We Don't Need Any "Third Temple"

Most Jewish sects have evolved a higher theology that began with the new scriptural interpretations introduced by the Tannaim ("The Teachers") in their school of Yavne in Judaea, a reformist rabbinical council of the 1st and 2nd Centuries CE, which essentially states that the offering of meaningful prayer to YHWH (God) not only should supplant animal sacrifice, but that it is actually a higher form of offering. For the Tannaim, the Torah itself became the "new temple". The Medieval Jewish Philosopher Maimonides upheld this dictum from Late Antiquity in his magnum opus, Guide for the Perplexed, when there was talk of rebuilding the Temple to reintroduce sacrificial worship. Consequently, most Jewish sects today, except "ultra-orthodox" extremists, believe a Third Temple should not be built by human hands in Jerusalem. As for Christians, they would do well to remember that Jesus himself was not a fan of the self-aggrandizing religious authority or parasitic priestly tithings of the Temple-centered form of Judaism during his era (neither, for that matter, was his mentor, the Prophet John the Baptist). For Jesus, a person achieved expiation of his or her sins through sincere prayer, and departure from a sinful existence began with the formal symbolism of a baptismal ceremony, to which a person freely submitted him or herself at a spiritually cognizant age. Right-wing fundamentalist Christians, who minutely plot and madly scheme for the erection of a "Third Temple" as a way to usher in a "cleansing" doomsday scenario, are transgressing the will of Christianity's central teacher, Jesus. Indeed, Jesus foresaw the future physical collapse of Herod's temple as a just result for the world of corruption it bred among religious authorities, and wanted people to turn within to discover spiritual salvation through their inner light rather than through primitive acts of animal sacrifice on priestly-designated "holy ground". For those Jewish sects that believe a Messiah will one day come to liberate the world from its suffering, the Third Temple will simply arrive from on high through heavenly fiat. It will NOT happen (legitimately and therefore everlastingly) by human territorial aggression, seizing Mount Zion from the Muslims, and tearing down their mosque to rebuild the temple and to sacrifice an inaugural red heifer without blemish. Misinformed Christians, who contingently "love" Jews only as tools to one day build for them a Third Temple so that a specious 19th Century interpretation of The Book of Revelations might be "fulfilled", should rather learn to truly love Jews for themselves as fellow human beings, who are following an independently viable moral path every bit as pleasing in the eyes of God as Christianity. These Third Temple Christians should not ask Jews to be the mere servants of such a gratuitous and Biblically-unsupported direction of militancy, and not politically compel Jews to become a vanguard against a fellow Abrahamic faith that worships the same God as Judaism and the Christian faith. It is vile heresy to foment fear-based right-wing agendas in Israel to spark off the woeful flames of a Third World War. War is not pleasing to the eyes of loving God. If it was, he would not have sent us his messenger, the Prince of Peace. The body given each of us is our Temple, and the Holy of Holies is the indwelling soul of every human being. God has no need for any particular material scrap of ground, and certainly needs no human army to "conquer" it for him. "I AM THAT I AM" (the literal meaning of "Jehovah") is in all things and in all people. We worship a transcendent God, not a pagan deity of topography. Indeed, we are supposed to have known this from the very day that Moses first recounted it from his own trembling lips after he came down from Mount Sinai.