Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and Dixie

Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and Dixie

Dixie grew up in the absolute tightest hole of the Bible Belt. South Georgia, USA. Land o’ cotton. Other side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Dixie. They even named her Dixie. Lucky girl.

           As an adult, Dixie had lots of complaints about the Deep South culture, as most folks do after living in a repressive area. One of her main ones was the religious atmosphere.

Not the spiritual atmosphere. This was all about religion. For one thing, almost all the folks she knew were Southern Baptist, with maybe a few misguided Methodists thrown in to show how open-minded the Baptists were.

She’d been taught that people who were not Christian were scary folk and sure to lead you astray if you let them into your life. And not just non-Christian religious folk. People who didn’t ascribe to Southern Baptist precepts were, at best, being deceived by Satan or at worst, working hand-in-hand with him to steal others’ souls and make sure they wound up in Hell.

           It really was pretty much that cut and dried. If a girl had the slightest spiritual experience of any kind, she’d best attribute it to either God the Father, Jesus the Son, or the Holy Ghost, or those good church people would be praying for her. Not laying on hands, though; not Southern Baptists. Not mid-twentieth century.

           She always had questions about Jesus but didn’t feel free to ask them. Always wondered why he was necessary if there was God. Wondered why he had to die for “such a worm as I,” and how that worked, anyway. But by the time she was about fourteen, she had successfully squashed her doubts and become a devout Southern Baptist girl. Deep questions that are ignored just go away, right?

           And that carried her through life. She sincerely tried to make decisions based on what Jesus would do. Oh, she made mistakes – excuse me, sinned against God – a whole bunch of times. But her heart always came back to Jesus. She studied the Bible and taught Sunday School, first with kids and later with adults.

           And then Nine Eleven hit.

           Now, she didn’t blame God or Jesus that that happened; they’d been letting horrendous things happen since the beginning. They let the Holocaust happen. Working in mysterious ways, and all that. That it had happened was not her quandary.

           Her problem was with all the anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence that exploded in the following years.

           See, she used to teach elementary school, and in teaching about the Cold War, she always stressed to her students that most of the people in the Soviet Union were exactly like us, moms and kids trying to have a good life. That the disagreement was between the governments, not the regular people. The regular people were just folks.

           And the part that stuck in her craw was that the belief among all the Christians she knew that all the Muslims would go to Hell. All of them, as well as everyone else who wasn’t Christian. Unless, of course, they accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. And she drew the parallel between herself and her counterpart in a Muslim country: a middle-aged woman who has spent her life trying to please the God she was taught to believe in. A woman who, every day, has done her best to live by the divinity she knows. She’s just like Dixie, only she had the misfortune to be born in a country that was Wrong, so she has to go to Hell, no matter how sincere her heart.

Playing Devil’s advocate, she assumed for a minute that it was possible that maybe Islam was Right and Christianity was Wrong. She could not possibly change, after five decades of stewing in Christianity, and become a Muslim. So how could her counterpart in Afghanistan or Syria or Iran make that kind of change? Especially since in some places in those days, a person could be put to death for disavowing Allah. How was that fair? How could the Afghani or Syrian or Irani her be held accountable for that?

           She’d been taught that God is a god of Love and Justice. This didn’t sound very loving or just to her.          The cognitive dissonance was extreme. And it started a gnawing inside her that grew and grew, even as she feared that God would smite her in some way for doubting. For questioning. She tried to calm it with more Bible study, more prayer, and it got quieter for a while, but it didn’t go away.

           Dixie usually listened to the nearest Christian radio station when driving. One day, and she always will remember the curve near her home she was on when venerated Christian teacher David Jeremiah said, “You should question everything you are told. You should question what I tell you. Question everything.”

           And there she was, on her own Damascus Road. She prayed then and there that whatever the Truth was, she wanted to know it. Whether it was Jesus or not Jesus, she wanted to know. It was a sincere prayer and a fervent prayer. She said it out loud.

           And soon she began to feel more peace. She stopped most of the Bible study and read about other religions. She read The History of God. That one really was an eye opener. She learned that there were about twenty religions that predate Christianity that have one or more of the basics of Christianity: a virgin birth, a creation story, a great flood, a resurrection. They don’t tell you this stuff when you’re a kid in South Georgia. They can’t. They were never allowed to know it, either.

           And over the next decade or so, she came to believe that there are many lamps, but only one Light. That Jesus and Mohammed and the Buddha and countless others came to point us to the universal divine light, but humans twisted their messages and instead of following them to the light, we worshipped them and declared them The Light.

           Today she believes that organized religion was created as a means to control masses of people; rules to keep the little people in line. The vast cathedrals all over the world are witness to how the Catholic Church, for one, forced people who already were barely surviving and literally had nothing, to give what they had to the Church so that a golden temple could be built to honor God, while the people starved. Promise of eternal life or eternity in Hell: you choose. How does a loving god require that?

           Dixie knew a lady who recently lost a son to COVID. She spends her days in excruciating despair because she believes her child is in Hell, because he never made a public profession of faith in Jesus. Actually, she is the one in Hell.

Dixie came to believe that we all are innately holy, and we’re here to learn to be truly human, which doesn’t necessarily include religion, but it does include spirituality. That God is not this giant guy in the sky, but is an integral part of every being, and not just our species, but many – maybe all – others, as well.

Dixie still lives her life as closely aligned to the teachings of Jesus Christ as she can. It happens that many of the ideas Jesus taught were also taught by other spiritual teachers (same light, different lamp). She lives that way because it’s a satisfying way to live on this planet and it helps her to walk gently and to be humble and to put something good into the world every day.

Sometimes now when Dixie prays, she addresses her prayers to all of them whose names she can remember: Jesus, Allah, Bhagavan, Jehovah, the Buddha, the Universe, Spirit… for she believes that they and we are all one.

She’s much happier now.