Contradictions of Christianity and the Pitfalls of Politics
With the horrible history of all the atrocities and contradictions
the ‘church’ has committed against humanity,
It amazes me that in these modern times that so many people
still embrace Christianity as the Ultimate ‘Truth’ and
their guiding light to the answers of their life, soul, and eternity.
How, in good conscious,
can any of the atrocities committed by the ‘church’ against humanity
be overlooked while continuing to embrace this contradictory religion
is beyond intelligent and reasonable sensibilities.
How can they still state, with a straight face that they are
“pro-life”!
~~~
I am seeing a pattern with the majority of people in the US
for religious beliefs and their political persuasions…
One that integrates ignorance, denial, and laziness, or
being born into a religion and political party so a person is stuck with that family tradition
and keeps one from doing their due diligence to learn exactly what they support or worship.
Ignorance
Most folks just haven’t looked deep enough into their own religion
to be aware of the horrific atrocities the church bestowed on humanity.
Most people are born into a religion and political party,
it’s not a choice they are allowed to take and remain in good standing within ‘the family’.
So many of these folks never even try to dive deeper to see if these
powerful church and state organizations resonate with their own good judgments.
Most of Christianity has ignored their ‘Divine Free Will’…
and mindlessly supports whatever ‘conservative’ candidate
even if he’s worse than the ‘anti-christ’, doesn’t go to church
While the other candidate goes to church every Sunday.
Most folks will do heaps of research when they are
buying a new car, motorcycle, boat, or expensive fun toy.
But
when it comes to
the two of the most important decisions one can have in this life
that has the greatest chance of
a profound understanding of this life, how to best manage it, and
possibly effect the ‘after this life’.
Most people prefer to just remain ignorant
of what they worship and politically support.
The same with politics.
Most folks just have not looked deep enough to recognize
the empty heart, soul and compassion of a demagogue politician
that doesn’t stand for anything but their own financial business investments and ego drives.
These folks just wanting to support the shallow knee jerk words
that were crafted to take advantage of their mentally vulnerableness.
Denial
Most folks that have vaguely heard a bit about
the horrific atrocities the church bestowed on humanity
are ether in denial that it actually happened, or
they tell themselves that
“Oh well, let’s not bicker about who killed who…
Besides, that was a long time ago,
it’s best to just sweep it under the rug and embrace denial.”
Laziness
Most folks ‘’aint’ got time for that” …
Too busy with their “life” or
just not that motivated to question the depth of life’s philosophies.
Some folks are just too ‘simple minded’ and find it easier
to just accept what an authoritative person tells them.
A lot of “religious people” are in fact
too lazy to even go to their own church regularly,
mis-believing that all that is necessary to go to ‘heaven’ is just to say
“Yuup” when they get to the “pearly gates” and asked
if you take the Lord to be your personal savior?
Most think it’s that easy to deal with the afterlife.
~~~
I am a strong believer…
in religious ‘Freedom’.
But I am very adamantly against making public policies
to be forced on to the rest of us sensible people
by the folks that believe in the imagined man made up projections of
certain ‘mythic-literal’ religions and personal sky gods.
Most of which was is written by archaic men a very long time ago that:
Did not consider women to have any rights.
Thought slavery was perfectly normal.
Thought the world was flat.
And didn’t know where the sun went at night.
And now, in the year 2024, using these archaic wisdoms,
misogynistic Christian men have persuaded the republicans
to outlaw the rights to women to have a say in what happens
when men get them pregnant.
This is absurd.
And somehow,
A large percentage of these pro-life Christians love guns
and don’t care about all the senseless gun violence
and unnecessary deaths idiots with guns commit.
So again, Collectively
Christianity is here to embrace senseless gun violence
and block any sensible gun laws,
and the republicans are all to eager to pander to their whims and votes.
~~~
The non-separation of church and state has always been a bane to humanity.
All of this religious nonsense is perverted into the convoluted name of being… “Pro Life”.
Yet,
This religion is based on being very murderous, sadistic, and evil…
All for the sake of power – the power of church and state combined
has been the bane of humanity for time immemorial.
Back in ‘biblical times’, in Noah’s ark story,
the all loving pro-life “god”
floods the world to murder all men, women, and children
of every species on the planet except for
the fortunate pairs that Noah somehow gathered and put on his boat.
Yes, of course, it’s just a man made up myth, but,
The followers of Christianity
are forced to believe these myths are the literal truth.
How pro-life is that story!?
~~~
In the original versions of the bible,
there were over 1000 passages that ‘God’ recommends
shunning the non-believer, to disenfranchise them, take their possessions,
burn their houses down and run them out of town.
Also,
There are over 100 passages that ‘God’ himself
recommends killing the non-believer
and those that don’t pray just like our church preaches.
How is this all loving and pro-life?
Then,
between the times of 400 & 1600, the ‘church’
tortured to death and or executed over 50 million people,
most of whom where Christians but
because they felt like they committed a sin against the pro-life all loving church
these atrocities have been committed.
Protestants have given figures concerning the total number of people
killed directly or indirectly by the Papacy during the Middle Ages.
The numbers given include 50 million, 68 million, 100 million, 120 million, and 150 million.
Why does it not bother Christians that countless academics
were burned to death in cages or tortured to death
just for stating the obvious proven scientific observations… and again…
most of them where devoted Christians.
Also,
whenever an artist, musician or gifted scientist created art or a discovery
that the ‘church’ felt was threating…
The “holy” church created a device that would crush both their hands.
SWEET “HOLY” JESUS!
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Another big contradiction is:
The bible is adamantly stated to be written not by
the imaginations of archaic men…
But,
The actual un-failing hand of ‘God’ Himself… the “All Mighty”.
But…
There are over 66,000 denominations of Christianity
that went through the trouble of creating an amended version of the religion
just so they can correct a few thousand of “God’s 66,000+ mistakes
:-O
For an “un-failing god”…
over 66,000 mistakes seem to be a big contradiction!
~~~
The next big contradiction of Christianity is:
How do you get 12 apostles in the middle of the middle east…
All with English names?
This next section will help explain…
No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists
to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef or a Jesus.
In the words of Bart Ehrman
(who himself believes the stories were built on a historical kernel):
“What sorts of things do pagan authors from the time of Jesus
have to say about him?
Nothing.
As odd as it may seem,
there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his pagan contemporaries.
There are no birth records, no trial transcripts, no death certificates;
there are no expressions of interest, no heated slanders,
no passing references –
nothing.
In fact,
if we broaden our field of concern to the years after his death –
even if we include the entire first century of the Common Era –
there is not so much as a solitary reference to Jesus in any non-Christian,
non-Jewish source of any kind.
~~~
I should stress that we do have a large number of documents from the time –
the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and
government officials, for example, not to mention the large collection of
surviving inscriptions on stone and private letters and
legal documents on papyrus.
In none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus’ name
ever so much as mentioned.”
The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of
the details of Jesus’ life, which become more crystalized only in later texts.
Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth, for example.
No wise men, no star in the east, no miracles.
Historians have long puzzled over the “Silence of Paul”
on the most basic biographical so called “facts” and teachings of Jesus.
Paul fails to cite Jesus’ authority precisely when it would make his case.
What’s more,
he never calls the twelve apostles Jesus’ disciples;
in fact,
he never says Jesus HAD disciples –or a ministry, or did miracles,
or gave teachings.
He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail,
and the few cryptic hints he offers aren’t just vague,
but contradict the gospels.
~~~
The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem
like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus’ own followers and family;
but Paul dismisses them as nobodies
and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!
~~~
Liberal theologian Marcus Borg suggests that
people read the books of the New Testament in chronological order
to see how early Christianity unfolded.
Placing the Gospels after Paul makes it clear that as written documents
they are not the source of early Christianity but its product.
The news of and about Jesus – existed before the Gospels.
The Gospels are the products of early Christian communities
several decades after Jesus’ historical life and tell us
how those communities saw his significance in their historical context.
~~~
Even the New Testament stories don’t claim to be first-hand accounts.
We now know that the four gospels
were assigned the names of the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
not written by them.
To make matter sketchier,
the name designations happened sometime in second century,
around 100 years or more after Christianity supposedly began.
For a variety of reasons,
the practice of pseudonymous writing was common at the time
and many contemporary documents are “signed” by famous figures.
The same is true of the New Testament epistles
except for a handful of letters from Paul (6 out of 13)
which are broadly thought to be genuine.
But even the gospel stories don’t actually say, “I was there.”
Rather,
they claim the existence of other witnesses,
a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has heard the phrase,
my aunt knew someone who . . . .
~~~
The gospels,
our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other.
If you think you know the Jesus story pretty well,
I suggest that you pause at this point to test yourself with
the 20 question quiz at ExChristian.net.
~~~
The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing “life of Jesus,”
and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark
and added their own corrections and new material.
But
they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree
contradict the much later gospel of John,
because they were written with different objectives for different audiences.
~~~
The incompatible Easter stories
offer one example of how much the stories disagree.
~~~
Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus
depict wildly different persons.
They include a cynic philosopher, charismatic Hasid, liberal Pharisee,
conservative rabbi, Zealot revolutionary, and nonviolent pacifist
to borrow from a much longer list assembled by Price.
In his words (pp. 15-16),
“The historical Jesus (if there was one)
might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or
a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage.
But
he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time.”
~~~
John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar grumbles that
“the stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment.”
For David Fitzgerald,
these issues and more lead to a conclusion that he finds inescapable:
Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity.
Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians
searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures
to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews,
complete with pagan rituals like a Lord’s Supper,
Gnostic terms in his letters, and
a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors’ longstanding
Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions.
~~~
In a soon-to-be-released follow up to Nailed, entitled Jesus:
Mything in Action, Fitzgerald argues that
the many competing versions proposed by secular scholars
are just as problematic as any “Jesus of Faith:”
Even if one accepts that there was a real Jesus of Nazareth,
the question has little practical meaning:
Regardless of whether or not a first century rabbi called Yeshua ben Yosef lived,
the “historical Jesus” figures so patiently excavated and
re-assembled by secular scholars are themselves
fictions.
There are more intelligent and evolved ways to get a better understanding of
the general concepts of Divinity and Grace, your True Self and the meaning of life.
The limited perspective of the human ‘ego mind body’
renders such Wisdoms as in-comprehendible.
Being open minded to the aspects of the higher states of human conscious
will ‘Enlighten’ the aspirant that has the volition do make the ‘Right Effort’.
—————————————————
Wake up people!
But… Oh.
The demagogue politicians made you believe that
being informed of their fraudulent and criminal behavior along with
racial and social injustices… or
being ‘woke’ is a bad thing.
Also,
The demagogue politicians have made their supporters
proud to be a part of the anti-intellectual movement
that’s all the rage these daze.
They require a dumbed down mentally vulnerable base just to get elected.
Vote for the person that will improve society and all of humanity!
But… Oh.
The demagogue politicians made you believe that
Anything that is good for humanity or society is…
“Socialism”! :-O
That’s bad.
However, I find it disturbingly odd… that
they love the idea of authoritarian dictators
Better to make the rich richer and the poor poorer
while the old middle classes becomes the new poor…
just one paycheck away from homeless
by exploiting our limited resources as fast as they can,
thus
condemning our children’s, children’s future options.
Use your Divine gift of Freewill… Divinely!
Think about it…
Take as long as you need.
