.

After a lot of careful research and 'shopping-around' I purchased eight books: Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his four volume The Masks of God series (Primitive Mythology, Occidental Mythology, Oriental Mythology, and Creative Mythology), Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, and Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. I hunkered down in my rooms and did nothing but read, as often and as long as I could in between school, work, and homework. After three weeks I exited my lair, filled to the brim with new and mind-boggling information, blinking and squinting under the light. I'd been blown away.

What all my reading had presented to me, what it had demonstrated with clear, precise, and scholarly language, was how religious traditions evolved from common ancestral concerns: life and death, the sun and moon, birth and regeneration, the seasons, weather patterns, planting and harvest. A lot of religious writing was also political (it was interpreted to enrich the community) and archetypal (it was interpreted to explain the individual). From the simpliest religious concepts to the most complex, an examination of religious writing as it developed over time clearly demonstrated religion's evolutionary nature. It grew, altered, changed, advanced, depending on local circumstances. It also freely appropriated 'ideas' as it came in contact with other myths, stories, and traditions.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered this was also true of Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (Old and New Testaments).

Because I had to begin somewhere, I began by studying the Jewish concept of death, the afterlife, and eschatology as it evolved in the Bible and how it was influenced by outside interaction (e.g., with the Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, etc). The ancient Hebrews emphasized the importance of the present life over the afterlife. As with both the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians, the afterlife, if it was considered at all, was conceived of as a pale shadow of earthly life, much like the Greek Hades. Also similar to the Greek Hades, in the Hebrew afterlife no distinction was made between the treatment of the just and the unjust after death. Instead, rewards and punishments were meted out in the present life, and in the covenant "contract" Yahweh promised to do just that.

Reflection on the inequalities of this life and on the apparent failure of Yahweh to make good on his covenant promises led serious religious thinkers to consider the option of resurrection. The resurrection of ordinary human beings seems to have originated in the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism (see Zoroastrianism: The Forgotten Source by Stephen Van Eck). As a result of several centuries of Persian control of the Middle East region, Jews were brought into contact with Zoroastrian religious ideas and the notion of resurrection. Zoroaster (Zarathustra) combined resurrection with the idea of a final judgment, in which the entire human race is resurrected and individuals rewarded or punished. This concept clearly appealed to Jewish religious thinkers of the time as an adequate way of coming to grips with the injustices that were so apparent in this life (further discussion, see Parsis: Zoroastrianism).

As implied in the Book of Daniel, the Jewish notion of resurrection in the Maccabeean period was tied to a notion of judgment, and even to separate realms for the judged. In rabbinical thought, the model for heaven was Eden. The rabbinic word for Hell, "Gehenna", is taken from the name of a valley of fire where children were said to be sacrificed as burnt offerings to Baal and Moloch (Semitic deities). Gehenna is a place of intense punishment and cleansing. This place is also known as "Sheol" and other names. This line of Jewish thought argues that after death the soul has to be purified before it can go on the rest of its journey. The amount of time needed for purification depends on how the soul dealt with life. One Jewish tradition states that a soul needs a maximum of 11 months for purification, which is why, when a parent dies, the kaddish (memorial prayer) is recited for 11 months. The concept of Gehenna as a place for temporary purification was the source for the orthodox Christian doctrine of "purgatory."

The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus stated that the Pharisees, the Jewish sect that founded rabbinic Judaism to which Paul once belonged, believed in reincarnation. He writes that the Pharisees believed the souls of evil men are punished after death. The souls of good men are "removed into other bodies" and they will "have power to revive and live again."

From time to time in Jewish history, there had been an insistent belief that their prophets were reborn. Reincarnation was part of the Jewish dogmas, being taught under the name of "resurrection". Only the Sadducees, who believed that everything ended with death, did not accept the idea of reincarnation. Jewish ideas included the concept that people could live again without knowing exactly the manners by which this could happen.

Josephus records that the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls lived "the same kind of life" as the followers of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who taught reincarnation. According to Josephus, the Essenes believed that the soul is both immortal and preexistent, necessary for tenets for belief in reincarnation.

The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Jewish mystical tradition of divine union went back to the first, perhaps even the third century B.C.E. Jewish mysticism has its origins in Greek mysticism, a system of belief which included reincarnation. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the hymns found are similar to the Hekhaloth hymns of the Jewish mystics. One text of hymns gives us clear evidence of Jewish mysticism. The text is called "Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice." Fragments of 1 Enoch, which is considered the oldest text of Jewish mysticism, were also found with the Scrolls. Since evidence shows Jewish mysticism existed in the third century B.C.E., as Enoch indicates, then it would certainly have existed in first-century Israel. 

Reincarnation has been a belief for thousands of years for orthodox Jews. The Zohar is a book of great authority among Kabbalistic Jews. It states the following:

That is, in their "revolutions" they lose all memory of the actions that led to their being judged.

Another Kabbalistic book, the Kether Malkuth states:

How can the soul be defiled before birth? Where does the soul wander if not on this or some other world until the days of her purification? The rabbis explained this verse to mean that the defiled soul wanders down from paradise through many births until the soul regained its purity.

In the Talmud, "gilgul neshamot" (i.e., reincarnation) is constantly mentioned. The term literally means "the judgment of the revolutions of the souls." In this view, people who had committed extraordinary sins were given an opportunity to return to life in order to set things right. More particularly, they were reincarnated in circumstances similar to those of their previous incarnation. Thus, Moses and Jethro, for example, were supposed to be the gilgulim of Cain and Abel.

Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), one of the most revered Rabbis in Israel, states in his book entitled Nishmat Hayyim:

In contemporary Judaism, the traditional, mainstream view of resurrection is maintained by the orthodox, but generally not by the non-orthodox. Outside the orthodox fold, ordinary believers often accept the notion of an immortal soul, not unlike the notion held by most Christians. Many also accepted reincarnation. And many secular and Reform Jews continue to view themselves as part of the tradition of Judaism, without adhering to any sort of afterlife belief.

From Jewish Afterlife Beliefs

It seemed the more I learned, the more I realized I had to learn. For every book I read, there were a hundred more to which it referred. It was like a Chinese string puzzle—as soon as I unraveled one knotty piece I encountered a thousand other strands all waiting for a solution. No wonder people were content to simply believe without doing any real examination or research—belief was so much easier. The 'search for truth', I discovered, was a lot of hard work and was going take a long, long time. Not just years, but decades. And not just five or six books, but thousands. I began having the nagging suspicion that most people weren't really interested in learning the 'truth' (whatever it may be) either because they were (1) afraid of what they might discover, (2) ignorant of the alternatives, or (3) just plain lazy. I realized there were three things the search for 'truth' simply could not tolerate: fear, ignorance, and laziness.

It was going to be a long, hard, and often rocky journey. What made it harder still was that I'd be sidetracked a dozen times along the way.