Hi Alan -
While I defintely do not want to start a church, I see no problem with the idea. However, it needs to be taken in context. I recall the words of the late science fiction author, L Ron Hubbard, who said that if we want to get rich, starting a church is the best way. And then he founded Dianetcs which turned into Scientology, and lived happily ever after on his Mediterranean yacht
The fact that someone discovers a truth, any old garden variety of truth, and then starts an organization at which other people come and also look at their truth and make it work for them, sounds to me like a good idea. Churches are made by men for men and women like us.
Personally, Alan, I'd be far happier to join a group that does something tangible than one that gives me a book edited by Justinian's cronies for purposes of extending their political power in the "Holy Roman Empire" and tells me to take all this on faith because nobody understands it enough to talk about it. About the third time I heard a priest tell me that it was all a big mystery and no mortal could fathom it I decided that something was seriously amiss. The next line to that litany is that we're all damned forever, so get out the asbestos overalls.
I rather prefer The Gospel of Thomas. But that was anti-imperialist, and didn't make the cut.
If we are willing to look at these ideas from the perspective of growth, we can see that there are a few religious organizations in which people do nothing but hang out, but they offer some kind of background focus for life. Next we have the "cheap and dirty churches" that specialize in fire escape religiosity, often with a lot of drama and screaming. Next in line are the popular apologists who try to find social platitudes by which to keep the lid on for another season. I'm inclined to put King Henry and the C of E into that group, right along with Justinian, although they've certainly advanced since them.
Then there are a few that suggest that we can benefit ourselves by various practices, such as self denial, learning to delay gratification, and penance. Then we find people undergoing great physical abnegations and flagellation and suchlike in an effort to mortify their flesh so as to evolve. Some of these guys actually can do remarkable things.
A very few "churches" suggest that the path to the Ultimate Galuptuous Golden Goody is by meditation and inner work, emphasizing more the Doctrine of the Heart over the Doctrine of the Eye. After we get a few steps beyond our meditation lessons we start discovering various organizations in which there are phenomena produced that actually involve spiritual changes, such as the Spiritualists' numerous groups. (I technically am a spiritualist minister, although I rarely act in that capacity.) And somewhere on the upper side of the goups that provide spiritual phenomena we discover groups that produce physical phenomena, including the various flavors of Christian Science and Religious Science (Science of Mind) and a few metaphysical organizations.
From this perspective, there is a progression of organizations available to the naive new soul through which to ultimately find the path back to God. I do not feel that it is because God is malicious, capricious, or inscrutible that we have all this ecclesiastical clutter. Rather, it is necessary to fit the means to those who need it, so we have a pretty wide spectrum of dors through which to walk in search of ultimate Realization.
Some individuals start churches for specific mundane purposes - I recall the Rastafarians and other neo-theo-herbalists in Maui, seeking to protect their meditation style. The tiny group to which I belong is oriented toward protection of rights to perform religious healing along the usual lines of spiritualism, entity depossession and so on, in spite of laws in places like Indiana that regulate and prohibit some of these activities. It's a church made for and by men, but for spiritual purposes.
My personal take on all of this is that if we truly want to find what the Tibetans call "the Short Path", then we have to use whatever resources we can find. These are provided so that we can start with any kind of background, such as idolatry, and progress to the one ultimate fact at the top of the mountain - "there's no-thing there". (That's because it all arose ex-nihilo.)
It is the aspect of no-thing and no-body that will presumably accompany our awareness into the afterlife. Meanwhile, we have CS, ACIM, esoteric Buddhism and Vedanta telling us that having reached that point, we can now do it for ourselves. If we accept that point, then we must also accept that, in this case, Rei has come to us because we are prepared to hear her message. And that has happened, not because of trivial happenstance, but according to the ultimately fine grinding of the wheels of God's enlightenment machine. So we can use it, lose it, or just sit and go into a sort of passive denial state from which we are required to do nothing, and which returns about twice as much nothing as we put forth.
Alysia - As a fine upstanding red-blooded American dissolute, it is my duty to chase skirts and to work dilligently to increase the multiplicity of the species. I have striven earnestly to fulfill these mundane expectations. However, alas, what I used to do all night now takes me all night to do.
dave
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