RE: Would Jesus promote punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?
August 10, 2020 at 3:54 am
(This post was last modified: August 10, 2020 at 3:57 am by Tulayhah-Asadi.)
(August 10, 2020 at 3:39 am)Belacqua Wrote:(August 10, 2020 at 1:22 am)Tulayhah-Asadi Wrote: What attracts me to someone like Jesus of Nazareth is my belief that he is someone that would happily embrace all these outcasts and be a light unto them. But where can we find someone like that today?
Yes, the gospel message is expressed so simply, and yet is so hard to implement. And of course it is so widely and effectively opposed by anyone in power, that it has taken centuries to make even a tiny bit of progress, which is always threatened.
I think that at root, what is demanded is a change of heart. But there has been a millennia-long debate among Christians as to what this change of heart would lead to, in terms of practical action.
And I do think that in the US, anyway, politics and economics have to be at the heart of it. Both Dems and Reps are so blatant in their desire to serve the rich and further impoverish the poor, that a focus on the centers of power makes sense. It's kind of like the environmental movement -- each of us is made to feel guilty and urged to recycle and do our part, through a change in our heart, while the vast majority of the damage is being done by about half a dozen evil groups, including the US military. A change in personal attitudes about consumption is good but only a tiny part of what's necessary to make any meaningful change.
The powerful people want us to fear Putin and whoever is running Iran, but Steve Mnuchin has done more harm to Americans than anyone overseas. The people who get rich from developing and selling pharmaceuticals while hiding the addictive qualities, the insurance executives who are enriched from other people's misfortune -- these, to me, are the evil powers mentioned in the New Testament.
I have mixed feelings about this narrative. On the one hand, you are right that so much that is wrong and unjust with this world is because political power is in the hands of a certain type of people whose greed trumps common morality and goodness. On the other hand, it is also true that those who rule us are not aliens from another planet, but people like us, and they reflect our own condition as a society. Therefore, a mere changing of the guard won't create a fundamental transformation in my opinion. Just look at how Communist revolutions in Russia and China empowered an entirely different category of people, removing the capitalists and industrialists, yet nothing good came out of it, in fact it was a change for the worse. So in my narrative, grassroots level change is the way, and not the political narrative of seizing power from the current establishment. Show me a society where virtually everyone are living lives of purity and altruism, and I guarantee you their political leadership will be a reflection of them. In summary, I simply do not subscribe to the political ideology.
What about Jesus? I think he made it pretty clear when he said "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" and "My kingdom is not of this world", his ministry was not meant to challenge the ruling elite. His attitude was, so what let them carry on with their business, the real work is to uplift souls on the ground. The establishment he did challenge was the religious establishment, but his challenging of them meant his rebuking of their hypocrisy and corruption. So I'm not necessarily interested in replacing but in reforming.
I believe Fate has written that the geopolitical condition of this world will pretty much always be as you see it now, powerful empires and superpowers exploiting the weak, waging wars and proxy wars against each other, and consuming the Earth's finite natural resources. It is simply beyond the capacity of any movement, no matter how popular, to reverse this trend. Nothing short of a Divine intervention can.