Hello James,
Yeah, I got sick of Molyneux and skipped to minutes 52-58 .. but Pesta gave me nausea as well. Why? He doesn’t realize ‘the christ’ is the invention of the self-serving evangelicals who’ve been happy to rip off the historical Jesus for a very long time. None other than Thomas Jefferson had noted this, some 200 years prior to modern scholarship pointing to the same. I’d thought of sending along ’The Gospel According to Ronald’ but I settled on ‘Celebrating the Anti-Christ’
Celebrating the Anti-Christ
Jesus is almost certainly the most misrepresented man in history. ‘The Christ’ is established in scholarship as an invention [lie] by the so-called St Paul, adopted by the church, and smears the reputation of the historical Jesus by adapting Greek paganism rites that turned animal sacrifice into the Christian ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism known as ‘Communion.’ Any rational person who will like to know the history behind these facts need only look into the research of ‘The Jesus Seminar.’
“For Paul, the Christ was to be understood as a dying/rising lord, symbolized in baptism (buried with him, raised with him), of the type he knew from the Hellenistic [Greek] mystery religions. In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role.”
St Paul was never taught by Jesus and in fact never even met him. All of St Paul’s information concerning Jesus was 2nd hand at best or anecdotal. St Paul was not present at Pentecost. Jesus disciples, nearly to a man, wanted nothing to do with St Paul, a man they resolutely despised and mistrusted, a fact Paul complained of. Paul’s narrative of his relationship with St Peter is highly questionable and Peter was the least reliable of Jesus disciples after Judas. Jesus was constantly annoyed with Peter according to the gospels and the idea Jesus would found his church on Peter were words put in Jesus mouth by people with a political agenda, after the fact of Jesus life:
“Eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were not actually spoken by him” according to the Jesus Seminar.
And recalling specifically:
“In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role”
Think about it. “In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role.”
That could also be stated ‘what ever Jesus had taught was irrelevant’ to Paul (if for no other reason than Jesus had never taught Paul, a man he never knew.) St Paul’s inventions concerning Jesus, adopted by the church and incorporated into the Bible have in fact largely supplanted the teachings of the authentic Jesus according to the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:
“The church appears to smother the historical Jesus by superimposing this heavenly figure on him in the creed: Jesus is displaced by the Christ, as the so-called Apostle’s Creed makes evident.”
St Paul, inventor of ‘The Christ’ was a self-anointed Apostle, that is to say he took it upon himself to claim his membership among the disciples of Jesus. Paul NEVER KNEW JESUS.
The contrast is startling between the two. The mystic Jesus was a tolerant man. The Greek language and Roman citizen Paul was intolerant, rules obsessed & misogynist, whereas Jesus was none of these and had great respect for women.
The teaching of Paul versus Jesus creates a contrast so great, it would require to be a ‘Christian’:
1) Choosing between one or the other or:
2) A life in denial
In effect, the church has, since its organization under the Roman Emperor Constantine, and its subsequent scripture considered imperatively sacrosanct, demanded faith be founded on belief in a lie.
Jesus had taught not to make a show of your religion, fasting, faith or prayer (“Do not be like the hypocrites”) but instead to express your faith modestly and communicate through prayer in private. Paul taught organized worship in public. And it is in this ‘public’ scene of Paul the entire public prayer teaching of Paul falls apart:
On top of inventing ‘The Christ’, when organizing public prayer in a twisted caricature of Pentecost, Paul had to come up with ‘speaking in tongues’, and then Paul had to invent ‘interpreters’ for the otherwise ‘unknown’ languages. Sorry folks, but neither was the case at the original Pentecost as described in the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ at which Paul was not present. At the Pentecost, no one needed interpreters and the languages spoken were known languages. It did not remotely happen in any way similar to what Paul had taught. And the people who primarily follow Paul’s teachings, do not remotely resemble anything close to the lived and taught example of Jesus.
Jesus himself stated:
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others .. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen .. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like people who 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.”
It is claimed that Paul, when traveling to Damascus to kill followers of Jesus, something he was keen to do, was blinded by a light identifying itself as Jesus. St Paul had later written “Satan is the author of all lies” and “The Devil masquerades as the Angel of Light.”
This begs the question: who did Paul meet on the road to Damascus? It was not the Jesus who gave the Sermon on the Mount… because Jesus never came back and said ‘Paul was right and I was wrong.’
It is pretty easy to see St Paul counterfeited the phenomena of Pentecost he could not duplicate. This is a dichotomy the Church has played down for the past 1,700 years, or that is since two mutually exclusive sets of ideas had been incorporated into what had to become a schizophrenic religion with people from the same faith always on both sides of any major issue.
Paul had said Jesus return was “imminent” -that is any day- not still waiting after 2,000 years, he got that wrong too.
The scholars of the Jesus Seminar state:
“Jesus taught that the last will be first and the first will be last. He admonished his followers to be servants of everyone. He urged humility as the cardinal virtue by both word and example. Given these terms, it is difficult to imagine Jesus making claims for himself-I am the son of God, I am the expected One, the Anointed-unless, of course, he thought that nothing he said applied to himself.”
Jesus was a great man, not a hypocrite. Those who follow his Sermon on the Mount live intelligent lives, contrasted to; everywhere you see people following the teachings of the liar Paul who’d introduced the ‘The Christ’ and worship of Jesus’ murder and related ritual cannibalism called communion, ideas Paul took from animal sacrifice in Greek Paganism. Consequently you see organized Christian religions murder in the name of love while pursuing narcissistic intolerance, hate, violence and/or destruction.
A gesture of respect to the authentic, historical Jesus would be to reject Paul’s ‘Christ’ and explicitly condemn any reference to Jesus’ so-called ‘sacrifice’ claiming his blood had been shed to ‘save’ people, the most perverted belief ever to contribute to the collective madness of Western civilization infecting the world. I’ve yet to meet a Christian professing this Greek pagan blood sacrifice based ‘salvation’ open to reason and learning, insofar as understanding how much harm these sort of archetype myths do in relation to perverting the minds of children and desensitizing people to human slaughters on a grand scale.
Talk about pornography. If human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism as base foundation for a culture do not make a pornographic culture, I can’t imagine anything that does.
It’s time to practice a bit of common sense and simply create a social scene where these images are not welcome and let people wonder what it might be like to live ‘beyond the pale’ or be ‘tempted’ so to speak, to discover the possibilities when they are willing to step beyond the fear mongering and necrotic bonds of ignorance. We live in a literate world now, perversions of history should no longer serve as instrument of superstition created by the power corrupt to control people through fear.
There is no healthy rationale to provide hospitality to any being harboring such absolute social poisons the image of blood sacrifice entails. I certainly don’t need it in my life.
Jesus should not be associated with hate mongering and mainstream ‘Christian’ dogma is chock full of invented hate, this evil is not limited to the religious right. From the misogynist story of ‘The Fall’ to ‘Cain and Abel’ requiring blood sacrifice to God, it just goes on and on.
It’s time to acquire sanity, reject Paul’s ‘Christ’, quit ritually killing and eating Jesus and genuinely healthy people would want no associations with people who do that. Particularly the people who push the idea Jesus tortured to death was a good thing (as though on a billboard) but consider; are those who quietly celebrate this killing and eating of a human being any better?
Much better would be to appreciate those things Jesus had actually said condemning hypocrisy and living simply, living with humility, indeed Jesus lessons can teach people to save themselves, those people who pay attention to what he had actually said; as opposed to the many inventions put on the lips of Jesus by institutions dedicated to control through fear-
The scholars of ‘The Jesus Seminar’ state:
“The first step is to understand the diminished role the Gospel of John plays in the search for the Jesus of history. The two pictures painted by John and the synoptic [Matthew, Mark, Luke] gospels cannot both be historically accurate.”
“The Fellows of the Seminar were unable to find a single saying [in John] they could with certainty trace back to the historical Jesus.”
“The words attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.. ..are the creation of the evangelist for the most part..”
“Words borrowed from the fund of common lore or the Greek scriptures are often put on the lips of Jesus.”
“The evangelists frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus.”
“We know that the evangelists not infrequently ascribed Christian words to Jesus-they made him talk like a Christian, when, in fact, he was only the precursor of the movement that was to take him as its cultic hero.”
“Jesus rarely makes pronouncements or speaks about himself in the first person. Jesus makes no claim to be the Anointed, the messiah.”
The historical Jesus was a healer/teacher having nearly nothing to do with ANY modern church teaching, church hate mongering actually, and a reasonable person should be able to see the good in Jesus teaching has been buried by the invention of Paul’s ‘Christ.’
To be an ‘Anti-Christ’ would be to stand against the necrotic fantasies and lies organized religion has used to bury the authentic Jesus’ truth, and truth is a good thing.
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”
-Thomas Jefferson
Indeed, were it necessary to frighten people away from any investigation into the fraud all of organized Christian religion had perpetrated in the name of the authentic Jesus, it would require the invention of a terrifying boogey man, that is the ‘Anti-Christ’, to frighten people away from truth, when in actuality opposition to the lie of ‘The Christ’ would be a blessing. Indeed the church has labeled the very idea of opposition to the lie of ‘The Christ’ as a very evil incarnate, when an ‘Anti-Christ’ determined to expose the lie would actually be a positive development.
Let’s reject Paul’s ‘Christ’, do away with ritual human sacrifice, take Jesus down from the cross, and keep him off the cross, that very cross which should long since been consigned to the rubbish heap of history; for the simple sake of mental health, and our national sanity-
“Experience witnesses that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and virtue of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution”
-James Madison
On ‘Christian’ holidays, people would do well to celebrate the authentic Jesus, a great teacher & healer, with a toast to any Anti-Christ opposed to the lies put on Jesus lips, in an act of overcoming “superstition, bigotry and persecution”..
..considering Jesus lived example and teaching, as opposed to St Paul, empirically meets the definition of ‘Anti-Christ’
Well thank God we have the "Jesus Seminar" to set us straight. I took just a cursory glance at the wikipedia article on them and this is what it says,"...The Jesus Seminar has come under criticism regarding its method, assumptions and conclusions from a wide array of scholars and laymen..."
"...The Seminar places much value on the criterion of dissimilarity. For the Seminar, a saying will only be held as authentic if it does not match the beliefs of Judaism or those held by the early Christians..."
Uh...WHAT! So if someone says Jesus flaps his arms around and flies like a bat and the early Christians disagree, it's true!
"...The voting system has been criticized by, among others, N. T. Wright, who says '... I cannot understand how, if a majority ... thought a saying authentic or probably authentic, the "weighted average" turned out to be "probably inauthentic". A voting system that produces a result like this ought to be scrapped..."
Uh..who weighed that???? I bet Hillary would love that voting system.
Ron West also includes parts of the Torah and consorts that with Christianity. They're not the same. Before he damns all Christians know that there was a group of Christians called the Catharist that understood this. They of course were killed down to the last Man, Women and Child by a Marrano Jew that started the Jesuits and was sent by the Pope.
Here's my take on the old testament and anything else the Jews write as referenced by a quote from Jesus.
JESUS CHRIST, speaking to the Jews in the Gospel of St. John, 8:44 “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is not truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it. – then answered the Jews — ” (which makes it clear that Christ was addressing the Jews.)
"JESUS CHRIST, speaking to the Jews in the Gospel of St. John, 8:44 “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lust of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is not truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it. – then answered the Jews — ” (which makes it clear that Christ was addressing the Jews.)"
Of course the anti-Semite Sam J would be in full concurrence with those early evangelical anti-Semites putting words on Jesus lips. Toeing his party line, Sam J resorts to Wikipedia, the least reliable of online resources when it comes to controversial subjects, because Wikipedia is a resource wide open to introduction of party line prejudice. And Christianity harbors plenty of motivated, prejudicial personalities.
Perhaps most telling is, the cowardice Sam J demonstrates by refusing to acknowledge the stark contradictions in scripture. Any honest person wouldn't need the Jesus Seminar to make the admission 'the word of god' is its own worst enemy when portions of one chapter entirely contradict portions of another chapter. Just another case of the usual suspects predictably manifesting the expressions of an idiot mind.
“Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.” 1 John 2:22 (NIV)
Interesting. However, Sam J. has a very valid point. It's apparent that this Jesus Seminar did not pay much attention to the canonical books of the New Testament. Especially the Gospels of Mark, Mathew, Luke and John. Clearly this so-called "historical Jesus" is a blank slate that the Jesus Seminar wrote their dreams and aspirations upon. Just as Liberals read things they want to believe into the U.S. Constitution. If the Left interpreted the 2nd Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Constitution every one of us would be required to own a gun, and the government would have to buy it for us. Why pick on the Apostle Paul? I don't see that there is any real daylight between what Paul taught and what Jesus taught. It would be interesting to go line by line and compare what Jesus said with what Paul said. Why pay any attention at all to Jesus if he was just a man? As C.S. Lewis said if Jesus was just a man then he NOT some great moral teacher and philosopher. Rather if he was just a man he would obviously have been a lunatic or charlatan of the worst kind. He went around telling everyone he was God and fooling them with magic faith-healing tricks after all. That IS the message of the Gospels, that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, come into the world and had the supernatural power of God. If you're not willing to believe that Jesus is God, AND that, by extension, Paul was divinely inspired, then none of Jesus’ teachings are worth much. Nothing that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the Stoic philosophers did not also teach. And THEY bothered to write books to help guide future generations of their followers, unlike Jesus who died the unpublished faculty member. The Golden Rule even predates Jesus, so he’s not original in that regard. We have already learned that attempts to secularize Christianity and turn it into a non-metaphysical ethical philosophy will sell as well as no alcohol beer. Of course half the intent on the part of some of these "secular Christians” may be to tear down and neutralize Christianity. Who knows for sure, but we do know that many people have always despised Christianity and wish to see it eradicated. So I remain unconvinced Mr. West. I am comfortable with the mysticism and contradictions within Christianity. Yeah it’s all bullshit, that's what they taught us in college, right? Mankind itself is contradictory in its behavior; part of growing up is learning to deal with this fact of life in constructive ways. The universal mind of God transcends mere human understanding. I will eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ and gain his power.
“Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.” 1 John 2:22 (NIV)
Interesting. However, Sam J. has a very valid point. It's apparent that this Jesus Seminar did not pay much attention to the canonical books of the New Testament. Especially the Gospels of Mark, Mathew, Luke and John. Clearly this so-called "historical Jesus" is a blank slate that the Jesus Seminar wrote their dreams and aspirations upon. Just as Liberals read things they want to believe into the U.S. Constitution. If the Left interpreted the 2nd Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Constitution every one of us would be required to own a gun, and the government would have to buy it for us. Why pick on the Apostle Paul? I don't see that there is any real daylight between what Paul taught and what Jesus taught. It would be interesting to go line by line and compare what Jesus said with what Paul said. Why pay any attention at all to Jesus if he was just a man? As C.S. Lewis said if Jesus was just a man then he NOT some great moral teacher and philosopher. Rather if he was just a man he would obviously have been a lunatic or charlatan of the worst kind. He went around telling everyone he was God and fooling them with magic faith-healing tricks after all. That IS the message of the Gospels, that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, come into the world and had the supernatural power of God. If you're not willing to believe that Jesus is God, AND that, by extension, Paul was divinely inspired, then none of Jesus’ teachings are worth much. Nothing that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the Stoic philosophers did not also teach. And THEY bothered to write books to help guide future generations of their followers, unlike Jesus who died the unpublished faculty member. The Golden Rule even predates Jesus, so he’s not original in that regard. We have already learned that attempts to secularize Christianity and turn it into a non-metaphysical ethical philosophy will sell as well as no alcohol beer. Of course half the intent on the part of some of these "secular Christians” may be to tear down and neutralize Christianity. Who knows for sure, but we do know that many people have always despised Christianity and wish to see it eradicated. So I remain unconvinced Mr. West. I am comfortable with the mysticism and contradictions within Christianity. Yeah it’s all bullshit, that's what they taught us in college, right? Mankind itself is contradictory in its behavior; part of growing up is learning to deal with this fact of life in constructive ways. The universal mind of God transcends mere human understanding. I will eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ and gain his power.
"...Toeing his party line, Sam J resorts to Wikipedia..."
For such a deep thinker you...uh...don't think very deep. Wikipedia is a White hating evil source of vileness and evil. So if I can get them to paint these "Jesus Seminar" folks in a little bit of bad light then in actuality they're probably pedophile, baby baking, Jew worshiping mutant Coneheads. Also it was one of the first links that came up. Now may be accused of not "looking deep enough" but I knew the were no good shysters from the beginning. I knew waht they were. Bob Whitaker calls these people wordist. You should look at some the Marvelous, fantastic, stupendous tweets of Good Ole Bob. Someone has been nice enough to gather a bunch up in one post for us.
Bob Whitaker’s Tweets
aryanskynet.wordpress.com/2017/01/01/stinging-in-the-new-year-bob-whitakers-tweets
As for,"...Perhaps most telling is, the cowardice Sam J demonstrates by refusing to acknowledge the stark contradictions in scripture..."
You should read more carefully where I talked about the Catharist. I believe the Israelites of the old Testament are following a Demon or an appendage of Satan. They have nothing to do with me or Jesus.