There Are No Competing Teams. There Is Only Humanity.
When someone shouts “Jesus is King of Kings!” or insists that “Christianity is the only valid path to God!”, they are not expressing faith. They are expressing tribalism — and tribalism is precisely what Jesus spent his entire ministry trying to dismantle.
These proclamations function less as declarations of devotion and more as assertions of superiority: “my guy is greater than yours, my path leads to heaven, and yours leads straight to hell!” This is, at its core, the spiritual equivalent of fans declaring their team superior after a championship. And it violates, directly and obviously, Jesus’ consistent instruction not to judge others — let alone judge them as inferior, condemned, or spiritually lost.
The irony deepens when you consider that Buddhism, one of the traditions most frequently dismissed by Christians as a lesser or even dangerous path, teaches nearly identical spiritual principles — principles that were being practiced centuries before Jesus was born. The overlap is not coincidental and does not diminish Jesus’ significance. It confirms something more important: that the truths he taught are universal, not proprietary. Recognizing that other paths arrive at the same destination does not reduce his role as a vessel of the Holy Spirit. It simply removes the justification for treating his followers as a winning team and everyone else as opponents.
Nowhere in Jesus’ actual teachings does he instruct his followers to proclaim him King of Kings, elevate him above all other spiritual figures, or declare Christianity the exclusive route to awakening. Had he done so, it would have marked him as exactly what he was working against — an ego-driven authority figure demanding supremacy. The title regularly bestowed on him by Christians is a boast, not a teaching. And boasting about your spiritual affiliation is not a fast lane to the awakening Jesus described. If anything, it moves you into a traffic jam.
God has appeared through human vessels more than once — not exclusively through Jesus. The emergence of multiple such figures across human history has, unfortunately, contributed to tribalism by generating different religions around each of them. But strip away the cultural wrapping, the distinct mythologies, and the institutional frameworks, and what remains across these traditions is a remarkable convergence on the same essential truths: ego dissolution, compassion, unity, forgiveness, and the recognition that all people belong to the same whole. “My God is better than your God” is an absurd argument when in most cases both are pointing toward the same Source and the same path.
The ego loves distinctions. It requires them. Separation, hierarchy, and the comfort of believing one’s own group is spiritually correct are among the ego’s most reliable tools for maintaining control. This is precisely why Jesus — along with every other authentic spiritual teacher — taught against it. The moment you find yourself declaring your religion superior, that impulse itself is the red flag. It signals a departure from the path, not progress along it.
There is only one team. It has always been one team. It is called humanity. And unity — not supremacy, not tribal victory, not the satisfaction of being right while others are wrong — was the entire spirit of what Jesus came to teach.
At the end of the day, Jesus had no interest in hierarchy — and his rejection of judgment was the clearest expression of that. To judge another is to place yourself above them, and that single act collapses the very oneness he was trying to teach. For this reason, the modern Christian fixation on “Jesus is King!” and superior would have been foreign, even offensive, to him. You cannot preach unity with all of humanity while quietly exempting yourself from it.
This is not speculation. His life demonstrated it consistently. He deflected praise, resisted worship, and in one of the most deliberately symbolic acts of his ministry, knelt and washed the feet of his followers — what was considered a low level task of his day and something no king would ever do. The message was unmistakable: I am not above you. He understood that the moment you elevate yourself over others, you sever the connection to the oneness he considered the entire point.
What he offered instead was a model, not a monarchy. He presented himself as someone guided by the Holy Spirit — and then taught his followers to seek that same guidance themselves. The authority he carried was never positional. It was the authority of someone who had actually dissolved the ego’s need to rank, compare, and dominate. His consistency on this point is precisely what makes his teachings credible. He didn’t just say these things. He lived them — and dared others to do the same.
The work of awakening ultimately comes down to one persistent task: rooting out tribalism in all its forms. The ego is relentless in this regard — it will claim superiority wherever it can find footing, and the realm of religion is no exception. Even on the spiritual path, perhaps especially there, it finds a way to slip in unnoticed and quietly undermine everything you are reaching for. Stay vigilant. The moment you believe your path makes you better than someone else, you have already wandered off of it.
Below is a common embarrassing example of Christian tribalism violating everything Jesus spoke of, besides the embarrassment of portraying Jesus as some violent Lord of the Rings warrior despite him being a pure pacifist. So much so that he stuck to his pacifism rather than fight back during the last hours of his life leading up to his crucifixion.
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