After Jesus performed the miracle of loaves and fishes, the crowds returned asking for more loaves and fishes. He told them they were wrong.
When Christ came back, Saint Thomas, the original Doubting Thomas, wanted PROOF. He had to thrust his hand into Christ’s wounded side to PROVE it was Jesus.
Jesus told Thomas he was wrong.
The pagan religions, including the Old Testament, concentrated on THIS world. God punished the Israelites in the here and now.
So did Odin.
Romans actually wrote CONTRACTS with their gods.
Jesus offered NOTHING in this world. He did not promise to be the Prince of Peace. He said he brought war. He did not offer to make anybody healthy, wealthy or wise in the ways of THIS world.
When it replaced paganism, the Church had to find a replacement for the old gods, the gods of THIS world. You prayed to a particular saint if you had a particular disease, exactly as you had once prayed to a particular god to take care of your worldly ailments before Christianity arrived.
Ancient philosophers always sought some kind of Natural Perfection. So Galen built a General Theory of Medicine. The body needed its NATURAL perfect balance of humors, which Galen apparently took for granted. You bled someone to restore the Natural Balance.
All this has come down to us in a confused babble.
To most church-goers God is a complete formula. He has a Plan for this world. There is a natural balance you can find in the Bible to do what all the old pagan gods did. Cosmology is in the Bible. This version of God can’t fit into a world with Creation.
God, we are told, has A Plan for THIS world. God will make you healthy, wealthy and wise in the ways of THIS world.
Every one of the old fake Patent medicines had eye-witness testimony of how it had changed lives and made the world good for people who testified to it. True Religion must make people healthy, wealthy and wise, and we hear endless testimony of how True Faith makes you healthy, wealthy and wise in the ways of THIS world.
I don’t believe a word of it.
His Kingdom is not of this world.
#1 by Jimbo on 06/12/2005 - 7:29 pm
Bob,
When Christ said “My kingdom is not of this world” he didn’t mean that it doesn’t reach into it and impact it. He meant that it wasn’t achieved by the ways of men; politics, wars, etc. It begins in the heart of the individual works its way outward to direct families, nations, and whole civilizations.
It means living with what you refer to as “moral courage”, which comes from a standard outside of and beyond the “ways of this world”, which are based on lies and illusion, and demands an allegience to that higher order. At heart is a call to face reality, and not live under the illusion that we are more or less than we are.
When the “apostle” Paul wrote that Christians were ambassadors of this Kingdom (ambassador is what the word apostle means), he was making a plain point. Christians represent the Kingdom they belong to in exactly the same way the ambassador of Spain, for example, represents the interests of Spain in the country he is sent to.
Science as you describe it comes from this understanding of the Kingdom, of man’s inherent limitations, and of the reality of a truth that can be discovered and known. The Christians focus on dealing with reality is what is behind wanting the FACTS.
“Christians” who deny or avoid reality are denying their faith. But facts are not enough in themselves, and must fit into a higher order of reality, or nothing has any real meaning. The goal of true religion is to understand and explain that higher order, and commitment to reality demands that it conform to facts and not fantasy.
Religion must also guide people in the things that are not immediately apparent to them. Most people can handle day to day things. But most can’t see consequences far beyond their noses. The surest sign that a religion has become a con game is when it promotes the long term destruction of the people it was meant to serve.
When it promotes race-mixing, it is denying its very foundation. It has become a con. It has become evil.
#2 by Bob on 06/12/2005 - 9:45 pm
Jimbo has provided a complete explanation of what I do NOT believe.
I do not believe that Jesus came here to change the world order.
“What profits it a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
The problem for modern Christians is that they are afraid of being labelled as a part of those who kept looking for the end of the world. Jesus Himself told His diciples to go out and say the world was at an end. Instead of covering it up, the New Testament records it. The New Testament was not interested in INTERPRETING what Christ said, it was interested in what Christ actually SAID.
CS Lewis makes the point clear: Jesus was God, or He was a madman.”
My opinion is relevant to understanding where I am coming from, not to Final Religious Truth.
If you follow Christ, you are either right or you are wrong. Those who make their living on religion are today trying to show that Christianiy is part of all religions. They say all religions should lean on each other.
In my opinion, Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead for their immortal souls, each of which is more important than all of world history, or Christianity is absurd. There is no New World Order in this.
There is no wiggle room. There is no “relevance.”
Christ is God or He was a madman.
#3 by Jimbo on 06/13/2005 - 12:20 am
Bob,
You are correct that the eternal consequences outweigh the temporal ones in God’s plan. That is not my point here. It is really very simple.
The Kingdom of God is not of this world. It is has its basis in the eternal God who manifested himself to us in the person of Christ.
“Of this world” means of the corrupted world that we live in. The world corrupted through sin, man’s willful rebellion against God’s perfect law (which is REALITY). This world is set up on the illusion that man has something better to do than serve God, which is what he was created for.
Hunting dogs are made to hunt. If they aren’t doing that, they aren’t fulfilling their purpose, and aren’t complete. Unless men are serving God, which is what they are made to do, they aren’t fulfilling their purpose. So they live in the illusion that they can be something great, or noble or powerful of their own strength, or they live in dejected resignation, or just plain fall to the level of subsistence.
Men were made to run the world. Just like a good plantation. But we goofed it up, and now have the consequences, which are what Christ came to save us from. He came to realign our allegience to what is right and true and good, namely, to come back to reality from our illusions, to bring us back to our purpose. We then become like a finely tuned engine, hitting on all cylinders.
This is why science began to flourish under the church. It was NOT hindered by the church, but pushed forward by it. The Reformation unleashed an even greater advance in technology by breaking up the calcification of the Roman bureacracy and by its insistence on every man being educated and fulfilling his calling.
That change manifests itself HERE ON EARTH. That is not the end of everything, but we must “bear fruit” so that we become known for what we are HERE ON EARTH. Eternal life is not in the future, but HERE AND NOW. It begins “this day” as the apostle Paul announced. It is not just some pie in the sky bye and bye.
You have already shown how C.S. Lewis dealt with the problem of predestination by pointing out that God lives outside of time. Time exists for us to have a chance to get it right. It is an aspect of God’s great mercy. It is God slowing things down for us to have a chance.
The “end of the world” had arrived with Christ. The end of the hopelessness of man’s state. It was all over but the shouting, as they say. Not the end of the physical earth, but of the reign of sin and illusion over reality.
Ultimately, it all comes down to being with Christ or against Christ. Just as it comes down to being for the white race or against the white race. There is no conflict between the two. Our duty as Christians is to fight for our people. We were made to do that.
#4 by Elizabeth on 06/13/2005 - 7:39 pm
If you believe this world is corrupt, that physical creation is corrupt, you are not a Christian, you are a Manichean. This is the same kind of thinking that is prevalent in some of the religions of Southern and Southeastern Asia.
The Reformation actually led to _more_ repression. In Catholic countries, boys who didn’t come from the high nobility could rule countries by advising kings and emperors. In Protestant countries, boys who didn’t come from powerful families could only advance if they caught the eye of someone powerful. Sometimes, that was literally under the Protestant monarch — James I of England, for example. In Catholic countries, girls could get educated. In Protestant countries, until the 1800s, if a Protestant girl got an education, it was usually because either her parents could afford tutors or because her parents sent her to a convent to be educated. In Catholic countries, if a family had a little money, they could put their daughter in a convent and ensure her a career, which was an alternative to the deadly risk of childbirth. (Childbirth was so deadly until early in the 1900s that more than 50% of all women, no matter their class or country, died either in childbirth or due to complications of childbirth.)
Elizabeth
#5 by Trager Smith on 06/18/2005 - 7:20 am
The New Testament not meant to INTERPRET what Christ said? But that’s what St. Paul’s letters are all about. As a typical zhid, he was obsessed with Jewish/Gentile issues, such as whether Jewish converts no longer had to obey Old Testament law, whether Gentile converts had to get circumcised and whether the abrogation of OT laws about sex meant they could enjoy pagan practices. “God forbid,” said Paul. In fact, a big hunk of the NT is devoted to squashing “heresies” that were already emerging. And remember the books that got put into the canon are those what conformed to “orthodoxy,” though the alternative Gospels (the only ones I am familiar with) are hopelessly inferior from a literary point of view.