The origin of Judeo-Christian spirituality, and why some hate it

By VLADIMIR MINKOV
The origin of Judeo-Christian spirituality can be described in the following spiritually Jewish way.
1. The great majority of Jews support the Rambam’s 13 principles of faith with the statement that the Torah is immutable and of divine origin.
2. The Torah states that God created the humans in His image and likeness – all of them, Jews and non-Jews.
3. The Torah defines the image of God as the Creator. If it is so, all the humans have to be creators in their individual (and collective) spheres of human endeavor.
4. The Torah defines the way of God’s, and therefore humans, creative work – evaluating the results of a creation: if it is GOOD, it remains alive and continue developing; if it is BAD, it is demolished and replaced by something else.
5. The Torah provides the Rules (spirituality, morality, rituals …) for defining GOOD and BAD to be tailored and applied to individual life circumstances.
6. The Torah defines one group of the humans, the Jews, as the Chosen to be a sort of testing ground for the Rules and a helper to the others in learning and applying the Rules to their God-guided creative efforts.
7. After receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Jews – for over a millennium – had accumulated enough experience in applying the Rules in their own realm, and had begun – about two millenniums ago – helping the non-Jews in changing their heathen rules to the Rules of One God.
8. At that time, there were no religions of Judaism or Christianity – just the Rules of One God for all the humans created by God in His own image and likeness.
9. After the God’s Torah-based Rules began to be followed by all Jews and many non-Jews, some of them began to play the role of interpreters and enforcers of the Rules in their own interpretation with the goal of becoming a sort of human gods for their own peoples – that is the beginning of religions Judaism and Christianity.
10. Judeo-Christian spirituality that we are discussing these days is the all-human spirituality based on the Rules of One God specified in the Torah without distortions introduced by some power-grabbing human leaders (in both Christianity and Judaism) without neglecting the unique role of the Jews as the Chosen.
Now, why some people may hate the concept of Judeo-Christian spirituality if, as is seen from the above description, this concept
• has nothing to do with the unique role of the Jews as the Chosen,
• has nothing to do with the unique distinguishing characteristics of Judaism and Christianity as different religions made for two different peoples – Jews and non-Jews,
• makes everybody spiritually equal in their individual pursue of happiness through creative work under one set of guiding rules for all, and
• what most important, spiritually arms us for defending our Judeo-Christian world from its chief spiritual enemy, the militarist Islam, bent on eliminating the Judeo-Christian world?
It looks like the answer is obvious. The haters of the concept of Judeo-Christian spirituality do not appreciate our great civilization, with two spiritual hubs in USA and Israel, and want to change it for something else. They do not understand the mission of the Jews as the Chosen and want do denigrate this mission. The Jewish haters do not believe in the Jewish spiritual strength and therefore think the concept of Judeo-Christian spirituality may encourage the Jews to leaving their faith. All of them are wrong!