On the Death of Christianity.

Whether Christianity is dying or not depends on how loosely one defines "Christianity." Not only are there tons of denominations within Christianity, but there are several that some people deem are not really Christian. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints most readily comes to mind, here. And as I've seen first-hand, even the Catholic Church has been described as being heretical, by some pretty extreme Protestants - which would make those Protestants theological bastards.) More denominations are being created everyday - so while some may say Christianity is dying, what's really going on is that Christianity is changing, stretching, widening and becoming more liberal, more mystical in some cases, more metaphorical in others, and yet more hermetic / analytical in others.

Given the nature of Christian theology, which is highly exclusive with its idea of Hell and the acceptance of Christ's message (which differs with every denomination, though the dichotomy usually remains), every denomination believes another denomination is going to hell. That means that no one is outside of that condemnation, even if Christianity is the "right" religion. Which means that no one's Christianity is certainly correct; they're all interpretations of something that has been lost under the sand (or in this case, blood) of its history.

Adding to that the more philosophical approaches to Christianity, which include postmodern interpretations such as "Christian Atheism," and "Post-Theism," things are just getting too vague to tell if anything is really "Christian" anymore - there certainly isn't a Christian canon anymore. (Not that there ever was, considering the early Gnostic writings, the Apocrypha, etc. that people just dismiss as heresy, (or worse, Satanic) because it's not in the Bible - which was compiled by fallible man.) So, maybe "Christianity" is dying, if there even is a Christianity anymore. I personally believe that what this all came out of was political maneuvering more than anything that Jesus himself taught. Jesus is kind of the spokesperson, the epitome, the poster boy for everything he preached against, especially in his exchanges with the Pharisees.

Not only do you have the Council of Nicea which made the job of deciding what writings are and are not God inspired to fallible man, but then they couldn't agree on it, hence the Great Schism, hence the Reformation, etc. then after that they killed everyone who disagreed. Not to mention that the "canonical" Gospels that we do have are third-hand sources. (The Gospel of Mark was written by a disciple of Peter in 65 C.E. at the earliest, and it has priority as being the source of both Luke and Matthew. The original Gospel of Mark, the source, has no resurrection stories, which explains why the three are so similar up to that point, where they promptly oscillate into WTF-mode like clockwork.) The Gospel of John, which differs from those three, was written as early as 90 C.E., and used rhetoric and Greek that is difficult to translate - what we call "Eternal Life" is closer to "Life of the Ages," for example - and this is where most Christians get their theology.

The Gospel of Thomas, however, was written as early as 50 C.E. by the actual disciple Thomas, and is considered heresy by pretty much everyone, except those with a(n either overt or covert) mystical approach to Christianity. That's what interests me the most.

I kind of see it the way that the post-theists do: "Post-theism is a variant of nontheism that proposes to have not so much rejected theism as rendered it obsolete, that God belongs to a stage of human development now past." Which cites heavily Nietzsche's cry that God is Dead: that "god" is no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code or teleology (because it's so vague that it's contradictory and there's nothing substantial in it at all except for the fact that it becomes a fabricated authority on which to project our own preconceived prejudices onto).

I believe that "God is dead," in this sense, but I believe that Christianity is not dead - just meaningless. As the famous §125 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science concludes: "Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!"— It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?""