Remembering Jesus

Amen to that, Ian!

My and my family’s religion is “I will treat others the same way I want to be treated”…and that is with love and kindness and compassion and fairness and justice and equality – and, you get the idea.

I worship by looking out my window at my wonderful natural world. And I “pray” that we don’t destroy ourselves – in the name of religion.

Cloud,

It’s best to take everything we “know” about Jesus with a huge grain of salt and consider that the establishment of Christianity is only tangentially related to Jesus or the Christ. Not to mention that so much of the tradition was purged in order for Christianity to be accepted by Rome.

What evidence we do have (find and read Funk and/or Crossan, especially the latter for serious consideration of what he likely actually said and the milieu in which he lived) portrays him in two ways: the gnostic-y manner of inner enlightenment as an answer to a difficult and cruel world, and as very much a social revolutionary acting in a time of serious upheaval.

To be sure, the Church wanting acceptance in Rome and the power that comes with it would have had zero use for either of these aspects.

Lex

@ Lex

There goes obtaining another book to read. JOY!!!

“I do not believe that Jesus was the son of God – But I do love Jesus. I do respect Jesus. I do think he was a good man, and a good guide.”

That always cracks me up when I read something like this. If Jesus wasn’t exactly who He said He is then He most certainly wasn’t a good man nor a moral teacher. If Jesus wasn’t exactly who He said He is He was a liar, a fraud, a con artist.
Jesus told people to worship Him.
He told people to be ready to die for Him. I
f Jesus wasn’t exactly who He said He is, He was scum.
Yet you love Him! What a joke!

But there isn’t a hell, and there isn’t a heaven either. That’s the whole point. It’s all here and it’s all now and there is no point in fairy tale games about the great hereafter. People don’t always get what’s coming to them. You have to deal with that and get on with it. If we are going to make a better world and a more just environment and social contracts to live by, we have to do it our selves.

@ Formerly T-Bear

You don’t have to read the whole of The Brothers Karamazov (though it’s worth it) to get “The Grand Inquisitor”

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm

I can rarely unequivocally agree with anything as much as I unequivocally agree with what you have said here, Ian. My Catholic mother (who is seriously investigating Deism at this point, in her 73rd year) and I had this same conversation over Easter, and I’ll be goddamned if your post doesn’t sound the same as my side of the convo!

Cloud:

And as Mark Twain said, for all his gentleness Jesus is crueler than Jehovah, because he invented or at least massively popularized the endless-torment version of Hell.

Hell was an invention of the Church, probably a political fix agreed with Constantine, to make Christianity an instrument of the Roman State.

Yes in the Revelations of St John the Devine, some 300 years after the crucifixion. The 4 Gospels of Christ define Christ’s message, and I do not recall the mention of hell in those Gospels.

I’ve always regarded Revelations as the (Catholic) stick to beat the faithful to make then subservient to Constantine’s (The Emperor who co-opted Christianity) rule.

That is: We’ve now got you temporally and spiritually.

I think it makes more sense to see religion as the primary expression of two fundamental, but diametrically opposed, human orientations. There is, on the one hand, the humanist orientation, in which religion serves as the spiritual force driving social and moral progress, breaking down economic, cultural, and social barriers between people. This is the Jesus Ian is defending. In its positive form, this version powers movements seeking profound social change (e.g. the civil rights movement). But on the other hand, there is the authoritarian orientation, which also finds in religion the spiritual resources it needs to construct communities marked by strong hierarchies, esp. patriarchy, caste, and class. Opponents of the civil rights movement, drawing on this orientation, saw that movement’s use of religion as a depraved ‘social religion’ that missed the essence of religion, viz the individual’s submissive relationship with God. I don’t think it makes much sense to ask which of these is the ‘correct’ interpretation of religious texts. You can find the same authoritarian and humanist tendencies in every major religion. People will find the resources they need for a reactionary project of the restoration of hierarchy and patriarchal power, but other people will always find the resources they need for a humanist challenge to those projects. At the core of religion are these two major historical tendencies: the authoritarian predilection for hierarchy and order, and the humanist need to promote human flourishing.

I once wondered if heaven/hell, Jesus/God, Christian anti-materialism, science and special relativity could all be neatly tied together into a single theoretical package. Of course, it’d just be a theory which couldn’t be proven or disproven. But still I wondered.

Then I came up with the idea that every life form might each have it’s own corresponding unseen spirit part. In a nutshell, the spiritual part, being massless, wouldn’t be constrained by the laws of spacetime as such, but would be (from our 3D limited perspective) ‘everywhere all the time’. Higher dimensionally infinite, so to speak. The badness of ‘hell’ would only happen to the intelligent forms which couldn’t handle that spiritual reality at point of death. The theory might explain the Jesus=God thing (Jesus being the earthly part of that whole, some kind of ‘personality organ’ for that whole). The theory might even explain what heaven/hell really is (hell is scripturally more often described as separateness or nothingness then it is a bunch of demons with pitchforks). The Bible would then be a spiritually inspired best-fit attempt by the various literate goat herders, Roman authors, etc.. who wrote it, to clumsily describe some kind of metaphysical reality which cannot be clearly described.

Excited, I went straight to a Christian website and offered my little idea for discussion.

I was swiftly and condescendingly rebuked by the regulars, especially the senior moderator. But I’d never once swore or said anything liberal. They simply had no interest in exploring what dreams might come, or any of the why. The one guy there who seemed interested in trying to combine science with the spiritual just for the fun of doing it, was an agnostic who claimed he was bored at work. And that was that.

I read somewhere that back in the 20’s around 80% of scientists claimed to be Christians. Today that number is somewhere between 3 and 24 percent (depending on the source). It seems very few of them want to play with the metaphysical anymore. Meanwhile most modern Christians also appear to have abandoned metaphysical ponderings. For most I know, Jesus is the guy who gives you a better life, makes your team win, then curses the liberal. I can see the value it’s had for so many in the past (outside of all the wars, pestilence and burnings… of course).

American Christianity is in decline. Atheists who may have once been seen as rational cultists, but quietly so, are today becoming increasingly more vocal with more compelling arguments than ever. I can’t imagine today’s youth preferring the ideas of nutty conservative evangelicals over that of the rational atheist who just wants to improve the conditions of physical life. The (seemingly) increasing Christian divergence from Jesus’ teachings doesn’t help. It’s a bit sad, but change is coming. Christianity really is under attack.

I am not a biblical scholar, but I would note that both the New and Old Testaments represent the combining of multiple narratives which do not fit comfortably or logically together in terms of our modern sensibilities. But this was not seen as a major impediment or criticism at the time of their creation and through much of their history. I would liken it to the popular perception of Thomas Jefferson. For most of our history, and even to a large extent currently, his being a master writer and defender of freedom and his being a large landholder and unregenerate slaveowner have been seen as unproblematic. That we can hold such contrary views and/or ignore such glaring contradictions should give us pause. My take on Jefferson is that he was not a modern democrat but must be understood in terms of the world in which he lived. His words continue to resonate but the worlds in which they are heard are different.

In my opinion, the Gospels, especially the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, should be viewed both structurally as texts and in terms of their different audiences, and goals. Mark is the simplest and earliest. His audience is primarily Jewish. Matthew and Luke use Mark and another text called the Q text for most of their content. Matthew writes against the Jewish priestly caste, the scribes and Pharisees, who do not accept Jesus’ message, but largely remains within the Jewish tradition, while Luke looks outside it and addresses himself to the larger Gentile world. Then you have the Gospel of John which is the latest and has always been the most problematic for Christians. And from my admittedly uninformed viewpoint should be seen as an extension of Matthew and furthering the break with Judaism.

It should also be remembered that the Christian canon of the New Testament (what books were included and excluded from it), while mostly in place within a hundred years of the four canonical gospels’ writing, was not finalized for another couple of centuries. So what we often take nowadays as a unitary construct, both in terms of the text, the church, and the figure of Jesus, was actually a very extended editorial process. And it took place against a backdrop of Christianity moving from a local cult to an oppressed religion to the religion of the Empire.

Christianity like Jefferson needs to be understood within its history. The words can resonate across the centuries, that is their universality, but we need to understand they were spoken in different worlds.

Ian is not a believer – he does not have to explain the entire text. The people here who are believers (or rather failed believers) wish him to do so, as if he were a reverend. it says a great deal about people who read his work.

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Willy, may I recommend a book by Owen Barfield called “Worlds Apart” (can be found online) that is some kind of an attempt, maybe not to “tie together”, but at least to “bridge the gap”. It’s written as a dialog between different specialists – a physicist, biologist, linguist, theologian.

For me the key point is that “the laws of spacetime” (ie, physics) only ever dealt with a limited subset of the world, inorganic matter. It is very easily proved that those laws could never apply to the universe as a whole — contrast for example the 2nd law of thermodynamics, with the anti-entropy of the universe as a whole. In any case the discoveries of 20th century physics show that the assumptions of 19th century physics are self-contradictory. And yet people still want to believe …

Joe Bageant’s take on the issue: https://www.joebageant.org/2005/12/19/what_the_left_b/

As a US citizen I can say that “WE are all Pharisee’s NOW.” Religions in the US now preach a “Success” gospel. “God wants you to be rich and get the things you want.” NONSENSE.