JESUS IS NOT THE ZENITH OF HUMANKIND IN ANY SENSE

People connecting to Jesus is odd from a psychological perspective.

Jesus gave a taxing moral code and thus should be held to a higher standard than Buddha or Muhammad or anybody else.  This is not done.  Also other faith figures have not offered magical cures and miracle healings for the tendency to do harm and evil like he has.  The laziness among people who call themselves his followers makes us ponder his teaching, "By their fruits do you see the wolves in the guise of sheep."  It might mean he was the wolf behind it all. 

Jesus and God are claimed to be sinless.  If a person always does the best thing and never seems to demonstrate deliberate misbehaviour we see them as predictable and robotic.  Paradoxically we dehumanise and objectify them to varying degrees.

You see robots and haunted walking dolls in horror films.  How these are considered toys and machines UNTIL they do wrong. We then declare them responsible.  If we keep telling ourselves they are machines we are trying to convince ourselves.  We know if a robot were lifelike enough we would respond to it as a person and perhaps one that is better and more valuable than anybody else.

People do evil or harmful things for they want attention and not to be treated as part of the furniture.  It would be interesting if telling people they have free will to do good or sin and that free will is a gift from God actually on some level was encouraging them to break the rules.  As Jesus is the reason the Christian has to believe in free will it would be mainly his fault.

We have a will and because it is our will we are going to feel free.  That means you feel you have to do what you have to do or like it enough to do it even if that is not much or both.  It says nothing about if you can really kill or save right now.  Your will might have been set by your brain to go for one of them.  You cannot go back even one second to test if you can choose tea when you chose coffee.

Jesus claimed that, Love your neighbour as yourself, is a moral rule of the highest wisdom.  That sounds fine and noble doesn't it?  The rule is useless in practice.  People can't agree on what loving your neighbour as yourself is.  Disputes and disagreements are the fabric of life.  Even Jesus believed that love did not mean being sweet but could mean being rude for people's good - he called the Pharisees names.  He upset people by rioting in the Temple.  He broke his mother's heart by going to the cross and endangered his friends.  The rule is just false advertising.   Oversimplifying morality the way Jesus and the Church did with the rule is arrogance and irresponsible and actually uncaring.  Take the rule, Respect life.  To keep the rule we have to keep people who are in the worst of agonies and who are dying alive as long as possible even if it means making their pain worse.  We can't give a dying patient morphine to ease the pain of cancer for the morphine will hasten death.  And then if we deny the rule we end up opening the door to a culture of death. 

Jesus enunciated that there are two great commandments, to love God completely with all you have, and to love your neighbour as yourself.  The latter tells you to treat the neighbour as if they were you and does not address the rightness or wrongness of self-love.  These however are summaries of the ten commandments.  Nearly half of them are about duties to God and a few rules about neighbour's rights are put in.  The stress on God clearly is an attack on sceptics who say you don't need God belief or prayer to be able to help others.

Jesus said that a man cannot serve two masters so God and mammon cannot both be served (Matthew 6:24). You can serve God and money both by compromising between them. But you cannot if God wants to be served to the exclusion of mammon. Mammon does not ask you to serve it to the exclusion of God. Caring a bit about money is fine but Jesus says it is not. If we have to have anything to do with money we should have no interest in it or love for it but just use it for the glory of God.

The Catholic Truth Society booklet, Charity, claims that charity is an infused virtue of loving God that God gives you what cannot be naturally acquired and that it is the greatest and best gift God can bestow (page 3). When God is insulted or left out of anything the person who has charity and sees this happening feels grieved (page 9). Anybody that does not put God first is his enemy (page 13). Atheists beware! This is fanaticism because if loving your child can make you happier and kinder than loving God would nobody has the right to condemn you for doing that.
 
Charity is disinterested in anything that you desire but only in what God desires and in its perfect state it closes God out altogether (page 15). Charity in its perfect state puts even the happiness of seeing God in the Beatific Vision second to simply loving God for his own sake and not our own at all. Then we are told that anybody who loves God right loves himself or herself in the right way (page 18). This implies that the person who denies God does not and is therefore an evil person. But we are never to love ourselves in the sense that we seek advantage for ourselves through charity (page 28). So loving yourself just means looking after yourself to please God and not yourself so it is really just God who is loved while you use yourself to express this love. This is made plain when I am told to accept it when others get all the praise from my work and I get none (page 36).
 
Extraordinarily, the booklet says that real charity for God means examining religious statements and claims with great circumspection and that it is not charity to be credulous (page 47). We learn that proper charity loves God without any thought for ourselves but that you need some self-interest in loving God at the start to develop proper and pure charity (page 55). God is to be thanked first for his own glory, for him being who he is. That is what he is to be thanked for first of all and principally. It is to be the main thought in our minds and the main thing we give thanks for when we thank God (page 56). He is to be thanked primarily for being what he is and not for what he does for us. This plainly denies that feeling good about and valuing yourself is where love starts and if it is wrong then this teaching is very vile and corrupting indeed. It is very unnatural to thank God for being God without any reference to the good he does.
 
We are told that if we make little of the wrongs others do and make a lot of their virtues God will do the same to us (page 57). Jesus did say in the Sermon on the Mount that if you judge others harshly God will judge you harshly and without mercy. Strange that you can commit loads of sins and be treated mercifully and just for having a bad attitude you get treated harshly! Sad! Poor Jesus was obviously feeling guilty about his own sins and hostile to those who judged him. Under the spell of revenge, he was desperate to will a God with his bias into existence!

We read that Jesus gave up his health and friends and life on the cross as an indication of full complete consecration or dedication to God (page 14, The Atonement: Mystery of Reconciliation). His voluntary death tells us that all should be renounced for God. Jesus showed us that the meaning of love your neighbour as yourself is consecrate your neighbour as yourself. If it meant what we take it to mean, loving yourself, then Jesus must have broken the commandment by renouncing all for the sake of consecration to God. Love in Christianity means doing what makes the person holier not happier or safer.
 
The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, that we cannot obey the commandments of God properly if we obey them because we love ourselves so the motive should be love of God and of neighbour (page 119). At the same time he stated that the person who lives the best and holiest way is the person who thinks of himself the least. He made it clear that when the Lord said we must love our neighbour as ourselves he meant we are to take the strongest inclination we have, self-love, and transfer this love to other people instead (page 120). You have a nice pudding. Eating it yourself is self-love. Self-love is an energy and a power. You give the pudding to a neighbour instead of eating it yourself. The love energy is given for her and not yourself meaning you love yourself less. You love yourself less because you use the love you had for yourself not to love yourself but her. Calvin showed the commandment does not imply any approval of self-love. It only presumes we have it and tells us what to do with it. By implication, it tells us to get rid of it by giving the love to the neighbour.

There are grave problems and incoherencies in Jesus' core teachings.  His example as a result has been appalling.  He accused Jews of saying he was using demons to fake casting demons out of an eternal sin to scare them into silence.  He rioted in the temple and hit slaves and innocent people.  He validated the gore of the blood sacrifices in the Temple.  He told the Jews in Matthew 23 they were evil to the core and going to kill the good servants of God including himself.  Talk like that leads to violence.  He knew the real sufferers as a result would be those men's wives and children.  He couldn't give good evidence for his teaching about eternal punishment so he had no right to risk causing mental trauma to people over something so badly verified.  Real warnings do not do that.  He locked girls forced to wed and they were typically only at puberty into their fake marriages by banning divorce.  He told an adulteress who avoided stoning she was guilty of adultery.  He knew that saying that to her would have led to her being stoned later on as adultery was a capital crime according to God's law that he gave Moses.   He said that all religious teachers barring the Jewish prophets were thieves and robbers and thus slandered good people like Buddha and so on.  Not once did he do any fundraising for the poor.

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