(April 20, 2013 at 4:23 pm)Love Wrote: I have researched Christian theology and, indeed, the history of Christianity. As I have repeated on a number of occasions, I am not interested in religious dogma, scripture (The Bible is absolute nonsense to me) or anything of that nature; I would certainly be considered a heretic by many orthodox adherents. I am much more concerned with Jesus as a historical figure, his consciousness and, indeed, the remarkable impact he had on those around him. Whilst reading the writings from Alister McGrath about theology, I was quite surprised to discover the actual evolution of early Christianity in the first few centuries after the Roman Empire adopted it as its official religion. From what I have read about the actual historical (not theological) teachings of Jesus, he did not preach anything about original sin or redemptive sacrifice; the core messages were very simple: "love" and "charity". Original sin and dying our sins (which I think are grotesque ideas), were superfluous ideas grafted on to the embryonic dogmatic system of Roman Catholicism.
I think many people do not understand how revolutionary the ideas that Jesus taught (love each other and be charitable) were at the time. Human beings were treated like cattle during that period, and I truly believe that Jesus and his ideas literally transformed civilisation.
I think the most amazing thing a person can do is to be selfless and to be kind, loving and charitable to others. I think the people who do this kind thing are vastly more impressive than those who are self-serving. I am working on being more charitable and loving towards others; I do my bit, but I could do more.
I'm going to bring up a quote by C.S. Lewis of all people...
Quote:“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
He's got a point there. Your faith in the "historical" Jesus is just as unfounded as you claim that those of faith in the bible are. The stories about him are rife with him very clearly not giving anyone the choice to believe in him as any kind of moral, mortal teacher. And indeed, Jesus' many so-called "deeds" are actually pretty fucking malicious if you really read the biblical "accounts" of him.
Never mind that there is no contemporary accounts of anything regarding Jesus to provide any kind of historical proof of Jesus, and that what so-called accounts exist were supposedly written 60 years after the events in which they happened by a bunch of dudes in their late 80s in a time without modern medicine. Do please tell me how many 80-year-olds you know of who have absolutely perfect, crystal-clear memories, and who are not even slightly senile, and then consider that the ones who are are living in this modern age of medicine and scientific understandings of nutrition. The gospel writers were not.
And ideas of human decency and equality actually did exist at the time. The Romans are not known for being the greatest civilization in history for nothing. They were a war-faring civilization, yes, but they were also just, disciplined, and civilized people, with laws and systems that most the developed world bases itself on. Christianity turned the Roman Empire from a society where to be Roman was to be equal to all Romans, to a religious empire that would later instigate the Crusades, the bloodiest and most pointless conflict that the world had seen up to that point, and would go from a civilization that shared and espoused knowledge and philosophy and learning into a close-minded, ignorant society of bigots, witch-burning zealots, and censorship of scientific inquiry.
What "good" did Jesus do to culture that you are talking about, exactly? You keep saying it, but you aren't showing any examples. Are you referring to charity? Or morality? Because both of those existed long before Jesus supposedly existed, and continue to exist in the modern day in individuals who are non-religious in the form of secular-humanists. Jesus had nothing new to say on morality whatsoever. Whatever he said was shit that had been said by others hundreds of years or even millenia earlier.
