Is Christianity just Judaism lite? (Or, how I lost my religion.)

Great Debates
1

okay as this is an honest posit and i will give full disclosure from where I am coming from. ( which is actually the whole posty!)

I am agnostic going on weak atheist. I started my life raised as a catholic, altar boy junior seminarian the whole works. I left the seminary not because of any philosophical argument but more because I was a young boy missing his mum and sisters.

But afterwards I still received my education in the catholic system. We never dwelt much on the old testament more so on the message in the new testament and the emphasis on love your neighbour etc. well no one can argue with that so I went along with it for a few years. But the more I looked at the basis behind it I couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that jesus didn’t want to offer an alternative to judaism but rather wanted to in his way 'perfect it", I mean as a kid he preached in synogogues and spread the jewish word (so as to speak) in other words his version was jew -lite!

This was the turning point for me.

this meant that the old testament’s god was jesus’ god. All the nasty bestial things that happened in this old testament god’s name was really the same god that jesus was proclaiming as god. All the misogyny, cruelty, barbarism, magic and any other amount of crazy hate … was really what I was supposed to accept and hold in esteem, reverence even! This god demanded it! jesus defended the scriptures , never once spoke out against the murders and attrocities carried out in god’s name…

That was a huge shock to me.

So I did a lot of research with all the experience and wherewithal that a 16 year old boy could muster. ( which was a lot of energetic research but with admittedly poor analytical skills)

but even if as a boy all I found were inconsistencies, horror stories, pure fantasy and pure horror, it actually just left me in the in the end with a feeling of guilt that I couldn’t figure all this out. It was ultra confusing…So I did what most young dudes did at that age.

Completely forgot all about it and got on with my life. religion was for old dudes!
my life over the next decade took me all around the world ( and still does) But opened my eyes to a more more and and even more logical approach to analysing and realising situations. I stopped looking at the bible as a divine recipe for life and came to realise that it was a necessary construct of an evolving species to cover their doubts hopes, insecurities…

It was quite a spiritual experience ( sic) losing the guilt bonds of catholic xianity. quite a relief to realise that I can take responsibility for my own actions based on my own morality and sense of self worth.

okay am gonna die and will to return to the universe as dust, molecules and atoms… and in this sense will be as eternal as the universe itself.

sounds good to me!

2

In short, “No.”

I’m not quite sure about most of your points(or what they even were), but I guess the main idea of “Jesus” is that he was fulfilling the Messianic prophesies of Judaism.

Therefore, it isn’t so much as Judaism Lite as Judaism fulfilled. It’s basically Judaism fulfilled and available to all nations, instead of just God’s chosen people, the Israelites.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “lite”, though. What do you mean?

Maybe you’ll explain and use capitalization and grammar. :wink:

3

The original Christians were Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the savior and liberator who would rid Israel forever of conquest and subjugation and establish God’s kingdom here on Earth. They were wrong, however, as the subsequent scattering of Judaism into the Diaspora proved. Israel is still beset and hated by those who would wipe it from the face of the earth, and Christianity has been co-opted by the descendants of the barbarian Europeans the early Christians colonized over a millennium and a half ago. So no, Christianity, while it has its roots in ancient Israel and Judea, is not “Judaism lite”. In fact, it bears no more resemblance to Judaism than Mormonism does to Roman Catholicism.

When it became clear that Jesus wasn’t the warrior-savior the Jews were looking for, there were already so many people so heavily invested in the new cult that they had to start changing the direction of their new religion. Gradually, they came up with the savior-by-sacrifice story line, borrowing an ancient Semitic (but not necessarily Jewish) tradition of heaping a village’s sins onto an innocent goat and then chasing the goat off the nearest cliff, and combining it with the Jewish tradition of sacrificing a spotless lamb to God in hopes that He’d go easy on 'em in spite of their sinful ways. Presto, change-o! Jesus becomes the Lamb of God, ritually sacrificed for our sins, and that’s where Easter comes from.

There is some debate as to whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, or whether he’s an amalgam of two or three itinerant rabbis persecuted and prosecuted for their heretical preaching back in the day. The story of virgin birth, moralizing sermons, execution, resurrection and ascension isn’t new to Christianity; elements of it appeared long before in the myths of Adonis, Attis and Osiris.

Works Cited:
Frazer, James George. Adonis Attis Osiris : Studies in the Hist. Grand Rapids: Kessinger, LLC, 2003.
Jesus and His Times. Alexandria: Reader’s Digest Association (Canada), 1988.
Smith, Huston. The World’s Religions : Our Great Wisdom Traditions. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991.

4

In’t this a Great Debates topic?

5

well I didn’t really want to dig up cites for any assertions I made and really am interested in opinions so i put it here. ( besides am to much of an inarticulate to go into GD !! i already been criticised about capitilisation and grammar here in IMHO!:slight_smile:

I believe that the current stance of the catholic church leadership is that the jews already have a contract with god so are some how exempt from their own saviour’s assertion that there is no way to god but through him.

But apart from that, my own personal problem with catholicism at that time (its over 35 years ago) was that the OT was really skipped over almost as an embarrassment.

My point, amidst the poor grammar, was that if in the main, Jesus supported and taught OT scripture, should not this also be intrinsically part of the christian faith? And if so can anyone defend those horrible cruel god driven aspects of it?
Now I accept that we have an evolving sense of decency, and what happened then would not pass the test of civility now. ty.

For me personally it’s kind of moot, being agnostic now for many years. It just strikes me that some people who profess to follow a faith…don’t really know what that faith really stands for?

or is that presumptious?

(By 'lite" I meant that really christianity is ( or should be known as ) a stripped down version of orthodoxy which goes beyond reform judaism. jesus observed jewish laws, why don’t christians?)

6

I second that, VBob.

7

You seem to be doing fine. I reported this so a Mod can move it.

FWIW before I leave this for good, you can teach Old and New Testaments in the time a student can stand on one foot.

OT: Treat others the way you want to be treated yourself. All else is commentary.

NT: Forgive others anyway when they forget the OT lesson because God will forgive you when you forget it yourself.

Have a Great Debate.

8

yikes! great debaters here we come!

9

I’ve moved this over to Great Debates and edited the title to remove the MMP portion (since, even if it had stayed in MPSIMS, it really wasn’t an MMP). Plus, that’ll help make it less confusing.

10

I know you have works cited but I would like to see one or two for the above thought. I have been under the impression that the vast majority of historians believed that a man by the name of Jesus of Nazareth did exist shortly before (within 75 years) the gospel of Mark was written.
Not to mention some of those things also appear in the Hebrew Old Testament, including arguably the virgin birth.

11

Unfortunately, Jesus (Yeshua and its variants) was a depressingly common name in those days. Everybody and their brother named their son that in hopes that he would grow up to be the promised deliverer, preferably in the “kick the Romans into the sea, make Israel the biggest baddest MoFo in the neighborhood” sense.

So yeah, Jesus existed…but that specific Jesus, of Nazareth, of uncertain parentage living under the roof two dirt-poor Judeans until he became a wandering preacher at the age of 30, and then crucified three years later for pushing forward ideas that made the religious establishment nervous is a little harder to prove. (The few surviving non-Christian documents do seem to take Jesus’ existence for granted, but if you want to be cynical I guess you can say that the Church eventually destroyed everything that wasn’t conductive to pushing their meme.)

12

I gave three cites. Before asking for more, do the legwork to find those three and read them (I have, from cover to cover, and everything I wrote is in one or more of those books.)

There is no extant text outside the Bible that any of the events described in the Gospel actually happened.

13

The Master answers, Did Jesus really exist? And what’s with the Shroud of Turin?

14

Basically, Judaism is Windows 3.1, then it was upgraded to Christianity which is Windows XP, and Islam is another (highly questionable) upgrade, which is Vista.

Each form has their adherents who refuse to move on and upgrade.

15

I think there is a good case for arguing that Christianity is essentially a classical religion (in the sense of based on Greek and Roman civilisation) with some Jewish mythology bolted on. It is easy to imagine that, in the absense of Jesus and/or Paul, a similar faith would have built up around Orphic cults or Stoic philosophy.

16

Frazer never gave any credence to the “Jesus myth” theory.

I will say this- I congratulate manila for leaving C’nity for a coherent reason- that Jesus’ God & “Father” was the YHWH of the OT, and that Jesus did not repudiate all the perceived nastiness recorded of YHWH in the OT.

I’ll go a step further- many C’tians, even Arian ones, hold that when the OT presents “The Angel of YHWH” speaking for YHWH, issuing a lot of these archaic “nasty” commands, that was actually the pre-Incarnate Jesus.

I hold to that myself & disagree with the moral objections against YHWH & the OT, but kudos to manila for not falling for the Marcionite heresy that pits the “Good God” of Jesus against a Demiurge YHWH.

17

It is the 2 paths we have to choose from. We can use man’s path, and God put down what standard man must live up to, put in effect through angels (Acts 7:53, Gal 3:19) (with God as a mediator). We can see the effects of this path not just with the Jews, even within Christianity, as children are taught the ten commandments, something they can not follow.

God knows we can’t follow it, we were never made to, but men have to come to the point where they admit to God they can’t. This is where the second path come in. Freedom from the law as all sins are wiped clean by the payment of Jesus. This is the freedom Jesus offers.

We can even see this freedom in the OT, where King David ate bread only lawful for the priests to eat, the path was always there, just revealed through Jesus.

I believe the Bible also tells the story of our personal (believer’s) lives, at first we live in the OT. We hear about God, and we go through priests to hear from God, we ourselves feel separated from Him. We try to do good in our own effort, by following the law and teachings of men. Then Jesus comes into our lives, we walk with Him, learning what God really wants (mercy, not sacrifice for one, the condition of the heart for another). After some time the walk with Jesus is over, but He sends His Spirit to live in us, and we walk in the power of God and Jesus lives through us. Also just to add, the preflood time may represent the time in the womb, with the flood as the delivery/birth into a new world.

18

I’m sorry, but Judiasm is UNIX. Old, codified to hell, and really effective at teaching people who use it to think. Admittedly, what they’re thinking about may not be the most useful thing in the world, but they are thinking.

Of course, none of the operating systems are all that useful if you’re running it on a CPU that takes 2+2=3.999999999…

19

Why, thank you.

I’ll buy that Christianity is Vista - it seems to want to send me to hell very frequently.

20

First, Jesus did not fulfill the Messianic prophecies - Christians are still waiting, just like Jews.
Second, Judaism fulfilled shows a misunderstanding of what Judaism is all about. Jews have a special relationship, true, but there is no sense of salvation. I never learned that we had any different of an afterlife than a gentile. If we thought we’d be treated better, we’d be ethically obligated to try to convince gentiles to convert, but in fact gentiles are discouraged from converting due to the rigor of really following the laws.

I guess Christianity is Judaism lite in the sense that it claims a relationship with God without the bother of having to follow the laws set down in the Tanakh. But the concept of salvation is a more basic difference, one introduced the best I can figure as a marketing tool.