The topic of the previous article started me on a line of thought which basically goes like this: “what is the fatal flaw of those people who profess salvation and what not, and secretly manifest all signs of spiritual fall, and how to avoid it”.

I think they assume that they must appear to be outwardly perfect, which creates a dichotomy of a perfect outward façade meant for the public, and their normal private condition, which they well know to be far from the ideal. As this dichotomy persists, they basically give themselves license to go incrementally more beyond the pale, because, from their perspective, it hardly matters – they are far from the ideal façade anyways, so it doesn’t matter whether they are off by an inch or by a mile. They are either doomed regardless, or saved regardless, depending on God’s point of view. Basically, they masturbate in secrecy anyways, which neither their Church nor scripture approve of, so they might as well have someone else do it for them.

From the perspective of their religion, that makes some kind of sense. From my perspective, the problem starts with separation of one’s consciousness from God, with the result of spiritual emptiness, which then manifests as many things – from desire for material things and pleasures, to actually sinful actions, such as treating other souls poorly, as if they were mere things. As you can see, my definition of sin is more abstract than the Christian one – I don’t see sin as something that is on a list of forbidden actions. I see sin as a state where your consciousness is not in God and of God, and this condition doesn’t make you experience agony. I see sin as willful defiance of God, and contempt/hatred for both God, and beings who love him. Basically, I see atheism and anti-theism as sin, and I see murder, rape, robbery, deception and other evil physical actions as manifestations of this inner spiritual state of sin. Sin is the state of apostasy from God.

The problem with those Christians is therefore that their religion has such impractically harsh definition of sin, that they basically can’t function as normal human beings without feeling that their religion condemns their actions, and they also feel that they have to keep up the outwardly charade for the sake of others, whose faith, they feel, will crumble if they knew how weak their leader actually is. And the more they outwardly condemn all sin, inwardly they drown in the feeling that they are fundamentally and irredeemably sinful, and even if God could somehow understand and forgive, their followers can’t and won’t, because the position of scripture is clear in condemnation of their actions.

The solution is that sin needs to be understood in a more abstract, fundamental way, so that people can focus on what matters, which is their personal relationship with God, and less on things that don’t matter, which is whether you allowed yourself to experience some innocent pleasure that didn’t hurt anyone. This doesn’t mean “tolerance for sin”, as some Christians would say. No, it means you need to stop being such bloody Pharisees, “who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel”. Focus on the important things, such as treating others the way you would treat God himself, and being forever in God. Stop annoying both yourselves and others with silly nonsense. If that made any sense, the early Church would not cease with the practice of imposing all those Jewish “laws” on the pagan-to-Christian converts. As St. Peter wisely stated, “Now then, why do you test God by placing on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe it is through the grace of the Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

What I want to say is, that by widening the spectrum of what is considered a sin, you think you are being moral and obedient to God, and what you are actually doing is falling into the trap of the Pharisees who even chastised Jesus and his disciples, thinking themselves more pure and lawful. Also, by broadening the definition of sin, you make it all but inevitable for one to consider oneself sinful, and from that point it’s a slippery slope, where it’s easy to cross the line into actions that are sin proper. Stop making both your lives and the lives of others more difficult without good reason, and instead focus your attention on that which is most important, and that is the presence of God within your soul.

There is another thing that I think is important; one of the reason why people fall into sin. You see, they see themselves as irrelevant and worthless, and they think their actions don’t matter one way or another. They think they are weak, powerless, worthless, small and inconsequential. As a result, they act like a child who takes his father’s gun, thinking it a toy, and kills his sibling. If a child truly understood the actual power it has in its hands, that would not have happened. It is only because they don’t understand what they wield, that makes it truly dangerous. In a similar manner, I’ve seen people condemn both themselves and others, thinking that their words and actions don’t matter, that seducing others away from salvation is merely an intellectual game. It’s like throwing rocks on a live land mine, or picking up a cobra thinking it’s a piece of rope. If people only knew how powerful their actions can be, and how much everything they do matters, they would tread very lightly through life.

There has recently been major fallout in the Christian circles regarding the Ravi Zacharias scandal, revealed after his death last year.

For those who don’t know, Ravi Zacharias is one of those American evangelists; you know the kind: saved by Jesus, because you need to accept Jesus as your personal savior because no salvation is possible otherwise, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Let me quote from the Christian site I linked above:

Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators.

One woman told the investigators that “after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.” She called it rape.

She said Zacharias “made her pray with him to thank God for the ‘opportunity’ they both received” and, as with other victims, “called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God,” the report says. Zacharias warned the woman—a fellow believer—if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.

The findings, alongside details revealed over months of internal reckoning at RZIM, challenge the picture many have had of Zacharias.

When he died in May, he was praised for his faithful witness, his commitment to the truth, and his personal integrity. Now it is clear that, offstage, the man so long admired by Christians around the world abused numerous women and manipulated those around him to turn a blind eye.

You get the picture. Some will say he “fell into temptation”, but from what I could see looking at the reports, he’s actually the one who manipulated others into temptation, mostly by using his charisma and willpower to force them into doing his will. He doesn’t look like an otherwise saintly person who fell into temptation, he looks like a manipulative, self-serving pig of a man; a “religious” Harvey Weinstein. But the man himself hardly matters.

The reason why his sleezy crimes and misbehaviors managed to remain secret until after his death is, to quote the argument from the man himself, “if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged”. Basically, if it turned out that the great Christian apologist who is berating everyone into accepting Christ as a personal savior because there is no other way of salvation, manifested more signs of being a power-drunk piece of human garbage than someone in whom salvation could be witnessed, one could conclude that the entirety of this teaching is dubious.

I’ve been warning Christians about this, but they are incredibly arrogant, probably because they are intoxicated by the ego-trip of being on the right side of salvation and being the ones that preach from the high ground. It’s incredibly seductive, I know, but it doesn’t excuse them. I’ve been hearing the same thing from them for decades – how their Church is somehow shielded from spiritual fall by the Holy Spirit because it’s the holy fiancée of Christ, how the Pope is personally appointed by the Holy Spirit and you are protected from false teachings and spiritual fall if you are a faithful member of the Church. I steadfastly reminded them that nobody can protect you from your own spiritual failings and you depend on yourself alone to establish a personal connection and relationship with God, and to defend and confirm this relationship with your daily actions, with every thought and every breath. They thought I was the deluded one, that I am the one who needs to come to his senses and accept the “truth”. Then they elected that terrible leftist demagogue as the Pope, because the Church was so full of homosexuals and pedophiles that the previous saintly Pope resigned because he faced such stringent opposition to his attempts to purify the Church, he probably surrendered everything to God, as a good saint that he is, and left them to God’s judgment. The Christians would probably call his successor the Antichrist, but I don’t think Antichrist is a person; it’s a spirit of “progressivism” and humanistic materialism that is a direct opposition to the teaching of Christ, and as such is literally anti-Christ. However, it’s not that people have ideologies – ideologies, in fact, have people who are possessed by them, and that Francis creature is obviously possessed by progressivism. Now, apparently, the Catholics are more aware that they have a problem, because their very dogma is being actively changed by that creature, and being safe from false teachings isn’t something they would brag about very loudly, if they had any sense in them.

The protestant Christians can of course use this opportunity to mock the Catholics for having a fallible man as a safeguard of their theology, while they “have Christ”, and thus they have “certainty of salvation”.

In this I see the same arrogance that is the bane of Catholics – everybody likes having the high ground, the claim to the position of certain salvation from which they can “teach” others. Accept Christ, that’s the only thing you need, that’s the only thing that’s important.

How did that work out for Ravi Zacharias and hundreds like him?

A person who is so spiritually empty that he behaves literally like the stereotypical alpha-male ape that coerces females into having sex with him by invoking his exalted position in his tribe, is not saved by any definition of the term. That is as base and animalistic and devoid of holiness that is of God, as you can possibly imagine. He was a charismatic male specimen of human animal, he behaved in a bestial manner, lacked not only holiness but also any kind of gentlemanly refinement and self-restraint that would indicate normal human sophistication. If he “had Christ” or “was saved”, then I need neither, and may God keep me safe from those horrors.

God only knows that I have to wrestle with the human animal on a daily basis. It degrades my spiritual connection when it’s sick, it wants to eat too much food automatically when I’m focused on something else, the dullness of the physical brain blocks my insight, it colors my emotions and spiritual states with its own instincts, it automatically tries to project fulfillment into all kinds of material things, and I constantly have to check myself to see whether something originates from higher spiritual sources or the “rightness” instincts originating from the ape-body. To think I’m in the clear while I still share this animal’s existence would be foolhardy, and it is that very same foolhardiness that I perceive in the Christians, and I must admit I find them annoying. Even St. Paul wouldn’t dare say he’s “saved” before the “end of the race”, and you don’t have that problem? Really? It is one thing to say that God extended his hand towards you, that you recognized and accepted this hand, and that it is that very hand of God that is your salvation, and not any virtue or power of your own, and I would have no issues with that, seeing it as merely a different formulation of my own position. However, it is quite obviously possible for quite a significant number of Christians to use the claim of salvation as an instrument of their own power over others, which they use to satisfy their own chimpanzee instincts and desires. Obviously, there’s more to salvation than accepting Christ as a savior and belonging to “the” Church. You need to actually keep the faith, remain loyal, every moment of your existence, and the pride of salvation is, to me, just a symptom of spiritual apostasy, of fall into animalistic darkness, where “having Christ” becomes a currency of social posturing. This is something to be aware of, because these things don’t just exist in the community of leftists, atheists and others; you don’t just suddenly cease to have these kinds of problems just because you managed to sniff some spiritual substance and decided that’s what you want and need. The entirety of your animal problem is still there and you will have to keep it within the grip of the “structural integrity field” of your spirit until it dies and allows you to leave, and failure to keep a vertical spiritual presence as a dominant force that incarnates in your body will result in the animal part gradually taking parts of control away from the spirit, and it will do its thing.