memes, movies, mind control

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memes, movies, mind control

Postby jc » Thu May 11, 2006 7:34 am

I just wanted to bring a topic to the board re the above. What started this was a discussion led for the most part by Hugh Manatee. <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=3427.topic">p216.ezboard.com/frigorou...3427.topic</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Anyway, reading his posts and comments by others, reminded me of some ideas of my own that I feel are related even though they have nothing to do with mmodern media. <br><br>I'm from a mixed but not rigorous buddhist/catholic background. And growing up I really really loved Jesus (I still do). What I loved about him was his strength, that he sided with the poor and downtrodden, fed them, fended for them and so on. His character basically. <br><br>But the more I read about him, the more I read the Bible, the less I saw in the church that had anything to do with him. This sense of disconnect grew over the years. And the more I looked into things the more convinced I became of the notion that the church had perverted everything he taught. Had perverted the entire essence and meaning of his way and teachings.<br><br>This "revelations" came in pieces over time. First, I think, came the idea that he was not indifferent to Rome. As a child, my own understanding of "Rend unto CaesarÉ" was that "nothing whatsoever belonged to Caesar." His coin was a false coin, a lie. <br><br>Which led to my dismissal of the seperation between the spiritual and the physical, as best exemplefied in the Lutheran doctine of Two Realms. That what is of God and what is of the world were to be seperated. In catholicism in the form of the difference between the Pope and Caesar.<br><br>It was, to my mind, as if I were being told that God had no place in the world. Nor did the example of Jesus.<br><br>Then came the realization on my part that were I to accept the divinity of Jesus then any attempt to follow his example would amount to blasphemy: trying to be like god. Which really frustrated me, cause of you wanted to be good, who better to follow? <br><br>So that idea had to go. Then original sin: the idea that man was inherently sinful, base and incapable of being or becoming good. A hopeless case whose only salvation lay in accepting the sacrifice of the best man ever to walk the earth. Tied into this was the idea that God, would sacrifice Himself in the form of Jesus, to Himself to atone for the sins of men He had created, which basically implied that God had no idea what He was about. <br><br>So that I discarded. Soon I came to equate papal Rome with Caesar's Rome, in that sense I guess I thought along the same lines as the Albigensians and other heretics. But the equation suddenly made perfect sense.<br><br>I looked up, one day, in church, at the cross. And realized that the example that Rome had meant to set by crucifying Jesus was right there! In everyone's face! As a reminder of what happened to the "Son of God" when he dared oppose the powers that be. Talk about a meme for slaves! this is what Hugh's thoughts and the comments of tohers brought back to me.<br><br>And looking at the narratives of ruling elites over time, in Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Pheonicia, wherever, you have to admit that none of this is new. The Nazi's constrcuted their own version of it, so did Stalin and his thugs. And today? Well, we all know about that. <br><br>Anyway, it's early, I'm a bit sick. So I'll leave off here. Jus wanted to put this up and see what y'all thought.<br><br>peace.<br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=3427.topic<br>">p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=3427.topic<br></a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: memes, movies, mind control

Postby sunny » Thu May 11, 2006 8:04 am

<br>_________________________________________________<br>Then came the realization on my part that were I to accept the divinity of Jesus then any attempt to follow his example would amount to blasphemy<br>__________________________________________________<br><br>Dear one, Jesus meant for us to follow his example. He was showing us the way to behave in order to please God, if you are so inclined. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: memes, movies, mind control

Postby snowlion2 » Thu May 11, 2006 11:34 am

I would highly recommend the recently published "What Jesus Meant" by Garry Wills. Very literate and provacative, two requirements to gain access to my "recommended" list. I certainly don't agree with all he postulates, but he does propose that our "historical" portrayal of Jesus has been distorted beyond reality.His editorial from the New York Times, April 9, 2006, reflects the tone of the book:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.<br><br>This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.<br><br>Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.<br><br>But doesn't Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me" (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.<br><br>The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice, appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes.<br><br>To claim that the state's burden of justice, which falls short of the supreme test Jesus imposes, is actually what he wills — that would be to substitute some lesser and false religion for what Jesus brought from the Father. Of course, Christians who do not meet the lower standard of state justice to the poor will, a fortiori, fail to pass the higher test.<br><br>The Romans did not believe Jesus when he said he had no political ambitions. That is why the soldiers mocked him as a failed king, giving him a robe and scepter and bowing in fake obedience (John 19:1-3). Those who today say that they are creating or following a "Christian politics" continue the work of those soldiers, disregarding the words of Jesus that his reign is not of this order.<br><br>Some people want to display and honor the Ten Commandments as a political commitment enjoined by the religion of Jesus. That very act is a violation of the First and Second Commandments. By erecting a false religion — imposing a reign of Jesus in this order — they are worshiping a false god. They commit idolatry. They also take the Lord's name in vain.<br><br>Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan "What would Jesus do?"<br><br>That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him "Satan." He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.<br><br>The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.<br><br>He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine.<br><br>It was blasphemous to say, as the deputy under secretary of defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, repeatedly did, that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide. To trivialize the mystery of Jesus is not to serve the Gospels.<br><br>The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.<br><br>It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.<br><br>Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: "Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah" (Matthew 23:8-10).<br><br>If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O'Connor described as "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus" and "a wild ragged figure" who flits "from tree to tree in the back" of the mind.<br><br>He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.<br><br>The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
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Postby jc » Thu May 11, 2006 9:13 pm

snowlion2,<br><br>i get the point yr tryna make but i have no intention of truning jesus into a dem, or stealing him from the reps, or whatever.<br><br>i haven't voted once in my life cause i've never and still have not seen any diff btw the parties or whatever. personally, i think the whole voting process and parties thing is a sham.<br><br>sunny said: Jesus meant for us to follow his example. He was showing us the way to behave in order to please God, if you are so inclined.<br><br>i agree with that, haven't said anything else, but the church doesn't teach that. and that applies to the caths and the protestants.<br><br>here's part of an article that addresses some of the concerns i had when i read the book and tried to get it to fit with what i was taught as dogma:<br><br>"<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/historical_jesus.html">www.infidels.org/library/...jesus.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>The Apostle Paul<br><br>"There is a disappointing irony in the Apostle Paul as a source for the historical Jesus. Even though Paul did not know Jesus (he was converted to the movement two years after Jesus' crucifixion), his letters to various early Christian communities predate the gospels, making them the earliest testimony of Jesus. Yet Paul never speaks of Jesus' life and very rarely mentions anything that Jesus said. This is because Paul's letters to the various communities he founded are ecclesiastical policy designed to organize the young Church and were not intended to communicate the sayings of Jesus. Since Paul did not know the historical Jesus (and fought with those who did) he is not as helpful to us as we might at first imagine.<br><br>"Jesus' disciples were still alive of course and Paul tells us that three years after his conversion he visited Peter in Jerusalem (the headquarters for the Jesus movement) for fifteen days (Galatians 1:16-19). Paul tells us that he did not seek out any of the other disciples and seems to have had little interest in their perspective of Jesus. In fact, very quickly Paul feuds with other disciples and his theology is questioned by those who follow Peter (1 Corin. 1:12-13).<br><br>"The "Cephas faction" (Peter) that Paul fought followed Mosaic law and insisted on circumcision even for the Gentile converts to the new faith. The fact that Peter is so insistent on this is good evidence that Jesus himself never abandoned the tenets of Judaism. Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians because a serious crisis had arisen in the community there over the conflict between the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem (under James and Peter) and Paul's earlier teaching. Paul tells us that he did not receive any instruction from the disciples in Jerusalem because his gospel from divine revelation was the only true gospel.<br><br>"These various factions that Paul mentions are called "trajectories" by biblical scholars; out of these trajectories emerge different movements which emphasized or understood Jesus' teachings in manners that caused friction between them. In his second letter to the community at Corinth, Paul complains of those "superlative apostles" who preach a different Jesus than the one that he preached to them (2 Corin. 11:4-6). Paul goes on to characterize them as "false apostles" working for Satan (11:12-15). These enemies of Paul were probably the Judaizers (of Philippians 3:2-15) who, if they were not Jesus' disciples, certainly Jewish-Christians in close agreement to the theology of Jesus' disciples in Jerusalem. We must remember that Jesus was a Jew and advocated an adherence to the Law. Unlike Peter and the other disciples in Jerusalem, Paul considers Judaism a regression, a step in the wrong direction (cf. Acts 2:43ff).<br><br>"We must conclude that Paul is of no help to us for understanding the teachings of the historical Jesus. Paul claims to have received his theology, not from Jesus via Jesus' disciples whom he despised, but rather through a direct revelation with a Risen Christ. Paul's understanding of Jesus' teaching received from this revelation seems to be in sharp disagreement with the understanding and practices of Jesus' own disciples in Jerusalem."<br><br>As i saw and still see it there's (1) the teachings of Jesus, James, the Apostles, the church/synagogue of Jerusalem, and (2) the "born again xtian" stuuf propagated by Paul.<br><br>two distinct and entirely different teachings. <br><br>the article posted above by snowlion2 pretty much represents Paul. it entails, fx, that "usury/interest is ok, there is no law." which to anyone who's familiar with the life of Jesus and his Apostles, and takes these seriously, would know is false.<br><br>i can't imagine Jeus saying, "usury is forbidden, but only in some other realm. here's it's ok." <br><br>no, he threw money changers out of the temple. he said, "my reign os not of this order," but he did not say the law is not of this order. he upheld it. the apostles upheld it. the only one to go against this was Paul. and from Paul the church: cath, prot, methodist, whatever.<br><br>the cathars on the other handÉ and the desert fathers. they stuck to the law.<br> <p></p><i></i>
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Postby jc » Thu May 11, 2006 9:16 pm

oh, and though willis writes that:<br><br>"The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair."<br><br>all i can say is that's exactly what he does, what the church does.<br> <p></p><i></i>
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Postby jc » Thu May 11, 2006 9:22 pm

there's of course this, which i read in the middle of it all, when iwas about 22:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.fns.org.uk/ac.htm">www.fns.org.uk/ac.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth! . . . Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour." . . . Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity . . . The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence--in the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means. --What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.--What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. <p></p><i></i>
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Postby jc » Thu May 11, 2006 9:42 pm

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/paul/paul.htm">www.sullivan-county.com/n...l/paul.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Jesus was not the founder of Christianity as we know it today. Most of the New Testament doesn't even concern the historical Jesus while the main influence is the Apostle Paul and through the church he founded at Ephesus a Greek convert named John. Paul never met Jesus in the flesh, he only claimed some strange vision and proceeded to paganize the teachings of Jesus (who preached an enlightened form of Judaism), until he created Pauline Christianity. Because there are no known writings from Jesus, the actual Apostles, or anyone that actually knew Him in the flesh (other then perhaps James), most of what He taught is lost foreverÉ<br><br>Paul's self-assessment is closer to the historical truth, which is that he was the founder of Christianity. Neither Jesus himself nor his disciples had any intention of founding a new religion. The need for a semblance of continuity between Christianity and Judaism, and between Gentile and Jewish Christianity, led to a playing-down of Paul's creative role. The split that took place between Paul and the Jerusalem Church is minimized in the Paulinist book of Acts, which contrasts with Paul's earlier and more authentic account in Galatians 2.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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