Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/
Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
According to Bishop Spong and too many others within the Christian Churches, there is nothing divine or even that interesting about Christ, or indeed about humans in general. We are simply ‘evolved’ bacteria. Somehow, offending mathematical, biological, DNA, cell probability, bacteria grew a brain. It just happened, because tautologically, here we are. And since we are here, it must be true, become no Godly intelligence, no design, no immaterial truths can intervene in the modern Church of Scientism, where everything is materialist, everything is naturalist, all processes ‘just happen’. These ideas are philosophies, not science.
According to Spong and many inside and outside the Church, the true historical story of Rabbi Joshua or Jesus, is perhaps more interesting and relevant to our modern world, than the supposed supernatural fantasy created by Paul and the early Pauline church. According to these Christophobes, Christ was not divine. He was not 'the' son of God. He was most likely a fatherless son of a woman who had given birth to many children from different fathers. (Notice here the ignorance of language. Christ had ‘brothers’ they say, but in Hebrew as in Russian, cousins are called brothers and sisters.) Christ was also probably a student inside a group of influential teachers including his Jewish mentors John the Baptist and Rabbi Hillel.
Many books by Reverend Spong [Jesus for the Non-Religious] and Barry Wilson [How Christ became a Christian], are ridiculously poor and historically inaccurate. They purport to illustrate a non-academic insight into the life of the real Joshua or Jesus in Greek, and the real meaning of Jewish monotheism and ethical thought as taught by Christ and others. Both authors attempt to outline the historicity of Jesus and confirm that he was a man, a teacher and a promoter of Jewish ethics. Christ the historical figure was promoting a line of Jewish thought which could be traced back hundreds of years and which promoted respect for the poor, the sick and the female; hospitality and charity; meditation and spiritual contemplation; devotion to others; forgiveness, love and gratitude to 'God' for life, nature and our world.
It is true that Christ along with John the Baptist and Rabbi Hillel was a radical teacher – radical in that he was a teacher who challenged the social order of Jewish religion and the political order of Roman rule. But Christ's program had everything to do with God and 'heaven' and he confirmed his own divinity many times. Christ called himself the son of Man – or ben Adam in Hebrew – a common way of suggesting that he served humans as the Lord and Saviour. Christ was most likely viewed quite mistakenly by the Romans as part of the radical 'Zealot' faction within Judaism, a group associated with the Essene or Dead Sea scroll community who believed in the necessity of spiritual purity and the separateness of Jewish culture.
Christ's message echoed that of Rabbi Hillel and other Jewish spiritual teachers and healers, but it went much further. Miracles abounded. The dead were made alive. The sick cured. The lame could walk, the blind could see. All done with a purpose. The metaphors and reality mixing. If you want to know God, walk to him, with your eyes open. Open your life and do the necessary work to understand the divine. As St. Paul would often state, you need to be an athlete, to train, to focus, to dedicate yourself to becoming ‘good’ at understanding God. Christ was the perfect exemplar of this. Pious, meditative, prayerful, humble, God in the form of a poor, ordinary man. That is always the way with God. Those who are chosen are usually the most common and most human.
Christ separated the Church from the State. Do unto others as you would like done to you; love even your enemies; and give to the state what is the state and give to yourself and your faith what your faith and your God demands. Those were the three basic tenets which Christ taught. They were however, a rather radical program which challenged the existing Roman political order and the existing Jewish spiritual order. Christ's message was revolutionary for the following reasons:
1.He challenged the blind rituals, codes and animal sacrifices which permeated Jewish belief.
2.Christ viewed the enormous second Temple as an abomination – a place where a caste of arrogant and quite rich priests – the Sadduccees – controlled Jewish spiritual life making a great profit from the rituals and offerings associated with being a good Jew.
3.He challenged the Pharisees who controlled the teaching of the Torah and of Jewish religious belief and who wielded great power over the mass of illiterate peasants.
4.He wanted people to have an individual relationship with spiritual faith or 'God' and to practice simple but effective rules of living and to take responsibility for their own learning and spiritual practice.
5.He taught that the spiritual world [or 'Heaven' as it was named] was more important than the material meaning that the Kingdom of 'God' or spiritual understanding was greater than Rome.
6.Understanding one another, showing compassion and exercising love in a community would bring spiritual awareness and gratitude to those who practiced it.
7.No one human is superior to another. Females, the poor, the sick and the leprous are just as valuable as the wealthiest and more powerful of men.
Christ was not a revolutionary teacher of ethics and living. If Christ was only a ‘teacher’ pace Bishop Spong and others, he would be as unremarkable in many ways as Buddha. Christianity would not exist. 11 out of the 12 apostles died for Christ spreading his message, most far from home. Martyrs in the Church history abound. Miracles of Mary, Christ and the Saints do exist. None of this can be dismissed. All of it to be accepted and embraced. Christ was the miracle of the Divine, brought to life, the word given flesh, the Godhead in our midst.
His example, miracles and Resurrection proved his divinity. Apostle John stated that his various miracles of healing would fill all the books of the world. The Bible lists only a fraction of what was performed. And while, pace Spong et al Christ may have wanted a complete reformation of Judaism to worship the only God, his mission was much greater. It was to spread the truth and the light about the Divinity and to share the power of the Holy Spirit which informs all life and is present with us at all times . God is everywhere. For Christ this meant down with the temple and up with the liberation of men's minds and souls. It is clear if you read the teachings of Christ 'God' is not some white figure peering through the clouds but 'goodness' and spiritual faith and strength. Christ challenged the entire religious-social environment and like John the Baptist and countless other 'radicals', was killed. The Romans and Jews did not accept his divinity, but many did recant after his crucifixion when by all accounts the Template was riven by an earthquake, the sky darkened and thundered and a dark storm lashed Jerusalem. Easter Sunday's miracle of the Risen is a historical fact undisputed by Roman or Jewish sources. It happened. .
But according to the execrable Spong and others the miracle stories of Christ were later inventions by Paul and others to justify the death of Christ [he died to save all of our sins]; to prove that he was a Jewish messiah in the messianic tradition of Moses, Elijah, Elisha and Jeremiah; and to generate irrational devotion to the new Church and its other-wordly orientation. Paul's appeal to divinity won over James – a cousin of Jesus – and his church who taught 'the way' of Christ and based their teachings on the words, the thoughts and the preachings of Rabbi Jesus. Paul and the New Testament are oriented towards miracles and the ancient traditions of supernaturality and superstition. James and his church were focused on Christ, the human, the teacher, the moral guide. Paul won the PR campaign, but lost the message says Spong and his little band.
It is hard to emphasise just how insipid and evil Bishop Spong and other Christians who believe his tripe are. Debasing Christ’s divinity, ridiculing his message as some sort of ‘radical politics’, ignoring the Risen, dismissing his curative powers and miracles, and disavowing the immaterial nature of his teachings is simply to destroy Christianity. The miracle of life is the design of its complexity, its perfect harmony, the perfect location of the Earth within the universe, the wonders of DNA, and RNA, the still-poorly-understood complexity of the cell and micro-biology, the various miracles from embryology to protein functionality. Reducing life to materialist chance, or the life of Christ to ‘good teachings’ is to destroy the truth, the beauty, the God given glory of living.