Showing posts with label
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
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Showing posts with label
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Show all posts
For reasons I'll get into in a future post I've been mulling over the nature of belief and the internal contradictions within certain belief systems
Top of my list of belief systems with internal contradictions is evangelical Christianity
Having not been raised in a 'born again' tradition, evangelical Christianity came as a bit of a surprise to me when I started bumping into evangelicals and the strange, rather scary take some of them had on how a supposedly Loving Creator goes about his business
I also couldn't help noticing that members of certain evangelical communities were very big on quoting that ode to genocide, the Old Testament, and the bits in the New Testament that follow accounts of the life of Jesus. They were much more selective about what they quoted from Jesus Christ himself and accounts of his life
All that stuff about sharing, turning the other cheek, embracing outcasts and unconditional love barely got a look in
Which struck me, and still does, as rather peculiar behaviour for people who claim to be followers of Jesus' teachings
Someone asked me yesterday about one particular inconsistancy within evangelical Christianity
The End Times thing
The subject came up because there is a significant overlap between people who are sceptical of 'Official Narratives' and evangelical Christians who believe that they are among The Elect, blessed to be around during the run up to Armageddon and battling in a holy war against Satan and his End Game (which includes state-sponsored false flag terror ops)
They know this because it has been prophesised
One thing that has always struck me as peculiar with this belief is that it seems to presuppose that either a) Satan hasn't read the Bible or b) Satan has read the Bible but reckons he can outwit the Creator of Everything and change the ending
Nope, it's not working for me I'm afraid
And then there's the small matter of Jesus' own words, as quoted in the divinely inspired Word of God - The Gospel of Matthew 24:36-44...
"36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. ... 42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."
Jesus' position on End Time prophecies couldn't be much clearer could it?
I freely admit that I like Christianity, as defined by the words and actions attributed to Jesus. The intolerant, arrogant, inconsistent belief system that some people practice and describe as Christianity has got fuck all to do with either
The capacity to adhere to a belief system which is contradicted internally by its own teachings is more Orwell than Jesus
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I've just discovered via the most reliable source of news in the Cosmos, The Daily Mash, that Tony Blair is now working for The Bankers in a more official capacity than in the past
Maybe he got the idea from that other staunch socialist and man of the people his former chief of staff Jonathan Powell
And still, people who consider themselves to be left wing will keep supporting that shower of sleazy, corrupt fucks called the Labour Party, in the belief that it somehow represents the interests of ordinary people
...and it's 'the conspiracy theorists' who are supposed to be lunatic fantasists!?
A pop quiz for all you Christian Capitalists out there - what's the one thing, the one practice that drove ace-pacifist Jesus Christ so mental that he kicked off and started a ruck?
Earlier on today I left a comment on someone else's blog which, given Blair's much publicised conversion to Catholicism and reportedly profound Christian faith, seems vaguely relevant...
As I hope you realise, I have no problem with Christianity, provided people claiming to be Christians at least try to follow the teachings of the person they believe to be the Son of God
But I can’t help noticing that an awful lot of people who claim to be Christians feel a lot more comfortable quoting from the Old Testament or the apocrypha than JC’s direct teachings as recorded in gospels
I remember a chat I had with a Christian a few years ago. He was very fervent about his faith and, as it happened, very rich. I asked him how he reconciled his wealth with his faith and I quoted Jesus saying that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God
his answer?
‘Jesus said it was harder, not impossible’
Belief in a Supreme Deity is one thing, believing that She/He/It is a dumb bastard who'll fall for the same lawyers' tricks that so many mortals do is something else altogether
You really do have to be something quite, er, special to think you'll pull that one off
God ... unlikely to be impressed by the terms of reference or wording of the Hutton or Butler Reports
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A couple of days ago I was, as I do, hanging around outside Westminster Cathedral in Victoria.
Victoria is home, of course, to London's main coach station and anyone who has had cause to use the station at any point over the last few years will have been greeted by the sight of dozens of coaches, queued nose to tail, waiting to unload their cargoes of thousands of people from Eastern Europe looking to find out for themselves if the streets of this unfair city truly are paved with gold.
Most of them, even though they soon discover that gold is pretty thin on the ground these days, move on and manage to get by. But a few don't and soon discover that a Plan for a Better Life which simply involves the following steps...
1. Get on a coach to London
2. There is no Step 2
...does have certain limitations
To cut a long story short, there are always quite a few people sleeping rough in and around Victoria. In fairness to the local council and various charities, they do get help but there are always more people taking their place
Anyway, I was standing by the 'Catholic Truth' bookshop next to Westminster Cathedral admiring its nativity scene and its fine selection of divinely-inspired cookbooks
when I noticed an interesting wee sign conveniently located at gutter level on the front door...
Not being a linguist I can only guess that the writing on the right hand side of that sign on the front door of an allegedly Christian bookshop is telling people who are down on their luck and reduced to sleeping on pavements to fuck off in four different languages
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A couple of days ago I linked to documentary about Jesus made by theologian Robert Beckwith. The central thrust of the film was that the teachings attributed to Jesus are universal and perfectly compatible with other belief systems across the globe.
I liked the film a lot because, for a welcome change, someone actually got to put up an intelligent show on mainstream TV which attempted to explore the similarities between people of different faiths, or absence of faiths. In the process the film also tried to demonstrate that being a Christian doesn’t necessarily mean being an intolerant nutcase and that, shock horror, Christianity really should be about being nice to people and doing the decent thing for its own sake
And whilst Beckwith didn’t explicitly state it, one of implied conclusions of the film was that the problem with many Christians is not that they’re Christians, it’s the fact that they’re shit Christians.
Gandhi probably put it better and without reverting to any swears…
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ"
Sure, belief in a Sky God is a bit silly but it’s no sillier than, say, believing that life spontaneously sprung up out of sludge after being struck by lightning a few times
And if secular polemicists such as Richard Dawkins serve no other useful purpose it is to prove that people with religious faith do not hold the monopoly on being intolerant, and plain fucking ignorant, dicks
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The reason why I mention all this is because someone has just left me a link (thanks btw) to an internet movie called Zeigeist which attempts to make a connection between religious faith, especially Christianity, the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror, the global banking system and elitist control of our world...
The film includes little original material and is basically a mash-up of information and clips that are freely available on the web and already well-known to people who are into that sort of thing. The most interesting part is the first third of the film which covers similar ground to Beckwith’s C4 documentary and makes a strong case that Christianity was itself a mash-up of pre-existing material and ideas.
A mash-up criticising a mash-up – oooh, the irony
FWIW my opinion of the film is that whilst it contains some very good and potentially startling factual content some of the conclusions woven around that content are totally misleading
My biggest issue is with the claim made by the film that monotheistic religion and the mindset it encourages has been the driving force for getting on for most of the Evil in the world over the last 2,000 years
Bollocks
Sure religion has often been subverted for Evil ends, but so has environmentalism, humanism, marxism, darwinism and lots of other initially well-intentioned isms I could name
If you could somehow abolish all organised religion tomorrow it wouldn't change a thing
Because people would still want to steal things off each other
And some people, the most wicked and most conniving of people, will continue to be very good at stealing - regardless of whether everyone else believes in a Sky God or not
The payload of Zeitgeist is the assertion that religion, not theft, is driving the bad things that are happening in the world. In that respect, whilst Zeitgeist purports to be a radical ‘Truth’ video, its message is absolutely no different to the Islamofascist bullshit that the Conservative Neocons and their puppet-masters are using as an excuse to rape the world
If I could be bothered I could sit down tomorrow and make my own competing film which highlights all the awful things that have been carried out in the name of atheistic secularism. The 19th and 20th centuries are littered bounteous quantities of source material. Sauce for the goose and all that...
But I won't because I think that would be a distraction.
The world’s problems don’t stem from religion, or lack of religion. They have come about because of greed and the inability of the majority of people to adequately comprehend and deal with the machinations of a ruthless, amoral minority.
When most people, Americans certainly, talk about Christianity they have one specific form of Christianity uppermost in mind - US style Christian Fundamentalism which is both intolerant and just about the least Christ-like belief system anyone could come up with.
I'd maintain that Christian Fundamentalism was created and is promoted, as with the Catholic Church, by very earthly interests. I can understand why people get wound up about religion but they are focusing on the weapon rather than the creature wielding it.
And if people keep swallowing the same old bait, crafted to divide and distract us, nothing will change
In short, whilst I think movies like Zeitgest contain a lot of interesting material and are worth watching with an open but sceptical mind, the film I’d really like to see made is the one that doesn’t fuel the eternally fruitless, divisive conflict between Christians and secular humanists but rather the film which shames the daft fucks who think they are Christians into behaving a bit more like the guy they claim to revere.
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Robert Beckwith's The Hidden Story of Jesus - one hour and forty minutes of absolutely top notch viewing imho...
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