THE HYPOCRISY OF THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE THAT YOU MUST AS GOOD AS LITERALLY SEE THE CHRISTIAN AS JESUS HIMSELF

 

Jesus once said that if you give water to somebody for they are his disciple then he will take that as being given to him.  There is the doctrine of the vine and the branches in the John gospel where Jesus says you are really part of him when you turn to him.

Remember in Matthew 25 that when Jesus condemned bad treatment of “the least of the brothers of mine” he was not referring to the marginalised in general. He was referring to marginalised people who considered him their savior. He was playing on our bigoted charity begins at home ethos. Contrary to love your neighbour as yourself, the Christian is to look after their own household first and then think of others. This is not surprising for short rules usually are about trying to awkwardly sum up complicated situations and how to respond. They are only given for giving nothing would be worse.

Read the text.  There Jesus says whoever hurts those who identify as his friends and brethren HURTS HIM. So that is what we are to pay attention to rather than the person.  HIM.

Atheists are often patronised by saying that they abandon religion for they have grudges against the religion and its followers.  The accusers never say that a Protestant becomes Catholic for they have a spite at their former religion.

Believers by telling you that atheists are resentful and spiteful and trying to make you think atheists should not be listened to when they give you arguments for not believing.  It is a clever way to divide people up to keep them away from anybody who may know and be able to show that a religion's claims are false.

The argument is saying that an atheist not being religious is happening for they are projecting their toxic personal issues with some believers unto their atheism.  The religious offer the solution, which is that the atheist needs to invoke God for healing and forgiveness.  Well believers, you must be projecting yourself out there and calling it God too then!  And even if anybody is projecting they could still by chance be right to be say, atheist.

It is true that many reject religion and Jesus because of bad experiences with people who act in his name. Christianity may complain that those hurt people are being unfair. Christianity is unique in claiming that a baptised person is in some way joined to Jesus so closely whether they know it or not that they are essentially part of his body, and can be classed as him “whoever hurts my suffering brethren hurts me” says the gospel. So good works from a Christian reflect on Jesus. But the Christian cheats and lies here. The fact that the bad works have to be in some way virtually attributed to him is unmentioned.  You simply cannot see a person as good if you won't see their potential to harm people.  You are supposed to see them as good because they can harm but do not.

Remember this.  If a religion is not lifting its members to be better than say the non-religious then it is right to regard the evil behaviour of members as an indication that it is not of God and its prayers as incapable of healing the bad side of human nature to a reasonable degree.  And sure enough you do find atheists who surpass believers in dedication and kindness.  So it is possible to reject religion and Jesus over bad experiences and to be right to do so.

The reality is that if you put blinkers on to just make out this disciple who is Jesus in a spiritual and somehow real sense, you are not being fair to Jesus.  If you have a friend, you are not a true friend unless you see there are two sides, a bad and good, to that person.  It is because the person can do bad and has done, that you praise their good.  You are selfishly making this about yourself, how you want to see the person, in this case Jesus.  If Jesus is perfect then he will not mind us questioning if he has a dark side and also if he gives into it.  In fact we would have to, to truly respect him.

The argument that Jesus had himself bad experiences with religious people is also manipulative. There is no record that they ranted and raved against him much but there is an account in Matthew 23 that says Jesus was the one doing that.  Jesus said that judging somebody has having done bad must be based on evidence and be certain.  There is no independent record, no quote even from a document, that what the gospels say any Jew did to Jesus was true.  The argument that the gospels do not blame all Jews for how Jesus was treated is refuted by how if that is true then why are they not giving names of the instigators and their pawns?  You have to name names instead of saying, "The Jews did this."  We all know anybody saying that is not saying all Jews did it, but they are still calling every Jew a person of interest.  That is the problem and the believers try to side-step it.

Don’t forget that Jesus Christ is treated as having rights. Only a living person can have rights. They give him respect and worship. He is dead so when you spend time giving him rights you are not spending that time giving them to others and working for them. The worshippers are cheating themselves. To give rights to the dead is inevitably taking them from others. Even being prepared to do that is terrible. Plus if rights are valid you need to erase any belief that justifies giving rights to what does not have them at all. It is about the principle not just the damage.  That principle is extremely attacked when you go as far as to say that respecting a Christian is about respecting Jesus.  Basically if you abuse rights for your Jesus, any problem with him is made your own for you are trying to own him and saying he is your's.

The Christians say that pagan gods are flawed ideas of what God is and others who don’t go that far say, “They are flawed ideas of what a God would be.” Some assume they have this vision of divine grandeur and others do not, but have a poor reflection of it.  See how human that is.  They decide what a good God should be like.  They claim to have a relationship with this entity.  A real relationship is based on knowing and accepting the person and not this nonsense.  They claim to have a humble relationship with God.  They say it is humble to befriend the real God instead of an imagined one.  It is a strange kind of humility that says you can know what a perfect God would mean when you have no idea of being perfect yourself even as a human being. 

If the gods are real and God is not then there is nothing flawed about them.  Problems with how some think the gods commit murder and adultery and so on do not prove that polytheism is necessarily flawed.  There is no need to think the gods that matter have to get up to such things.

And if God is too great for us to even reasonably have an accurate vision of who he is, it may be that the gods know better than us so we need to approach him through them.

The believers say it matters if we have flawed religious targets of devotion for we need to be real friends with a real God for his sake and for ours.  We don't want to be wasting worship and depending on what is going to let us down.

Remind them that they call anything that varies from their theology of God as flawed.  Don't they admit that all believers don't have a great perception of who God is?  Where is the dividing line?  They even want atheists to affirm that their version of God is okay while pagan gods are flawed.  Sorry we are not joining you in this.

To sum up, even if what is said about a God is convincing and plausible and probable, it still comes from ideas that human beings come up with or make their own.  In that way, the conversation is really about persons and they cannot really expect us to affirm, "They are about God not themselves."

Feuerbach said that you can talk the religious talk but not walk the walk when it comes to an alleged god. You cannot really avoid thinking of something human for that is all you know. Thus God is just a projection. And it is a lie that God sends grace to get you around the problem. The believers would say that anyway and the evidence is not there. Believers need some excuse.  They know that the Bible says most refuse grace meaning their connection with God is not real and that is why a very religious person is not guaranteed a place in Heaven.

We learn then that the Christian doctrine, "Jesus lives in his disciple so see Jesus when you see that person", is not the only way you can identify the person with Jesus.  God and Jesus are projections by the Christian in the first place.  The Christian makes their idea of God and Jesus part of themselves.

If you are projecting yourself and using Jesus and God as cover, onto another person then you have no right to say their bad deeds don't reflect on good and caring you.  You are trying to represent how God approaches them so whatever

 

 

Would it matter if a religion is saying that about God or just you?  Well a religion is a collection of yous saying it individually.  Then there is noise and its considered a collective voice.  It comes down to individuals eventually and ultimately.

Christian doctrine is that Jesus is with his people intimately so that they are essentially his hands and feet.  For that to be true, you cannot appeal to your good works as showing your faith in a good light when other believers do harm.  For you to be one body in Jesus with that person means that you take the blame with them.  St Paul says that the hand cannot plead innocence for what the foot does. You cannot let people outside the Christian community say, "You are good but that member is bad and you people are not all bad."

While in the world, that offender will be punished, not you, before God, it is regarded as your sin too.  The Church is blamed as a body for what the member does.

So the Church sees justice in God giving the people some measure of punishment for what one member does though the member obviously will be punished the most.

The Bible says every believer is a king and queen before God.  The head of state is held responsible for things they have not done.  They tacitly agree to that when they take on their rank.  That is one way to understand how the good believer is sullied by the sin of another believer.

There is a sense in which what one member in a group does reflect on everybody else in that group, reflects on the group as a whole.  While Christianity would say it agrees with that, it would also say that is true of any group.  It says it is a group but also a body, the body of Christ.  So the reflection here is more than just the ordinary way a group is made to look bad if some members are bad.  There is the ordinary connection that makes the religion look bad and there is a separate connection, a supernatural one, as well.

So where does forgiveness come into all this?  Can you be forgiven with the person who has harmed in your name?  Should a person be forgiven by x for what you have done as if you had a part in what x did?  You can be forgiven for how you take some responsibility for what the bad person did.  You can say you did not pray enough.  You can say your own sins brought evil into the Church and once evil is in it may draw in somebody to do something very bad.  You can say that you take responsibility the way a good family might for the behaviour of one member.

No mature person just assumes the person they hurt forgave them. The person has to tell them what they did face to face.  The person has to decide to move on and invite you to heal the situation.  To assume God has pardoned you will soon lead to you thinking the same thing of others.  You will tend to assume their kindness to you shows they have forgiven.  And if you trust that God is bringing forgiving power into the situation

If you are the offender, you have to keep guesses out of it.  You need to be clearly told you are forgiven and that you seem to be addressing your bad side. 

As for others they are to let you do it and ask you to.   They are not to send you prayers, give you soul-healing sacraments, vibes and energies and magics to get you forgiven or to help you - even if these things can.  It is your job.  You are told clearly that you are forgiven.  None of this happens in relation to God so divine mercy and pardon is just a cover for making a person feel good when they should feel bad about the damage they have done. This is a mockery of forgiveness and dangerous.  It will not work in the long run. 

Forgiveness from God is the core of your faith.  Your attitude is the sea in which the evil fish swim so you are not entirely innocent when they do wrong and their wrongdoing shows that.  You are not in a position to speak of amnesty or forgiveness at all so you cannot complain if instead of pointing at the evil person in the group the judge points at the group because the evil person is in the middle of it.

If God forgives a person, that person has no right to ask or expect you to know this and act as if you know it full stop.  Also if God is too much of a projection or you are the creator of your ideas about God including the ideas of others you take your accepting of how God forgives the other is too much about you.  You hand that person a way to feel good and changed when they should not. 

Popular faith argues that if John rapes women it is up to the women to forgive him and nobody else.  So does that mean you are not to care about the evil in him? Or that you do care but hope that it destroys him?  There is a sense in which you do have to forgive him but not as if you were one of the women.  You cannot say, "I forgive you for raping me", when you are not her.  But it does mean if she forgives you have to be good to him despite what he has done and that is the definition of forgiving.  It is equal to her forgiving in importance for you have to support and validate what she is trying to do to put it behind her.

You have to take seriously how he would not value you if you were one of those women and you are to take evil seriously.  In a sense he makes his sin your affair.  It follows that there is a sense in which your good or bad work belongs to all humankind.  Its importance must be admitted.

And besides that, using your good works so that you can halo-shine when other believers do harm is manipulative.  If they are good works, they are done for they are good not because of how you want appear.

Also, if you think your religion's perspective and sacraments and prayers heal the bad streak in human nature and somebody in it does evil then you are guilty of maybe standing for treatments that do not work.  The evil in the other person then becomes your problem too.  You will not admit that.  Who does?  Be honest.

If you see the evil your co-religionist does you will wait until everybody finds out about it before you will try to get people to reason, "They are not all bad.  Look at John for example."  That is clearly defensive and devious.

You would not dare argue publically that the offender's good works should mean their evil deed is lightly condemned or even condoned.  Yet you will do that with your own when you are on trial.  You will beg for mercy saying how you fed the poor and so on.  You do the same for the offender but inwardly.  So for that reason their crime shows your own corruption.

If that person owns your goodness in some way because it belongs to the Church and he is part of it, then you are implying punishment should be lighter.

The argument that we are all connected in Jesus clearly means that you are saying you are linked to the other person's offence in some way and you are to think of it as your own and you will clearly use your good works to paradoxically argue that you are not the same as them.  In other words, you use your good works to avoid any condemnation or punishment for what the other has done though you make it your own.

Saying we are the body of Jesus is a rationalision for trying to get you to feel that you must make what the other has done your own but it clearly tells the offender he or she shouldn't feel so bad about their crime for it is offset if not by their own good works then those of others.

Now if God frowns on the whole community for the sin of a few that bans them or anybody else outside the group from saying, "They are all bad.  They have a few bad apples."  The reason is that before him the community is as one person and nobody respects a person who uses their own good deeds as an excuse for getting away even partly with some terrible thing they have done.  That looks cynical and manipulative.

And the body thing means your good works belong to the bad people too. 

The view that practically, symbolically and somehow literally, the persons in the Church are the same as Jesus is toxic and vile.

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