CHRISTIANBOOKS

My wife and I have slightly different religious beliefs because of our backgrounds, and as a result we faced several issues trying to decide how to teach our children about religion. Our simple solution was to combine our beliefs and let our children decide what worked best for them. The hard part was determining how to go about doing this in a way that would not confuse our children. We ended up opting for a mix of discussion and reading that not only gave our children perspective, but helped them to learn on their own.

What an emotive topic and when one looks at the synonyms we can see why with words like apartheid (coined in this country), bias, bigotry, discrimination, prejudice and segregation. The church that I belong to was one of the first openly multi-racial congregations in South Africa and it was started in 1986. This alone is a sad fact in a country that has been torn by racial conflict for decades. Before 1994 it was ruled by a predominantly ‘white’ government that had made many racist decisions in the previous 40 odd years and since then we have been ruled by a predominantly ‘black’ government that has carried on the tradition of decisions based on race. It seems that whoever is in power is unable to see the fact that they answer to God first and then to everyone else in their country.

Most people seem to go through life doing what others do and never seem to question much about whether the people around them are actually right or wrong. How many of us do exactly what our parents, grandparents and great grandparents do? I was raised a Christian by Christians and they were raised Christians by other Christians and so on. I don’t know when or who in my family tree actually decided to become part of the Christian faith. I don’t think it really matters today.

In the preface to his new novel Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra is very straightforward about his purpose in writing this book, saying “[there is] a Jesus left out of the New Testament – the enlightened Jesus. His absence, in my view, has profoundly crippled the Christian faith, for…making [Jesus] the one and only Son of God leaves the rest of humankind stranded…What if Jesus wanted his followers – and us – to reach the same unity with God that he had reached?”

I just got through watching a video on Oprah and Christianity. I thought that she made herself perfectly clear to her audience and to the people who were interviewing her. The only problem is, that there are thousands of Christians, especially Christian women who look up to this woman and they often put her up on a untouchable pedestal.

We need to keep something in mind here, Oprah Winfrey is just a person like us, she overcame tougher obstacles than most in her life and became a multi-billionaire. This could have happened to anyone, but it happened to her and she probably deserves every thing that she has been given by her creator.