So first of all – what you’re doing is so important, especially now during Pride Month. Reminding people that what Jesus really stood for was radical love is so necessary, and I admire the way you stand strong and refuse to accept that the only options are atheism and conservative Christianity – you know there’s room in the middle for nuance and for a more truthful read of who Jesus really was. And honestly you do lifesaving work in helping lgbt Christians realize that Jesus loves them.
But. We’ve gotta talk about how you sometimes frame things. Sometimes, in your (admirable!) haste to assure lgbt Christians they are loved, you throw Jews under the bus. And it… doesn’t feel great. As a fellow lgbt religious person, we should be in this together.
What I mean is, comments like “the old testament god was vengeful, but Jesus is loving.” Or “now that we have Jesus, the old testament commandments are irrelevant and they’d be impossible to follow anyway.” Or really, in general, things that put down the old testament.
There are living breathing people whose religion is based on the old testament god and the old testament laws. When you throw those under the bus, you throw us under the bus too. We’re not just some sort of ancient strawman from the times of Jesus, we exist here and now and we see those comments.
I know this is complicated because supercessionism (regardless of how problematic it is) is a core part of Christian belief, but let’s try to move forward more sensitively, at least. Just… at the very least keep in mind that Christianity is based on Judaism and got its foundational documents from Judaism, and to do that and then turn around and throw those very same documents (and Jews and Judaism) under the bus is pretty rude – especially considering the legacy of Christians murdering and massacring Jews based on our being “incomplete” for not accepting Christ.
So, keep moving forward with the important work you are doing, but frame it in ways that does not uplift one group of people while throwing another under the bus.
I mean the whole damn point of the Nativity story is that the supposed son of God (interpret Jesus how you fucking want, of course) was born to a couple of poor, exhausted peasants in the stable for the inn, and his first bed was a feeding trough for animals. That would nowadays be like a poor couple where the mother gives birth in a parking garage behind the motel because they couldn’t find a better place and nobody else would take them in. It’s a pretty gritty setting, and the idea is that God was reborn in some of the rock-bottom lowest circumstances. The only thing majestic was all the angels and shit, and of course motherly love
I get that a lot of the art portraying Madonna and Child as fabulously wealthy europeans in splendid robes and golden light was meant to glorify God + whichever nobility was sponsoring the artist, and while of course it’s genuinely beautiful art, it just always struck me as horribly missing the point, which is that the supposed son of God started in incredibly humble circumstances, among the kind of people that everyone else looks down on
‘Massacre des Innocents’ by Leon Cogniét, 1824. Although the Feast of the Holy Innocents is in a couple of days time, this painting is still really relevant in that it portrays Mary as how She really was: a scared refugee mum, so fearful that Her son was going to be one of the Innocents killed by King Herod.
My mom said that today in church her pastor said in the sermon that Jesus told us to help the poor, and taking money away from public schools to give to charter schools only widens the gap between the rich and the poor. She then added that Jesus spoke against adultery and lust and would not have approved of bragging about sexually assaulting women. According to my mom, people got up and walked out.
The pastor also started the sermon by noting that she’d heard of another minister who read the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount at the pulpit, to be told by the so-called Christian parishioners after the service that it was offensive and they didn’t agree.
The Sermon on the Mount is straight up the words of Jesus.
I recently read an article that said, hypocritical Christians in America don’t actually worship Jesus. They worship America, and even then, it’s a very specific, self-centered idea of America.
YES. EXACTLY.
My mom’s church talks almost every Sunday about how Christians are called to welcome strangers and foreigners and does tons of stuff to help refugees because HELLO, IT’S RIGHT THERE. IN THE RED TEXT, NO LESS.
I don’t believe everything they believe, but I REALLY like those people.
What a lot of these people are is idolators.
Not in terms of the realness or unrealness of who they worship, but in terms of how they’ve warped their focus away from the reality and turned it towards a fantasy of their own construction.
By definition, an idol is an image with no god behind it.
What they have done is taken the idea of Jesus and created a false image of him, nothing like the reality, to carry around in their back pocket, or to wave around on signs, and pull out and shove in people’s faces to justify all manner of unChristlike behavior.
It is a “worship” that is fundamentally self-centered rather than deity-centered, wherein the deity in question is more of a pocketbook get-out-of-jail-free card than directive to live by, and more of a status symbol than a guiding light.
That people will, without a shred of self-awareness, rest themselves assured that Jesus would want them to tip their waitress with a Jesus pamphlet made to look like folded-up money (to take only one example out of many) is the ultimate dismissal of everything the original stood for.
There is a line in the Bible about Jesus meeting his false worshipers and saying “I do not know you.” It seems like plenty of so-called Christians have beaten him to the punch with how quick they are to say they don’t know him.
A lot of churches and organizations in America that call themselves Christian churches are in fact Christianist cults. They no more represent Christianity than Daesh represents Islam. In addition to the usual nonsense of so-called Christians being pro-war, anti-immigrant, racist, and so forth, there are a lot of sects/movements that are just completely toxic and not Christian at all, even though they use that label. If you are Christian and want to have some fucking nightmares, google “christian dominionist,” or “prosperity gospel.”
Still think this is the most realistic diagram of the difference between the theological Jesus and the Comfortable Reinterpretation of Jesus.
American Christianity is, at this point, like the Cult of the Emperor in ancient Rome, which is simultaneously both ironic and appropriate given the history involved
My mom said that today in church her pastor said in the sermon that Jesus told us to help the poor, and taking money away from public schools to give to charter schools only widens the gap between the rich and the poor. She then added that Jesus spoke against adultery and lust and would not have approved of bragging about sexually assaulting women. According to my mom, people got up and walked out.
The pastor also started the sermon by noting that she’d heard of another minister who read the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount at the pulpit, to be told by the so-called Christian parishioners after the service that it was offensive and they didn’t agree.
The Sermon on the Mount is straight up the words of Jesus.
I recently read an article that said, hypocritical Christians in America don’t actually worship Jesus. They worship America, and even then, it’s a very specific, self-centered idea of America.
YES. EXACTLY.
My mom’s church talks almost every Sunday about how Christians are called to welcome strangers and foreigners and does tons of stuff to help refugees because HELLO, IT’S RIGHT THERE. IN THE RED TEXT, NO LESS.
I don’t believe everything they believe, but I REALLY like those people.
What a lot of these people are is idolators.
Not in terms of the realness or unrealness of who they worship, but in terms of how they’ve warped their focus away from the reality and turned it towards a fantasy of their own construction.
By definition, an idol is an image with no god behind it.
What they have done is taken the idea of Jesus and created a false image of him, nothing like the reality, to carry around in their back pocket, or to wave around on signs, and pull out and shove in people’s faces to justify all manner of unChristlike behavior.
It is a “worship” that is fundamentally self-centered rather than deity-centered, wherein the deity in question is more of a pocketbook get-out-of-jail-free card than directive to live by, and more of a status symbol than a guiding light.
That people will, without a shred of self-awareness, rest themselves assured that Jesus would want them to tip their waitress with a Jesus pamphlet made to look like folded-up money (to take only one example out of many) is the ultimate dismissal of everything the original stood for.
There is a line in the Bible about Jesus meeting his false worshipers and saying “I do not know you.” It seems like plenty of so-called Christians have beaten him to the punch with how quick they are to say they don’t know him.
A lot of churches and organizations in America that call themselves Christian churches are in fact Christianist cults. They no more represent Christianity than Daesh represents Islam. In addition to the usual nonsense of so-called Christians being pro-war, anti-immigrant, racist, and so forth, there are a lot of sects/movements that are just completely toxic and not Christian at all, even though they use that label. If you are Christian and want to have some fucking nightmares, google “christian dominionist,” or “prosperity gospel.”
Still think this is the most realistic diagram of the difference between the theological Jesus and the Comfortable Reinterpretation of Jesus.
American Christianity is, at this point, like the Cult of the Emperor in ancient Rome, which is simultaneously both ironic and appropriate given the history involved
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 