IN SEARCH OF AN EVOLVING UNIVERSAL-VALUES COMMON DENOMINATOR

The purpose of this document, to which we invite your contributions, is first of all to list the precepts of diverse faiths, spiritual paths and philosophies, putting these side-by-side wherever they are similar, adding to this information the dates in historic time and locations in the world of these codes of conduct.

This is an important consideration as almost all religious codes are an imperfect alloy of any messages of guidance from God/The Creator Spirit and a reflection of the socially accepted cultural practices of the time & location of their conception, as all inspiration, channelled through one human intellectual faculty (even of it claims to be, as do fundamentalists, nothing but "the word of God") even as other forms of creative expression, can be either ‘channelled from beyond’, the fruits of pure speculation or the constructs of our own desire ‘to know everything about everything’ (even when we do not!) such that we take the incomplete story/cosmology and cannot resist that urge to full in the blanks with our own ideas!

Most people receive their religion or philosophy at many-hands removed, as words (even if called "Holy Books’) such that it is impossible for we inheritors of faiths to tell the difference between these three sources. As a writer & (former) playwright, know how easy it is to make a convincing plot that has all the hall-marks of a feasible actuality, like Orson Well’s scary movie in 1939 America that convinced many who watched it that it was an actual newsreel of America being invaded Martians. Religious depictions of "Heaven" & "Hell" can fall into this category or genre of make-belief become belief for the naive!

Another purpose in culturally dating these precepts is that by doing so, we can indicate evolutionary patterns, assuming that their shared ethical-spiritual common denominators indicate the soundest foundations for an yet more evolved and all-humanity uniting Universalist Faith. I emphasise the word evolutionary because it is another fundamentalist delusion that their "God" (of whatever description) came upon a world of total moral chaos, and ex-nihil, as from the void of physical Creation, presented the entire religion as a "once-and-for-all-time package" to impose order on the world, even as Fundamentalist dictatorships are convinced that it is their Divine Duty before God to impose such order on a world that would otherwise fragment into chaos, forgetting that, often, the original idea had been added to by further ‘theologians’ while still flexible before it set solid, even as one can draw pictures in freshly mixed concrete before it goes hard. However, a precept does not need to be shared across the board with other faiths & philosophies for it to be one of the most vital ones for an evolved & better future Universalism, it may be unique to its faith, like the teachings of forgiveness are to Christianity, and that vital ingredient missing from the precepts of others.

Such ‘cultural dating’ also makes clear to us that ethical ideas that now seem either common place or even ‘behind our awareness of the needs of our times’, were once, in fact, so strange, radical & revolutionary in their times, that they were well in advance of them. This reminds me of Comedy sketch by a once famous, now long passed to Spirit, British comedian, Charlie Drake, in which, scion of a tribe of socially-accepting cannibals, he, alone, comes up with a personal conviction that "eating people is wrong" –but everyone else thinks he has gone insane and he ends up in the stew-pot. (personally, I can feel similarly as a Vegan, on Essene/Jaina lines, in a still mainly carnivorous society), so just let us try to imagine the average response of the hunter-gatherer and barbaric tribe of the Hebrews, in a world used to inter-tribal war-fare & plunder, to Moses, one of the earliest religious pacifists when he came down from Mt Sinai having "talked with God/Yahweh" with those first Ten Commandments which included "Thou shalt not kill", which has become throughout history, for so many it seems, a most unkeepable commandment, even those who revere Moses as first founder of their Law. If any commandment came from the angels, this is IT and before we seek to "improve" on our ethical precepts, we first ought to try to make sure that we abide by those that we give verbal allegiance to already! It is said that he (an educated half-Egyptian) might have derived many of these radical ideas from the previous Pharo Ackenaton who was derided by many in Egypt as insane for both asserting one invisible God and, as a Pacifist, disbanding the imperial army, relying on love, justice & compassion to maintain his sway over the people: but then one must ask "Did not he get such, then ‘strange’ & ‘heretical’, concepts, no where else to be found, from Spirit".

It is my conviction that throughout the ages Spirit has sought to speak through many prophets & other wise leaders (even if what came through did get occasionally distorted by human interpretations), and we must not forget in this the less well known Zarathusdras of Iranian Zoroastrianism, the Hakim of the Druzzes of Lebanon/Syria as the Zen-Tao meditative hermits of ancient China. This was not an new idea "invented" by the current mainstream religions of humanity (or New Age Channellers) but goes right back to the primal, primitive roots of spirituality in the earliest homo sapiens, that Shamanic conviction that not only are all life-forms on Earth infused with an invisible empowering, creating and shaping eternal Spirit that outlasts mortal forms, but that, initiated, we can commune with the disincarnate realms of this Spirit!

So, to start near the beginning, let us start with Moses’ "Ten Commandments"! – David Allen Stringer.

The Ten Commandments of Moses
(Circa 1,200 BC)

Exodus Chapter 20 vv 3 to 17

1/ Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above or in Earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

2/Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them: for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the children unto the 3rd or 4th generation of them that hate me and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. (Is this a Law of Karmic Consequences?)

3/ Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.

4/ Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. Six Days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord, for in it, thou shalt not do any work - - for in six days the Lord made the Heaven & Earth, the Sea and all that is therein and rested on the seventh day whereby the Lord blessed the Sabbath day & hallowed it* – (the Qabalistic Number 7 is that of Awareness & Consciousness, i.e. a day set aside to ensure through prayer/meditation & contemplation etc our Awareness of the dimension of Spirit beyond the material spheres of moral survival, while the No6 is that of the material Creation without self-awareness).

5/Honour Thy Father and Mother

6/ Thou shalt not kill (i.e. anything!)

7/ Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8/ Thou shalt not steal.

9/ Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

10/Thou shalt not covet - - anything that is thy neighbours.

Many people might and have found the Thou shalt not tone of these commandments, negative or repressively theocratic in our modern times of more advanced moral conscience so need to put their formulation into the cultural context of the time:- the Hebrews (Khabirus) a somewhat aggressive migrant pastoralist tribe from the Khabir River region of North East Syria who had been attracted by some of the religious ideas of Chaldean cosmologist, Abraham of the civilised City of Ur previously, even as they felt drawn to some of those of the Egyptian Moses during their stay there, might well have acquired, amongst their educated elite (the Levites) some of the veneer of softer civilised values & practices, but remained, then, in an early stage of their evolution and, in so far as some were still "barbarians" likely to commit anyone of the above "sins" as a socially acceptable practice- hence the more "prohibitive" and threatening tone of this first "rule-book", even as "strict discipline" is needed when dealing with criminal delinquents, bearing in mind that "laws" exist because there are "criminals".

*These commandments are expressed very simply, but their implications & ramifications are profound & extensive as regards our individual & collective spiritual growth e.g. The Sabbath as the Lord’s Day is when we can all transcend the material divisions of wealth & poverty that divide us in our self-identities and see our true place as co-equals with all Creation before "God". Only this kind of awareness can only ultimately unite us in our diversities as one humanity!

It is when we place our material idols as the centre of our Cosmos & aspirations and neglect the Sacred Temple that we become cut off from one another and the greater whole of which we are part.

This collective & mutual alienation is, unfortunately the prevailing state of atheistic-agnostic & amoral Western-style cultures that have rejected such ancient Wisdom as enshrined in the best "commandments" of religions that lead us to awareness of being smaller parts of the one whole over which no man can rule!

Of course, Moses must have understood this as a Visionary on a Vision Quest in Sinai himself, but he did not expect the greater part of the Hebrews to realise all such implications, only hoping that, if they did "keep the Sabbath Holy" in time, such spiritual realisations might evolve in their psyches. The rule is not the be-all-&-end-all rather it is the door, the way that facilitates our further upward progression!

Jesus comes more than 1,000 years later as "the way" to restore this possibility of our further evolution to atrophied and rigidified creeds, to announce the coming of the time of "rule by an inner enlightened conscience & Consciousness" in place of the foremer "rule by theocratic legislation" imposed from outside

David

This open-ended and evolving document has been initiated by David Allen Stringer
International Coordinator – The Universal Alliance
http://www.universalalliance.org.uk
Email: universalalliance.org@tinyworld.co.uk

Please email to us your own sets of precepts (plus comments & historic background?) from whatever sources so that they can be interwoven into the final document for which this is the introduction & foundation, either as Plain text emails of simple word documents for insertion into this text!

 

 

 

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