I’m not religious and have plenty of issues with organized religion in general but I do support any Christians who aspire to live by the teachings Jesus actually preached. And it’s always good to see someone like this Reverend here, willing to call out conservatives who wear their supposed piety on their sleeves while espousing bigoted, selfish, reprehensible beliefs.
It’s so God damned rare these days. Literally the only positive religious group experience I have had my my adult life was the day after the first George Floyd riots, I spent 8 hours on emergency overtime at my dispatch center. The next day I was out in the area and a local mosque decided to go around cleaning up broken glass and boarding up looted stores because “our brothers and sisters are hurting”. I wish more people acted that way.
The only pastor from my parents church who had any interest in helping the community ended up getting ousted over a differing interpretation of some Bible verse or other. I had stopped going for almost a decade by then so who knows.
Now they’re more interested in remodeling and expanding the church building to make it more gaudy.
You know, like Jesus said when he helped the merchants at the temple maximize their earnings potential, “rule of acquisition #10, bitches!”
Relevant link. https://youtu.be/ANNX_XiuA78?si=2eZJ1t5Gn5bmj52K
WWJD is actually a great moral role of thumb, the problem is that so few self-proclaimed Christians follow his teachings.
Except for the part when he called for his followers to take up swords and abandon their families (Matt. 10:34-36, among other passages).
And the part where he claimed that loving the Father took precedence over treating others with love and respect (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), which opens the door for all manner of inhuman atrocities and hate in the name of “loving God”
Matthew 10 is definitely more about conviction in the face of persecution, even from one’s own family, than literally taking up swords. Just a few verses earlier, 10:16, he specifically says to be harmless as doves.
You’re gonna have to find me an actual verse on that second part, as I interpret it, “loving the Father” goes hand-in-hand with treating others with love and respect.
the teachings Jesus actually preached
Except that we really don’t know what those would have been, and there’s a pretty decent likelihood that many of the most popular sayings like “blessed are the poor” and “easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle then a rich man to get into heaven” were additions after Paul and what later becomes the canonical church shift their splinter of the tradition to start collecting money from people.
“Want salvation? Too bad you have all that money - maybe we can help you out with that.”
For example, in apocrypha that has a decent chance of also dating to the first century, it depicts a Jesus ridiculing the very idea of prayer, fasting, and charity as necessary for salvation, instead characterizing it as a birthright for all people and those who give money to the church as being like people who take off even their clothes to give to someone else in order to be given what is already theirs.
This is arguably an even more transgressive tradition and version of Jesus than the one Paul offered up, and was more in keeping with the pre-Pauline attitudes about “everything is permissible for me” and the resistance to his rights to profit as an apostle discussed in 1 Corinthians.
There’s a significant survivorship bias in modern Christianity - for example, a tradition that changed the prohibition on carrying a purse and collecting money from people when ministering (Luke 22:35-36 - absent in Marcion’s version which was likely the earliest copy) was more likely to survive and thrive than ones that had limited fundraising capabilities as originally directed.
So while yes, he may have been all about helping the poor and downtrodden, it’s also entirely possible that a lot of it is a load of BS meant to separate fools from their money by an organization claiming to do those things on people’s behalf (you’ll notice in the Epistles vs gospels that Paul, who is supposedly collecting money for the poor back in Jerusalem, mentions a gift of a nice aromatic in Philippians 4:18, and then in the gospels written later on there’s a scene where Jesus is given an expensive aromatic and chastises those who criticize him for accepting it rather than selling it and giving the money to the poor).
Personally, I prefer the nuance in something like saying 95 attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you won’t get it back.” There’s a bit more nuance in that this addresses not an obligation for everyone including those struggling with money to give to the poor via the church but rather the inherent wisdom of recognizing the diminishing returns on personal wealth for the rich and the value in directly enriching one’s environment rather than hoarding a resource you can’t take with you (the point of the parable in saying 63 in the same work).
So while I’m inclined to think that a historical Jesus probably was against hoarding wealth stupidly given the overlap between unique extra-cannonical and canonical sentiments, I’m quite wary that the extreme degree of bleeding heart asceticism we see promoted canonically is much more than a sales effort by a parasitic organization that went on to build the Vatican off its back.
Yeah I went through a phase of reading biblical history when I had my faith deconstructed, and you quickly realize how many different Christianities there were. As well as the political context for why these sort of ideas were able to spread in this specific part of the world at that time in history. I think the version of the story told in Jesus Christ Superstar actually does a decent job with the structures of authority and their conflicting interests. To me Jesus was likely a very charismatic “nobody” who gained a following by expressing sentiments that were kind of already floating around, until it caused a problem for the authorities who needed to keep the peace or risk Rome intervening. Whether Jesus actually said what’s in the Bible isn’t important, we know people thought he said that stuff and that it resonated strongly with many. We can infer things about people at the time based on what they ascribed to Jesus.
Whether Jesus actually said what’s in the Bible isn’t important, we know people thought he said that stuff and that it resonated strongly with many. We can infer things about people at the time based on what they ascribed to Jesus.
Eh, the above mentioned sect of Christianity claimed he was talking about indivisible properties of matter and naturalism as a greater wonder over intelligent design, with the sower parable (the only one with a 'secret ’ explanation in the first canonical gospel) as actually being about the naturalist origins of all life and the universe while inadvertently using the language of Lucretius’s “seeds of things” from 80 years earlier to do so (who even described failed biological reproduction as “seed falling by the wayside of a path”).
I think we too readily cede the authority over what a historical Jesus might have been trying to say to the revisionist version that snowballed into a beast torturing and executing people for even possessing competing versions of Christianity and directly accepting money in exchange for promises of salvation and propping up tyrants over the masses.
For example, here’s another saying from the above tradition:
Jesus said, “Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce .”
Weird that the council of Nicaea at the prompting of an empire largely governed by those who were born into power and held it until death didn’t decide to canonize that tradition, no? But could you imagine the Roman empire maybe motivated to be executing a guy that was saying it?
Also weird that Paul seems vaguely familiar with this connection between gaining wealth and ruling in 1 Corinthians 4:8 as pre-existing his first letter to Corinth where he later accused them of accepting a different gospel from superapostles and where they later depose the presbyters appointed by Rome:
Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!
Except that we really don’t know what those would have been
when people say “the teachings Jesus actually preached”, they usually mean “the canonical teachings from the bible”.
Which is a pet peeve.
Also, given the highly contradictory nature of the Bible, that’s not saying much.
He also told people to sell their cloaks and go buy swords canonically at the last supper in Luke, explicitly going back on things he had allegedly said earlier.
My favorite interpretation of the Bible is basically it’s a collection of stories from medieval times. It was rough back then I mean if you fell in the mud, your life was over. You’re trapped and no one is helping you, your kindling won’t be warming your family tonight.
And then this dude comes along and a hand comes in view. You flinch at first, I mean why not kick a dog while he’s down? But no, the hand grabs your arm and pulls you out of the mud. Nobody saves your life! This man is, this good man is a saint! His story is written.
A few decades later another man collapsed in the sun and another nice guy gave him some water. His story is written.
Another few decades later a different guy is low a few cattle and sheep and his neighbor, maybe someone who was moving to Egypt, just fuckin’ gives you his whole flock. His story is yadda yadda yadda.
Jesus is just a collection of society’s niceties. Why else do you think these people were living for 900 years!? “Sonny boy your great great great great great great great grandfather from 50 years ago only survived because Jesus pulled him from the mud!”
In short - the stories of Jesus’ deeds was never just one person. I mean, literally the guy whose skeleton they have sure, but in terms of the Bible these stories existed long before Jesus came along, then more stories got added after him too, many attributed to him retroactively.
That sure sounds like something somebody who’s never seen a bible and who doesn’t have a basic knowledge of any time before 50 AD might believe.
Again with the Gnostics? Haha. How is the thesis going? Wishing you luck!
Both of your points are assumptions all of us, I would guess, were taught in graduate school. The earliest editors of “Gnostic” texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving “esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges,” as you yourself write.
As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, “we just thought these were weird.” But can you point to any evidence of such “esoteric ideas” in Thomas? Anything about “aeons and demiurges”?
Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good “Father of all”-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do.
So first let’s talk about “Gnosticism”-and what I used to (but no longer) call “Gnostic Gospels.” I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were “Gnostic,” I just accepted it, and even coined the term “Gnostic gospels,” which became the title of my book.
I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call “Gnosticism” from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about “Gnosticism” has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed “Gnostic influences.”
- Princeton’s Elaine Pagels to Ben Witherington III in an email debate
You are aspired by the teaching that you should speak in metaphors so people don’t understand you and they will burn in hell? Or the teaching that you should abandon your family and means of survival depending on skydaddy? How about the teaching that you should love a person so much that even your own children you feel hateful to them by comparison?
You are aspired by the teaching that
Hahahaha… Look, next time you decide to try to dunk on someone on the internet make sure you know what the word they used, in this case, “aspire” actually means and how to use it in a sentence. That way you won’t embarrass yourself like you did just now.
Deflection won’t make the points I advanced go away. It will however slow down your ability to resolve the Cognitive Dissonance.
You haven’t read the NT, you haven’t studied it, you can’t deal with the verses that go against your notions of what it ought to say. No amount of deflection and wordplay will change these facts.
Hell isn’t a real big feature of the Bible. Jews started getting an idea of hell from the Greeks around the time of Jesus - there was Sheol before, but it wasn’t really “hell”. This idea of perpetual torment in a some sort of arrangement run by Satan is something that developed of thousands of years, and isn’t Biblical. The hell we imagine is mostly the creation of a late medieval poet :)
I’m not a Christian, but I think it might be helpful for you to read the Bible as a historical document. If you read it angrily, and just look up verses to disprove Christianity, then you work yourself up and don’t develop a better understanding of the text. You seem to be arguing with a lot of people in this thread as if they are religious when they are not. The fact that God is not real and that the historical Jesus was not the Son of God does not mean the Bible is stupid and garbage.
Right except Paul talks about hell 3x in the authentic letters. There was a concept of it around and yes it probably had Greek roots. Really not seeing what difference this all makes. This is Christian doctrine and just because people can point to the history of it doesn’t mean that suddenly people don’t believe it. I argue with people on the ideas that they present not the ones I would have liked them to.
The Bible is fucking stupid hot garbage. The books are propaganda that have almost nothing to do with real life events and provide multiple contradictiary ways to live that are somehow all terrible. You know it endorses the very worst behaviors. Who the heck cares if the Christians borrowed hell from someone else? They still have it. Paul grabbed and since the Gospels were all fanfics off his letters they have it as well.
Oh and Jesus never existed so you can drop that historical Jesus stuff.
Ain’t no love like Christian hate.
“Was talk of virtue just pretention? Was I to naive, to expect you to heed the morals you’re purveying?”
I wish this ever worked on Christians with political values on the right side of the spectrum. The fact is they refuse to see the contradictions and don’t care.
We’ve tried to use this logic on family and friends in a loving capacity and it essentially never works. They are the Bootstraps for Thee but Not for Me party. Subsidies are only for the rich who deserve it.
“Jesus helps those who help themselves. Pretty sure that includes elementary school kids in poverty.” - conservatives
For some of them, I think it’s because they feel a thing first, and then reach for justifications second. If you say something that contradicts their feelings, it won’t feel true to them and they won’t believe you. It doesn’t matter how true it is. They’re driven by emotion. It is extremely ironic that the right wing is the one that says stuff like “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
If you want to change minds, you probably need to make them make emotional connections to the thing you’re trying to get them to believe.
Belief is also social, so if you want their beliefs to stick you need to get them away from the group that’s believing nonsense/hate/whatever, or they’ll go right back.
So many christians today are eager to live like old testament Israelites and wish only to put the sword men, women, and children in glorious sacrifice to their bloodthirsty vision of god.
Except all that pesky other stuff like “the worker deserves their wages”, and “treat the alien(/immigrant) and poor among you as one of your own”.
No, I think they equally abuse both Testaments. Woman, submit to thy husband. Husband, submit to thy wife.
“treat the alien(/immigrant) and poor among you as one of your own”
Yay, someone actually knows their Leviticus 19!
A sentiment that’s one of the few things in the Old Testament that’s not anachronistic given the emerging picture of archeology.
Joshua killing the Canaanites? Poppycock nonsense.
Early Israelites were cohabitating with Philistines and Canaanites for much of the early Iron Age, and the animosity towards those neighbors in the text is a pile of revisionist BS.
For a newly emerging pastoral community to survive, getting along with their neighbors and not being a dick to others was adaptive as shit.
I never understood where that objection to Bible history came from. I mean, there are plenty of “good” objections to the Bible as inerrant history that could be discussed - e.g. there’s several stories told twice but they differ, except the Bible says that it’s not supposed to differ - but that one (that Israelites derived originally from Canaanites rather than being immigrants to it) seems SO obvious to counter?
The Bible story goes like: Abraham went there (to Canaan), then many years later his descendents went to Egypt (the story of Joseph, like that of Moses, is QUITE well-known), then their descents went back to Canaan, after getting bored with all that pyramid-building.
The objection: bruh, why you say you never been there before?
Response: wtf - I never said that I hadn’t?!
A temporary leave-of-absence (for a few hundred years) and then return is NOT the same thing as “never been there before”.
I’ve seen that Satan video - it looks really quite well-made in many ways, but the content… bruh, the content… it’s not so much good. I liken it to a ChatGPT response these days (except it long predated that), where it has the form of an authoritative response (like his snappy witticisms - THOSE I very much enjoyed:-P), without bothering to put in the work to make the content thus as well.
Anyway, I hope you don’t feel that I am attacking you personally, it’s just that I am a fan of argumentation, on whatever side, and I really don’t understand why that one was even supposed to work.
