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Originally Posted by ethereal  I recently had a realization about "Christ died for our sins..." I've heard that phrase from many Christians over and over, but I never got a satisfactory context of what it really means. It just didn't "click", until I read the following explanation and piecing together some other things:
"Christ took the sins of the world on his shoulders. When you reach a very high
level of consciousness you pick up negative karma from the collective human
karma. This is what Christ did. He held all of the suffering of man in mind
(“please forgive them for they know not what they do”). Jesus could die for all of us because he could feel our collective suffering."
I read somewhere else that when your consciousness is high enough, you're able to transfer karmic merit (good karma) to others, and take on other people's karmic debts (bad karma).
Now it finally makes some sense! It seems like Christians believe in karma even though they say they don't 
I'd be interested in learning more about how to integrate Christianity into a larger spiritual context, if anybody else has any additional insights to share on this topic. I think by doing so, people will be more willing to learn about Christianity, and they'll be understanding it at a higher spiritual level as well (so both sides win  ). |
The idea that Christ was the only begotten son of God and died for our sins is a very literal interpretation by the mainstream church, and I don't care to believe it. Taken from the Gnostic pre-church perspective, the crucifixion is a metaphor for the spiritual path taken in becoming aware of, and illuminating the spirit, the subsequent death of ego and the rebirth of the authentic self. Gnostics did not have a sense of sin as expressed by the church today; the idea of mass sin was created by the church many centuries later to justify Jesus' apparent horrific death.
Reading the gnostic texts, including those recently found in Alexandria (more important than any others), the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gospels of Thomas, Paul, Mark and Luke can be very useful and make Christianity sound quite Eastern. They say God is within and all around ourselves (as opposed to a "supreme being" watching us from heaven). Subsequently, the ability to realize our inner God is within ourselves (we only need become aware of it), so the Church and priestly intermediaries become irrelevant. They called Jesus an "enlightened illuminator" and believed he was a man like any other.