A drastic decision...

Deeply and profoundly inspired by my recent reading of Sam Harris's fabulous book, The End of Faith - astonishingly competent and important - I have arrived at the epiphany to overtly make the clean bold break that has been natural to me for decades now and announce point-blank that I am not a Christian. I have held on to being a "moderate" and espousing the tradition due to my great respect for the genuine spiritual master Jesus Christ. But Harris enlightened me to the error of my ways and I now see clearly the immorality of condescending to endorse the warped tradition ostensibly associated with Jesus' name. Of course only one "Christian" in a million has a clue to the original teaching. Most have never even heard of - much less read - the most important of the gospels, namely, the Gospel of Thomas. But anyway, faith as the term is socially understood (unrelated to anything valid as a tool for salvation) is inconceivably dangerous. It is the main thing wrong with the world, second only to sleep (our ordinary state we live out our lives in, including our fantasy of faith). What is needed is empirical and practical spiritual practice. I will continue to claim to be a Buddhist since that is so amenable to that. But for an example of practical empirical spirituality, in my opinion Jeanne de Salzmann's book The Reality of Being is light-years beyond the average person in its spiritual wisdom and is the most precious and sacred book existing for those who would take it on in a serious way. I take my spiritual life very seriously at least in principle, regardless of how feeble it plays out in my actual effort. As for the most important book in the world in terms of what most people in the world desperately need to read, I pick Sam Harris's book.