(August 17, 2016 at 9:53 am)KevinM1 Wrote: RR and Steve seem to conveniently forget that otherwise intelligent, 21st century people believe stupid shit all the time. Again, Scientology and Mormonism immediately spring to mind.
As far as 'for so little gain'/risk of harm or death goes, Jesus was also a political revolutionary. I mean, shit, guys. Revolutionaries and their followers face that kind of risk as a matter of course.
Are you guys really so dense that you don't get that religion, regardless of what it is, has always been a political apparatus? Or that the stories you claim to know so well aren't just about spirituality, but of a man becoming a seditious threat to the social order of the time (which is why he was fucking tortured and killed)? Stop turning off your brains and start looking at the bigger picture.
Yes, it does seem as though the authors of the Gospel accounts bend over backwards to play down any seditious tendencies within Jesus' message -- so much so that Pilate becomes an ever more sympathetic figure (and the Jews correspondingly more culpable for his death) the later the Gospel in question. It's not hard to understand in light of the revolt staged by the Jews and ruthlessly suppressed by the Romans, not to mention the traction the movement had within largely Gentile circles. But these very understandable human motives mean nothing to people who see the hand of their god at work in all of this. For them, there is no big picture, just Truth carved into stone.
