I am not saying there are not spiritually advanced individuals out there, but they are not god-like creatures set above being human themselves. They were just like you and me, and they took what was within them and went somewhere with it, while others happily just lived out their lives plowing fields and making babies. Not everyone is a great musician either, but that doesn't make great musicians gods from another dimension, singularity called out to save the world.
I agree they were just like you and me, they were human, but they were
above an ordinary human because they were “Manifestations of God.” Having been chosen, preselected by God to receive communication through the Holy Spirit sets them apart from the rest of us.
One of the worst things the church did with Jesus is that they "kicked him upstairs", as Alan Watts termed it. Rather than being an inspiration to others through what he learned on his path to God, that we too can in fact be just like him, they deified him instead and made him unlike us, unreachable, unattainable, exactly in the same way you are doing with your made-up chart which is actually nothing more than a map of a religious mythology made up to fit a religion's theology it made up about oneself.
I am not a Christian so I do not deify the Messengers/Manifestations of God. True, I believe they are on a
level above an ordinary human being, but they were not God. Logically speaking, if they were not above the rest of us why should we even listen to what they have to say? In short, I believe they were “mediators between God and man.” That is what it says in the Bible:
1Timothy 2:5 “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” Jesus never claimed to be God but Christians completely misinterpreted the Bible and made Jesus into God. Not only that, they took that verse and others to mean that
the only way to God was Jesus whereas those verses only applied to the dispensation of Jesus. After that other Messengers came to earth and they were “the way.” I could go on and on about what Christianity did to distort what the Bible means, but then I would never finish this post and all the other I have to answer!
They may be a very small percentage of individuals in the overall population, but they are a whole lot more than just "one" for every one thousand years!
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Think of it in terms of gifted musicians. Most are just average players or composers, but there is a rare percentage who are truly gifted. They inspire other musicians to find their own gifts within themselves.
Some of this rare souls, actually, may never even been known outside their own little village. Some of these "Jesuses" may only touch the lives of ten people in their entire lives. It's not the quantity that counts, but the quality or the essence. A small sliver of infinity, is infinity.
I do not consider rare and gifted souls to be the
same as Manifestations of God. God chose them to receive a message or He did not. There are only so many of these individuals. There are more than were listed on that chart; those were just the Major Prophets we know of. In the Qur’an it says that a Prophet has been sent to every nation. I do not know what their names were as they were not mentioned in the Baha’i scriptures.
I'm not an agnostic. I very much believe in the existence of God. I do not however believe all the mythologies about God or those inspired souls, that various religions craft about these things in order for them to teach them to beginning piano students, so to speak. Those object lessons are fine to get some rudimentary images of the divine conveyed to young minds, but they are far from the actual Truth of them. Jesus called himself the Light of the World. He also said of us, "You are the Light of the World". We are too, or at least have the potential to be.
I fully agree with that because we were made in the image and likeness of God, so we can
potentially reflect all the attributes of God. “I believe” those Major Prophets such as Jesus and Baha’u’llah reflected
all the attributes of God since they were a different order of creation, in between a man and a God, but NOT God incarnate. They perfectly “manifested” God on earth which is why they are called Manifestations of God.
What I dislike about these models you presented is it would instead take Jesus' words and make them say. "I am the Light of the World, but you can never be because I am special and you are not. You'll only ever be a lesser light, like a dim bulb in a tiny pen light, while I'm a solar flare! All worship me!". I find that tragically misguided and misses the point of Jesus' teachings.
The way I look at that, we cannot all be a Jesus or a Baha’u’llah because that is just not the way God intended it to be. They were chosen for their respective missions for a reason, a reason we cannot really know, only God knows that since God chose them. But we can look at their lives and their character and figure out that they were special in some ways, and they also had innate knowledge. It is said in my religion that we can never fully understand a Manifestation of God because we cannot understand what is above us in kind, but we can understand their human nature, and that is precisely why they can act as “mediators” between God and man. It is all pretty logical if you think about it...
Jesus already gave the criteria here:
Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits.
It's not about how many followers they have. It's not about if they started a major religion. It's not about popularity nor name recognition. It's very simple: fruit. This is how you demonstrate whether or not you are genuinely inspired by the Divine. An old woman with her great grandchildren at her knees can be a prophet of God too. It really depends how one's gifts express themselves in service to others, be they small in following, or large, or even no following at all.
I agree that fruit is the way we can know if they were really Messengers from God. But that does not mean that all people who have fruits are Messengers from God. There are other criteria. They have to be able to reveal scriptures that are universally applicable to humanity. A person can be
inspired by God but that does not mean they received a
message from God. I believe that Joseph Smith was inspired by God for example but I do not believe he was actually a Prophet/Messenger of God. However, he has a large following but it is notable that Mormons really follow Jesus, not Smith. No religion could have 15 million adherents unless they were associated with a Major Prophet.
And this is part of that magical thinking I dislike. "Came to earth"? Every human alive "comes to earth" too, if you want to look at it like that. Did Bach "come to earth" to be one of the most gifted musicians the world's ever seen? No, not exactly. He was born, like you or me, but he had certain innate talents that given the circumstances of his life was allowed to come to fruition. This is true of all of us, each with our own unique gifts waiting to come to fruition. This includes you too.
True, we all come to earth and have a unique mission to fulfill, but not every human was chosen by God to deliver a message.
The "scriptures" of the NT did not come about as is mythologized in imagining these "eyewitnesses" wrote stuff down. There was a proliferation of writings from the various religious communities that formed themselves around this common figure and teachings that were shared between the communities. They varied widely and in contradictory ways.
Yes, I know the problems with the NT and the Christian Church and I do not believe that Christian doctrines represent what Jesus taught. I believe that the Bible is the testimony of God but Christianity is the religion of man; because the Bible was never fully understood, councils such as Nicaea had to settle upon doctrines. As it is stated in Daniel 12, the “book” would not be unsealed until the time of the end, and people would run to and fro until then. I believe that the book was unsealed by Baha’u’llah when He came, meaning He explained much of what was in the Bible and what it was intended by God to mean. His eldest son and center of His Covenant also explained a lot of what is in the Bible, for example in this book:
Some Answered Questions, Part Two: SOME CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS
You do realize that these were later myths about this figure to reflect that community's imaginations of what the history of this person must have looked like, full of magic and miracles because he seemed so special to them? There are other myths of the child-Jesus making a dove out of clay and breathing life into it. But that story didn't find its way into the NT. It did however get picked up and added into the Koran.
Yes, I realize that the NT is not an accurate historical record of events that actually took place. To save time, here are a few excerpts that explain the authoritative position of the Baha’i Faith on the Bible:
From Letters Written on Behalf of the Guardian:
...The Bible is not
wholly authentic, and in this respect is not to be compared with the Qur'an, and should be wholly subordinated to the authentic writings of Bahá'u'lláh..
(28 July 1936 to a National Spiritual Assembly)
...we cannot be sure how much or how little of the four Gospels are accurate and include the words of Christ and His undiluted teachings, all we can be sure of, as Bahá'ís, is that what has been quoted by Bahá'u'lláh and the Master must be absolutely authentic. As many times passages in the Gospel of St. John are quoted we may assume that it is his Gospel and much of it accurate.
(23 January 1944 to an individual believer)
When 'Abdu'l-Bahá states we believe what is in the Bible, He means in substance. Not that we believe every word of it to be taken literally or that every word is the authentic saying of the Prophet.
(11 February 1944 to an individual believer)
The Bible
What is our purpose for "coming into the world"? The true purpose of any of us, is to be as Jesus was, the Light of the World.
I fully agree. However, if Jesus had never come and had never been a Light to the World, I do not think we would ever have known that.
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
The world was profoundly affected by the teachings of Jesus, even those who do not believe in Him.