Hi everybody. I used to be around here a lot, then I left, but now I'm back. Just read a diary about the "atheist" (I don't believe it) that killed those kids in NC, and the religion bashing that ensued. I get so very tired of having this conversation with people, so maybe once and for all I'll just put it out there.
I am a pretty devout Christian. That term means something quite specific to me, as in a follower and student of the philosopher Jesus of Nazareth. Why him? His message was as simple as it was revolutionary: love the Creator and love your neighbor without condition. His teachings were all about the lifting up of the poor, the friendless, the oppressed and the dispossessed among us. And not much else. I am totally on board with that - that's a worldview I can get behind.
What I can't get behind is everything that happened after he died. Clearly humanity was not (and maybe still isn't) ready to receive that message as intended. The folks that came after him so completely fucked up his message with a bunch of Old Testament hate and fear, along with a heaping dose of misogyny (big shout out to St. Paul here), that I am in doubt that the original message will ever really recover. So much evil has been done in the name of Christ that it boggles the mind. And we want to sit around and talk about bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists? Seriously...
Why was this evil done? Because we human beings are not nearly as evolved as we would like to think. We still have the bodies and brains of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of fifteen millennia ago. Well, our bodies are bigger and stronger but only because we have better nutrition, but our brains are still the same. Simply put, we still have the same tribalistic, zero sum game, short term thinking and instincts that our species has always had. We can be educated to overcome this, but it's self evident that that education doesn't stick. The early Christians corrupted the message of pure and unconditional love almost from the beginning, and took the Great Commandment of Christ at Pentecost (go forth unto all the nations and make disciples of all men), as license to conquer the Earth and slaughter untold millions over the centuries in the name of evangelism. That Great Commandment turned out not to be so great, because it gave ambitious men with unbridled lust for power and control over a very long time permission to exercise that power ostensibly in pursuit of a higher purpose. Evil, pure evil.
I am an Episcopalian, which is commonly referred to as the thinking man's Christianity. I have been a member of four different parishes over the years, and between those four, I have heard the following things directly from the pulpits of each:
1. The Virgin birth is a myth (oh and the ridiculous creation story too). All the ancient religions, most of which no longer survive, have a virgin birth story. Mary, whatever the circumstances of her pregnancy, turned out to be the greatest mother of all time, as it was likely she that taught her son how to be the great man that he was.
2. Jesus of Nazareth was not literally the Son of God. I firmly believe he had a special relationship with the divine that others have not, but it was not conferred upon him purely by his conception.
3. The Resurrection is a metaphor. Jesus certainly was not raised from the dead after three days of his corpse rotting in a tomb. That defies the laws of physics, under which this planet must operate or it wouldn't exist.
4. "God" is not a white haired bearded father figure sitting on a cloud in the sky dispensing divine judgement. The Creator is just that, a force of nature, call it pure love, the life force itself, whatever, but that description of the the Creator is infantile first century thinking.
5. Heaven and hell are not places, but states of being. They are the next plane of existence, the next life, the next world, however you wish to describe it. Heaven is to dwell in the eternal presence of the Creator, and hell is to be forever apart from that entity.
I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was sent to us to show a pretty messed up world how we can live together without killing each other, and what unconditional love truly means. How we've gotten it so terribly wrong will be one of the great mysteries of my life...