On Feb 1, 2005, at 12:38 PM, Dave Land wrote:
On Feb 1, 2005, at 10:00 AM, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
On Feb 1, 2005, at 10:21 AM, kerri miller wrote:
Last time I was home in New England, a rather enlightened and liberal
place, free of most of the trappings of religiosity, I wandered past a
couple debating whether Jesus would be upset with them for buying Easter
egg coloring kits.
Did you remind them that Jesus is dead and doesn't give a damn?
Of course, in their view -- and that of plenty of other Christians both freaky and not-so-freaky -- Jesus is very much alive.
Not literally. I mean, I know that many people believe otherwise, but sorry -- they're just plan wrong. No one born 2,000 years ago is alive now.
As to why they
would think that Jesus would give a damn about them and their Easter egg
coloring kits, I haven't a clue.
Mm, possibly because they were worried that either the eggs --> bunny thing was a little too much like idolatry; or they were worried that the eggs --> bunny thing is pagan. Some people do get concerned about those issues; my stepmother, for instance, loathes Santa Claus because she says it takes the focus of Christmas off Jesus. I care not a whit for either mystical figure, but find it amusing that Isaac Newton was born on 25 December. (And he was a very right-wing Christian fundamentalist too -- spent lots of time trying to prove Biblical infallibility. And, tellingly, failed completely to do so.)
Lots of us who believe that Jesus is alive (in a manner that I do not
pretend to understand) are able to conceive of a Jesus who isn't Jor-El:
He is not the disembodied head of Marlin Brando, hovering over us, looking
disapprovingly at everything we do.
That's a great image, truly great. And pretty damn accurate too, really -- I mean it seems to me that many people *do* believe in Jor-El the Messiah.
Even if one conceives of Jesus as some sort of ever-watching eye, I have
no idea why one would come to the conclusion that He is a perpetual
critic.
That same stepmother used Jesus as a beat-stick on her kids from time to time with phrases like, "Jesus doesn't like little boys/girls who..." And the poor deluded little sods fell for it. Now of course those kinds of admonishments are mocked (and rightly so) with phrases such as "Microsoft makes baby Jesus cry", but there are some people who still use those warnings without any irony whatsoever.
True, the stories we have of Jesus include moments when He sternly reproved the "brood of vipers" around him. But those remarks were generally reserved for the Jewish religious authorities.
Yes; he was pretty well documented as being accepting of all rather than judgmental. I think the extreme right version comes in part from a conflation of JHVH with Jesus -- the god of the old testament, who was petulant, irrational and often very angry. It's a tenet of Mormon theology (for instance) that the OT god was in fact Jesus, going through a kind of "god training" with Daddy-O looking over his shoulder and stopping him before *too* many innocent people died. They base this in the "I am" identifier ("I am that I am"), believing that when Jesus said it he was claiming to be the voice that came from the flaming weed Moses stood too close to: "I am *that* 'I am'. [as opposed to some other 'I am'.]"
I do know that at the Lutheran school where my son attends, (at least)
one of the other parents raised a serious ruckus about the school's plans
to have a Halloween party, so now it's called the "Harvest Festival." My
wife, who helped coordinate it, referred to it as the "Harvest Fiasco,"
though for reasons unrelated to our freaky fellow school parents.
You ever watch South Park?
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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