A core concept

Christianity is not magic. This really has to be emphasised. Christianity is NOT magic. By magic I mean the mechanistic, scheming and ultimately dependent approach to paying spiritual and supernatural powers to do what you want.

At first glance, one would not think of Christianity and shamanism as having that much in common. In one you are smoking ganja and climbing mystical ladders, among other things, in your pursuits and manipulations on the spirit world. In the other you are living a good life, getting baptized, staying clean and passing judgments of being "unbiblical" on certain actions. But what do these two approaches have in common? They are both fully allowing the individual to be subverted by the system and consumed, to varying degrees, in service to it.

Granted, the Christian practice of systematically approaching the divine and fallowing all the right formulas to get it to do what the believer wants, "I can't live in sin or I will be punished. We just have to live good lives. We can't do that. It's unbiblical.", is not really quite as bad as child sacrifice to insure good harvests, but the underlying practice looks quite disturbingly the same.

Again I say it is not magic! It is time to start taking what Paul said, "all things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial" seriously. However, lets focus on the first part and not be afraid for once. Let us fearlessly accept the fact that nothing is out of bounds. Nothing is off limits. All thing truly are permissible. ALL things. It matters not how bad they are. Works are not EVER the basis for salvation. Accepting this as fact and relentlessly embracing the true scope of what we are allowed to do, let us now embrace the fact that we are not going to lose our minds in orgies of evil with this knowledge. This is because, even with the whole world open to us, all we truly want to do at our deepest core is influenced by the divine personality we accepted when we first believed. It is unto such that our life and actions are conformed and through such that our actions can be expanded into all the dark cracks and shining expanses of reality when we fully embrace that all things are permissible and that the only guiding force is the personality of God, which is fully contextual to the setting in which it wishes to express perfect love.

Embracing this, who knows where we will go and what we will do? Through our freedom the light shines to all and in the way it must to reach them as they are, for G-d is merciful enough to meet people as they are. Why else would he have become human in the first place?