(April 20, 2014 at 9:07 pm)Mark Fulton Wrote:(April 9, 2014 at 4:54 pm)Severan Wrote: Believe it or not, religion has a real purpose in our every-day lives. I'm going to talk about this after a theory of mine.
First of all, my theory. With my idea of the purpose religion, it seems as it could have been something created by people of power to calm the masses. As we see mostly in history, the powerful and intelligent have created religion for the "peasants". For instance, the Pharaoh of Egypt would always be considered himself a god. This was a way to suppress his people and his slaves. Nobody wants to fuck with a god. Again, another example of this "calming of the masses" appears in the new testament of the christian bible. Jesus called for slaves to be "good slaves" and obey their masters, and they will enter heaven.
What connection can we make from this? This all ties back to what I feel is the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion is to suppress the lower class of society. Why do we see a correlation with wealth and atheism? Why is there a connection between atheism and intelligence, and a correlation between being poor and being religious? Consider the janitors that work at McDonalds or gas stations. What do you use to satisfy them and ensure that they don't rise up? Religion. What do you use to ensure that they don't grab power from you? Religion. However, it's important. This might be a rather "cold" statement, but we need those janitors. We need the lower classes of society to help us with things like cleaning up, and religion is the way to keep it like that.
Agreed! It's certainly true of the three Abrahamic religions.
“But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
(Reg, leader of the People’s Front of Judea, from the film “Life of Brian”
Six hundred years before Jesus, Jewish priests badgered the people into a fanatical reverence for scripture. As a consequence, most Jews looked backward by trying to rigidly conform to the last jot and tittle of the Torah, instead of being open-minded and flexible. They were obsessed with ingratiating themselves with their imaginary God, which excluded them from having cordial relations with Gentiles.
Most other people from conquered nations came to realize that while they may have had no great love of Rome, it was in their interests to embrace the Empire, because to do so usually bought them peace, law, order, and trade. The Palestinian Jews were different. Most of them refused to learn from foreigners or get on with them because their make-believe God had told them they were so very different and special. They failed to adapt to what was then a more modern world, and suffered recurrent military defeats at the hands of Gentiles as a result.
Their obsessive reliance on scripture meant they were subject to primitive laws and ethics. They frequently fought and argued amongst themselves, because “God’s” rules were so open to interpretation. Their religious leaders, not democratically elected, who claimed to know how to interpret scripture, used God as their sock puppet, so asserted an elevated status, ruled over the rabble, and taxed their incomes.
At the beginning of the Christian era, an eclectic mix of Jews and Gentiles wrote more stories about God with the explicit, but not admitted, aim of asserting authority over people in the empire. They invented a new God/man, Jesus Christ, whose story may have been loosely based on a real life Jewish political insurgent. Some of these writings eventually became the core of the New Testament. They instilled similar convictions in their converts, such as an injunction to obey priests, a reluctance to embrace new ideas, and an intolerance of all non-believers.
Ever since the dawn of Christianity, Christians have been squabbling with each other and outsiders, just as the ancient Jews always did, and the baloney in the bible is largely to blame.
Six hundred years later the first Islamists, too, learned a lesson from the Levites. They wrote their own version of scripture, the koran, and it is also still being used to control people.
A large part of the human family is still suffering from belief in holy books. Jews, Christians and Muslims are still fighting each other.
(April 20, 2014 at 1:59 am)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: Jesus said that he was sent only to the Jews. Therefore, when he helped the Gentile woman he was being disobedient and got punished for it.
If Jesus was sent only to the Jews why should anyone else give a damn about him? After all, the entity that sent him didn't give a damn about Gentiles or else he would have sent Jesus to everyone. So it's a waste of time for Gentiles to worship Jesus because he wasn't sent to them and the entity that sent Jesus doesn't care about them. When I was a small child and read that passage I tossed Jesus into the garbage can.
Yes! Jesus was a xenophobic bigot.
Most Christians assume Jesus loved anyone who accepted him; that he had a personal interest in each and every individual. I think they seriously misunderstand their main man. Jesus didn’t love Gentiles (who he referred to as pagans.) He told his disciples:
“Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matt. 10:6, NJB.) He said:
“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” (Matt. 15:24, NJB.)
He forbade his fellow Jews to pray like pagans:
“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:7–8, NJB.)
Here is Jesus’ encounter with a Greek (i.e., non-Jewish) woman:
“He left that place and set out for the territory of Tyre. There he went into a house and did not want anyone to know he was there, but he could not pass unrecognized. A woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him straight away and came and fell at his feet. Now the woman was pagan, by birth a Syrophonecian and she begged him to cast the devil out of her daughter and he said to her ‘the children should be fed first, because it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house dogs’. But she spoke up ‘Ah yes sir’ she replied ‘but the house dogs under the table can eat the children’s scraps’. And he said to her ‘for saying this, you may go home happy; the devil has gone out of your daughter’. So she went off to her home and found the child lying on the bed and the devil gone” (Mark 7:24–30, NJB.) Jesus was drawing an analogy. The children were the Jews, who were to be fed first. The dogs were the Gentiles, (when Jews wished to insult someone they often referred to them as dogs) whom he’d rather not help. Jesus hesitated before healing the girl because her mother wasn’t Jewish.
Caesaria was the capital of Judea and Sepphoris the capital of Galilee, yet there’s no record that Jesus ever preached in either city, despite their size and importance, I think because Gentiles populated them. He could’ve taken his mission outside Palestine. Egyptians, Greeks, Africans, and Romans might have been wowed by his words of wisdom, yet he didn’t bother with them either, as they too were in Gentile territories.
Jesus was xenophobic. If he was an insurrectionist trying to start a war, preaching platitudes to Gentiles would have been the last thing on his mind. It’s possible these statements reflect his real attitude.
People who push the “Jesus loves you” line need to read their bibles more carefully, and should try to understand the real history. It’s obvious Jesus didn’t even like you unless you were Jewish and supported his military ambitions.
It’s true there are quotes portraying him as a preacher for all people. I think Gentile interpolators have added these to try to give him universal appeal, yet they can’t compensate for his bigotry elsewhere.
Excellent points.
