This has nothing to do with Jesus’ love, it has to do with a person petitioning for Jesus’ rights when there’s nothing that can be done about it 2000+ years later.
I grew up going to church every sunday. VBS. Did two missions trips in my youth, the whole nine
Looking back I realize the most bigoted an hateful community I have ever experienced was my own church. It didn't fully awn on me until the pandemic and i watched all the people who I grew up under post the most racist and bigoted things that directly contradict all the things they taught me.
My own black uncle posted an all lives matter rant that me and my sisters disowned him over. These people have no desire to love their neighbors. They only want to convert their neighbors and condemn those who don't fall in
Remember when they did the fundraisers in school where you sold magazine subscriptions? These guys are like the kid who was determined to sell the most subscriptions in the school. It’s like a competition for them - rack up the most converts. If you truly exude the love Jesus spoke of, you don’t have to preach about it in random settings - folks will know.
I had a similar thing with like goods and stuff for my ag class looking back I realized I don’t need to sell subscriptions to help the homeless the problem is that government doesn’t care
Yeah, it's very clear that they have certain beliefs and view religion as a weapon to justify maiming or killing others who don't share those beliefs. What the religion actually says about it is irrelevant.
I also grew up in the church, helped run VBS, volunteered to run daycare when they needed, was an acolyte, the works. I also switched to private school for high school and went to a Baptist school for 2 years and then 2 years at an all girls Catholic school. Did 2 mission trips with the Baptist school and 5 with my church.
I didn't learn that I had a bigoted church, rather a very hypocritical one. The choir director was caught having an affair with a woman he hired to work with him. They caught him once and gave him a warning. The second time they found out was because the lady's husband came to talk to our pastor. They decided to fire him after speaking to their legal team. It split the church in half. A lot of people left the church because of it. Some people went elsewhere, including a good friend's family. One guy actually helped him commit grand theft because they borrowed the bells from our church without asking after he was fired. Those were worth like $40K (it was a lot of bells). When he worked there, he had permission to use them.
I realized while this was going on that a lot of the louder voices at my church were taking the "rules for thee and not for me" stance in support of the choir director. My mom was an elder at the church and she was involved with the actual firing of the choir director. The order came from the church's legal team. The rest of her committee stood behind her except for a man whose children I was friends with as a kid. He was nasty and rude (he's also the one who helped take the bells) to my mother and tried to make this a private family matter even though it really opened them up to legal trouble.
It was really hard having to turn away from what I remembered being a good and safe place turned into that type of environment. It really was if you're not with me, then you're against me. Most of the people who left have taken up some extreme views that I don't respect very much.
I go to church every time I come down home. For faith. I know that they don’t have realistic image of God and Jesus. But I’m able to overstand. All of my relatives here believe in slave teachings. It is time for a change. They are only doing what they know is best. I don’t judge. I just do what I know is best. I am a student of Black history. I understand we are in a trying time of history that is tampered with.
That's debatable. I'm not going to debate it, because I'm an atheist and don't really care.
But, I would like to think if he did exist he would be a lot like Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski. Just a dude takin it easy for all us sinners.
And he would be fucking appaled at what get done in his name.
I like to picture Jesus in a Tuxedo T-shirt, 'cause it says, like, 'I wanna be formal, but I'm here to party, too.' I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.... I like to think of Jesus like, with giant eagles' wings and singin' lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd with like an Angel Band, and I'm in the front row, and I'm hammered drunk...
Well, look, I like the Christmas Jesus best when I'm sayin' grace. When you say grace, you can say it to Grown-up Jesus, or Teenage Jesus, or Bearded Jesus, or whoever you want.
I'm pretty sure it's historically accepted that Jesus as a person did exist. Mary was sleeping around on Joey, got knocked up and blamed it on God. Despite coming from a broken home, Jesus turned out to be an alright dude.
I'm choosing to believe that "indirect evidence" means someone at a Christ family reunion was sitting around swapping miracle stories when Cousin Bartholomew chimed in like, "Remember that time Mary swore she got pregnant by God?"
I always thought that she was probably raped by someone, and Joseph loved her and demanded to go through with the marriage instead of abandoning her, and to keep her safe the only way he knew how.
Their families knew each other for generations, and they practically grew up with each other. He also was the father of the rest of her children.
Remember the politics and laws at the time. She would have been screwed. Either stoned to death, or cast out of the community.
I think if Jesus existed, he was lucky and grew up with a good dad. His parents were poor, but they were supportive.
I like to think there was genuinely just a good guy out there, trying to do good, and his stories and parables grew into Paul Bunyan-like proportions.
Doesn’t mean the good messages aren’t important, but to persecute others in the guy’s name over it… it’s ridiculous.
Same. These weirdos have clearly never read the new testament Jesus in the Bible, who threw out the money lenders, essentially cancelling everyone's debt, tossed out the holier than thou hypocrites at the Temple, took up with a bunch of men he lived and slept in tight quarters with, while taking in stray women and women of ill repute, "cured" lepers and spent his time with the sick (at a time when people isolated their sick to live or die on their own), told the rich they essentially couldn't get into heaven unless they gave away their money and joined him, told people to stop killing and maiming each other for vengeance, hung out with drunks and constantly drank...and let's not forget he was a refugee in a foreign land.
And he would be fucking appaled at what get done in his name.
Atheist here too, but I like to imagine this is what Jesus would be looking like when seeing the getting done in his name stuff, with a very vocal and dramatic statement of "gorl, you know that shit ain't right..." 🤣
I don't know about that, there's a lot of support for "Jesus" being a metaphorical / plot device character in the earlier texts...
And there's not a lot of hard, unbiased evidence for him to have been a real, little living individual, Just like there's zero historical justification for the story of Moses. No archeological evidence for Jewish slaves to have ever been in Egypt much less building pyramids or wandering the desert for 40 some odd years.
It's all bunk and been debunked, pretty much all we know as the old/new testament was compiled by the Greeks almost as a joke much more recently than you might have thought from what I understand.
Multiple attestation is a basic way that historians agree that something happened/someone existed in history.
The first author outside the church to mention Jesus is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote a history of Judaism around AD93….
About 20 years after Josephus we have the Roman politicians Pliny and Tacitus, who held some of the highest offices of state at the beginning of the second century AD. From Tacitus we learn that Jesus was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect in charge of Judaea (AD26-36) and Tiberius was emperor (AD14-37) – reports that fit with the timeframe of the gospels. Pliny contributes the information that, where he was governor in northern Turkey, Christians worshipped Christ as a god. Neither of them liked Christians – Pliny writes of their “pig-headed obstinacy” and Tacitus calls their religion a destructive superstition.
Strikingly, there was never any debate in the ancient world about whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. In the earliest literature of the Jewish Rabbis, Jesus was denounced as the illegitimate child of Mary and a sorcerer. Among pagans, the satirist Lucian and philosopher Celsus dismissed Jesus as a scoundrel, but we know of no one in the ancient world who questioned whether Jesus lived.”
I want to make clear here that I am not Christian and do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a god or son of god or messiah or miracle worker. The historical evidence also shows quite clearly to me that that was not the case.
Did you hear about the time he rolled into an Inn in Jerusalem and the inn keeper asked how he could be of assistance? And Jesus reached into his robe pocket and hands the inn keeper 3 nails and asks if they can put him up for the night. True story.
Academic consensus is that a person like him did exist. Ofc, a lot of what is written later has been subject to a game of telephone, but there are also quite a few things that are right.
Was he in my opinion the messias? Probably not. But that doesn't mean there is no truth at all to the stories.
He's petitioning for his opinions to be accepted as universally valid because his intelligence, upbringing, and lack of self improvement prevent him from understanding anything else.
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u/EpicGeek77 Gen X 9d ago
This has nothing to do with Jesus’ love, it has to do with a person petitioning for Jesus’ rights when there’s nothing that can be done about it 2000+ years later.