I didn’t say he lives in Rome. I bet he has a satellite phone.
I agree with you about number 3.
I disagree that this was his message. Jesus did not by any stretch advocate pacifism. I think the Jesus of the scriptures is a war God, and advocated doing what it takes to win. He said to love God, he said to be nice. He didn’t say to be a pacifist, he said he came to divide houses, brother against brother, that he didn’t come to bring peace but a sword. He said to love everyone, this does not equate with a lack of violence. The end-result is peace, not necessarily the means. He didn’t say not to judge others, he said “Judge not lest ye be judged.”, in otherwords if you are going to pass judgement be willing to take responsibility for your actions. He said to be charitable.
Precisely.
Maybe he’s waiting until he’s got control over the world in which case he’ll use the moden successor of the Roman Empire to crush any non-Christian states, starting with Babylon.
Erek
All I can do is quote a silly movie:
“Frank-en-fur-ter it’s all over. Your mission is a failure. Your Lifestyle’s too extreme. I’m your new commander. You now are my prisoner. I return to transelvania - prepare the transit beam.”
Sorry about the silliness - I couldn;t help myself. However, I do have a serious question.
I am curious where these references are. I’ve got my Bible open and I’d like to see a couple.
Thanks,
-Citizen Bob
Please tell me you’re joking, otherwise, I, too, am demanding scripture references.
Matthew 10:34
Ok… I again posted without checking previous posts. But it was the last post of the thread. How could I have tought that someone would have already answered the last post?
Obviously I shouldn’t sit on posts…and I apologize for the hijack.
He also says in Matthew Chapter 10:5-6
Does that mean is message is for the “house of Isreal” alone? Further in Matthew 5:37-38 he says:
How is this consistent with one that wishes to bring war? That doesn’t sound very warlike to me…
Yes
I’ll leave you with this quote from Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’.
Erek
As he was speaking only to the house of Israel, all of his statements were culturally relevant within that context. So if he was fighting a war for the moral authority, then isn’t making your enemy look like a bigotted asshole, an effective tactic?
If you give them no physical threat of violence, and they hit you anyway, and then you give them the opportunity to hit you again, then you have provoked them into overplaying their hand.
I used that to get my Dad to stop hitting me. I told him he could hit me and I wouldn’t try to stop him. He punched me in the face, I didn’t move a muscle to stop him. My head snapped back, it snapped back forward, and I was giving him the same glare directly in his eyes that I was giving him before he hit me. After that he was always worried that I could take him in a fight, and he didn’t hit me anymore after that.
I didn’t do that out of a sense of pacifism, I did it because I knew it would defeat an enemy I wasn’t sure I could take.
Erek
I do know what you meant; I was playing off your remark to make the obvious point (which escapes a lot of people who reject Christianity based on the fire-and-brimstone-preacher stereotype they see).
It would be a significant hijack of a good thread to get into this discussion, but let me offer for your meditation: Jesus did not say, “No one comes to the Father except by being a Christian,” but rather “…except by Me” – and He is the Second Person of an eternal and all-loving God, not merely a Palestinian rabbi whose life and atoning death we commemorate. C.S. Lewis (“The Horse and His Boy”) was able to convey the idea that Jesus != Christianity pretty clearly in a children’s book; it’s a pity that more people don’t pick up on the idea.
I don’t dismiss Christianity based upon the Fire and Brimstone in the same way that I would not dismiss Krishna even though he is part and parcel with Shiva the Destroyer.
I was raised Christian nominally. I like to show alternate sides to the radical peacenik hippy interpretation.
If I were to claim any anthropomorphic deity that I worship, it would probably be Shiva however, as Destruction is a necessary part of Creation, so I see Destruction as the intitiation of the creative process.
I’ll even share a more radical aspect of my belief in that I do actually believe that George W Bush is working with Christ(Shiva) and his job is to destroy the American empire. (In as much as I actually believe anything)
I see Gods as memes with their own consciousness, being and agenda. Jesus is an active participant in the way the world is unfolding. So to ask whether or not Jesus would approve or not is silly. Jesus has been actively shaping the world around us for 2005 years.
So Jesus is behind the current American regime in the same way that Mohammed is behind Osama bin Laden. Except that I would say they are in cahoots working to bring down the Western Empire that Alexander started, Julius Caesar secured and Jesus has been ruling for a couple thousand years. A reminder of our rule by the three greatest Roman rulers is that the calendar starts when Jesus is born, and Julius and Octavian have months that seperate the 6th month of June from the 7th month of SEPTember.
Of course I do not believe in a stable sense of reailty. Subjective reality is individual and Objective reality is consensus.
Erek
Interesting, at least I can understand why you might believe Jesus would be happy with current events.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that Jesus would hide his true intentions within 3 verses (found only in Matthew and Luke) while the rest of his ministry implies something different. Particularly when a portion of the verse is found in the Old Testament, Micah 7:6. Further, there is no historical evidence that his mission was as you claim, mainly, he gathered no army (as many of those that claimed to be the Messiah did, here ).
Additionally, if his ministry truly meant what you imply, there would have been no purpose of the Just War.
Of course, that’s why I believe Jesus would be horribly disappointed with the direction that his ministries took - that people focus more on the little details than trying to be better people and trying to make the world a better place. But then again, I subscribe to the “radical peacenik hippy interpretation.” 
Now we’re close to the same page- my pastor expressed shock in a sermon that a recent poll showed 60+% of self-identified Evangelical Christians agreed that
non-C’tians could enter Heaven, because of course “if we could get to Heaven just by being nice & believing anything there would be no need for Christ to die for us”. Whether I kept my mouth shut out of discretion or cowardice, I really wanted to point out that 1) if I really strongly questioned him, I probably could get him to agree that God’s Grace in Christ would avail to save some non-C’tians, 2) a poll of those in our pews would probably yield similar results, and 3) we Evangelicals who did believe this do not believe they get in Heaven by being good but that by the conduct of their lives, they showed themselves touched by God’s Grace through Jesus whether or not they know JC by Name.
That said- I also want to avoid the other extreme- that Christian faith is irrelevant to salvation.
I do firmly believe-
-Those who could be real C’tians yet choose not to be will be judged for their rejection of Jesus (just as professing C’tians who deliberately live hypocritically will be judged, probably more harshly than any decent non-Ctians).
-Devout caring C’tians will have a privileged place in the Afterlife/Resurrection, perhaps comparable to what the JW’s believe about the 144000 or the LDS about the deified humans in the Celestial Kingdom. Mediocre C’tians & decent non-C’tians will be on a similar level, with perhaps the latter outdoing the former.
-In the Blessed Realm, btw, there will be no non-Ctians as everyone who dies not trusting Christ will trust Him by the time they get to Heaven.
-There is no real division between the Eternal Divine Son and the human Jewish son of Mary. Jesus and Christ cannot be properly distinquished from each other
(Two natures- One person).
As I said before, God’s are memes. I disagree that Jesus didn’t form an army. He did form an army, he just didn’t use them violently. Didn’t he have like 5000-10000 devout followers at one point? Would they not have fought had he instructed them to?
So as a meme the memes struggle with other memes, and in the end we as humans are the arbiters of which meme wins out. So the Peacenik Hippy archetype will win if it is the will of the people. However, the state of the world seems to point out that this interpretation is preached more than it is willed.
It is most painfully obvious to me that our meddling in the middle-east caused us to be attacked, but people treat it as though we are on some righteous crusade against a muslim hoard that wants nothing more than our complete destruction. Something, I think is patently false. If the people who claim to be christians subscribed to the radical peacenik hippy interpretation, then we’d probably be living in a utopia about now, but as we are not, I think the evidence to the contrary is fairly prevalent. We are choosing the right to drive Hummer H2s over the right to live peaceably with our neighbors on this planet.
I like to bring up the radical war god interpretation, because there is scriptural evidence for it, and because I’ve heard it quoted by more than once crusading evangelical type. I’ve seen the fantasy of fighting for a righteous army of God espoused by more than one young romantic. For this belief to be held so widely, there obviously has to be some undercurrent of violence held within the scriptures.
At the moment I think wide-spread destruction is needed as we live in a country that has a perpetually lying government that is difficult to understand and lacks any sense of true justice. Whether this means that the American government needs to be brought down, or simply drastically overhauled I cannot say, but regardless I believe the system we have MUST be destroyed, and replaced with a more honest/just system.
I believe that Jesus would want peace, justice and harmony eventually, but I am unable to really know what he may or may not have known about the narrative in the interim. It might very well be going according to plan for all I know.
Erek
Would you say that Sun Tzu was a pacifist even though he claimed many of the virtues that Jesus espoused, only in a different context?
Erek
Just a quick, almost-hijack comment to avoid a wave of argument on what was otherwise a thought-provoking post.
God and/or gods may or may not exist, that question having been dealt with in numerous other threads and not germane here. But I read the quoted phrase as saying "People’s ideas of God or gods are memes." And with that I’d agree. (I just got through with an exchange of posts with our dear departed H4E on another board; her concept of God and mine are quite different, even though we both think we’re talking about the same existent entity. 'Nuff said?
Sure, you might be talking about the same existent entity, when you might disagree about the properties of said entity. Now what I am arguing is not so much that one of you is right the other is wrong, that both of you are wrong, or both of you are right, but that the disagreement is a power-struggle, the resolution being the decision as to what the actual properties of said meme truly are.
In otherwords, as Jesus has made the transition from person to Meme, his followers have become his will, and are acting out his internal struggle, externally ultimately deciding on what that will, inevitably will be. It is rather irrelevant whether or not he was a pacifist or a warrior, because peace will come when all sides agree that they have “won”, and come to a resolution that everyone is satisfied with, and that at this point is when peace on Earth will reign. In the end the ideology used to come to the resolution is completely irrelevant, as what brings about peace is the harmony of total accord, or a redefining of the word, ‘conflict’ so that certain types of conflict like stabbing someone to death, are considered ‘war’ and philisophical argument is considered ‘peace’.
So if Jesus is truly a God, which to me would be a sentient Meme, then he has taken an active role for the past two millenia, and the state of his followers is his doing. To imply that there is an ideal is to say that one day it will be “finished” and then we close the book and it’s over. Total satisfaction in this case would be the end of the world. (Taking the idea that Jesus is the supreme deity)
Erek
An army and what his followers were are two very different things. I would not say that a peaceful protest that has thousands of attendees is an army. Perhaps the more significant observation is not that he had a large following but that he never once chose to use them violently. He had the ability and still chose not to.
I disagree. As I understand your argument, you’re claiming that because Christianity appears to not be peaceful that that is the way it was intended. I think you’re confusing scripture with St. Augustine’s Just War. Jesus spoke very little of war and violence and much more frequently on love, compassion, etc. It was St. Augustine, who upon seeing Rome fall and took what critics of Christianity claimed was its downfall (pacifism) and spun it into a light that would justify a non-pacifist Christianity.
And while both you and I can read the Bible and come away with two different meanings, it is equally plausible that religious leaders have place their own bias witin the scripture.
To state that another way - is it possible that not only the “meme” of Jesus influences Christianity, but also the “memes” of others that would rather take Christianity down a seperate path? And, would it be fair to claim that there is only a single “meme” at work among Christianity? That perhaps Jesus truly was a pacifist and his “meme” continues on the message of love and compassion while a conflicting “meme” distorts Jesus’s message so that it carries a separte, yet distinct message?
Side question: Is your theory of “memes” similar to the movie Fallen?