Ierrellus

I believe in God and Jesus in the following ways:

1. Jesus is a way, not a form of personalized idolatry that must have its representative icon.
2. In prosylitizing Jesus as an icon, Paul forgot the "what" in favor of the "who". In formulating Christianity, he lost track of Jesus the rebel and put in his place Jesus the happy servant of inhuman social orders.
3. Augustine augmented Paul's structuralizing of religion by adding to it a mix of Greek philosophy and his own sexual frustrations.
4. The church that came from all this was ripe for --
witch-hunts, slavery, genocide of aboriginal inhabitants of countries deemed desireable, etc., etc.

There is little or no truth about God or Jesus in these historical blasphemies.

Ierrellus

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]

[ April 15, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

sidewinder

You'll need to elaborate on your statement. What do you mean when you say that you believe in God and Jesus? Who is this God that you believe in? What are this God's characteristics and relationship to human beings? What does Jesus have to do with this God?

In my opinion, Jesus was not any of the identities that Christianity gives to him. Christianity continues to misinterpret the message of Jesus. They have done it for 2000 years and still going strong. Those who have figured out his message, usually end up becoming very liberal Christians or renounce the faith altogether.

Jesus believed he was a prophet of the God of Israel (Yahweh). He believed he was called by Yahweh to announce the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. He preached much about this Kingdom but what most people miss or ignore or reinterpret is that he clearly taught that this Kingdom was coming very soon, within his lifetime perhaps, or shortly thereafter. All the early Christians believed this because Jesus taught it. There's evidence for this scattered throughout the New Testament. It's not until the later NT writings that you get Christians trying to reinterpret the imminent coming of the Kingdom. Remember that verse in one of the later NT letters that states a day is like a thousand years to the Lord.

So, my opinion of Jesus is that he was just another ancient religious figure who believed he was called on a particular mission by one of the many gods of the ancient world. I have no doubt that Jesus was an intense and charasmatic man but that still doesn't make him all that Christianity claims him to be. If it wasn't for Christianity, Jesus would've been forgotten.

Ierrellus

The Jesus who gave the Sermon on the Mount fits no further Biblical or Church exegesis of who he was. That Jesus defied the Hebraic tradition of law by stating, "You have heard it said, but I say. . ." That Jesus broke most of the ten commandments in his brief ministerial life. That Jesus spoke of universal morality which was foreign to that pronounced by the Hebraic Yahweh.
That Jesus agreed with Plato that God is love.

What followed is bad press, worse interpretation of the difference between knowing by mind and knowing by experience and the various human agendas that allign God with human expectations of an impossible human absolute.

Ierrellus

sidewinder

I strongly disagree with this interpretation. The Sermon on the Mount was not one sermon that Jesus gave at one point in his ministry. The Sermon on the Mount represents a bunch of Jesus' sayings that the writer of Matthew put together in some order. Jesus may have broken commandments but his goal was not to break commandments. His message was the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. When the text has Jesus saying "you've heard it say, but I tell you", it was the writer of Matthew trying to show that Jesus was the new Moses.

Where did Jesus preach a universal morality? Even if he did preach something that perhaps could apply to all people at all times, it's a coincidence. He stated himself more than once that he only came for Israel. He had no regard for what happened outside Israel. Hell, he had no idea how big the planet was.

Jesus would never have seen himself in conflict with the God of Israel (Yahweh). On the contrary, he believed he was on a mission for Yahweh. It's true that Jesus had his own unique interpretation of how the Jewish Law applied to Jews but he would've never thought it went against the revelation of Yahweh.

I admit that I haven't read Plato, so I don't know if Plato believed that God is love. In any case, I don't remember Jesus stating this explicitly. There is a verse in the NT that states God is love but it's in one of the NT epistles. To put it into some historical context, Jesus believed that God was the God of the Israelites, so certainly he believed that God loved the Israelites but it's not clear how Jesus imagined Yahweh's relationship with non-Jews.

By the way, the sayings in the Sermon clearly support the main message of Jesus which was that the Kingdom of God was coming soon.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I'll just say that the Bible was written by humans. It has human thoughts, ideas, beliefs, concepts, etc. It is human interpretation of events based on the knowledge that these people had at the time of writing. There's nothing supernatural about it. It's impossible that it was written by the supernatural being claimed to exist by Christians.

Ron Singh

Ierrellus, I totally agree with you. I am not Christian, and your statements make a lot of sense. I also hope this implies that you don't beleive in the trinity?

Ierrellus

Please forgive my delay in responding. I've been out of town.

sidewinder:

I could care less whether the Sermon on the Mount is a collection of sayings or one oratorical instance. Neither do I care about the intentions of the authors of these books, the mythology formulated by Paul, nor the claims of any supernatural authorship for these books. None of that proves a diddlysquat about anything.

Most important is that Jesus told desciples to "Follow me.", not "Worship me." A good interpretation of "the way" is given in Aldous Huxley"s PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, a work that seeks out the underlying substrata of the major religions.

Circa 500 BC the Golden Rule appeared in the "Bibles" of many different cultures--those of India, China, Greece; but it did not appear in Hebrew writings. That rule, which states the moral mandate better than Kant could, is my instance of universal morality which Jesus introduced to the Hebrews.

Sikh: Only in the Pythagorian sense.


Ierrellus

[ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]

[ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

Eudaimonist

I'd prefer to keep the Greek philosophy part and throw away the Jesus part. BTW, the Stoics preached a "universal" morality (a brotherhood of men), and much better than Jesus did.

[ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: Eudaimonist ]</p>

free12thinker

Just my two cents

I personally believe there was a Jesus, but that he was a common man, but a Robin Hood like
figure to the peasants (who were the majority). I think his heart was so big and his counseling
efforts so gracious, that he became a terrific morale booster for people to tlak about when times were hard (which was always). And so the legend grew form there. I believe that when the big wigs got wind of this Jesus, they exploited his "legend" by adding in bylaws that benefitted them without alienating man itself. This explains a lot of what Jesus tolerates and does not tolerates. In retrospect, it helped the big wigs then, and it helps them now. It belittled women. It maximized machoism.

Tristan Scott

Irrellus wrote:

Actually Hillel is on record introducing the concept of the Golden Rule to the Jews before Jesus was born.

sighhswolf

Eudaimonist,
I agree with your statement. I wonder why it is that there are all kinds of people who try and make this character of the NT gospels into something that he wasnt.
Everything attributed to the "teachings" of Jesus
were rehashed and borrowed from other teachers and cultures, and mystics and philosophers.
There was absolutedly nothing new in his teachings.
It seems to escape many of these Jesus freaks that a simple fact is that Jesus (if he did in fact exist historically) was a JEW.
In the rantings and raves of christianity they have lost sight of the fact that Jesus was first and foremost JEWISH.
His teachings were not aimed at a gentile audience
his main purpose was to bring the lost sheep of Judah back into the fold.
His purpose was to try and get the Hebrews to abide by the Torah and the rabbinic oral teachings and gather up all those tribes who were scattered and lost, before the coming of the Kingdom of god on earth.
He was convinced as it has been already mentioned that the kingdom of god on earth was at hand, and would be manifest during his lifetime, with himself as the right hand of god.
He was also aware of the conditions set down in Hebrew law of the attributes of the "Messiah", those attributes designed to identify the real messiah. In that time period there were many Jews running around claiming to be the promised messiah. Many of those making the claims though,
were not aware of the messianic conditions and therefore were discredited very quickly.
Jesus was intelligent enough to study the conditions and the prophets works.

Wolf


<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />