In my youth, the more I learned the worse it got.

My entire society was dedicated to destroying everything my life was based on, beginning with my race and my Southern identity.

And they sincerely believed that destroying everything I cared about about the highest morality. They felt that everything I cared about just showed my ignorance, my shallowness, my lack of serious feelings for the Universal Concepts they were dedicated to.

And now I am watching young people in our movement going through exactly this same agonizing process. It took me decades to develop and elephant-thick skin and a a sense of humor that keeps me out of the loony bin.

When I was young I was resentful and I was MEAN. I hope our fellowship on the internet will help that happening to young people now.

This process HURTS. I took almost everything as an insult because so much of it was intended to be insulting.

I was ALONE. The media were dedicated to making me and people like me feel that we were the only people who believed what we believed and who felt what we felt. They made it clear that they were not only the only legitimate view, but they were the ONLY view.

The concept of Political Correctness had not occurred to anybody. Colleges were the seats of Wisdom, universalist, anti-racist, anti-provincial — by which they meant Southern — feelings.

Yes, every nightmare you could imagine is true. Yes, the entire world is run by bigoted fools who think they are sophisticated, educated, and noble. That is a hell of thing for a young person to have to learn straight out of the box.

Yes, we’ve got to learn to live with it. But we must also realize how HARD it is to be an intelligent and perceptive and loyal young person today.

That makes you intolerant. That makes you mean.

I would have given anything for this internet fellowship.

One thing I hate about Europeans is that they take their own particular national feelings very seriously, but they laugh at my being a Southerner. When I was young and I told a Scotsman that it really hurt me to be called a “Yank” he was too wise, he thought, to take that seriously. He had read all the stuff about how silly Southerners were.

I hated his guts for that. I wouldn’t now. But I still think very little of him.

I didn’t hate him because he took HIS identity as a Scot seriously. I admired him for that. But when he then turned around and laughed at MY identity, it was more than a young man could take.

What made me think of this was reading the comment I just answered by Jehovists.

They always start off by insulting me. THEY know their Bible. My ideas are navie and wishful. THEIR ideas are based on reading the Book, which I obviously never did.

THEY take their religion SERIOUSLY. Mine is just superficial.

After saying all that, they give me extensive quotes with which I, a fairly intelligent Bible Belter, was very familiar before most people living today were born.

But the insults have to come first.

THEY have a religion they take seriously. THEY have read the Bible.

Compared to them, they say, I am just an ignorant piddler.

I respect that ranting, Bible-believing “little” preacher out in the sticks. I respect his beliefs, and I don’t care how much education he has.

I respect a European’s dedication to his own identity.

But if you want to turn a potential ally into an enemy fast, tell him how much you know about identity or religion and tell him how REAL and SINCERE your ideas are and how superficial and ignorant HIS feelings and beliefs and knowledge are.

There is a piece of wisdom in the North Carolina saying, “You’re ugly, your feet stick and you don’t love Jesus.”

That saying ridicules people who are not aware that they are assuming that if someone is against them they are evil or insincere or ignorant in every way. Jesus said the same thing: There are people who say you are either with us or you are against, but we — his followers — are not of that sort.

A couple of commenters have used the usual lengthy Biblical quotes to prove that when Jesus spoke of God, he meant Jehovah.

I have a very simple, one-two-three kind of mind.

When I was in the hospital in my youth, the preacher visiting me made the same point twice: the Old Testament gave him a despairing view of God. It was only when he got to Jesus that the weight lifted and the judgmental, cruel and immature view of God was taken away.

The only reason I have the slightest use for Christianity is because of Jesus. I rejected it because of Jehovah.

If Jesus’s only concept of God was the titanic bully of the Old Testament, then I wouldn’t have the slightest interest in him or the slightest respect for him.

So how did I reconcile this?

First of all, I repeat for literally the fortieth time, a) Jesus was speaking in a PARTICULAR society and b) it was not a FREE society.

If Jesus had not concentrated on Jehovah and Moses, how long would he have stayed ALIVE, much less been listened to?

Jesus fulfilled ALL testaments. That is MY interpretation.

You may be a Jehovist if you wish. As I say, MY choice is simply between accepting the realities I know about a person speaking in a particular society and my long experience in dealing with vicious restraints on free speech, or simply rejecting Christ entirely.

Every word you quote sounds like a man staying alive and proving he was the fulfillmentof the PARTICULAR testament of that society.

He did NOT say, “I am the fulfillment of that one, TOO.” They would have stoned him or at least silenced him.

The words Jesus used to deliver his message in the society he was in have been used to take attention away from him and to spend time concentrating on the Old Testament.

That is choice I have. I would take Odinism, the faith of MY fathers, over the Old Testament in a split second if it were a choice between two old concepts of God.

What justifies the “Christian” obsession with the Old Testament — the Book of those who crucified Jesus — are the word he HAD to say: that he came not to destroy it but to fulfill it.

He also said Caesar’s property was sacred. But comehow nobody gets obsessed with THAT idea, though that is a direct quote, too.

Jesus could not say, “I come to supplant the old ideas.” He had to say “I come to fulfill it, totally and completely.”

Just try to imagine what would have happened if Jesus had said, “I come to supplant the old ideas.”

Please, just try to imagine it.

Jesus also said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

That was used by many a secular authority to prove that Jesus demanded obedience to any tyranny.
Do you REALLY think Jesus said that in defense of Caesar’s property?

Jesus didn’t care about Caesar’s property, but he was NOT in a free society.

Jesus was not in a free society.

Jesus was not in a free society.

Jesus was in a PARTICULAR society. He spoke the language of that society. He spoke in the TERMS of that society.

Once again, please try to imagine what would have happened if he said EXACTLY what he meant.

When you do that, his words look ENTIRELY different to you. It gets your nose out of the Old Testament and makes you look to Jesus.

Or you can believe that the bully Jehovah was the Father Jesus was actually describing. I sure can’t do that. But I also can’t believe that Jesus was saying that he was just as interested in protecting Caesar’s property as he was in God’s property, our souls.

You have to decide one or the other. If every word Jesus spoke was exactly what he meant and his objective view in a free society, then all state property is holy and the Old Testament is holy.

You are free to believe that, and I’ll fight for your right to believe it.

You are also free to worship trees.

What I am saying is my opinion, nothing more. But don’t assume I haven’t READ all the words you quote.