Love thy neighbor

[Harry Nevis]

Jesus said he didn't come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, which he did.

Oh, horseshit.  The assholes who wrote that nonsense couldn't get their story straight.

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Matty 5:18

Last I looked, heaven and earth are still here.

I never understood a law being fulfilled.  Was there a sunset clause?

---

17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

Matty 5:18


Last I looked, heaven and earth are still here.

Since the rest of the new testament testifies that we are no longer under the requirements of the law, Jesus obviously wasn't saying that we must follow all the requirements of the law.  I think he clarifies his position in the following verses:

Matthew 22:36-40English Standard Version (ESV)
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

We are required to follow these two commandments, and in doing so we are fulfilling the old testament law.  The Jews, obsessed with following ordinances, never did understand the true spirit and requirements of the law.

---

Soooo... God changed? He's not the same forever? He changed his mind? He made a mistake in the Old Testament?
Or... he didn't authorize the Old Testament. It was fraud. Not really divine inspiration? What's it going to be? Either Jesus is the son of the god and they're one in the same, or Jesus disagrees with his dad, or the Bible is man inspired (not the word of the god) and it's no wonder it's a load of contradictions.
I don't know how this can be confusing. Lol

Are you saying that an unchanging God cannot establish different laws to people at different times?  He established the law for the purpose of demonstrating that people were unable to follow it.  It demonstrated that we are unable to justify ourselves to God.  That is why we needed Jesus to make the sacrifice for us.  God didn't change his mind, rather it was all part of his plan for us.

What does unchanging mean to you?  Does it mean that if God was happy and then he became angry about something that means he changed?  Or maybe if he decided to make a covenant with Moses and then another covenant with Moses, then that means he changed.  I guess if I give my 14 year old son a ten o'clock curfew and then change it to eleven when he turns 16, that means I'm changing into a different person.

Oh, please. No one had ever said of you that you were perfect and unchanging I bet.  And who did the old law "demonstrate" our inability to follow them to?  God?  Didn't he know how it would turn out?

[Brian37]

It only applies to christians and no one else. So yeah you can hate your neighbor if they aren't christian. 

- Bible.

I cannot state this enough. While religion is a huge cause of human divisions, it isn't a patent owned by one religion. There is not one religion in the world that does not have competing sub sects that don't agree as to how to follow the umbrella label.

Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate, to see cooperation or to use force, is not in a holy writing or holy person or holy hero.

This attitude of "love" stems from the local and evolutionary tribalism. Most humans widely get sold the religions of their parents and are most likely going to defend what they grow up with.

I love my species capability of empathy, but I don't have to love the greed and violence any religion might use to justify it, or any individual for that matter.

No, I don't love every single 7 billion as individuals. I only value my species potential to be compassionate, that does not mean every individual will, only that my species has that capability. I do not owe "love" to any individual or sect that hides behind their religion to justify violence and or oppression to their fellow human.

[dyresand]

It only applies to christians and no one else. So yeah you can hate your neighbor if they aren't christian. 

- Bible.

I cannot state this enough. While religion is a huge cause of human divisions, it isn't a patent owned by one religion. There is not one religion in the world that does not have competing sub sects that don't agree as to how to follow the umbrella label.

Our species ability to be cruel or compassionate, to see cooperation or to use force, is not in a holy writing or holy person or holy hero.

This attitude of "love" stems from the local and evolutionary tribalism. Most humans widely get sold the religions of their parents and are most likely going to defend what they grow up with.

I love my species capability of empathy, but I don't have to love the greed and violence any religion might use to justify it, or any individual for that matter.

No, I don't love every single 7 billion as individuals. I only value my species potential to be compassionate, that does not mean every individual will, only that my species has that capability. I do not owe "love" to any individual or sect that hides behind their religion to justify violence and or oppression to their fellow human.

Well said. 

[emjay]

[...] that Jesus himeslf came up with this and other "good" stuff. And that this is supposed to be the proof that he is god because this is so moral that no mere mortal could come up with this. [...]

I was watching Ben-Hur (the new one) the other day and it got me thinking along similar lines as you in this post. That the things Jesus was saying, and the context in which he was saying them (as portrayed in the film) were not new, but rather the sorts of thoughts anyone can have under similar conditions. Ie if you look at the world and all you see is violence met with violence and misery, there'll always be, in every time and place, people who want to find 'a better way'... want to find a way to break the pattern. Some may be more vocal/determined (ie activist) about it than others. So just hypothetically, if Jesus or someone like him existed, and was as portrayed, it seems perfectly plausible to me that he could just be one of these people... an activist trying to find a better way (in the context of a brutal Roman world) and even willing to die - requesting his followers forgive rather than reply in kind with violence - to make the point and break the pattern. So a bloke... an idealist... tired of all the shit around him, and looking for a better way. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me and nothing supernatural required, just one possible human response to a shitty situation.

[Fake Messiah]

I was watching Ben-Hur (the new one) the other day and it got me thinking along similar lines as you in this post. That the things Jesus was saying, and the context in which he was saying them (as portrayed in the film) were not new, but rather the sorts of thoughts anyone can have under similar conditions. Ie if you look at the world and all you see is violence met with violence and misery, there'll always be, in every time and place, people who want to find 'a better way'... want to find a way to break the pattern. Some may be more vocal/determined (ie activist) about it than others. So just hypothetically, if Jesus or someone like him existed, and was as portrayed, it seems perfectly plausible to me that he could just be one of these people... an activist trying to find a better way (in the context of a brutal Roman world) and even willing to die - requesting his followers forgive rather than reply in kind with violence - to make the point and break the pattern. So a bloke... an idealist...  tired of all the shit around him, and looking for a better way. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me and nothing supernatural required, just one possible human response to a shitty situation.

The Christians want us to think that those older civilizations—Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia were the great darkness which, save for a few prophetic gleams of light in Judaea, brooded over the world until Christ came. The sacred bulls and cats of Egypt, the dragons and demons and whores of Babylon, were the outstanding memories.
Nevertheless when we look at the evidence like letters, contracts, grave-stones, moral treatises, fragments of law, and other documents from those civilizations we see they reflect the moral temper of a people with unalterable fidelity.
Egyptians believed intensely in the immortality of the soul, and in the severe moral examination of each soul as it entered the underworld. Like the great god Osiris. There the good and evil deeds of the man are weighed in incorruptible scales, and the judge passes sentence.
Or the so called "Whore of Babylon". I mean if you look at Hammurabi Code (written more then 1700 years BC) you can see they were obsessed with sex-chastity and had laws protecting the position of the wife against a favourite concubine; protecting her from divorce in case of illness; giving sentence of banishment against a man for incest, or of death for intercourse with his daughter-in-law and so on...


When it comes to Rome the orator Cicero (who lived BC) had the first complete Roman manual of morality called De Officiis (On Duties) and in it there is a fine chapter on benevolence, of "the universal fellowship of the human race," and he says that "nature ordains that we should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man"; and he condemned the use of torture in the administration of justice.
Then few decades later you had Seneca who wrote the standard of conduct which was received among cultivated Romans. He wrote moral stuff that slaves are not just people but your family; that you must live for others if you would live for yourself; and so on, that it is worth checking at least as quotes on the internet. They were so moral and so richly paralleled with the Gospels that early Christian writers pretended that Seneca had borrowed from Paul, and even such scholars as Jerome and Augustine accepted the correspondence which was forged in their names.

Or the Christian propaganda that wants us to convince that the emperors before Constantine were generally a perverse lot, encouraging a vicious people; but an hour's study of Roman history will inform us that during the first two hundred and fifty years of the Empire it was ruled by good emperors for two hundred years and by bad emperors for only fifty years.
I mean sure they were conquering and plundering Europe and middle East, but again they saw themselves as helping those people, bringing civilization. I mean if we where to judge them by that, then what about today's so called "wars for oil"? Are we to condemn whole nations of people because they are dragged into stupid wars, like in Vietnam?


When it comes to "Ben-Hur" I remember hearing from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek how during Yugoslavia the communist party edited out scenes with Jesus and released movie like that and he said that the movie was actually better. It was instead this existential story of survival.

[emjay]

I was watching Ben-Hur (the new one) the other day and it got me thinking along similar lines as you in this post. That the things Jesus was saying, and the context in which he was saying them (as portrayed in the film) were not new, but rather the sorts of thoughts anyone can have under similar conditions. Ie if you look at the world and all you see is violence met with violence and misery, there'll always be, in every time and place, people who want to find 'a better way'... want to find a way to break the pattern. Some may be more vocal/determined (ie activist) about it than others. So just hypothetically, if Jesus or someone like him existed, and was as portrayed, it seems perfectly plausible to me that he could just be one of these people... an activist trying to find a better way (in the context of a brutal Roman world) and even willing to die - requesting his followers forgive rather than reply in kind with violence - to make the point and break the pattern. So a bloke... an idealist...  tired of all the shit around him, and looking for a better way. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me and nothing supernatural required, just one possible human response to a shitty situation.

The Christians want us to think that those older civilizations—Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia were the great darkness which, save for a few prophetic gleams of light in Judaea, brooded over the world until Christ came. The sacred bulls and cats of Egypt, the dragons and demons and whores of Babylon, were the outstanding memories.
Nevertheless when we look at the evidence like letters, contracts, grave-stones, moral treatises, fragments of law, and other documents from those civilizations we see they reflect the moral temper of a people with unalterable fidelity.
Egyptians believed intensely in the immortality of the soul, and in the severe moral examination of each soul as it entered the underworld. Like the great god Osiris. There the good and evil deeds of the man are weighed in incorruptible scales, and the judge passes sentence.
Or the so called "Whore of Babylon". I mean if you look at Hammurabi Code (written more then 1700 years BC) you can see they were obsessed with sex-chastity and had laws protecting the position of the wife against a favourite concubine; protecting her from divorce in case of illness; giving sentence of banishment against a man for incest, or of death for intercourse with his daughter-in-law and so on...


When it comes to Rome the orator Cicero (who lived BC) had the first complete Roman manual of morality called De Officiis (On Duties) and in it there is a fine chapter on benevolence, of "the universal fellowship of the human race," and he says that "nature ordains that we should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man"; and he condemned the use of torture in the administration of justice.
Then few decades later you had Seneca who wrote the standard of conduct which was received among cultivated Romans. He wrote moral stuff that slaves are not just people but your family; that you must live for others if you would live for yourself; and so on, that it is worth checking at least as quotes on the internet. They were so moral and so richly paralleled with the Gospels that early Christian writers pretended that Seneca had borrowed from Paul, and even such scholars as Jerome and Augustine accepted the correspondence which was forged in their names.

Or the Christian propaganda that wants us to convince that the emperors before Constantine were generally a perverse lot, encouraging a vicious people; but an hour's study of Roman history will inform us that during the first two hundred and fifty years of the Empire it was ruled by good emperors for two hundred years and by bad emperors for only fifty years.
I mean sure they were conquering and plundering Europe and middle East, but again they saw themselves as helping those people, bringing civilization. I mean if we where to judge them by that, then what about today's so called "wars for oil"? Are we to condemn whole nations of people because they are dragged into stupid wars, like in Vietnam?


When it comes to "Ben-Hur" I remember hearing from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek how during Yugoslavia the communist party edited out scenes with Jesus and released movie like that and he said that the movie was actually better. It was instead this existential story of survival.

I was mainly just making a general point that in any time and place, there'll be people sick of the status quo and looking for a better (or different) way. This was just really an illustration of that thinking, but I don't know much about Roman history... how it actually was; whether it was as brutal as it is portrayed in some films, or not in others. That's always been a bit of a confusion for me to be honest; on the one hand you have ancient Greek and Roman philosophy suggesting a very moral and learned culture, but on the other you have films like Caligula, suggesting a very decadent and brutal culture. I know it would make a difference who was emperor, and that some may be better than others, but still I don't really have a picture of what it was generally like in the Roman world.

[Fake Messiah]

Yeah but what is "Ben-Hur" about? It's about Ben who is angry at Romans for occuping them, but at the same time he loves his Roman friend. Then it switches and all his anger is centered toward Messala so that during the movie we see him on the journey getting Romanized (he even met the Emperor) so that he even becomes Roman himself and only Messala seems to be the problem. He kills Messala and then that holy rain falls so that his sister and mother get healed and then what? They live happily ever after?

And when it come to Caligula you must understand that during the first two centuries of the Empire the vice was encouraged at Rome only during the very brief reign of the insane Caligula (4 years), the 9 years of the influence of Messalina, and the reign of Nero (54-68); 27 years out of more than 200.
But like I mentioned Seneca, after him there was this Stoic movement for assisting the helpless. From Nerva to Marcus Aurelius the emperors set the example of founding orphanages and homes for the aged, and the wealthier citizens generously followed it. Civic festivals, civic baths and theaters and aqueducts, were established by the wealthier Romans. The municipalities were compelled to provide schools at which every free Roman child could obtain gratuitous education, and poorer youths were assisted to pass to the higher schools. There has been no such humanitarian movement in Europe since those days until the 19th century. Woman's position was relieved of all the old injustice; slavery was so consistently censured that, if paganism had continued, it could not have survived as long as it did; war was denounced by Lucan and others; the gladiatorial displays were heavily condemned by Plutarch and Seneca.

Christianity taught brotherhood and mercy because brotherhood and mercy were familiar doctrines of the age. Eventual triumph of Christianity was political, not spiritual. Indeed if you look up emperor Constantine you can see he was far from a moral man.

Nevertheless Rome had it's moral problems, like war and slavery and it might have looked divine if Christianity demolished those problems as it came to power, but needlessly to say it did not.
Jesus had many opportunities to disavow slavery. He never did. St. Paul reaffirmed the practice. The Bible was widely used to justify slavery in the United States. Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.

[emjay]

Yeah but what is "Ben-Hur" about? It's about Ben who is angry at Romans for occuping them, but at the same time he loves his Roman friend. Then it switches and all his anger is centered toward Messala so that during the movie we see him on the journey getting Romanized (he even met the Emperor) so that he even becomes Roman himself and only Messala seems to be the problem. He kills Messala and then that holy rain falls so that his sister and mother get healed and then what? They live happily ever after?

That sounds more like the first one than the second one. The second film pretty much missed out the whole Romanization storyline; ie he didn't rescue the Roman guy off the galley or get adopted, or any of that side... he just bought his way into the games to race Messala. So that film was more centred on the struggle of Judea, and that's what prompted me to think of Jesus as this other type of freedom fighter In other words I wasn't saying anything about the accuracy of the film... because the first film was very different... but just that the way it framed it gave me that idea whereas I had no such idea from the first film. Ie the second film focused more on the anger in Judea at the Romans, and the resistance... 'we should be struggling together'... 'we are' (wrong film I know ).

And when it come to Caligula you must understand that during the first two centuries of the Empire the vice was encouraged at Rome only during the very brief reign of the insane Caligula (4 years), the 9 years of the influence of Messalina, and the reign of Nero (54-68); 27 years out of more than 200.
But like I mentioned Seneca, after him there was this Stoic movement for assisting the helpless. From Nerva to Marcus Aurelius the emperors set the example of founding orphanages and homes for the aged, and the wealthier citizens generously followed it. Civic festivals, civic baths and theaters and aqueducts, were established by the wealthier Romans. The municipalities were compelled to provide schools at which every free Roman child could obtain gratuitous education, and poorer youths were assisted to pass to the higher schools. There has been no such humanitarian movement in Europe since those days until the 19th century. Woman's position was relieved of all the old injustice; slavery was so consistently censured that, if paganism had continued, it could not have survived as long as it did; war was denounced by Lucan and others; the gladiatorial displays were heavily condemned by Plutarch and Seneca.

Christianity taught brotherhood and mercy because brotherhood and mercy were familiar doctrines of the age. Eventual triumph of Christianity was political, not spiritual. Indeed if you look up emperor Constantine you can see he was far from a moral man.

Nevertheless Rome had it's moral problems, like war and slavery and it might have looked divine if Christianity demolished those problems as it came to power, but needlessly to say it did not.
Jesus had many opportunities to disavow slavery. He never did. St. Paul reaffirmed the practice. The Bible was widely used to justify slavery in the United States. Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.

Wow, thanks for the education So on the whole, pretty moral and progressive, apart from a few blips (ie Caligula ).

So don't get me wrong, I wasn't speaking about the historical Jesus (and what he actually said or even if he existed) per se. I don't know enough about the history, whereas you clearly do, to make any call on that. I was just making a general observation that the behaviour attributed to Jesus, in the context of that film (the second one), would make sense in perfectly human terms of someone pissed off at Roman occupation, and looking for a better/different way.

[Cecelia]

The Christian idea of love is frightening. Murdering sinners is considered 'love', of course Christians don't do that anymore because society realizes it's wrong, they just stop applying it to the old testament and God.

[Ravenshire]

I tried to love my neighbour. Pity her husband came home early.

I tried to love my neighbor, biblically. After a few attempts, she got a restraining order.