Christian worship Christ because we believe He is God. So that is not idolatry.

Seems kind of selfish...self centered..and jealous for God to want a person to worship them and not others..I think that's the point some are trying to make.

If Jesus is not God, then what do we do with the verse (John 10:30) where Jesus says "I and the Father are one"???

What a sad, deceived train of thought.

Thou shall not commit idolatry. Then why is jesus made into an effigy, an idol to be worship, prayed to?

The popular Myth of Jesus is an Idol of mass religion. It was created by the exoteric Christian Church, when it moved to legitimize itself in the eyes of the secular State of Rome. That Idol is worshipped by popular belief, and many have been and continue to be deluded and oppressed by the Cult of that Idol.

Like every Idol, the Myth of Jesus contains a secret about Man himself. But that secret is locked away in the features of the Image men worship. Men worship Jesus as an exclusive human embodiment of God because they are unwilling or unable to accept the kind of responsibility for themselves that Jesus accepted for himself.

Jesus did not teach the worship of himself as an Idol of God or a Substitute for the responsibility of each man for his own religious and spiritual sacrifice. And even if he did, it would be our responsibility to liberate ourselves from that Doctrine.

The popular Myth of Jesus is founded on archaic cosmological archetypes. Jesus is believed to have come down from Heaven (or the sky of stars above the Earth) and become a blood sacrifice (in the ancient style of cults that ritually killed animals and men), and then he is supposed to have risen up into the sky again — back to Heaven. The man Jesus is popularly believed to be God, the Creator of the Universe, and his death is glorified as a necessary Cosmic Event that somehow makes it unnecessary for any believer to suffer permanent mortal death.

All of this, and more, may have made some kind of imaginative, street-level sense in the days of the Roman Empire, but it is nothing more than benighted silliness in the last quarter of the twentieth century. And, in any case, none of this Idolatry was the teaching or the intention of Jesus or any of the other great spiritual Adepts of the world. All of the mythological idolization of Jesus was the creation of the exoteric and popular cultism of the early Christian Church. And the time has come for the world to renounce this nonsense — even if the Christian Church itself is yet unwilling to renounce its obnoxious absolutist claim on all of humanity.

The Myth and the Idol of Jesus have nothing to do with true religion or the spiritual responsibility of Man — as I have tried to explain in these essays and in many other writings. And it is time we stopped glorifying the martyrdom of Jesus. Even though it seems possible that he personally survived the crucifixion and went on to continue his work outside Israel, the popular belief is that he died on the cross. And the persecution and attempted assassination of Jesus by the hypocritical religious cultists of his time was not in any sense good for mankind. It was a grave misfortune, and a prime example of the stupid, unillumined, and aggressive mentality that still characterizes the popular or mass level of subhuman existence. The world would have profited much more if Jesus had been able to work openly and live to a remarkable old age as a great prophetic Teacher of Israel. In that case, the true esoteric foundation of religion might have begun to become the basis of human culture two thousand years ago. And, at the very least, mankind could have avoided the long tour of domination by yet another impenetrable Idol of the mind

The idea that the martyrdom of Jesus was the literal and final Sacrifice of God is a perversion of the Truth. The true sacrifice of Jesus occurred while he was still alive. That sacrifice was of an esoteric spiritual nature, and it is of no inherent value to any other human being, unless that individual will duplicate that same sacrifice in the processes of his own body-mind.

Why do we persist in a retarded and negatively cultic understanding of religion? The Truth is plain — and it has been plainly preached and demonstrated, not only by Jesus, but by many Adepts in every epoch of human history. But the Idol of Jesus persists — because it is one of the great archetypal alternatives to authentic personal religious or spiritual responsibility. It is time for mankind to awaken to Wisdom and to the understanding of Jesus in Truth. Then perhaps some benefit will have come to us at last from that ancient outrage performed in Jerusalem.

I said that anciently the HEBREWS were. even if they did not worship any other gods, they did not deny their existence. by the time we get to the period where they are established in kingdoms, we get monotheism.

Genesis 1:26-27 says, "And God said, `Let us make man in our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea....' And God created man in his own image in the image of God created he him, male and female he created them."

The word man in this text includes male and female . This is confirmed by the word them whose antecedent is man. So he and his in this sense are both male and female. In fact, the word him is superfluous, and we could omit the superfluity by stating the passage like this: "In the image of God, he created them male and female." This means that male and female were created in the image of God. In other words, man [male and female or mankind] was created in the image of God.

Since man [male and female] was created in the image of God, it logically follows that this god was both male and female. The word our implies more than one, so, in effect, what we have is a god-pair consisting of a male god and a female god.

Chapter one of Genesis is from the Elohist source that used Elohim [gods plural] in referring to "God." Originally, the male god was Baal, and the female god was his consort Ashtoreth. Orthodox clergymen will argue that the us and our in the creation passage are simply examples of the "royal we" used by emperors, but this rationalization is false. The book of Genesis was written before the "royal we" originated. It began with the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and included the emperor and his loyal civil administrators. Afterwards, it was sometimes used in pagan religious ceremonies in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, which at that time was polytheistic.

In Genesis 3:22 , there is further evidence of polytheism as the Hebrew gods are depicted as saying, "Behold the man has become as one of us to know good and evil, and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever...." Here again the orthodox clergy will claim that the us is really the LORD God and the angels that were with him, but this cannot be for a number of reasons. First, there is no mention of angels in Genesis until Chapter 19 , but even if these angels did exist, they would have been acting upon orders of the god-pair of 1:26-27 . So the us here was again referring to that god-pair. To further show that the our and us in these Genesis passages referred to the god-pair of early Hebrew polytheism, we have only to review the history of the ideological clashes between the proponents of Baal and those of Yahweh that went on in the Caananite-Israelite lands from the time of the judges until the fall of Judah and the Babylonian captivity.

During these times, Baal and his consort Ashtoreth were worshiped by many Israelites both in Samaria (Israel) and Judah even after the captivity, mainly by those who remained in the conquered lands. Yahwists like Ezra finally purged the Israelites (by then known as Jews) of all Baal residuals and even forced them to give up their Baalish wives and families (see Ezra 9-10 ). Ezra's purging of Baal appeared to be complete. It was his wish to erase Baal completely from the Israelite past; however, the residuals in Genesis 1 and 3 continue to remind us not only of Israel's polytheistic past but of the Canaanite origins of Judaism.

Using archaeological evidence on one hand and biblical between-the-line implications on the other, the following conclusions support the premises stated above:

(1) Most of the Israelites at the time of the exodus (about 1250 B.C.) were already located in the Canaanite area, which, incidentally, was at that time a part of Greater Egypt. A relatively small number, probably only one tribe (Levi), were in Egypt. Exodus 1:15 , for example, says that only two midwives were needed to attend the births of Hebrew children. Furthermore, the Israelites needed divine help to defeat a small seminomadic tribe (Ex. 17:8-13 ) in contradiction to the later editor's estimate of an army of 600,000 men (12:37 ) besides children (and women?).

(2) This relatively small group of Israelites from the outside (Egypt proper) formed some type of symbiotic relationship with the much larger inside group (which consisted of Israelites and Canaanites, the so-called mixed multitude) to form the "12 tribes" (when they were not fighting each other).

(3) The outside group was the Yahwist cult, the inside group the Baal cult. The struggle between the two groups went on for well over 500 years.

(4) Apparently it was not until the reign of Josiah that the Yahwist group was able to achieve dominance. The "lost book" of Deuteronomy was discovered in the house of the LORD (2 Kings 22:8 ), and the Passover was reinstituted after a lapse of 500 years (if indeed it even existed before then). The golden calf (symbol of the Kings of Israel) from the reign of Jeroboam was suppressed (2 Kings 23:15 ).

(5) Biblical scholars agree on how the Pentateuch was put together. The sources were (E) Elohist, (J) Yahwist, (P) Priestly, (D) Deuteronomist, and (R) Redactor. The last two were written to dovetail with the first two, and the writers tried to do two things: (1) eliminate all contradictions, and (2) eliminate all vestiges of the Israelite primitive past of pagan polytheisism.

Richard Elliott Friedman noted in Who Wrote the Bible? that after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B. C., some Jews fled to Egypt and formed a colony at Elephantine at the first cataract of the Nile (p. 153). They built a temple there, which was clearly against the law of centralization in Deuteronomy. The extraordinary thing about the Elephantine temple, however, was that this group of expatriated Jews worshiped Yahweh and two other gods, one male and one female. This god-pair apparently was Baal and Ashtoreth. The Yahwist Jews living elsewhere were not happy with this development, for when the Elephantine temple was destroyed in the 5th century, B.C.E., they would not help to rebuild it (p. 154).

The scholarly piecing together of information from archaeological discoveries and overlooked textual implications of a polytheistic past indicate that the editors failed in both endeavors listed above. As a result, we know today that monotheism came to Judaism not by divine revelation but by a process of theistic evolution.

(Sol Abrams' address is 132 Easthampton F, West Palm Beach, FL 33417.)

If Jesus is not God, then what do we do with the verse (John 10:30) where Jesus says "I and the Father are one"???

GOD IS NOT A PERSON! God is neither male or female. God is.

do you believe that Christ knew that he was in fact God while he was in human form?

You see...since God wants us to have the best and He is the best of the best, He wants us to have him. In essence if God didn't have us worshiping him...then we wouldn't be doing the best thing for us because He's the best.

Nice, simple and easy to digest. Best of all...little to no thinking involved

I notice one common thread to religion and it's "Believe what I say or you'll get hurt"

Now we have the roman catholics. In the name of god people have been slaughtered in crusades and countless wars (well i am sure they are countable). The religion has been perverted to fill the coffers of churches. And the bible has been CHANGED, the king james edition is not the original and there are new versions being made to change it to suit the needs of those in power.