1 Mahayana Buddism - 100%
2 New Thought - 97%
3 Hinduism - 94%
4 Christian Science - 83%
5 Scientology - 83% (no, just no)
6 Neo-Pagan - 81%
7 Mainline - Conservative Christian/Protestant 78%
8 New Age - 76%
9 Unitarian Universalism 74%
10 Jainism - 70%
Results came out a little weird, I think mostly for the fact that I see the Christian Trinity as the core of the universe, the pre-Christian gods and goddesses being agents of heaven now, aside from egregores or cases such as Baal, Astarte, Moloch, being under the employment of heaven. IMHO Jesus was the fulfillment of the cosmic cross - the lion, eagle, man, and bull - the circle and equal-armed cross that add to 26, YHVH, tetragrammaton. The story came together from Sumeria, Egypt, and Babylon, and came to a central climax in 4BC - 30AD Jerusalem.
My tendency though in addition is to say that I'm not closed to the idea of reincarnation, partly in that there are plenty of quite valid reasons such as not being able to get a full-rounded education in one life. I also run into problems with the notion that experience has to be forfeited for scripture - enough people having researchable and verifiable past-life memories, enough people running into Christ during NDE's in a way that Rudolph Steiner might describe him as Lord of Karma seems to make a lot of sense. I also find that the Rosicrucian/Anthroposophic take via the fifth gospel makes a lot of sense, whether pointing to two lineages of Christ (Matthew vs. Luke), two early life stories that deviate a bit, the Magi seeing the astrological signs of what their teacher/master saw as potentiating off of the sun. IMHO the repetitive stories of gods dying in sacrifice, most pertaining to the sun dying in winter to be reborn in spring, aren't a debunk on the Christ that Christianity worships but rather showing that the whole western current converged right there (aside from material pessimist currents such as Manicheanism and Christian Gnosticism which took the more eastern 'abort mission! This is all a trap!' outlook - Christianity, Hermeticism, etc. on the other hand maintained an optimism, particularly Christianity that the world of matter is redeemable).
Aside from a preponderance of astrological references in the old and new testament to 12 signs, 7 planets, and 4 corners or 4 elements you also have plenty of solar references to Jesus, 'sun of righteousness' in Malachi 4 is probably the most loud and obnoxious to those who are against any solar equivocation of Christ but that also tends to be from people who can't stand the idea of pre-Christian pagandom being part of their story whereas its funny, from the 15th to 17th centuries in the Catholic church Hermes Trismegistus was highly revered, almost canonized as a Catholic saint until the notion came up that the Hermetic corpus was from late antiquity and therefore after Christ (apparently disproven more recently - the document they had back then was late antiquity, the age of the doctrine wasn't however). You also had 19th century writers on church history saying good things about pre-Christian ethical pagandom and even stating Zoroastrianism, Platonism/Neoplatonism, and aspects of Hinduism/Buddhism to be somewhat clouded but none the less pre-Christian impulses of the same energy stream that lead to Judaism and culminated in Christianity. Somehow in the late 20th and early 21st century that more unified picture disappeared and everything was deemed 'Satanic' that wasn't 100% in-the-life-raft solo scriptura, part of why I had to leave the cultural stuff.
10 Oct 2013, 5:41 am
