JESUS WHEN LOOKED AT WITHOUT THE GOGGLES IS A WASTER
Jesus is a false prophet who allegedly lived in the first century. His
prophecies are susceptible to too many interpretations. Are his best prophecies
lost? God would not let the evidence that he spoke through a true prophet,
especially Jesus who professed to be the supreme prophet, disappear. There is no
evidence that Jesus really could predict the future.
A prophet as ambiguous and suspect as Jesus could not be a real prophet of God
and God said that when he speaks through a prophet there are no games like that
or errors (Deuteronomy 18). Jesus gave no remarkable or unique moral example or
advice. We are told little about him meaning it could only be the good things we
are told and his advice was dished out by many religious teachers before him.
And so he could not have been the Son of God for why not believe that somebody
decent who you know better is the Son of God?
Jesus’ prediction of his own resurrection could have been written down after the
event or been a later invention. Jesus said he would rise on the third day but a
true prophet will leave proof of that. He didn’t. The point of making prophecies
is that they will be seen and proven to have come true. Prophecies have to be
declared before the events they forecast. He appeared on the third day which
proves nothing for we have no proof that he appeared in the body that died. In
fact his friends struggled to recognise him. Also the body could have vanished
from the tomb before the third day. It was only found empty then. This error
proves that Jesus was not a prophet, and if he was not a prophet he was not God
or the Son of God.
The crowning point of Jesus’ mission was his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).
This was uttered to ordinary people so we should take it at its word rather than
pretending it was more poetic than literal like even fundamentalist Christians
do. When it suits, Christians soon forget the rule that a text should be
interpreted the way the listeners would have done and the listeners were not
theologians but simple people. That means then that Jesus condemned all sexual
feelings, saying that a man who looked at a woman with desire was an adulterer.
It means that you should let anybody who steals from you steal even more he must
be taken literally. He also said that he hadn’t come to soften the harsh Law of
Moses but to perfect it – that is add in more tough teachings. Jesus advised
extreme hatred of sin by saying you should pluck out your eye if it makes you
sin meaning you should do all you can to avoid sin for you should detest it so
much. People find hating sin too painful and stressful these days and don’t want
to do it and the clergy is as bad. Jesus made it clear that his words were
literal in this Sermon when he said that whoever listens to it and obeys it will
be like the man who built his house on the rock (Matthew 7:25). And the
gospeller commented that this Sermon was taught not like a sermon by the scribes
but with authority (Matthew 7:29). It was serious and there was no time for
confusing people with non-literalism. There is no doubt that going by the Sermon
on the Mount that Christians have turned an evil or insane person into their
God.
If you love your neighbour as yourself that means a lot of stress for sin is all
around you. You won't live too long if you seriously hate the harm that sinners
supposedly do to themselves by sinning. Hating the sin is as dangerous in
practice as hating the sinner for even if you make a difference in your mind
between sinner and sin you won’t be able to in practice. Jesus' teaching was not
about helping people but about burdening them.
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith. Forgiving is
supposed to be good while condoning, rewarding the ill-done by
acting as if it does not matter, is bad. Forgiveness says the sin
matters and requires hating the sin and loving the sinner on the
basis that you cannot forgive a sin unless you resent it and hate it
first.
Christian forgiveness is two-faced because you can no more love the
sinner and hate the sin any more than you can trust the sinner and
not trust the sin they commit. Trust is an ingredient of love and a
major one at that. Hate thrives on mistrust and mistrust involves
fear. Fear always blinds you at least a bit. Therefore to fear is to
tempt yourself to hate or will evil on another and to attempt to
become unfair.
Christianity seeks to turn away from valuing people to valuing
people for the sake of God - so in reality people are thought of as
commodities to be used to please God. Mother Teresa once admitted
she didn't give a toss about the people she helped for it was all
about God to her. A faith like that can only appeal to people who
are at least secret misanthropes and how could such people genuinely
love sinners?
The idea of a forgiving God is not consoling at all. If God forgives
he will not forgive you unless you forgive everybody else too first
which is only decency and commonsense and it is scriptural too (Mark
11:25,26; Matthew 6:12). But can you forgive Hitler? You can only
pretend you can. You would need to experience the full horror of the
evil that Hitler did for you need to understand the evil before you
can pardon it. Otherwise you are not forgiving properly.
Subconsciously, if you experienced his evil and your family did, you
wouldn’t forgive. Nobody can genuinely forgive everybody. They only
imagine that they do.
If to refuse to forgive means that God refuses you pardon, then to
sin after or to not forgive means you are ungrateful for this pardon
you have received from him and are trying to reverse it all which is
a very serious sin indeed. Then nobody can be saved. To deny this
would be to become a self-deluding hypocrite.
Forgiveness means that if the person could be punished, you would
not approve this punishment. Forgiveness is not about feelings.
It means that if God were prepared to punish you would disagree with
it. Christian mercy and forgiveness is offered in the light
and framework of a controlling God. Real forgiveness is free
and atheistic. The religious version is a copy and is not the
real spontaneous forgiveness we all uphold.
Christians talk about how good forgiveness is for you and that it
rids you of hate and stress and fear. Recovering from these pests is
not forgiveness. It is emotional recovery. If you would not
retaliate against an evil person but cannot erase the hatred you
feel for them then you have forgiven them. The feelings are not your
fault.
There is something arrogant in Christians seeking to have and having
no ill-feelings towards those who have tortured their loved ones to
death. You can only do that if you do not truly understand how awful
it was for them. You would need to be able to become them in order
to understand and in so far as you cannot understand you don't know
what you are forgiving. And in so far as you don't know you are not
forgiving. The Christians are in fact condoning the evil. They pay
lip-service to the horror and turn around and reward it.
To accuse people who are trapped in their anger and resentment of
being unforgiving is the worst form of bullying imaginable. Yet
Jesus said that those who don't forgive will not be forgiven.
Those who are being forgiven "in spite of" their wrongs (by others)
and sins (by God) are really being insulted. It is like, "You are
bad and it is bad for you to be bad but I will treat you as if you
are not harming yourself and others". If you have to reach the
disposition that you would not commit your sins if you had the
chance again, it follows that you are getting conditional
forgiveness. There is something begrudging and unsatisfying about
that kind of forgiveness. And it cheapens forgiveness.
Jesus famously ordered, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's". Nothing was more capitalist than Caesar. Money was spent on glorious trappings, temples that worshipped his statue, wars. Jesus did not give funds to the poor or raise funds. Like a sarcastic person, he looked at a coin and saw the head of the Emperor on it. He then declared that proved the Emperor should get what he is entitled to. A head on a coin does nothing to prove or show any such thing. He was mocking the oppression of his people by Rome.
In a culture where just about anything got one stoned to death, it is clear Jesus was being literal when he said its best for corrupters of children to be cast into the sea. It's rabid hate speech. He ordered that stupid sins against your brother should be taken to the Sanhedrin. This was the authority that sentenced people to be stoned to death. He validated their punitive ways. Despite trying to incite hate against the Jewish leaders in Matthew 23, he started off by saying that the scribes and Pharisees gave accurate teaching from God but the problem was their hypocrisy. He was clear that he did not come to refute or water down the Law of God given to Moses but to make sure it was looked after correctly.
Read Josephus and learn there were loud figures doing much the same as Jesus. That his own mother said in public he was possessed and insane is interesting though his behaviour was not that unusual.