That's a kind of prejudice that is unacceptable to me, and shame on you for pushing it. When did Jesus push the idea of slaughtering people on a global level? Never is the answer, but people may go to war and feel they have the backing of Jesus, but it is no more then a a rationalization for the horrors they commit.
You fail however to make the very significant distinction between his teaching and the rationalizations people use to justify their carnage. However do learn to make that distinction between what Jesus taught, and how people will justify their brutality in his name. The end.
Jon Carver, Jesus came down hardest on the Pharisees, the priestly class of time, saying that they closed the kingdom of heaven to others but did not go in themselves. He said that they went about like whitewashed tombs, but inside were full of dead menтАЩs bones. You appear unable to distinguish between people doing things in JesusтАЩ name, say, like running to a Washington church during a protest and holding up a bible which youтАЩve likely never read; or others might do things which are actually Christlike. Your own thinking is pretty shit if you canтАЩt discern a difference there. Jesus disciples came to him and told him men were calling him this or that. He replied: But who do you say that I am ? I would ask you the same question. Put in terms of secular philosophy, what is the thing in itself? And Jesus didnтАЩt go anywhere except a few places around the Sea of Galilee by the way. Except Egypt, and his parents didnтАЩt even bring back a lousy tee-shirt.
Roland, truly spirituality is the greatest achievement of evolution and there have been authentic virtuous people in all religions everywhere but... the demands of organized religion especially those that consider themselves the only owners of truth are designed to make war to the others. About the historical Jesus we know very little except that He was a Zealot teacher in an obscure rebel apocalyptic sect whose goal was to finish the roman dominance and return to a Jewish theocratic state and the romans tried and executed Him for sedition. The rest of what we know of Him is a matter of faith on what the gospels, written generations after his death, tell us about him and his teachings.
Professor Huston Smith in his book "The World's Religions, Revised and Updated: A Concise Introduction" writes so beautifully about the spirituality of the traditional religions of the world that makes, even an agnostic like myself, to love them. Following is a quote from his book:
"Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the manтАЩs successтАФthat he had seized hold of the TruthтАФSatan was unperturbed. тАЬDonтАЩt worry,тАЭ he yawned. тАЬIтАЩll tempt him to institutionalize it.тАЭ"
Thanks for that, Julio. I like the fable about tempting the man who laid hold of the truth to institutionalise it.
When you talk about what we know historically about Jesus you arenтАЩt focussing on his personhood. When we say we know someone it is because we know the way they think; their mind makes repeated choices based on an understandable guiding principle, from which we can anticipate what they would do in a given situation. From the basic agreement of the four gospels we get to know through JesusтАЩ actions which he attributes to God, that God is love. People come to know and love Jesus because of this. A lot of critics get hung up on the apparent exclusivity of the statement: тАЬno-one comes to the father but through meтАЭ, which I interpret as meaning that only through his suffering of his life on Earth which still did not fall away from the truth while suffering what other humans suffer, can humanity be reconciled to itself as the creation of a good God, and expect to find the God of Love. I donтАЩt think weтАЩll ever look upon God in some kind of filmic Nazi ark of the covenant moment, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. I would never expect to comprehend being in the presence of a God immanent in a universe of stars, but self-knowledge in the light of the life of Christ can be a searing judgement on what we may have failed to become. Take perhaps when you spend $83 Bn on defence and everybody becomes less secure, especially where you buy your own gun as well and become seven times as likely to kill a member of your own family with it; or if you spend another few billion to overthrow your enemy through mercenaries and a corrupt proxy. I might be content with a cold dead hand to comfort me if I had done those things. My living hands being all the colder for my having no Russian natural gas with which to heat them.
The judgement being that light has come Into to the world and that mankind has preferred darkness. Yet evil is not a thing in itself, it is an absence of a virtue in a particular individual. It is an absence of character, which makes it such a nameless influence. In the particular being, first the person loses sight of or is never shown the goal to pursue, and then, having lost sight of a rational goal to pursue, the individual falls into absurdity and in so doing loses motivation (or Kantian freedom of the will power) to pursue a goal, ultimately taking the position: IтАЩm alive, IтАЩm dead, ha ha ha! This is why the integrity of the personality of Christ and the focus of his life is so important. ItтАЩs not enough to say that all we know is where he lived and who of all those who wanted to, actually killed him.
Thank you for your post, Roland. It seems that you want people to focus on the Crist of faith and not too much on the historical Jesus who, after all, was a rebel that perhaps we would call him a terrorist today. On the contrary, the Crist of faith is a beautiful dream of love but just imaginary. We all are made of stardust and it seems to me (metaphorically) that we want to return to our origins, and so, we create religions that satisfy that desire. Unfortunately, we have to face reality and study history to evaluate the usefulness of those lofty dreams, and the result is IMHO that religion has impeded the moral advancement of mankind, hampered the progress of sciences and fomented continuous wars specially since the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths that introduce the element of intolerance that didn't exist in older religions. This is what I believe is the contribution of the peoples of faith, but there are glorious individual exceptions. We inherited the fire from the stars that is so beneficial but also extremely destructive. On the good side there are examples of virtuous persons like Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and mother Theresa. The other side contains villains like the great inquisitor of Seville, Osama Bin Laden and our born again Cristian Richard the Lionheart that recently launched a crusade against Iraq.
All of these people were deeply religious but the difference in their actions was due to the way they understood their spirituality.
This is my understanding of good and evil. We all are made of the same stardust and keep the same fire. It is up to us to use that fire in a good way without any help from organized religion. I agree with Epicurus: "If God wants to abolish evil, but cannot, He is impotent. If He can, but doesn't want to, He is wicked."
Roland, we see the world from two different perspectives. You accepted the Axial Age legacy that "We live in this world but we are not from this world" and ,I feel very comfortable in this world. When our time comes to depart, you and the other good believers will die with the hope that you will be in heaven. When it is our turn, I and the other agnostics will die with the satisfaction of having enjoyed our lives to the full and following our conscience.
And you and I will end being a great soil fertilizer to contribute to the developing evolution of all creatures.
Well, since IтАЩve caught your attention, the only half arguable point you might have is that St Paul, not Jesus, being the foundation of the Catholic Church, the Catholics in misplaced admiration for his single-minded attempt to drop everything in favour of mission work, have instituted celibacy for priests, which to my mind contradicts their excellent formal Thomist doctrine of the balance of the natural inclinations. Their inability to switch that false doctrine off is a terrible thing. They should seriously just cancel that tomorrow, a bit like you just see the stupidity of what youтАЩre doing and cancel the Second Amendment tomorrow and throw away your gun.
If youтАЩre going to just rail at people and call them shit thinkers and worse, try keeping shit insults out of your texts and attempt to construct your own actual doctrine which will deconstruct Christianity and reveal your true guidelines for human action. And once youтАЩve done that maybe theyтАЩll build three buildings in every town in which to celebrate you. And then sit back and see if youтАЩre ever tempted, like the pastors of the Prosperity Gospel, to say, I deserve to be rewarded for showing people the true faith, bring me my private jet, and weтАЩll go and buy out the poor people on that ranchland IтАЩd like to buy with all the cheques my followers sent me. But youтАЩre talking about Jesus now, not Jim Jones. You need to up your game, Jesus didnтАЩt fall into the traps of the Pharisees and youтАЩve yet to set one for him. тАЬWithout a parable he spake not into them.тАЭ Jesus only gives analogies in parables as to what the Kingdom of Heaven is, the parable of the mustard seed, for example, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God is тАЬlikeтАЭ a father, but no, a being that transmits its will through the luminiferous aether and sustains the universe from moment to moment does not have тАЬkidsтАЭ, people are putting labels on everything. In the US a man who wanted money and power stuck a Maga label on his hat and came within an hour or two of making the system of government into a formal dictatorship. All kinds of people followed him and still do. You seem to be content to accept that anything done in the name of something is that thing itself. Have you not heard the term false gods? Why do you think that the first commandment is to have no other gods but the one true God? It all seems a bit naive on your part. YouтАЩll never know who Jesus was and is and be able to write anything credible about Christianity if you canтАЩt consider what something, Jesus, is in itself, rather than thinking youтАЩve found another radical way to annoy people to the level that youтАЩre annoyed, and a suitably unarmed target at which to vent your inner rage. You still have not answered my first question, who do you say that he is, because it appears that you canтАЩt answer as to who or what you think Jesus was. Knowing Jesus is never a bad thing, it gives you an idea of who you yourself really might be once you burn away all the misconceptions and propaganda of the society youтАЩre living in. LetтАЩs have your manifesto, then. WhatтАЩs your lifeтАЩs work, beyond the destruction of Christianity which by your slagging off and trying to humiliate people will doubtless keel over immediately in awe at the magnitude of your understanding of its absurdity, and disappear in a puff of logic?
Well IтАЩm disappointed in Jesus to find out from you that heтАЩs been running around impersonating Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay. I suspected he might have been living out his dark side when I saw him impersonating JFK, but on that occasion he got his lines muddled and said тАЬAsk not how your country can traffic you into war, thatтАШs just how we roll, but rather, ask how you can meekly go along with that plan and blame it all on me. IтАЩll give you this cross I borrowed off your real role models and you can lay it all at the feet of that, you whining, grievance-ridden, deluded advert for ArmeggedonтАЬ.
Each keeps its own nature. We are all part of the body of God, suspended in a lattice of harmonies formed from the luminiferous ether. A being whose will propagates through the highest tenuity of matter doesnтАЩt generally have kids; I donтАЩt think Jesus ever limited the manifestations of God to three, so IтАШm of the opinion that the doctrine of the Trinity is a derivative of some midrashic or numerological thinking, but the closeness of Jesus to the Creator makes him talk in terms of being one with God. What happened to you ? If you donтАЩt like God or Jesus, тАЬwho you gonna call? тАЬMust sleep, I may address your other specifics tomorrow. Good luck to you meantime.
Agreed. The whole madness starts with Deuteronomy chapter 20 where among other niceties Jehovah commands that (verse 16th) "it is only in the cities of these peoples that Jehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance that you not must preserve any breathing thing alive because you should without fail preserve to destruction..." and so for, and much later Jesus said that he had not come to change the law of Moses.
Not just the Abrahamic religions but most organized religions have fomented wars.
That's a kind of prejudice that is unacceptable to me, and shame on you for pushing it. When did Jesus push the idea of slaughtering people on a global level? Never is the answer, but people may go to war and feel they have the backing of Jesus, but it is no more then a a rationalization for the horrors they commit.
You fail however to make the very significant distinction between his teaching and the rationalizations people use to justify their carnage. However do learn to make that distinction between what Jesus taught, and how people will justify their brutality in his name. The end.
Jon Carver, Jesus came down hardest on the Pharisees, the priestly class of time, saying that they closed the kingdom of heaven to others but did not go in themselves. He said that they went about like whitewashed tombs, but inside were full of dead menтАЩs bones. You appear unable to distinguish between people doing things in JesusтАЩ name, say, like running to a Washington church during a protest and holding up a bible which youтАЩve likely never read; or others might do things which are actually Christlike. Your own thinking is pretty shit if you canтАЩt discern a difference there. Jesus disciples came to him and told him men were calling him this or that. He replied: But who do you say that I am ? I would ask you the same question. Put in terms of secular philosophy, what is the thing in itself? And Jesus didnтАЩt go anywhere except a few places around the Sea of Galilee by the way. Except Egypt, and his parents didnтАЩt even bring back a lousy tee-shirt.
Roland, truly spirituality is the greatest achievement of evolution and there have been authentic virtuous people in all religions everywhere but... the demands of organized religion especially those that consider themselves the only owners of truth are designed to make war to the others. About the historical Jesus we know very little except that He was a Zealot teacher in an obscure rebel apocalyptic sect whose goal was to finish the roman dominance and return to a Jewish theocratic state and the romans tried and executed Him for sedition. The rest of what we know of Him is a matter of faith on what the gospels, written generations after his death, tell us about him and his teachings.
Professor Huston Smith in his book "The World's Religions, Revised and Updated: A Concise Introduction" writes so beautifully about the spirituality of the traditional religions of the world that makes, even an agnostic like myself, to love them. Following is a quote from his book:
"Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the manтАЩs successтАФthat he had seized hold of the TruthтАФSatan was unperturbed. тАЬDonтАЩt worry,тАЭ he yawned. тАЬIтАЩll tempt him to institutionalize it.тАЭ"
Thanks for that, Julio. I like the fable about tempting the man who laid hold of the truth to institutionalise it.
When you talk about what we know historically about Jesus you arenтАЩt focussing on his personhood. When we say we know someone it is because we know the way they think; their mind makes repeated choices based on an understandable guiding principle, from which we can anticipate what they would do in a given situation. From the basic agreement of the four gospels we get to know through JesusтАЩ actions which he attributes to God, that God is love. People come to know and love Jesus because of this. A lot of critics get hung up on the apparent exclusivity of the statement: тАЬno-one comes to the father but through meтАЭ, which I interpret as meaning that only through his suffering of his life on Earth which still did not fall away from the truth while suffering what other humans suffer, can humanity be reconciled to itself as the creation of a good God, and expect to find the God of Love. I donтАЩt think weтАЩll ever look upon God in some kind of filmic Nazi ark of the covenant moment, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. I would never expect to comprehend being in the presence of a God immanent in a universe of stars, but self-knowledge in the light of the life of Christ can be a searing judgement on what we may have failed to become. Take perhaps when you spend $83 Bn on defence and everybody becomes less secure, especially where you buy your own gun as well and become seven times as likely to kill a member of your own family with it; or if you spend another few billion to overthrow your enemy through mercenaries and a corrupt proxy. I might be content with a cold dead hand to comfort me if I had done those things. My living hands being all the colder for my having no Russian natural gas with which to heat them.
The judgement being that light has come Into to the world and that mankind has preferred darkness. Yet evil is not a thing in itself, it is an absence of a virtue in a particular individual. It is an absence of character, which makes it such a nameless influence. In the particular being, first the person loses sight of or is never shown the goal to pursue, and then, having lost sight of a rational goal to pursue, the individual falls into absurdity and in so doing loses motivation (or Kantian freedom of the will power) to pursue a goal, ultimately taking the position: IтАЩm alive, IтАЩm dead, ha ha ha! This is why the integrity of the personality of Christ and the focus of his life is so important. ItтАЩs not enough to say that all we know is where he lived and who of all those who wanted to, actually killed him.
Thank you for your post, Roland. It seems that you want people to focus on the Crist of faith and not too much on the historical Jesus who, after all, was a rebel that perhaps we would call him a terrorist today. On the contrary, the Crist of faith is a beautiful dream of love but just imaginary. We all are made of stardust and it seems to me (metaphorically) that we want to return to our origins, and so, we create religions that satisfy that desire. Unfortunately, we have to face reality and study history to evaluate the usefulness of those lofty dreams, and the result is IMHO that religion has impeded the moral advancement of mankind, hampered the progress of sciences and fomented continuous wars specially since the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths that introduce the element of intolerance that didn't exist in older religions. This is what I believe is the contribution of the peoples of faith, but there are glorious individual exceptions. We inherited the fire from the stars that is so beneficial but also extremely destructive. On the good side there are examples of virtuous persons like Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and mother Theresa. The other side contains villains like the great inquisitor of Seville, Osama Bin Laden and our born again Cristian Richard the Lionheart that recently launched a crusade against Iraq.
All of these people were deeply religious but the difference in their actions was due to the way they understood their spirituality.
This is my understanding of good and evil. We all are made of the same stardust and keep the same fire. It is up to us to use that fire in a good way without any help from organized religion. I agree with Epicurus: "If God wants to abolish evil, but cannot, He is impotent. If He can, but doesn't want to, He is wicked."
Roland, we see the world from two different perspectives. You accepted the Axial Age legacy that "We live in this world but we are not from this world" and ,I feel very comfortable in this world. When our time comes to depart, you and the other good believers will die with the hope that you will be in heaven. When it is our turn, I and the other agnostics will die with the satisfaction of having enjoyed our lives to the full and following our conscience.
And you and I will end being a great soil fertilizer to contribute to the developing evolution of all creatures.
Well, since IтАЩve caught your attention, the only half arguable point you might have is that St Paul, not Jesus, being the foundation of the Catholic Church, the Catholics in misplaced admiration for his single-minded attempt to drop everything in favour of mission work, have instituted celibacy for priests, which to my mind contradicts their excellent formal Thomist doctrine of the balance of the natural inclinations. Their inability to switch that false doctrine off is a terrible thing. They should seriously just cancel that tomorrow, a bit like you just see the stupidity of what youтАЩre doing and cancel the Second Amendment tomorrow and throw away your gun.
If youтАЩre going to just rail at people and call them shit thinkers and worse, try keeping shit insults out of your texts and attempt to construct your own actual doctrine which will deconstruct Christianity and reveal your true guidelines for human action. And once youтАЩve done that maybe theyтАЩll build three buildings in every town in which to celebrate you. And then sit back and see if youтАЩre ever tempted, like the pastors of the Prosperity Gospel, to say, I deserve to be rewarded for showing people the true faith, bring me my private jet, and weтАЩll go and buy out the poor people on that ranchland IтАЩd like to buy with all the cheques my followers sent me. But youтАЩre talking about Jesus now, not Jim Jones. You need to up your game, Jesus didnтАЩt fall into the traps of the Pharisees and youтАЩve yet to set one for him. тАЬWithout a parable he spake not into them.тАЭ Jesus only gives analogies in parables as to what the Kingdom of Heaven is, the parable of the mustard seed, for example, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God is тАЬlikeтАЭ a father, but no, a being that transmits its will through the luminiferous aether and sustains the universe from moment to moment does not have тАЬkidsтАЭ, people are putting labels on everything. In the US a man who wanted money and power stuck a Maga label on his hat and came within an hour or two of making the system of government into a formal dictatorship. All kinds of people followed him and still do. You seem to be content to accept that anything done in the name of something is that thing itself. Have you not heard the term false gods? Why do you think that the first commandment is to have no other gods but the one true God? It all seems a bit naive on your part. YouтАЩll never know who Jesus was and is and be able to write anything credible about Christianity if you canтАЩt consider what something, Jesus, is in itself, rather than thinking youтАЩve found another radical way to annoy people to the level that youтАЩre annoyed, and a suitably unarmed target at which to vent your inner rage. You still have not answered my first question, who do you say that he is, because it appears that you canтАЩt answer as to who or what you think Jesus was. Knowing Jesus is never a bad thing, it gives you an idea of who you yourself really might be once you burn away all the misconceptions and propaganda of the society youтАЩre living in. LetтАЩs have your manifesto, then. WhatтАЩs your lifeтАЩs work, beyond the destruction of Christianity which by your slagging off and trying to humiliate people will doubtless keel over immediately in awe at the magnitude of your understanding of its absurdity, and disappear in a puff of logic?
Well IтАЩm disappointed in Jesus to find out from you that heтАЩs been running around impersonating Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay. I suspected he might have been living out his dark side when I saw him impersonating JFK, but on that occasion he got his lines muddled and said тАЬAsk not how your country can traffic you into war, thatтАШs just how we roll, but rather, ask how you can meekly go along with that plan and blame it all on me. IтАЩll give you this cross I borrowed off your real role models and you can lay it all at the feet of that, you whining, grievance-ridden, deluded advert for ArmeggedonтАЬ.
Each keeps its own nature. We are all part of the body of God, suspended in a lattice of harmonies formed from the luminiferous ether. A being whose will propagates through the highest tenuity of matter doesnтАЩt generally have kids; I donтАЩt think Jesus ever limited the manifestations of God to three, so IтАШm of the opinion that the doctrine of the Trinity is a derivative of some midrashic or numerological thinking, but the closeness of Jesus to the Creator makes him talk in terms of being one with God. What happened to you ? If you donтАЩt like God or Jesus, тАЬwho you gonna call? тАЬMust sleep, I may address your other specifics tomorrow. Good luck to you meantime.
Agreed. The whole madness starts with Deuteronomy chapter 20 where among other niceties Jehovah commands that (verse 16th) "it is only in the cities of these peoples that Jehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance that you not must preserve any breathing thing alive because you should without fail preserve to destruction..." and so for, and much later Jesus said that he had not come to change the law of Moses.
Not just the Abrahamic religions but most organized religions have fomented wars.