Your Own Personal Jesus

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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Demon of Undoing
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Your Own Personal Jesus

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I think he only way God is even worth discussing is if he is seen in a mold that does not require miracles and dead people coming back to life. If what is required to fill in the gaps of our reason is nothing less than phantasmic faith, then we are talking about a God useless without a miracle machine. Jesus was a superhero with powers denied to us mere mortals, there is no lesson there for us except to shut down and obey. Of course, you have to obey a guideline that includes a firm insistence that a guy walked on water, so you will need frequent, divine and miraculous input to make the machine function. Those twos better be meaningless all the time.

If not? If you build a church on miraculous inputs and don't get them? Will the church crumble for want of them? What, and let all that leveraged power go to waste? No, instead, the lack of miraculous, from- outside- creation input will be forged wholesale. A pope will become Gods mouthpiece. Individuals will gain the power to determine when the creator of the universe lets them know ultimate, free- from- yer- stupid twos kind of truth. They will carry on two way conversations with God while on the crapper, and swear he hates and disapproves of the same lavender as they do. Oh, no. We won't let it go to waste. Just push those miraculous gaps farther and farther away, make them appear smaller. No need to question the assumptions that got us here, buried under accretion and dead tradition.

The insistence that the traditions are the truth, that the language is literal, that God is something else beyond mere twos, is why Christianity is dying. A God that can't deal with a simple two is not God.
Demon of Undoing
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

And yes, traditional Christian teaching is that God is outside creation. He did not divide himself to construct heaven and earth. Ex nihlo arguments aside, creation is not part of him, of him, or capable of being him. He is deus ex machina, literally.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Mr. Perfect »

Uh, before anyone gets too far afield we should plug in here that this universe as-is is decidedly temporary, so one maybe shouldn't get too attached to it or it's modalities. Would be like over thinking props on a stage.
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Marcus
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A statement of ultimate truth . . .

Post by Marcus »

Demon of Undoing wrote:. . . creation is not part of [God], of him, or capable of being him. He is deus ex machina, literally.
And you know this how?
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Demon of Undoing
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I read Genesis.
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Marcus
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Source of authority . . .

Post by Marcus »

Demon of Undoing wrote:I read Genesis.
Then [your interpretation of] Genesis is your self-authenticating source of authority for your belief.
"The jawbone of an ass is just as dangerous a weapon today as in Sampson's time."
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Demon of Undoing
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Re: Source of authority . . .

Post by Demon of Undoing »

Marcus wrote:
Demon of Undoing wrote:I read Genesis.
Then [your interpretation of] Genesis is your self-authenticating source of authority for your belief.

No, I am talking about the historic policy of Christianity. Not my belief. I think Genesis is little more than premodern speculation and Kabbalistic commentary.

Or are you actually insisting that Christianity does not hold that God is outside creation? IOW, a supernatural God?
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

That sense of nearness is what I understand immanence to mean; a real concern for us in the middle of a creation that is not him. He loves us. I believe that, too.

For the record, I have no use for a God that is not of love and concern for us. Without that qualification, God is an alien superhero out for something other than our good, and I'm going to be antipathetic to him, at best. Similarly, I don't believe a God that doesn't love us would be bothered with us. Still don't know how it all plays out, but Christ as an expression, his revelation to us, if you will, seems the highest illustration of his will. I just think there is a metric ton of stuff that has been reasoned backwards about him. Holy Spirit as a new God, some sort of embodiment of divine mojo( that doesn't actually work). Virgin births. Physical resurrection. It all creates a story that gets farther away from what I could value from a relationship with an almighty.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Enki »

Demon of Undoing wrote:That sense of nearness is what I understand immanence to mean; a real concern for us in the middle of a creation that is not him. He loves us. I believe that, too.

For the record, I have no use for a God that is not of love and concern for us. Without that qualification, God is an alien superhero out for something other than our good, and I'm going to be antipathetic to him, at best. Similarly, I don't believe a God that doesn't love us would be bothered with us. Still don't know how it all plays out, but Christ as an expression, his revelation to us, if you will, seems the highest illustration of his will. I just think there is a metric ton of stuff that has been reasoned backwards about him. Holy Spirit as a new God, some sort of embodiment of divine mojo( that doesn't actually work). Virgin births. Physical resurrection. It all creates a story that gets farther away from what I could value from a relationship with an almighty.
Christ is the author writing himself in as the protagonist.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Demon of Undoing
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I am just coming to see that the fictions we have created around Christ have become walls that keep us from understading the core point. The things that can not be believed by a modern will not be, as we have seen. My understandings of this have been shaped by NT Wright and Bishop Spong, both of whom are insistent on understanding Christ in a Jewish context. There were no words for what Christ was, so they used traditional Jewish religious language. Ironically, the mundane truth of an itinerant redneck Jew, his more human than human yet all- too- human sense of seeing beyond, is lost when we think of him as Kal-El, an alien superhero.

He was able to fill the multitudes because he was the bread of life. It wasn't how many baskets were left over. It's that he revealed the love of God without qualification. As Fred the Cranky German said, when man has the why, the how is easy. People properly motivated are capable of not being weak and fainting. Coronado proves that. Filled with the freedom that Christ brought, food was irrelevant. I can get by on nothing for days if I am thankful to find that God is no vengeful potentate, but instead a forgiving Father that just wants to love you. You could get killed talking that talk, BTW. The people that man the walls have a lot to lose and a life revealed to be meaningless, besides, when there are no walls.

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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Ibrahim »

Demon of Undoing wrote:I am just coming to see that the fictions we have created around Christ have become walls that keep us from understading the core point. The things that can not be believed by a modern will not be, as we have seen. My understandings of this have been shaped by NT Wright and Bishop Spong, both of whom are insistent on understanding Christ in a Jewish context. There were no words for what Christ was, so they used traditional Jewish religious language. Ironically, the mundane truth of an itinerant redneck Jew, his more human than human yet all- too- human sense of seeing beyond, is lost when we think of him as Kal-El, an alien superhero.

He was able to fill the multitudes because he was the bread of life. It wasn't how many baskets were left over. It's that he revealed the love of God without qualification. As Fred the Cranky German said, when man has the why, the how is easy. People properly motivated are capable of not being weak and fainting. Coronado proves that. Filled with the freedom that Christ brought, food was irrelevant. I can get by on nothing for days if I am thankful to find that God is no vengeful potentate, but instead a forgiving Father that just wants to love you. You could get killed talking that talk, BTW. The people that man the walls have a lot to lose and a life revealed to be meaningless, besides, when there are no walls.

Eureka.
I think this is very appealing to the humanist mindset that we live in today, but I doubt this was the appeal of the early Christian message. Christianity emphasizes Jesus' metaphysical role as a substitute sacrifice and portal to salvation. The appeal of this is often cynically stated by atheists and Jews and Muslims hostile to Christianity as an easy "get out of jail free" card. The Law is made redundant by the ability to repent (as in the Don Giovanni thread).

But I don't see it that way. The genius of Christianity (man-made or authentic True Faith) is that it places man at the center of a cosmic drama, where his fate hangs on a decision of free will. And not a lifetime of keeping the Law as Jews and Muslims do, but a single all-encompassing decision.

The Jesus you describe above is telling you about a God that loves you, but I think the wider historical appeal lies in a Jesus that tells you God is paying attention to you and waiting on your verdict.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I will agree that this is a good chunk of the appeal of Christianity then and now. God is all about you.


However, the more I read the NT in historic context, the more I realize that this is not what it's about at all. The salvation Christ was talking about is very Jewish and about not being under the encumbrance and judgement of the Law. And this is what I mean; the accretions about free will and choice and striving with sin, etc- all that stuff is Greek thought and then later attempts to reinvent ( and market) the wheel. Much of it is backwards reasoning that was first and foremost designed to justify the presence of whatever team they were on. The sacrifice was made, the penalty paid. Someone can choose not to join the Nation of People, but that's more like walking away from town than suspending pending theatrics the will of the Almighty.


When Christ told those many people, " your sins are forgiven" and " the Kingdom is among you", he wasn't making a prediction. It wasn't going to wait until they made the right prayer. He had already done it ( from the perspective of the NT authors many years after the fact), and it did not require input from anybody else. It was finished at the cross. Salvation complete. Once you get rid of the nonsense of a disembodied soul awaiting some throne judgement, it makes more sense. That just really skews the whole thing.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Ibrahim »

Demon of Undoing wrote:The salvation Christ was talking about is very Jewish and about not being under the encumbrance and judgement of the Law.
Isn't that a contradiction though?


And this is what I mean; the accretions about free will and choice and striving with sin, etc- all that stuff is Greek thought and then later attempts to reinvent ( and market) the wheel.
Christianity is as much a Greek product as a Jewish one. The influence cannot be overstated.





When Christ told those many people, " your sins are forgiven" and " the Kingdom is among you", he wasn't making a prediction. It wasn't going to wait until they made the right prayer. He had already done it ( from the perspective of the NT authors many years after the fact), and it did not require input from anybody else. It was finished at the cross. Salvation complete. Once you get rid of the nonsense of a disembodied soul awaiting some throne judgement, it makes more sense. That just really skews the whole thing.
There are schools of Christian theology ancient and modern than concur with this exactly, but this view did not become orthodox (small "o") Christianity. For good or ill I cannot say, but it isn't the version that took.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Enki »

Ibrahim wrote:
Demon of Undoing wrote:The salvation Christ was talking about is very Jewish and about not being under the encumbrance and judgement of the Law.
Isn't that a contradiction though?


And this is what I mean; the accretions about free will and choice and striving with sin, etc- all that stuff is Greek thought and then later attempts to reinvent ( and market) the wheel.
Christianity is as much a Greek product as a Jewish one. The influence cannot be overstated.





When Christ told those many people, " your sins are forgiven" and " the Kingdom is among you", he wasn't making a prediction. It wasn't going to wait until they made the right prayer. He had already done it ( from the perspective of the NT authors many years after the fact), and it did not require input from anybody else. It was finished at the cross. Salvation complete. Once you get rid of the nonsense of a disembodied soul awaiting some throne judgement, it makes more sense. That just really skews the whole thing.
There are schools of Christian theology ancient and modern than concur with this exactly, but this view did not become orthodox (small "o") Christianity. For good or ill I cannot say, but it isn't the version that took.
I love the notion that there is one 'authentic' Christian belief and another is not. If the Kingdom is now, then does God not provide the revelation in particular ways for particular nations?
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Ibrahim »

Enki wrote: I love the notion that there is one 'authentic' Christian belief and another is not. If the Kingdom is now, then does God not provide the revelation in particular ways for particular nations?
I'm just saying that one version was adopted by most of the Christian churches in the world, and represents the "official" view for the majority of the world's Christians.

It doesn't mean that one version is more valid, and indeed by definition I view all versions of Christianity as invalid, but there is no way to verify any of that.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I'm just saying that one version was adopted by most of the Christian churches in the world, and represents the "official" view for the majority of the world's Christians.
Yep. I absolutely claim the charge of being a heretic. I am going against the grain here. I'm in good company ( see below).
Christianity is as much a Greek product as a Jewish one. The influence cannot be overstated.

What if I told you I am prepared to admit some of the Diamond Sutra and the Quran as cannon? I don't mind the Greekishness, but you can see Christ without it, and do the important parts. Other than responding to Greco- Roman political situations ( admittedly a huge caveat), Jesus lived without reference to non- Jewish ways. His general worldview was thoroughly Jewish, and can be reconstructed reliably by that light. IMO, the Greek thought, while admittedly widely adopted, and which perverted Christs teachings in a truly " Life of Brian" fashion, is neither necessary nor welcome. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?


Isn't that a contradiction though?
You might think so. I'd reproduce the whole of Romans ch 2-3 on this, but who cares. It leads to tons more. The Gentiles needed justification, too.

I view the covenant/ sin/ justification dynamic as a convention or system that let the Jews explain a relationship. As people's understanding of that relationship ( why does life still seem an affirmation instead of a negation, in spite of it all?) changed, the language needed to change. To do that, Jesus had to fulfill the Law- be consistent with tradition- or at least credibly have seemed to have done so in the eyes of his audience. In spite of the Herculean effort of Gospel writers to portray him as of a logical line from Moses and the Prophets ( with a little Davidic nationalism thrown in, if you know what I'm talkin' over here), Jesus was clearly more than just a fulfillment. Something about the guy so convinced his contemporaries that he was literally speaking God's truth that they exhausted Israelite liturgical references to send the message. Of course that was a fulfillment, at least as plausible deniability.

But no matter how you hide it or couch it in Jew- friendly terms, he destroyed the law. He and his disciples violated social norms and constrictions as a matter of policy. He pointed out how hollow they were. He made a persistent effort to show them how their language, inadequate to begin with, had ultimately become a positive enslavement. The only functional alternative to that bondage to the law - and the Jews knew the Temple was dying, or at least I am convinced Jesus did- was both a recapitulation and a revision.

A justified Jew was expected to bear no shame in the eyes of God. Justification, salvation, was to be found to be in communion with God's peace and acceptance. It was to be rid of the harsh disciplines because the Lord had overcome all obstacles, on the day when every man could rest under his own fig tree. No guilt, no pressure, no compromises. It was called the bosom of Abraham, evoking imagery of a leisurely dinner with an intimate love of a great spirit beyond your own.

Christ's revision and restructuring was to say that the chains that had kept the Jews incapable of adapting to a new Roman reality, which would test their existential mettle, had best be shed. Remember, eventually the Romans wound up blaming the religious leadership for starting the war that the Romans finished, but good. There was always some prickly Jewish religious fine point causing a riot somewhere. Probably a lot like Jerusalem today, actually. You can't live like that when worlds collide. Oddly enough, the situation is just like that with the modern day Pharisees/Saducees, ie most of the church structure. Their insistence on old language, on requiring that faith consist of faith in impossible magic , will be their undoing, also. Watch what happens to organized Christianity over the next thirty years.

Choose life indeed. Inseparable in that theme of " going the extra mile", which is a direct reference to being a Roman beast of burden upon compulsion, was not just submission to reality. Instead, the constant focus on loving the neighbor, blessing those that curse, aiding the unclean and untouchable, carries with it the assumption that love undergirded all of it. The will of God expressed in the Kingdom as Christ brought it cleared the cobwebs from the Jewish altar, literally ( as in, in the literature) rending the veil so the presence of God, that peace, protection and being known, was free to and in the world.

So the Jew could finally get rid of his own walls. The Gentiles, that may well ( probably were ) coming from frameworks that didn't even establish the idea of a God overly concerned with people, got brought in to the intimate, familial and tribal intimacy the Jews sort of uniquely possessed with their understanding of God. But, they got brought in without the circumcission, which is symbolic of Israelite religious conventions from before the Exile. Those conventions, so onerous even to people raised within them, simply render the whole experience impossible and inaccessible without those walls being broken by Christ Christ made it happen by showing it could be experienced in a personal setting, not as a ritualized annual ceremony. So salvation was very Jewish, but for the Gentile, also.

Jesus was called a blasphemer for tearing down the walls. Early Christians, because they undestood the idea of a tribeless God as revealed by Christ, were called atheists. I think that when a certain percentage of people can't use the old frameworks of understanding to communicate an evolving truth, they have to create new ways and new uses of the language. In our time, the swell of people that simply can not accept a Mideval sky monarch, who when understood literally has to incorporate the most rank fantasy, are these people. The very language the NT uses to confer legitimacy ( miracle stories echoed from the OT) to an unorthodox but consistent message ( God loves Jews? Why not everybody?) has become a stumbling block.

These kids just can't buy the miracles. Who can blame them. It's okay. The truth is miraculous enough.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

Don't understand the question. Is salvation designed to be they key in the lock? Are all other things substitutes? Yes.

I would argue that the real mission of Christ was to render himself, the covenant, all of it, obsolete. Much of the moral transformation, in the sense of affecting global mores, has already outlived particular faith in any particular Jew. Paul went through a lot of words to show that the Law should be put off since something greater had come. We may need to revisit that idea.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

I'm shutting off from this conversation for a while. I have some thinking to do.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Ibrahim »

Demon of Undoing wrote:When you go back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the quest is immortality. Seems like that, too, in the garden of Eden, but by that time, it's not so clear cut. It's tied in with knowledge ( and uncertainty) and position in the universe. The Egyptians search was for righteousness in judgement by the gods ( sorry about gross oversimplification, been a long time since Book of the Dead). Others were simply pagan in the Goldman sense, worshipping the tribe or human excellence. Excluding this last category, which to me is the lowest form of religious thought possible, I think you can cast all of them in existentialist molds.
Actually the Gilgamesh epic is a great thing to bring up. Arguably it also reaches and existentialist conclusion. Gilgamesh is distressed by mortality, seeks immortality, and settles with his city of Uruk.

The point, or so it seems to me, is the search for individual meaning. FOr some that is indeed the tribe, but it isn't the value of the tribe as a tribe, but simply as something to provide meaning. Spengman calling this "paganism" as a pejorative when he lives and writes only to talk up certain tribes and denigrates others is such a squalid and laughable position that it doesn't deserve further comment. Egyptians are hard to peg because what we have is incomplete and funerary-cult-heavy, but it could be said that their meaning was found in preparing for the afterlife.



Enki wrote:In my sparse studies of the subject, Native authors who wrote for posterity described something lost precisely to this. Like this alienation did not previously exist for them, and what existed before was lost to this alienation.

No doubt the vast panoply of human conditions have existed in all societies, but whether or not it was the default condition for all societies is another matter.
My limited knowledge of the subject suggests that Native Americans saw the loss of tribal continuity as a major cause of despair, and obviously contact with Europeans increased this from a tribal scale to an entire civilizational scale. This is likely their cultural method of describing the general existential dread we are discussing. Short of catastrophe, a man unsatisfied with tribal life would probably leave the tribe to search elsewhere, amounting to the same thing in that culture.
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Renewal in an ever changing world

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Demon of Undoing wrote:
Parodite wrote:I wonder if this is not a life exposition of how secularisation works. You start with miracles and saints, come to reject the holy baloony, keep the good acceptible stuff and slowly forget about it. Freeeheee at last.

It's only because the holy baloney was put out there as a viable ( mandatory!) belief that this progression is even real. Belief in those miracles as an absolutely fundamental requirement is the aberration. If they put that all in the proper context, then the faith can be what it was supposed to be. It was never supposed to be Vaticans and Councils and creeds and armies. All that happens because of angels- on- a- pin speculation that had to under pain of death be thought of as real. It is unnatural to expect that thinking adults from any age should have to believe seven impossible things before breakfast, or God will deny them.

Secularization happens because we have forced people to run away from the foolishness. In doing so, they have had to run away from themselves and become these rootless and lonely consumers, jamming plastic into the hole in their chest.
Some, disjointed perhaps, added stuff.

I think the type of struggle that is part of a process of secularization is pretty much identical to the struggle within any given belief system, i.e. the evolution thereof. People have always been busy developing it, changing it, adding, rejecting it in whole or part to have it replaced with... whatever follows. And the whatever is never entirely the product of anyone's guided or misguided information and control. When Murphy, the God of Contingency, always pushes and pulls the rudder, or is never too far behind.. surprises (revelations) will stay with us for the foreseeable future. With or without... it is renewal in an ever changing world. To insist facing the sun backwards and making the past (in any form or shape) an idol is missing the point.

There are more ways to look at the life of Jesus. Clearly, he was in the business of renewal. The tendency is however to not only identify major renewals, but to also give them a status as to give them permanence, a reference point in space and time. A POMI (point of major interest) on the map. As much as it helps "to go from there" down south to where the sun always shines, it can equally immobilize and even paralyze. Grounded @home, searching in the dusty attic for clues in old texts, scan historical research on what really happened and what was really meant. Overlooking that even if you'd find out.. you'd be still at home in the same attic, having gone nowhere. (IMHO) To be on the safe side, it seems to me always preferable to assume all accounts being partly true (as historical fact), partly myth and fantasy, partly hearsay with a high noise/sound ratio. But always try see the human face in it, in some general sense. People back then were not very different from us of course.

Prophets and prophecy. Not sure about the meaning of the word, but I once read it can be understood as poet and poetry. Maybe someone more informed can clarify. But it makes sense that inspired poets now experience something similar as prophets back then: the words came to them. But the important part is that the words that came then and now.. are of the vocabulary and meaning present in the culture in which they arise. It [the culture] is like an instrument that brings forth a particular sound and music. Poetic divine inspiration (God) sounds different on a lute than on a synth, so to speak. But it is always there. The obvious error is to try make the lute sound as the synth: both will annihilate each other and again you are left with... nothing. There is no going back to, or escape from.. the renewal that is always now.
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Re: Zombies remind us that death is social

Post by Demon of Undoing »

Some thinking about stuff after thinking about stuff:

The Christ that emerges out of the study of the NT as identification with Jewish liturgy is only seen as existentialist because existentialism is, in the limit of current understanding of the mind, the farthest progression of awareness and philosophy. I would appreciate Dioscuri's input on that, but if anything has risen beyond postmodernisim and its related ways of thinking, what is it? A new way is coming, but is not yet. This is why the paradigms must change.

What is being lumped in as existentialism is in fact a tribute to the influence of Jewish thinking on the modern mind. Keeping in mind that Jesus was to assume the role of the Paschal lamb and the Yom Kipur scapegoat ( " lamb of God/ takes away sins of the world"), what he represents is twofold. Both things are critical to our understanding of personality. One, modeled after the lamb, is the sinless sacrifice that keeps us safe from supernatural harm. IOW, security and a deal with the infinite and unknown. What is our existential choice in the face of absurdity but this? The lamb slain is the passing over of the wrath of God. Who doesn't want that? Or better yet, who doesn't want to avoid cancer? Yes, yes, it's cells, genetic information, predispositions, exposures, blah, blah. In the middle of the night, it's not the numbers that make your feet turn cold. Ancient or modern, it's very visceral, and it's understandable. Maybe the mental giants among us don't need it. But there are not many great called, not many wise...

Second, and to my mind more important, it represents a way to be rid of our guilt at having life be more than we are. The sense of not measuring up, of not being all that is required for the eternal nag of transcendence to function, is a constant burden. It reminds us that we could have done better, and burns to inspire us to do so ( assuming we are lucky and functional. Don't bet on it. Ususally, that fire just scars humans). The scapegoat was the literal bearer of our imperfections, something that could absorb a primitive Two Minutes Hate and leave us cleansed, even if only for a while. Christ, by being identified with that scapegoat, was our way of letting him bear that guilt. By being the lamb, though, and sinless and perfect, he still may be approachable. By showing us a way that a man can live without encountering those entanglements ( again, see below) , he became an eternal scapegoat. He showed us how to behave to remove our own guilt and sorrow at the effects of our imperfection.

And yes, Tinker, I think even non-Western primitives are keenly aware of their failures and fragility. Literature is riddled with evidence. Pre-literate cultures? Who knows. I haven't read any of their books, but I play their music.

These are rough psychological mechanisms, battleaxes designed to cleave an ancient way of identification with tribe alone ( see below) into something more manageable , more tolerable , more human; or at least, more towards a human a modern person would prefer. And require, for that matter, in order to have modernity function. He was returning the Law to the service of man , and freeing man from the service of the law. Freed of those chains, of guilt and the burdens put upon Hellenic Jews by Exilic priests, who sought to differentiate Jews from the masses of Babylon in order to preserve cultural cohesion. The burdensome mitzvot, by Jesus time, did nothing to help the Jews except by accident. Instead, they had moved beyond that to a point where their insistence on alienation would prove fatal.

Did Christ then decide to destroy Israel ( the Law) in order to save Israel? No, he showed how it could be redefined and perpetuated, as indeed the core idea was ( supercession, Marcus?). How was the Law God's will? What did the Law ever hope to express? Its highest aspiration was to show a model of whatever the Other may be as love and concern for a people, instead of just and only a force to be appeased and avoided except at all but the most pressing moments. IOW, it was an attempt to understand and posses , however ironically and brutally by a people no strangers to brutality, a God of love. How does a God of love show His love by preserving a people when the people ( or at least, their talking-box to God, the Temple) are about to be destroyed or scattered? And come on, they had to have seen it coming. That Roman caligae was going to fall, as it had before countless times. The Jews are not poor tacticians.

So by being identified with the lamb and the scapegoat, what were the people that were writing the summations of the oral traditions about Christ trying to say? They were saying that in him and his illumination was a way to escape anxiety and lack and pressure and guilt. By approaching life as being the expression of love instead of legal processes, he showed a way to escape all the chains that bound them, the people of his audience. I think that, due to the similarities of our mind and that of Christs' contemporaries, the same mechanisms work for us today.

If the faith is taken as literal due to a lack of contextual understanding of their sole authority ( paying attention, Marcus? Just wondering), then ironically, this mechanism is much less useful. Perceived this way, It is diluted by the expectation that, if there is anything of value to be had from Christ at all, it must be seen in signs and wonders and heavenly input, even if only a still small voice. This exchanges a circus trick that will never happen for a constant companion.

Instead, the Comforter is with us always. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, which is nothing more or less than the reassurance of an ever present and loving God ( yer breathing, ain't ya?), doesn't have to be sought in visions. Neither dreams nor trances nor journeys to a mountain top, nor faithfully showing up in the pew for forty years and breathing through your eyes just right in the same way Paul did. Instead, that Spirit is the orientation of our own mind into alignment with the will of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. Asking in Jesus name gets you what you want, not because you say the magic words. It happens because to be in Christs' name is to be consistent to his will. His will? The will of the Father. The will of the Father?

Love. If you want to see love, be it. Can happen anywhere and everywhere. It saves lives, it brightens perception, it passes on a sense of eternity. It's a simple thing. In everything Christ did, he expressed that will, that love. That is why his contemporaries were in such awe of him. It's not that man can't love unconditionally, we just don't. To err is human, to forgive, divine. Christ showed us that forgiveness could be human too. How? Did he play hippie songs? Give lots of hugs? Speak in a quiet voice?

How can I show a fuller expression of love if my reactions to anything other than myself or those like me is avoidance and fear, if not hostility and a sneer of superiority from being God's chosen? In light of the fact that those old ways were about to get Romanized, one way or the other, it was self preservation, yes. But it was a better understanding of truth. It is contradictory to say God loves man, but only some men. If there is one thing the Gospels and before that the Epistles point out about the person of Jesus, it was his insistence that He was the gateway, and that the Gate was wide open. He was the gateway by not restricting love. That's the way you get to the mind of God. You eat with the outlaws and the broken. You walk with the outcasts. You touch the untouchables. You give hope to people about to pack it in. You let people know they are not alone, but a child of God much more valued than many sparrows. You tell them that even if they pull you apart, you will still forgive them with your last breath, and there's not a damn thing they can do about it.


Christ was a psychological scientist in search for a better model in accordance with the truth as he, perhaps very early on, could perceive it. He was the New Adam, showing that man did not have to live by tribes and laws that become walls. He gained the secret of Knowledge and of Life. God is love, and you neither die nor fear death when the pressure is off. Christ took the pressure off. He could act in the face of death because he had known what it was to be alive.

It may be remarked that it is odd that such a new interpretation ( I would argue that it is not new)is coincidentally embedded in new values of inclusiveness and tolerance and love, instead of biblical themes of judgement and conquering. I would argue that such material is scant in the NT, and those that exist are accretions of later developments that tried to reason backwards from abstractions of an abstract.

However, I also think that a Christ that is characterized this way, and the " new agey" virtues he allegedly brought along with him, are perhaps denigrated only because of our divorce from the ancient world in which Christ lived. Perhaps also, because we keep blinders on the savagery of our own time. To live and love outside of tribes and expectations that determined the social status in which you either lived or died, at the time, was a huge moral leap, most especially for a Jew. It speaks to something divine in him, that such a thing could happen. It makes sense in a way, but not.

We denigrate the novelty and present value of the rejection of such tribalism from the ostensible moral superiority of our own time, where we see no such tribal warfare and hatred before us. And yet at this moment, belonging to the wrong tribe increases your likelihood of eating a Hellfire missile by a million percent. We are not so far advanced. As much as his followers have done greater deeds than his own ( how many ways have we to be thankful in our modern world, for greater expressions of Christ's inclusive love?), there is still far to go.

This is a better and more believable way, not because it agrees with modern sensibilities. It's better because it is more faithful to the truth as it was revealed, to say nothing of having a better understanding of scripture and history. It loves more, more broadly, and does not exclude. It is not a formula to mercy that remains a postmortem construct of speculation. It is mercy, for us and for our neighbors, now. It is understanding that our failures are not on us, even as we know we will make them because of who we are. It is a brotherhood that identifies itself by loving self sacrifice, no pins or ceremonies or self-destruction required. It is our best ambition for ourselves to live de-bugged of the useless subroutines that effect our ability to live life as we can. It allows us to live free and capable of mercy without compulsion , and without the sting of guilt when we fail. It comforts us because our heart is clear of malice- loves is not selfish. We know that, when seeking the love, even when we fail, we can trust ourselves to do better next time.
Demon of Undoing
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Re: Your Own Personal Jesus

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Thank you to forum moderation. Once again you prove yourself to be closet Mossad. Your assistance to global Zionism is appreciated.
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Typhoon
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Re: Your Own Personal Jesus

Post by Typhoon »

Demon of Undoing wrote:Thank you to forum moderation. Once again you prove yourself to be closet Mossad. Your assistance to global Zionism is appreciated.
They also serve who only moderate . . .
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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