August 7, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"
It occurs to me when: ignorant people criticizing other faiths cannot get their own faith right, it should be pointed out. So it is with the case of the Koran burning by a small mind and those even smaller minds who give hate speech wide coverage in media.
Moreover, were we in the west to look closely in a self-examination of the facts, particularly those of us in the USA, it would become readily apparent there is a double standard.
If we held the American extremist sects of Christianity to the same standards we put upon Islam, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have declared so called ‘mainstream’ groups, such as the ‘Assemblies of God’ to be hate groups, based on their promulgating “Muslims are the children of Satan” in ‘advanced Bible study’ programs attended by both John Ashcroft and Sarah Palin.
Ashcroft introduced the torture of Muslims to American jurisprudence and Palin is curiously quiet on the matter of Christian extremism and with good cause. Her credentials might suffer were the more moderate extremists [oxymoron, I know] to discover Palin had been blessed against witchcraft by a Kenyan bishop from a community where people, including numerous children, are routinely murdered every year, following witch accusations by Palin’s fellow ‘charismatic’ Christians.
Perhaps it would be wiser to criticize our primary beliefs and let Islam produce its own critics in line with the teaching:
“You hypocrite. Remove the log from your own eye, so you may see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” –Jesus
In the ‘Acts of the Apostles’, when the wind that is called spirit manifest in the miracle of Pentecost, there was no need for interpreters, everyone understood the other’s language directly. These were known languages, however different, commonly spoken in communities. These people had experienced something very different from that which has been handed down to the modern Pentecostal from St Paul.
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, and anecdotal. St Paul was not present at Pentecost. Jesus disciples, almost to a man, refused to meet with St Paul, a man they resolutely despised and mistrusted. St Paul’s relationship to 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 relating to Paul specifically:
“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.” -Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar
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 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. Paul could not know Jesus intention except to rely on remote accounts or the accounts of people Jesus himself found to be unreliable (Peter.)
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, and 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 Pentecostal teaching falls apart.
To reinvent 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. It did not even remotely happen that like that. And the people who primarily follow Paul’s teachings, do not remotely resemble anything close to the lived and taught example of Jesus,
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 masquarades 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 set 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.
More from the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:
“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.”
“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, the psycho-misogynist who’d introduced the worship of Jesus’ murder and the subsequent 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.
“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
Ronald Thomas West is author of Penucquem Speaks, ranked five stars by Howard Zinn at Amazon. A former sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces and past Investigator for a law firm aligned with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and Gerry Spence (Mueller Law Office, Austin, TX), Ron is co-author of the Mueller-Wilson Report with Dr Mark D Cole (International Law & Human Rights.) Briefly a professor at Johannes Guttenberg University, Ron is persona non-grata at the law school, after having taught a course on U.S. Constitutional Law as satire, in stand-up comedy format. A political exile and fugitive from American intelligence agencies since July 2007, other than the occasional analysis/exposé, presently Ron writes prurient satire from undisclosed location in Berlin. More of Ron's work is available at: http://www.scribd.com/Penucquem/info and his public email is: penucquemspeaks@googlemail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment