The power of Christ is paradoxically his weakness. It is his love and care for the lowly, his relentless compassion and refusal to stop even at threat of death. It is known and has been experienced throughout the ages, that when such love is witnessed, there is always someone wanting stamp it out. However, people who witness the love are infected by it and it spreads – not without the same or similar malevolent opposition, but it goes on, quietly, discreetly. That is why Christians are told to take up their cross, because this opposition is always there, even inside the church.
People are Christian to extent that they fulfill the same vision whether or not they call themselves Christians. It was a mistake of Protestantism to devalue the saints who represent people realizing this in their lives. Virtue is not a concept it’s a person.
Today’s culture wants to find the hero’s flaws and bring him down. The only thing standing between the hero and the leveling process is divine power. Plato explicates this in the dialogues.
Jesus was not weak…what was weak about Jesus? he was intelligent, healthy, good-looking, disciplined, eloquent, evoked authority of his teachings by his impeccable life and thus reputation, had followers and social circles that he could lean on if he wanted to defend himself but did not do it because his mission was greater and its part was to allow himself to be killed for a sacrifice to occur to give mankind another chance at redemption… Jesus was a strong person, an intelligent person and could be a very powerful person and could have easily avoided his death… Jesuses life is a moral lesson to every Christian and the teachings of his apostles(teaching what he taught them); not some hippie love, some celebration of weakness, insanity and meekness, some death-wish, some masochistic kink or anything else, not even that every person has the duty to be like Jesus and carry his cross. I dont know what churched you go to but I never heard a priest say that we carry Jesuses cross…we carry our own crosses like he did.
Christianity is not some racket to sweep up the drunks and homeless from the train station and put them into heaven…When Jesus says:
he is not saying it is being rich that is the problem, but that it is hard to be a rich person and not do shitty things constantly and submit to ruthless greed on regular basis and that is the problem, not being rich per se.
and when we take the context of the above:
we do not have a recommendation to sell all your possessions and give them to the poor but a specific recommendation to a rich person asking what A PERFECT CHRISTIAN ought to do(a self-less Saint etc.)…he is not saying you must be poor or sell everything to go to Heaven, but that an ideal path of a Christian is a selfless path of charity and empathy.
That, he did do, and quite well. But only because the wealth disparity and class division in the Roman empire was so expressed that even an idiot would have taken notice of it. So his ‘wisdom’ is nothing unique.
It’s what he did, if anything, that is noted by the those who wrote the text. And sure, from a perspective, it could be argued that what he did was good. From another perspective it could be argued that he didn’t do enough. From yet another, that he couldn’t do anything more, etc.
“but that it is hard to be a rich person and not do shitty things constantly and submit to ruthless greed on regular basis and that is the problem”
Excellent observation, Watson. This is precisely the prob with cAPiTalISm. In order for it to work, an employer must pay his employee less than the value of his labor, while an employee must, and does, threaten to quit if he isn’t given a raise. The set up is naturally in conflict and at odds, but this peculiar condition is not necessary for an economy to function well. While it continues to exist, it creates that unnecessary stress for both parties and they begin to try and deceive each other and get one-up. Labor unions fighting against shipyards, etc. Really, is all that necessary?
Now there’s a difference between healthy, necessary competition in the market, and tedious, unnecessary fighting that is ugly and brings all professionals to the level of plebeian squabblers. I have experienced this ugliness in my career working for nearly a hundred different builders and contractors. The stupid little tricks, on both sides, are just insulting to anyone with a modicum of respect and professionalism.
That is the teaching of your church no doubt. However, if you do as Christ did, “in lowliness of mind”, taking upon oneself the “form of a servant”, “humbling oneself” and “obedient unto death”, there is no getting around it, you realise he took the lower path, with all of the abuse that can come your way. Only, people today have too much self-esteem, too much “strife and vainglory”, and therefore their hero must be “strong and manly”. You can’t imagine that he gave that up, “made himself of no reputation”, and let himself be carried by the love of God.
I’m not so sure he knew what his mission was, only that he knew what God wanted.
Is it any wonder that down through the ages those in power have always welcomed religion to the extent that it can be used to sustain their power by keeping “the people” properly narcotized.
“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”
For example, tell me that, here in America, Trump and the Republican Party haven’t hitched white working class Evangelists to their Wall Street agenda. Unbeknownst to them of course.
Only here at a philosophy venue it can never be that crude. It’s got to be pumped with the sort of intellectual and spiritual “analysis” that makes it all seem to be so much more profound.
Of the two types of suffering of the Christian dogma; the Christian observes all the bad Christians and hipocrits among him and reasons that while this is unfortunate, it does not detract from the goodness of the Christian religion. His suffering of this misfortune is only slight because it is redeemed through the certain goodness of the religion in general. The atheist, on the other hand, suffers the problem in a much worse way. Not only does he see the liars and hipocrits among the other good Christian people, but he must also notice a profound and rather unsettling irony that the former type cannot experience. The suffering here is anything but slight because there is no truth to Christianity to begin with, so you have a doubling of the problem and the suffering therefore.
Knowing that the liars and the hipocrits could be prevented through the elimination of the religion entirely (but never will), and therefore any opportunity to abuse and deceive people with it, in ‘its name’, is a heavy absurdity to carry in one’s heart.
And it hurts me to see such inquisitive and ambitious minds spend so much irreplaceable time thinking about such ballyhoo.
The argument among atheists is whether or not the religion is dangerous. There’s unanimous agreement that it’s a fairy tale, and atheists don’t backtrack to reinvent the wheel, so…
U get varying degrees and levels of dangerousness depending on who u ax. Most leftists still agree that it’s a pacifier and at least prevents some people from being more aggressive in their attitudes toward that wealth disparity. Others think it’s harmless, and might even praise it for being at least able to assist in keeping some social order.
This is not a teaching of anybody’s church, this is how Bible portrays Jesus. Confident, outspoken, intelligent, well-connected, with a following, respected or feared by the various elites, disciplined, healthy, brave…When was Christ portrayed as lowly of mind and in form of a servant in-front of anybody but God himself? Show me one place in the Bible.
your “in lowliness of mind” is taken out of context by you completely, this is the actual context:
In any event, if Jesus Christ and Muhammad and Buddha and all the rest of them didn’t exist those who own and operate the global economy would be fools not to invent them.
Jesus Christ was God “in the flesh”. So, despite all the “existential” events unfolding in the New Testament, all that time Christ is both omniscient and omnipotent.
In other words, all the time He acts out the persona of the “Son of God”, He knows that whatever might unfold between Him and mere mortals and whatever pain and suffering He might endure, it’s an absolute certainty [for Him] that Paradise awaits Him.
Meanwhile for mere mortals it’s all about leaps of faith. We think ourselves into believing that He does exist, but we know that beyond faith itself we cannot go.
So, for any pain and suffering that we endure “for God’s sake”, it’s never more than a wager.
Then the part where there are dozens and dozens of other Gods [or conflicting accounts of the same God] in which the faithful on these paths are wagering that, on the contrary, it’s their God and not yours judging our sins.
And that’s before we get to things like reconciling an omniscient God with free will or [for me] the truly thorny issue of theodicy.
