Religion is filled with changes. It evolves from one era to another, gets some tinkering done in between generations and ultimately what we believe today is really a largely modified version of what it was meant to be.
The believers, however, are often blind to this fact. They love to believe that what they are believing now, how they believe now, and everything in their belief is the tradition, the source, the one truth. They say, "but we must keep to the traditional ways! We cannot keep having so much changes to the church! Your idea is too radical!" Little do they know that this "tradition" they claim is actually radicalism a generation before.
I do not know about how the other religions evolve other than the fact that monks walk on tight ropes and gets called to court these days, but I will attempt to explore the evolution path of Christianity as we know it.
Lets begin from the beginning. When organized religion/worship was first recorded in the bible. I like to believe that this started with Cain and Abel but I really have no idea how they worshipped. It appeared to me that pre-Egypt era's worship was a very primitive, unorganized, and is a pure relationship form between Man and God. In simple words, man goes straight to God. There's no walala in between. Purely relationship. That's the beginning. (and I believe very much this is what we try to achieve today, just that we got clogged up by the walalas)
Then comes the post-Egypt era, the "We are God's people and these rules will guide us" era. Israelites receive a whole bunch of dos-and-don'ts from God via Moses. Other than the ten commandments, there's a whole lot of rules listed in Leviticus. Sabbaths, fasting, tithing, sacrifice... the list goes on. This is also when it became extremely exclusive. The whole "God chosen people" thing really got to the Israelites and they go to wars with other countries to carve out their promised land. Although some of the stories in this era still remain relevant today, the entire concept is actually quite screwed up. Such a view of themselves really show how narrow-minded the Israelites were, but of course that's not for me to comment because God chose them anyway.
Whatever happens in between this era till Jesus's time is really quite gray to me. Israel gets defeated in war and exiled from their land, moving from one place to another, and then returned to their land, and then the prophets wrote alot of stuff. This era is filled with woes and dryness. You get alot of lamentations, and you get Lamentations itself. I do not know what to say about this era, I think religion itself is having a hard time in the face of their pagan lords, and thus the bleakness.
Then came Jesus time. Jesus gave religion a whole new meaning with the changes he brought about. Some of the laws were given new meaning (you murdered when you anger, you commit adultery when you lust) and the religion is no longer exclusive. Major parts of the old religion were abolished or given another meaning (such as sacrifice and fasting - see Matthew 9:14 for a saga on fasting) This of course was resisted by the pharisees. The pharisees often question Jesus and accuse him of blasphemy.
We often see the pharisees as the bad guys, as too traditional, think too much about themselves, showy. But that's really because we are on Jesus's side. When you really think about it, this has been the way they go about religion for the past hundreds or even thousands of years! Can we blame them for their reactions? For so long they've been doing things the traditional way and now this guy comes along and tries to overturn everything. So what if Jesus is the son of God? That, to their eyes, is a blasphemy in itself (gosh I am so close to committing blasphemy myself!)
The pharisees, if we take away the cloak of evilness that the bible put on them, are simply resisting change to a tradition that they have held dear almost all their lives. The key lesson that we can take away from them is perhaps the need for us to embrace changes in the traditions that we hold. We have to be open minded, ready to become radical in our thinking, cross the line, jump over the boundaries. Religion is not set in stone, and we won't be the first ones crossing boundaries here.
Protestanism, as we know it today, was a radical branch from Catholicism formed during the "Protestant Reformation" in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of the All-Saints Church in Germany. In England itself, the reformation was embraced by King Henry VIII as the Catholic church did not allow him to divorce his first wife to marry his second. There was a whole bunch of other events untill Queen Elizabeth I established Protestanism as the main religion over England, thus us seeing it as the traditional despite of it being radical at the start. A whole bunch of politics become intertwined with religion as well.
Denominations form as the Protestants get fragmented and divided with their beliefs. Anglicans, Baptist, Pentecostals et cetera were all formed during this fragmentation. What we think has been around since a long long time ago was acutally formed only 500 years ago. That what we believe is traditional was a radical reformation from the the Catholic church
Up till today, Christianity keeps going through changes. Worship styles change, the way messages are preached also change, the way churches are built et cetera. If we become blinded by "traditions", we will never be able to go anywhere. We have to embrace changes, put more thought into the unorthodox. We have to push ourselves to think out of the box, or we will only end up like the pharisees ourselves, holding on to our "traditions" so tightly that we become incapable to embracing the future and miss out on so so much.
We have to understand that religion is ever evolving. What is tradition or fundamental now was radical in the past. What was tradition in the past, was radical in an even distant past. If we ever do a backtrack in order to find the one true source/tradition of religion, we will only find God standing in the picture.
God is the only constant, the source, the traditon. Religion as we know it only serves as the walala. But we will never be able to go back to how it used to be millenias ago. The only way now, perhaps, is forward. And the only way forward is to embrace what comes our way. Sitting in the baby pool of "traditions" really will not get us anyway.
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