re: How many don't know about Jesus Christ
Check out the Chinese (1.1 billion). But the problem is that billions of people in history have only been exposed to schismatic and heretical sects and to illiterate and incompetent preachers who are not fluent in first century vulgar Greek and could not possibly understand what the message of the scriptures actually is. You cannot possibly imagine that the many weird translations of the scriptures can convey the correct message. If you read the gospels, acts, and epistles in any language they are a mass of indecipherable and inexplicable contradictions. How is a simple man or woman to thread his or her way through this morass and not fall foul of heresy when highly educated theologians cannot escape hellfire. Billions of people have been excommunicated because of the misconduct of their kings, and millions have been killed in conflicts over the validity of certain supposedly holy scriptures.
Personally, I find it impossible to find a credible message in any of the various scriptures. None of the churches I know about reflect well the opinions of their supposed founders. The idea of true followers of Jesus supporting capital punishment or burning of heretics at the stake is preposterous. The idea that Jesus was of virgin birth is contradictory to everything that is known about human reproduction. The idea that Jesus was in anything more than a purely figurative sense the "son of God" is contradicted by the very scriptures that are supposedly irrefutable. Forced to choose between a Jesus who is divine, virgin born, resurrected, one of the Trinity, the Jewish messiah, capable of miracles -- and Jesus who is kind, eloquent, ignorant, generous, progressively disturbed, deranged, and -- ultimately -- suicidal -- in that he forces his enemies to execute him -- and with only the documents of the Bible and ordinary apparatus of historical criticism to rely on in the decision -- I have chosen the latter. I was raised in a community in which Christianity of a particularly poisonous Protestant ilk was daily forced down everyone's throat. I watched children threatened with horrible damnation and threats of suffering death struggle to come to a reasonable understanding of their religious life. Most of them -- nearly all, I suspect -- chose the conventional Dixie baptist or evangelical Christ. Few of them chose by a rational analysis -- most -- even many of the most intelligent -- chose Christ because of fear, groupthink, the need to belong, and irrational exuberance. Very few chose atheism.
Many pagans around the world grow up in traditional religion, and incorporate certain elements of world religions into their pagan rituals. I don't believe Jesus was ever an orthodox Jew of any party. I don't know if Jesus ever sacrificed at the Temple (can anyone help with a citation?) His denunciations of the Sadducees and Pharisees were whole-hearted and enthusiastic. He claimed to be fulfilling the Law, but it was a far different law than any Jewish religious authority would have recognized. Because the Jews by and large rejected Jesus as the Messiah, a few hands of Christians eventually broke away from Judaism. I have always wondered how a group of Jews (or ex-Jews) developed a ritual of eating the body and drinking the blood of God -- abominations to Jews. Surely this must be a pagan ritual of separation -- like spitting on the cross (which the Romans required of suspected Christians). It looks like a Christian adaptation of Mithraic ritual.
Argued as a legal brief, Jesus is proposed as a co-God on the foundation of Jewish tradition and prophecy, but the Christian church renounces traditional Judaism and attempts periodically to destroy it thus renouncing any traditional authority for its existence. The church has no authority for its existence, because it has rejected its Jewish heritage (which has in turn rejected the Christian offshoot.) When the church attempts to return to monotheism (Arianism), the now polytheistic Orthodox have to destroy it.
One can easily see that Christians have an impossible intellectual struggle. They cannot resolve the contraditions in the documents they hold to be holy. They cannot answer specific objections of critics and dodge the question. Intelligent and educated critics raised outside of the tradition and indoctrination of Christianity usually find the idea of Christianity absurd. Christianity seems to be a kind of intellectual virus only spread by contact and continual exposure. Merely think through its absurdities, and it disappears and can be replaced by true freedom of thought. For those within the tradition the process of deprogramming is long and dangerous. The threats and pain inflicted on children is a form of intellectual child abuse -- and few children are able to overcome its baneful effects.
I believe that people ought to be free to believe any religious thought they wish, but I deeply resent the kind of religious indoctrination that I and my friends were subjected to. To see a child burst into tears of terror because vicious adults have damned him to hell and blamed it on Jesus is a sight I hope Jesus was spared. I must admit that I was later in life horrified to hear about the outcome of the 2d Law of Thermodynamics which my science teachers were kind enough to keep from me as long as they decently could. I had at the time no tears to shed for the fate of the Universe. I took quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that I had independently decoded the vicious fraud of religion. I knew that I had a lifetime to come to grips with the dissolution of everything everywhere, and that there would be plenty of time for honest tears later. |
