About 20 years ago I had premonitions of death. I felt that my own death was imminent, and this due to my deteriorating mental state. I had a severe anger problem. It was making my life hell. By becoming so angry I had condemned myself to a living hell. However, I also live in a society which generates anger and so that society also condemns other people to living in a hell (a hell on earth).
You could say that my first “saviour” was the realisation that, because in this society people are constantly trying to make each other very, very angry, the fault did not necessarily lie with me. I remember the enormous relief I felt when I realised this. It took a huge amount of pressure off me. And this first step allowed me to deal with my own anger (I started off dealing with the problem by taking up meditation, although this alone was not enough to save my life. Meditation only provided a stay of execution, as it were.)
I have now dealt with my anger problem. I have achieved such a degree of detachment that I simply do not allow people to anger me the way they once did. This detachment has also allowed me to see that as well as being angered by people, my bad behaviour also generated anger in other people. You could say that attaining such a degree of detachment was also my “saviour”.
Had I not dealt with my own anger as well as my bad behaviour, then I know I would be dead by now.
Moreover, I note that the government has recently said that anger is a major problem for UK citizens (and, in my opinion, for people all over the world). What the government does not appear to realise is that it is among the worst in our society at generating anger. (Just think of any dealings you may have had with e.g. the DWP or with intractable beaurocracy and then tell me you don’t get angry! And who doesn’t get angry with the unreasonable demands made upon them by their boss? And yet mental health problems are on the up and up?I remember hearing once about a farmer who got so angry with his building society that he took a truck load of slurry into the town centre and sprayed the building society with the slurry. ) Any person or institution or authority that disempowers another, as this, or any, government routinely does, generates huge amounts of anger. So people, whether acting as individuals or as part of another body such as government, generate such huge levels of anger that they create a living hell for both themselves and for other people.
As this is a philosophy forum, I assume that non-religious answers to religious questions are permissible. However, now that I am a “real Christian” I’d better get my Sunday best out in preparation for church this week!
Now that may be the problem right there.
One reads black and the other reads white.
Obviously, between those two there are many gray areas.
Perhaps one ought to read the bible as one reads a beautiful sunrise or sunset of many different colors.
I keep a bible in the house even though I think this quote quite correct.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Then again, I am a Gnostic Christian and know how to read the filth in it.
Said of Gnostic Christian versus Christian bible reading practices.
“Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white.”
William Blake.
I would take this further and advise you to read any scriptures from as many POV as is within you. Question everything including yourself.
The bible, if read as a book of wisdom, does have much wisdom though.
You just have to read it the way Gnostics do and reverse a lot of the Christian morals.
Christians call evil good while Gnostic Christians call evil, evil.
I E. Gnostic Christians think that bible God, the demiurge to us, is quite immoral for thinking that torturing King David’s baby for 6 days before finally killing it is good justice. Gnostic Christians think that evil while Christians think that a good form of justice.