Christianity must be a way of life

Visiting the blog of Sam Harris, a self-professed atheist who wrote the bestsellers "The End of Faith" and "Letter To A Christian Nation," I have chanced to read what he said was a manifesto of Norway's so-called fundamentalist Christian Anders Behring Breivik who killed at least 77 people in a murderous rampage in his country on July 24.
Reading the manifesto, I cannot imagine how Breivik has been hastily labelled as a Christian when there was not a trace in his writings, much less in his deeds, that he has been following the teachings of Jesus Christ after whom the Christian Faith was founded. Breivik has even confessed that he was more of a secular man than being a man of Faith.
I quote: "I'm not going to pretend (that) I'm a very religious person as that would be a lie. I've always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment. In the past, I remember that I used to think religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point of believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself?"
Even Harris did not believe that Breivik is a "Christian fundamentalist", to borrow his own words. Says Harris: "Having read parts of his 1,500-page manifesto (2083: A European Declaration of Independence), I must say that I have my doubts. These do not appear to be the ruminations of an especially committed Christian."
Indeed. Christianity is not a mere label, a tag that we receive after baptism or inherited from our forebears. It is living the teachings of Christ which is quite difficult as His teachings are often against the ways of the world. It is probably the reason why the Bible has admonished us not to love the world but to live in it.
To be a Christian is to be committed to the Christian values. Without that commitment we can be no more than nominal Christians. We cannot simply go to church every Sunday and abuse our maids at home. Christianity must be a way of life. It is following, or trying to follow, at least the two basic teachings of Christ - love God above all and then our neighbors.
The two basic teachings sum up the 10 commandments which the Bible says had been handed by God to Mosses on a stone tablet. Regardless of whether we have doubts on that Biblical story, the 10 commandments have been the cornerstone of our moral values. If we love God and our neighbor, we will neither steal nor commit adultery and the other prohibited acts.
Our human nature, which is more attuned to the worldly ways, makes is difficult for us to follow Christ'a teachings. Our ego, the core of our being human, makes it easy for us to love ourselves more than anyone else and drives us to work for our self-gratification. Our ego makes us pursue the standard worldly dream of gaining wealth, power and fame, fair or foul.
Our pursuits for self-gratification prompt us to bend rules. Instead of strengthening our Christian values, we adopt new social ethos that suit our worldly ways. We try to exorcise our sense of guilt when we carry an affair out of wedlock with a justification that there is nothing wrong with consensual acts. It is ironic that in much of the so-called advance societies, it has ceased to be a virtue for women to remain a virgin at 30. It is being prudish.
We have been reading in the papers how corruption has thrived in many countries, from India to Pakistan, Indonesia to the Philippines and so on and so forth. In the United States, there have been grumblings about how politicians have been serving the interests of the financial giants at Wall Street at the expense of the ordinary citizens, to return whatever favors they get from the Wall Street billionaires.
To be a Christian, we have to tame our ego. Without putting our ego in harness, we will never learn to love our neighbors, we could only see them as tools for self-gratification; we will never learn to see the virtue of humility, which is one of the many teachings of Christ. As I see it, one of the great lessons that we can learn from the Passion of Christ it is the lesson in humility.(Please see my previous blog "Lessons to learn from the Passion of Christ).
Without taming our ego, we can hardly find peace with ourselves and in the world. The likes of Breivik and of nations that go to war in search of peace have proven this. The only way to peace is love, the core teaching of Jesus Christ. The sword may be a good tool for defense but never an instrument of peace.

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