REPLY TO ROCKO | 2005-09-30
Rocko's statement is at the end, but I think you will get a sense of what he said from my reply.
MY REPLY:
Rocko, you are being very unfair to me, but I survived it.
I never said anything remotely approaching the concept that hypocrites calling themselves "Christians" invalidates Christianity. Please, NEVER accuse me of that!
I never even hinted anything of the sort.
Try to understand that I deeply resent "Christians" precisely because I am, or try to be, a Christian. So being told that I am being anti-Christian is not what I want to hear.
As I have said over and over and over and over and over and over, Jesus was not an Old Testament savior any more than Aramic is the holy language. He spoke Aramaic because the people around him would not have understood Hindi or Swedish. He spoke in Old Testament terms because nobody where he was preaching had read the Zoroastrian Avesta (?) or the Eddas.
What language would you EXPECT him to speak? What scriptures would you EXPECT him to cite?
But in the end, he said that the Old Testament was as worthless as pagan myths. He, not Moses, was the way, the truth and the light. The ONLY way. He left not a micro of room for the Old Testament or anything else.
People listened a moment and then went right back to what they always did.
Which is what humans always do.
Jesus didn't die on the cross because we were WORTH it.
ROCKO SAID:
I think Bob and joe rorke have missed a crucial point here, and have adopted a sort of "magical" view of Christianity, that somehow the fact that people have been hypocrites in every era and civilized society somehow shows that Christianity is false. That is very poor reasoning.
The Sermon on the Mount is a sermon against hypocrisy. Jesus constantly condemned the leaders of his day as hypocrites. His most important (at least recorded) sermon is focused on that. As Bob has often said, when he figures something out that makes real sense, he realizes Jesus said it better already.
Jesus said "By their fruit ye shall know them". It is fine to moan about how bad so many "Christians" are, and condemn the whole thing, if you just ignore the plain teaching that Jesus himself pointed out. Why do you think he kept repeating the point? Obviously He knew it would be a big problem.
joe rorke is right, that the warmonger attitude is not a result of what Jesus taught. How does that invalidate Him? Just because Bob's spelling is poor, that doesn't invalidate the English language. It is Bob that is at fault, not the language.
Bob uses a phrase, "Old Testament Christians" to say what Jesus said more simply, that is "hypocrites". Almost everything Jesus said came straight out of the Old Testament, so does that make him an "Old Testament Savior"?
"He is my brother and my sister who does the will of my Father", said Christ. There it is again. If they don't do the will of His Father, then what does that mean? It isn't complicated.