One thing that is unique about Jesus seems to be the fact that He took it for granted that His words would be misinterpreted: “Not all that call me Lord, Lord will be saved.” This also seems to be the basis of His parable about the wedding guests..
In short, the concept of Wordism was not alien to Him.
He was a fully-fledged and recognized educator for His time and place but He did not stay inside the Temple. He went out to explain things to the people. As I understand it, He is the first religious leader to be referred to as rabbi , teacher, in the Bible.
The later the book of the Bible, the more it seems to have a hatred of women, an inheritance from degenerate Zoroastrianism, in it.
If the terminology were political rather than religious, we would call Jesus a Populist.
Those who wrote about Christian theology never noticed the giant chasm between Paul and Jesus. Brown made a great thing of this revelation in “The DaVinci Code.”
Paul made being anti-women a major part of his Christianity Jesus did nothing of the sort, but it is always assumed, through Paul, that Jesus rejected women, especially sex with them. There was never any questioning of the fact that Peter, whom the Roman Church claims as the first Pope, was declared the first Pope by Jesus in the full knowledge that he was married.
This is easy because we aren’t comfortable with the idea of the Christ having carnal relations with a woman, in exactly the same way that we did not dwell on the fact that our own parents coupled.
Non-theological Wordists tend be automatic atheists, because to them words are everything, and the churches today are very different from Christ. But if you recognize THEIR religion, their Wordism, as merely the product of the same kind of Wordism that separates Jesus from the institutions that have evolved using his name, you don’t need to reject the faith.
Those who think they are too sophisticated for religion are, as usual with people who think of themselves as ”intellectuals,” just being childish.
The fact is that a much higher percentage of people in quantum physics are practicing Catholics and Baptists than of people who claim they are “social scientists” and claim that “science” makes them atheists.
As usual, Mommy Professor is being childish.
I am NOT recommending religion to you.
I am pointing out that if you do not understand Mantra Thinking, as in the case of Wordism, you have absolutely no way to separate what should be the obvious evolution of institutions from an absolute reliance on a set of words.
#1 by Dave on 10/14/2011 - 10:30 am
Wordism is being blinded by raw facts instead of understanding them.
Wordism is understanding raw facts and remaining impotent.
Wordism is self-deception about the manifold ways people are shoehorned into manifold forms of unrecognized bondage.
There is no escape anyone can RUN AFTER.
Nevertheless, it may be possible to discover an escape. An escape perhaps a teacher and his students can discover together.
#2 by BGLass on 10/14/2011 - 11:17 am
But if you say all that, people will just say you’re a southern protestant. Still, I would recommend religions, b/c what is the alternative?— and the godless religion of atheist materialism is just not that interesting. Once you take in what Marx did to german idealism and the dialectic model of history (reaching to the Gods), and how he “turned hegel on his head” then you’re left with race-baiting and “class oppression” rhetoric. Nagging to get stuff becomes all life is, really (and listening to other people nagging to get stuff and having some job that is somehow connected to nagging to get stuff).
Not only that, but absolutely every single mind in the world must be focussed this way.
It’s like living with Woody Allen’s mother.
Just noticed how “problem-reaction-solution” rhetoric is frequently picked up in “conspiracy theory” jargon (as showing how ‘evil government’ sets up problems, then uses the setup to introduce a reaction, then solution. In turn, this is connected to hegelian dialectic.
Marxist Dialectic (“Dialectical Materialism) is never the cause of this.
The idea of Dialectic (action, reaction, synthesis// problem-reaction-solution) as a way history moves is much older philosophically— but no one ever points this out, and it is always hegelian dialectic.
Dialectic, meantime, was Marx’s big thing.
It’s a backdoor way of blaming germans for everything, imo.
(and anyway what does it even mean? is it really rocket science for people to understand they are actually living in an interactive world, lol. And note— this (seeing interactively) is seen as “unsophisticated” as CRASS. Only crass people notice cause-and-effect reality, supposedly.
It is very strange that noticing the world around you is said by academics to be a sign of stupidity and insensitivity, if you think about it.
#3 by Trager Smith on 10/15/2011 - 12:44 pm
It’s just as well that the Jesus story is mostly bogus. The historical Jesus was an oversocialized Jew who failed to realize the uses of hypocrisy and so railed against the Jewish establishment that the Jews do what rent-seekers do everywhere, get the government (Romans) to suppress the competition. After he died, some of his followers snatched his body to ensure it had a proper Jewish burial in an “ossuary” (bone box). (Read The Jesus Family Tomb for an exciting account how the bone box was found.) His followers got caught and made up a cover story that he rose from the dead. Mark spent about thirty YEARS writing up a narrative, in which he had Jesus fulfill prophecies from the Old Testament and had Jesus shown to be better than Odyssesus by constructing numerous dense and sequential passages that parallel Homer. (Read The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark for a scholarly treatment.)
I say this is just as well, for what the New Testament is all about is that God finally got fed up with the Jews for good and, this time, would destroy Heaven and Earth (but not Hell, which is the NT’s major contribution to theology) and would not be talked out of it by Noah or Moses.
God got fed up, since Isaiah and the other prophets foretold that the united monarchy under King David would be restored. Some of the other prophets focused on the misdeeds of Israel and others on Judah, so bad that God withdrew his protection. The proviso was that the Jews would behave themselves. After about nine centuries, they never did.
God came to hate the humans he created in his own image. He sent Jesus to offer those who would abandon their most human characteristic (reason) and accept the offer on “faith,” an idea not found in the Old Testament.
Some offer!
The chief problem with God is that he is a liberal, meaning someone who constantly overestimates what men will deliver. You would think that God would learn from history and specifically that the Chosen People are the most stupid people on earth for repeatedly falling back into sin. But he didn’t and didn’t renegotiate the covenant and soften its terms. (What the Jews’ persistent attraction to Baal is, the Bible doesn’t say.) This happened seven times in the Old Testament (Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, I forget the others).
You see, Bob, I reread the whole Bible last year (King James of course, this time with the Apocrypha) and pushed aside all the theological overlay that tries to smooth over the manifest fact that God can get confused, change his mind, lose his temper (he does this big time), and clueless. Read _God: A Biography_!!)
Reading what’s right in front of you is the hardest thing of all to do.
So who cares if Paul distorted Jesus’ teaching, esp. those he never made? Paul knew very little about the Jesus of the New Testament, because Mark hadn’t constructed it yet.
You are correct that Jesus wasn’t a wordist, I mean the historical one. (You are right that “rabbi” is first found in the New Testament. The underlying Greek word is also translated as “master.” It derives from a Hebrew root word “rab” meaning “abundant (in quantity, size, age, number, rank, quality”
It gets used a huge number of times in the OT in many different senses, only one of which only elder or master have much to do with what we think of as a rabbi.
KJV – (in) abound (-undance, -ant, -antly), captain, elder, enough, exceedingly, full, great (-ly, man, one), increase, long (enough, [time]), (do, have) many (-ifold, things, a time), ([ship-]) master, mighty, more, (too, very) much, multiply (-tude), officer, often [-times], plenteous, populous, prince, process [of time], suffice (-lent).
Well, our words get translated into a whole flock of words in a Semitic language.
What all this has to do with race is beyond me. The historical Jesus was a Jewish parochialist. He just didn’t like the rabbis of his day. But both Mark and Paul were big time universalists. This universalism got going in Isaiah’s day. The LORD told him that those who obeyed his commandments, irregardless of their parentage, would get his protection.
(For a while, after King Cyrus of Persia let the Jews come back and rebuild Solomon’s temple, they became exclusivist (racist, if you will) and conveniently found passages in the books of Moses that supported them. I need to know more about this.)
The only real reason some of us babble about “restoring” Christianity is because it is an alternative wordism to Left Creationism, which is the belief that once men arose biology was replaced with culture, as though man was created afresh. Left Creationists want to destroy the competing Right Creationism.
Christianity, I mean what Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Paul, and the rest of the gang wrote, is ineradically universalist.
#4 by shari on 10/14/2011 - 12:46 pm
I term I’ve heard used by some marxist academics is “faith community.” It is a mushy PC soup, I think. Effeminate! Or as Flannery O’Conner put it, the church of Jesus Christ, without Jesus Christ. I would describe it as the broad way.
#5 by Roderick on 10/14/2011 - 6:45 pm
Wordism: “My words are better then your words.”
#6 by OldBlighty on 10/15/2011 - 1:17 am
As usual with people who think of themselves as ”intellectuals,” they are just being childish.”
Pay no attention to that Mommy Professor behind the curtain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyCCJ6B2WE
#7 by Bob on 10/15/2011 - 5:56 pm
I am not recommending religion.
I am not recommending religion.
I am not recommending religion.
I am not recommending religion.
I am not recommending religion.
I am not recommending religion.
#8 by Bob on 10/15/2011 - 7:38 pm
Actually, the fundamental Christian churches are becoming all-out for interracial marriage, from what I can see.
That is easy when out start out Wordist.