Still the picture painted that remains of Jesus, or this idea of Jesus… does have some identifiable philosophies. Mostly comparable to the classical stoics.
Yes when you ignore data that doesn’t agree with you, you can find data that does. There is no universal agreed upon method of verifying that the oral tradition
- Existed
- Accurately reported what really happen
- Self-correcting so it could remove what didn’t happen
Besides which we really do not have a reason to believe that a country bumpkin illiterate preacher in that culture and place would know and invoke Greek philosophy. The very word we have for a person going against God Apostate comes from Epicureanism by means of Aramaic.
But at least part of the situation in figuring out the formation of the early church and the development of is to look at the early adopters. The bible is not meant to be be read through as a full endorsement of every rule. Leviticus for instance is “the rules of the tribe of Levi” and are essentially a snapshot of the sort of rules created by the priesthood of that particular time. It gives context of where dogma comes from potentially so that one can extrapolate what is God’s law and what is cultural. There is no divorcing Paul from the modern church due to him being the core around which the whole thing aelf legitimizes… But a Church, any church or the conception of an organized church is not Christianity. As movements go using the document as a historical document (more or less in the same way we would use Monmont or Herodotus) you can recontextualize a very different conception of the religion and there is nothing really to stop you from following it.
Cool. Are you trying to convince me or Christians? Your argument is that Christianity doesn’t have to be terrible it just is. It is a fixable problem. Which might be true since hey as I said it is all a Rorschach test. There is no historical Jesus so anyone can make him say whatever they want. Now where does this get you? In theory if multiple things happen in a very specific sequence something awful could be good, for a small amount of time.
Why don’t we just cut out the stalling and middleman and just all become atheists humanists? No? Fine go retrocon the Bible and pretend you have some means of detecting what can’t be detected.
My general issue with atheists is that they are generally complete asshats about people who do believe in anything and even the suggestion that any belief system other than their own should be taken seriously as a potential core function of identity causes them to go on a massive hostile tirade where they treat everyone else in the room as an idiot.
If you are as big an asshole about any belief than your own functionally you are basically just Christianity 2.0 as far as trying to flatten the spiritual landscape. When people become hostile towards you with that behavior you earn it. I don’t know what religious trauma got you where you are but taking it back to the drawing board for a hard think about how you are turning it around and inflicting it on others.
No I don’t think Jesus was particularly up on Greek philosophy but it’s not actually all that hard a philosophy to hit upon. Most of the stoics did so in isolation because essentially it is a trauma response. Sometimes someone randomly pops up out of the landscape with a similar idea call it the convergent evolution of ideas.
And Yes, convincing Christians is in part my deal because I am queer and as a whole we need to fight these beliefs just to stay alive but Christians aren’t going to become athiests. You do not fight belief with disbelief, they spit that back in your face because that’s not how faith works.
But by all means act a complete social paraiah that makes the work harder by making them believe that people are trying to rip away what’s precious to them. Drive them to believe they are persecuted and call them idiots so they dive back into their book and their churches with a self righteous relief at having dodged the devil once again. Ask yourself what that ego hit of proselytizing your atheism with vicious slow burn rage looks like from the outside and then look at the men on the street corners telling us how we’re all going to burn in hell waving their holy book and ask yourself if your behaviour towards others is all that different.
Everyone. Everyone murders people like us.
It doesn’t matter if the person who kills you does so because they believe their God believes you are obcene or if the person simply thinks you are mentally ill and endangering their convenience to treat you however they feel you deserve to be treated. They don’t even need to resort to dirtying their hands themselves most of the time. All they need to do is make life so endemically miserable that fighting to survive becomes insurmountable.
You want to point the fingers elsewhere because you want to blame all the ills of the world on the Christians but believe me when I say they aren’t even represented in half of the problems I deal with regularly and there is a significant number of people of faith who are in this fight with us. While you might not share their beliefs they still deserve your basic courtesy but you seem to consider nothing but screaming at them like a rabid ape.
