Hi Windwalker. Great to see you again!!
Likewise.
There's only a unique handful who have achieved this and I can't put it down to such a random thing like timing, culture, luck or charisma.
I think you underestimate the currents of culture that foster and nurture these gifts we as individuals have that give rise to these people and the movements created in their names. These religious, or political, or culturally influential people would have no name whatsoever if they existed in a vacuum. They had something to say, because the need surrounding them existed.
What you need to try to wrap your mind around is that those like a Jesus figure exist all over the place, but their gifts only appear when the pressures of the environment are such that it causes them to emerge. In other words, it created them out of the potentials they possessed laying in wait within them. It made it come out. During times of great political and social unrest is when those like a Martin Luther King appear. If everything had been hunkydory socially, you'd have never heard his name nor seen what gifts he had come to bear. The greatest art humans produce is created during the darkest of times when we reach for Light. That's how these things work.
You need those things but you also need a spirit that can withstand change and despite massive changes to our world, their Message keeps winning hearts and minds.
Another factor you are not taking into account here is that the understanding of what these teachings are evolve. They do not, nor should, remain static. Their enduring power is because
people invest themselves in them. It's not that their words were necessarily deeper or wiser than any other great teachers of wisdom that exist the world over in all generations of humans, but they were the ones that got promoted, that people invested themselves into, and made the teaching have the power they do.
An analogy for his is that without the marketplace, without the consumers, the currency has no value. The dollar is strong because people spend it and invest in it. The dollar is not a magical piece of paper just sitting on a desk somewhere. We make it alive. We make it do magical things, so to speak. Christ is nothing, completely powerless if people didn't invest themselves in it.
Buddha 2,500 years ago, Christ 2,000 years, Muhammad 1400. And what they achieved was without wealth or power and even intense opposition.
Well, this is not true at all. Let's take Christ specifically here. Jesus did not start the Christian church. His followers did. And how they achieved that was again because people invested themselves in the movement started in his name by various groups in those early years. How it became The Church of Rome was in fact very much a result of both power and wealth under the Emperor Constantine. His power and wealth made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. And as he did that, all sorts of other little groups like the Christian movement fell off into obscurity.
Christianity didn't become what it is because it's message was necessarily more profound or enduring than any of the other movements out there. They simply became what they were because of circumstances and people with power and wealth who both promoted and spread by force it's reach through the empire. It could have been any other religion, or any other "prophet" today you believe was "sent by God". You're starting with who "won" out, and presuming it had a divine plan behind it. The same way you imagine evolution is all about human beings.
Jesus a carpenter eventually won over Rome
Constantine won over Rome, not Jesus.
That's a mythology. It never happened historically. But even so, you don't think God drowning the armies of Pharaoh in the mythology isn't the use of force and
power???
Islam spread by the conquest of warfare, i.e., power.
Without any wealth or power how have these Beings established their ascendancy and their Cause over all the world?
Their followers seized upon the religion with their wealth and power to spread it, and themselves, all over the world. These are the facts.
You cannot separate the religions in their names with the so-called success of the founders. Without the religions, their teachings would be lost in the sands of history, just like so very many are. And that is my entire point.
What drove it if it wasn't money and power? Culture, charm ? Yes but you need more than that to survive and thrive thousands of years later.
In all honesty, of all the millions of Christians out there, few actually are. For the most part, they are members of the religion, and the teachings of Jesus are neither understood nor followed by them. The reason his teachings survive, is because the religion in his name has them preserved as part of the objects of their faith, like the stripes on the flag.
Very few understand them, so the "success" of his teachings should really only be measured by the very few, scant souls whom they actually resonate within. I wouldn't call that "highly successful", actually on the scale of "taking over the world". They haven't. Nor should that, necessarily be the measure of worth in order to hold them in esteem. If you were to measure the actual value of the teachings, then I'd say Buddhism has far greater influence in people's lived experience because it's more about
experience than belief. Christ's teachings are suffocated underneath the blanket of "acceptable doctrine," and whatnot.
If we could put our finger on it and bottle it don't you think men would have done it by now?
They have, and I just explained it fairly well. Don't mistake you not recognizing these factors with people not having successfully identified them, and supported them.
I put it down to God because that to me is the only way they could have and still have such a massive influence over billions of people thousands of years after they have died.
And this is why you mythologize these things, because you aren't looking at the very human, and very natural social and cultural factors that are in fact responsible for what you see. When you ignore these, then it all just seems like magic. But it's not. It's far more complex, nuanced, and fascinating than the magical view which ignores the complexity.
