Pop Idol
Why isn't Jesus ever short, fat,
bald and ugly? After
all, scripture gives absolutely no description of him!
Yes ... YES
St Teresa feels the earth move.
"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold,
and at the iron's point there seemed to be a
little fire.
He appeared to me to be thrusting it at
times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails;
when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all
on fire with a great love of God.
The pain was so great, that it made me moan;
and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain,
that I could not wish to be rid of it.
The soul is satisfied now
with nothing less than God."
– The
Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, 37,
Saving
themselves for Jesus.
The
veil, beloved by Muslims, began in the courts of Christian Byzantium. When
Arab
armies captured the cities of Syria and Egypt in
the 7th century they adopted the practice
for their own women. |
Loved-up for Jesus
"Natural selection builds child
brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents
and tribal elders tell them ... Such trusting obedience is
valuable for survival ... But the flip side of trusting
obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product
is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses ...
What
is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires
to generate religion? ... One especially intriguing possibility
... is that the irrationality of religion is a by-product of
a particular built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain:
our tendency, which presumably has genetic advantages, to
fall in love."
– Richard
Dawkins, The God Delusion (p174-184)
Jesus is not merely an imaginary friend, he
is also a fantasy lover.
The innate human desire for an intimate relationship
with another person finds its ultimate fulfillment in "union
with Christ". JC may exist only in the mind of his adoring
paramours – but then, what object of adoration does not
owe more to the self-delusion of the admirer than to the objective
excellence of the admired?
Unsullied by any compromising physical reality Jesus
transcends our wildest hopes and doe-eyed dreams. HIS limpid gaze
never fades, HIS hair never thins, HIS waistline never thickens.
Pubescent teenagers, the bereaved, the lost, the lonely and the chaste,
all may find comfort and protection in the godman's ethereal embrace.
HIS love is unconditional, HIS fidelity beyond question. Did
not this supremely selfless lover suffer agony and death two thousand
years ago because, even then, he knew HE would love us, for all our
frailties and failings? HIS is a Love that truly will last forever,
a bottomless, infinite, eternal vat of love. How can reality
compete?
Is it any surprise that organised religion draws into
itself the lonely hearts and the abandoned? To be unloved, to be
denied a focus for the primordial force that impels all life to seek
out reproduction, leaves dangling an "emptiness", a "longing",
and an "unworldliness" which become the breeding ground
for delusion, mysticism and religion. The sufferer battles with,
and punishes, his or her physical self and escapes into a psychotic
realm, misinterpreted as "higher", "spiritual" or
even "heaven" itself.
Love of Jesus – the ultimate narcissistic
infatuation.
Canaanite
figurine (7th century BC, British Museum) |
God's
love – for the Jews!
Central to Judaism was
an obsession with a fierce tribal war god, Yahweh. With his blessing,
misogynistic scribes encoded a raft of sex crimes which
sanctified racial ambition. The sacred mission was to populate
and subdue the earth. Judaism would bequeath its unfortunate
mix of ignorance and intolerance to a wayward faction of
heretics known to the world as Christians.
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Roman figurine (Herculaneum, 1st century
AD) |
Christianity – the
triumph of perversity
"For, says the Scripture, "A
woman is inferior to her husband in all things."
– Josephus, Against
Apion 2.25.
From Judaism, the enthusiasts of Christ derived
the notion that the body was a source of shame and that women
were an inferior breed. But the early Christians were also
influenced by Hellenic ideas that the passions were inherently
suspect and that sex was harmful to the soul. Mortification
of the flesh and abstinence
became the path to spiritual purity.
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Randy Romans? |
Pleasure – a
distraction from God
The Roman world, for all its pleasure
seeking, was not unfamiliar with notions of stoical restraint
and self-denial. Into this cosmopolitan world intruded
a bunch of fanatics for whom sex was not merely tainted
by uncleanliness but was itself a "pollution of the
spirit". A triumphant Catholicism happily compromised
the fierce strictures of the founders for worldly advantage.
Predators replaced the puritans.
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Inner
conflict
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Christianity – a
psycho-sexual disorder?
With such perverse values at its core, the
dogmas of the Church weighed heavily on the human psyche,
the cause and occasion for mental anguish and displaced anger.
The consequence was that for
two millennia Christianity's anti-sexual, puritanical
doctrines inflicted untold
damage on the mental, emotional and physical lives of
countless millions of people.Only monumental hypocrisy and abuse leavened the deadly precepts
into a cruel empire of servitude and violence.
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Natural or naughty? |
SIN – Drowning
Humanity in Guilt & Fear
Sin is the very foundation of Judeo/Christian
religion. It is the dominant theme of the Torah and the Prophets
and permeates every book in the Bible. If God's creatures
did not sin how could this heavenly monster exercise his 'saving
compassion' and justify the priestly protection racket? The 'Gospel
of Sin' became a source
of great wealth and power
for the pimping priests.
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Fund raiser extraordinaire. |
The
Good Christian? – In
fact, the whole goddamn family, Faith, Hope and Charity
Are Christians
any better than anyone else? And just what is the truth
about that modern saint Mother Teresa?
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Jesus promised
retribution to his enemies.
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Jesus
Christ –The
Neighbour from Hell
If you think
the godman was "perfect" and only the Church
was a disaster better check out this message.
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Some fifty articles are now available as a book.
For your copy order:
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Copyright © 2007
by Kenneth Humphreys.
Copying is freely permitted, provided credit is given to the author and
no material herein is sold for profit.
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