Despite the 'new and perfect Covenant' spoken of by Christ Jesus, there are an awful lot of 'Christians' who seem to want the ol' fire-and-brimstone version.
J.C. just isn't very "Operative", know what I mean? Thank god for that Paul guy, who never actually knew J.C. but still got to decide how everything would work, homophobia included.
@Andreas Geisler Ooh, somebody else finally brought up the Paul thing. A few years ago that really hit me, that most of the New Testament is Paul's letters (supposedly). So, when someone calls it the gospel "according to Jesus" I had to stop a second and go, but wait, Paul was the one doing most of the writing, so technically isn't "The gospel influenced by Jesus and according to Paul" more accurate? Hmm... I'll get on that after I finish reading the Old Testament part of The Brick Bible.
Ahhh, Matthew--the Persian flavored one. His Gospel is the only one that lauds pagan high priests as "wise men". Magism = Zoroastrianism The Next Generation.
@Khurram Wadee Itβs Machiavellian. Send the Brute to oppress and pacify the populace, then bring in the Chosen One, who rules over a region where all the troublemakers have been killed or imprisoned, and the rest wonβt speak out.
It's a case of not getting it right the first time. * Creation failed so needed drowning * Drowning worked only for a while so that needed a Redeemer Plan * Redeemer Plan was incomplete--Redeemer has to come again.
For a God that's Almighty and Perfect, he sure goofs up repeatedly.
Bob's got the politics of the scheme quite right. No empire could exist without its religion and even ancient Egypt discovered that when a ruler monkeys with a religion widely believed by the ruled, it's possible to get executed for blasphemy even when the religion has declared the ruler a god.
Both Persians and Romans recognized the utility of adapting state religion to encompass the religion of the conquered. We'd have no "Greco-Roman" anything without it, and Christianity wouldn't have had so many Egyptian, Jewish, Mithraic elements in it either.
It's a bit funny how, when kings use religion as a pretext for war and plunder, it's the fault of religion, but when they use "advancing civilization" as pretext for same, they are (mostly) seen as just greedy.
Religion has certainly caused evils, but many evils caused in the name of religion were actually done for greed, and it is dangerous to ignore the root cause, just because it feels good to rag on those sanctimonious hypocrite priests.
But for the brutal Catholic colonization of South America via Spain & Italy's Columbus, Italians wouldn't have any tomatoes to make sauce with. What you're looking at is a forcible appropriation of Native American culture.
Current events in Russia shows us the dangers involved in the interplay between leaders and followers. The followers enable the leaders, and ultimately must control those leaders. Otherwise, it's the head wagging the dog, so to speak.