On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 02:04 PM, David Walters wrote: > > I think it's all pretty much nonsense and superstition with absolutely > zero history behind it. There no evidence in the record Jesus as "Christ" > did anything or even existed. Thus what writers do, including song > writers, is to impart a perscibed (and delusional) "progressive Christ" > for the purposes of a lefty morality play. Just say'n.
It's great propaganda to point to the antinomian elements in the myth of Jesus as a way of turning state and ruling-class religion on its head. But there is very little historical substance to this. There is AFAIk one line in the surviving corpus of Tacitus and some references in the work of Josephus. But there are no direct contemporary accounts of JC--certainly not the Gospels. All this stuff about Jesus being a workin' man ignores the fact that the Jesus of legend (a fictional character, BTW, even if there were a historical basis) left his working-class family behind as soon as he decently could to embrace the life of an itinerant rabbi who lived off a subservient gang of passive followers and spoke and wrote about kingship and his kingdom being not of this world and rendering unto Caesar. Subversive if you allow for the "atheism," as Romans saw it, of the monotheists, whose rejection of the gods struck at the ideology of the Roman state, but hardly aimed at the overthrow of the empire. The case for Jesus the revolutionary is AFAIK based on 1) the unfounded supposition that the Historical Jesus incontestably existed; and 2) the conspiracist fantasy that for two thousand year the reality of this Che Guevara avant la lettre has been suppressed in order to falsify his true teachings. This is roughly on a par with the assertion that, after thousands of years of burning the Gay at the stake, God now loves and blesses gay marriage. Try to suggest that the thing to do is to abandon supernatural religion altogether and likewise encourage alternative forms of family more suited to the reality of contemporary society and relationships. Horrors!! We would not now have Christianity if the Roman Empire had not made this cult into a state religion. Both Catholicism in the West and Orthodox Christianity in the East owe their existence not to the persecution of Christians but to the wholesale embrace of this cult by the Emperor Constantine. What if the cult of Isis or that of Mithras had been promoted instead? But who can be surprised at the renewed promotion of a "progressive Christ" in an age that promotes the myth of a progressive Obama or Joe Biden? It isn't only Donald Trump who equates freedom and justice with the right to believe in the lies of one's dewy-trousered choosing. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4799): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4799 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79204595/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
