Speaking To the World

WITH TYPICAL RELIGIOUS FERVOR, the brightly colored Faebook post,in ominously large looming letters, exhalted: Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again.He is the King of Kngs,the savior of the world. As might be expeced,this elicited a variety of responses, ranging from unqualifie endorement to sorn ans ridicule, to well stated, reasonable quetsions and objections. i coount myself in the third category, raising what seem to be reasonbalb questions. I begin with a bit of poetry from Goethe: "Pure was Jesus in his passion, in his heat but one God serving. Who of him a god would fashion, from his sacred will is swerving." Goethe was pointing out that nowhere in the gospels did Jesus ever claim to be a god,or anything resembling one, nor desired to be considered such. What his words seemed to indicate is that he, as well as all human beings, are children of the one God, creatures of divine creation, whose reverence for and obedience to god was merely reasonable and appropriate reponse to the parent child relationship, a matter of obedience and love of children for their parents. In one particularly hard core scriptural passage, Mathew chapter 15 verse 4, Jesus, who often indicated that his purpose was not to contradict but rather to amplify and augment Old Testament law, said, or seemed to say, that death is the proper punishment for anyone who curses the father and the mother, presumably referring to the strict obedience and respect with which all children are expected to treat their parents, just as all people are expected to similarly love and obey God. This habit of referring to Jesus as a "king" has always troubled me, and still does. His behavior towards people wasmuch more akin to a servant than a king, and, again, there is nowhere in scripture in which Jesus refers to himself as a "king". True, otehr people,including those unknown authors of the four gospels canonical gospels, referred to him as a king and a savior, evern before and immediately after he was born. The same scriptural accounts lso refer to him as a sacrificial lamb, the lamb of God, whose blood was shed for the atonement of the sins of all mankind, Christ teh savior by virtue of washing al the redeemed in his sacred blood. This theology I have always found primitive, barbaric, arvitrary, capricious, and cruel, all too remindful of the bloody sacrficial rituals which manifested in primitve stone age cultures all over the world; the propitiation of an angry, blood thirsty, flesh eating god, for the purpose of getting more favorable treatment from said god. Sometims the sarifice of an ainmal was sufficient, sometimes a human sacrifice was required, and sometimes, the human being had to be a virgin, usually a female virgin. The rains will come and the crops will grow and the disease will stop spreading and the enemy at the gate will be vanquished, with sufficient purity of sacrifice. Even in the Old Testament, Isaac the son of Abraham was on the verge of being sacrificed as an arbitrary test of Abraham'slove o fand loyalty to God, when God, satisfied of Abraham's willingness to kill his own child in unqualified obedience, relented at the last moment and expressed his willingness to take the life of a sheep instead. To me, that story has always impressed me with the capricious cruelty of the biblical god. Jesus Christ is at once king of the world, savior of the world -but only for those willing to worship him as a god, the Son of The God. To me,that sounds suspiciously like blackmail. Christ can never be the king and savior of a world in which there are thousands of different religions, religions which for the most part do not share this theology. And so the world in which we live is full of Christian religious devotees (fanatics) bound and deermined to make believers of everyone,and as long as that remains in effect, there will be strife and conflictamong peopel of all religions,almost entirely because religions tend to share the irrational conceit that there is only one true religion, and that all of us should embrace it. This conceit is indisputably the most pernicious gift the religions of the world have bestowed upon us.