I suppose it won't come as news to anyone that much-beloved storybook character Jesus "Kinch" Christ was totally bonkers, a charismatic cultist who obliged his equally nutty followers to give up all their earthly possessions, abandon their families and homes, and join him on the mothership trailing in the icy tail on the lee side of the Hale-Bopp comet. He Himself couldn't quite make up his mind what he stood for. He spent half his time helping whores and the homeless find their Body Thetans, tying daisy chains for his hair, and singing Peter Paul & Mary numbers, and the other half haranguing his groupies for the insufficient commitment to divisiveness and spiritual violence:
Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. [Matthew: 32-36]Yo that shit's crazy yo! So then I read Jim Wallis, a latter-day, leftische huckster of the Good News, following up on a spat with notorious root vegetable Glenn Beck, opining that
Jesus said that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. So whatever Beck does, Christians who want to follow Jesus should not personally attack Beck but, rather, should pray for him, for the poor and for our country, which is being harmed by an increasingly poisonous public discourse.Well, it's true that Jesus said that, sort of, but he also said that he would, you know, deny those fuckers their place in heaven, that not only would he fail to intercede on their behalf with Sky Dad, but that he would, literally Joe Biden, cast them into an eternal torture chamber where they'd be consumed "body and soul." Speaking of poisonous discourse. So all that turn-the-other-cheek shit, that was basically Diamond J telling his boiieeeze not to pop a nigga and bring the heat but don't worry son I got your back you know what I'm sayin? Can't just be a brawler gotta be smart, son. Aight?
I mean, pray for Glenn Beck? Pray for him to what? To die? To molt that obviously painful exoskeleton and free his constricted thorax? To finally lose his virginity? What the fuck is praying going to do? Shit, Wallis, you better pray that Fox cancels his goddamn contract, because that's the only thing that's going to shut him up. Oh, what, wait, you thought his shit is for real? Brother, you Christians will believe anything.
43 comments:
Kill em all: let Glenn Beck sort em out.
Some of your funniest writing yet, particularly the J-Man characterization. But, it's an oversimplification and/or willful misinterpretation of the red text an shit.
God doesn't, exist--okay. No such thing as the other firmaments, nor a Jew zombie king with whom we ought to have mindsex morning, noon, and night, nor souls, nor immutable, external moral values--fine. But the "I came not to send peace, but a sword" shit isn't as crazy as it seems: it compels Christians to give their allegiance not to particular loves, but to love, truth, and justice, generally, supposedly incarnate in the Homey himself. Wait. That's pretty crazy. And does imply that whole non-contingent value system.
And wanting people not to hate makes one less hateful, that's all I can get out of the prayer stuff.
Yeah, Luke 14:26, RC. Hard to see that as anything other than the words of a cult leader.
Saturday, IOZ, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means that you don't work, you don't get in a car, you don't fucking ride in a car, you don't pick up the phone, you don't turn on the oven, and you sure as shit don't fucking blawg! Shomer shabbos!
Right because IOZ keeps kosher.
lulz ... we is all atheists now
"Now it's the dictator who's style is greater
It's the man with more wild flavors than motherfuckin' Now & Laters
And rappers I hit 'em well
They automatically go to heaven fuckin' with me cause I give 'em hell
So don't try to front troop
When your style is played out just like an Oshkosh jumpsuit."
Well, there is also the whole "I did not come to change the Torah but to fulfill the Torah" stuff there.
Christianity IS judaic sect, what do you expect?
Rainbow unicorns?
Capt'n Obvious
Christianity is a Judaic sect, what you be expecting?
Rainbow Unicorns?
Capt'n Obvious
I'd say you're misunderstanding the text. The author of the Gospel is just saying that Christianity is dialectical, that the New Testament turns the Law of Moses on its head. He's not proposing that people cut their daddies and mommies into little bite-sized pieces.
I'm eating a communion wafer in honor of this post!
that the New Testament turns the Law of Moses on its head…
Not one tittle, dude. Nor a jot. Matthew 5:17-18.
Oh man it's so simple didn't you ever see Alan Arbus in Robery Downey's Greaser's Palace?
"If ya feel, yer healed!"
Not one tittle.
Uh, you believe that shit? Try reading more closely. The Hebrew Bible is being totally subverted, the contents of "Joseph's Well" (i.e. the Kingdom of Israel and mainstream Hebrew religion in general) is analogized to mere physical running water, while the liquid of Christian baptism brings eternal life. You can say that would have pissed observant Jews off a little bit.
Not for nothing did Ambrose say in discussing Jesus's decidedly non-halachic attitude toward leprosy, "A new master brings a new medicine."
Jesus fuckin gott damn Christ. How can anybody say IOZ has misread or misunderstood anything?
Fist of all... er, first of all, the story ain' original, and the text sure as hell cannot be considered adequately translated. Still countless proselytizers claim to have distilled its essence?
I'll tell ya what the Good News is good for: gettin' hairless - as in pre-pub - tail. Praise be butt-rapin' Jeebus!
I love how the "good" passages are assumed to have been translated accurately and are allowed to stand for themselves, but the parts that contradict the hippy-dippy Jesus image have to be remixed and turned upside down and inside out until they mean the exact opposite of what they say. Amazing how consistently that seems to be the case.
Isn't anarchism as critical of existing hierarchies and power structures--including the family--as the J-bird here?
Of course anarchism leaves out hell, the Heavenly Papa, and all the swords and shit.
http://www.jesusradicals.com/anarchism/
I love how the "good" passages are assumed to have been translated accurately and are allowed to stand for themselves
Um, you tawkin ta me? I'm not aware of having said anything about the "good" passages. My point was simply that the Gospels are a literary artifact, more specifically a commentary on the Hebrew Bible. They need to be understood in those relational terms and not taken literally, in isolation. The story of Solomon and the baby makes the most sense as a parable of exegesis. Christ's "sword" looks to be flavored similarly.
Summing up, I think Jesus is just a sort of inversion of characters in the Old Testament, so the meaning of what what he "said" in any given situation depends on what he was alluding to.
Eight years old, Dude.
Oh, wrong Jesus. Sorry.
The real dialectic at work here is the interface of Marxism and capitalism with Christ, or at least Christianity. Social Gospel and Gospel of Wealth.
Liberation theology and its milquetoast simulacra such as that which is practiced by American prog-Christers like Wallis, emphasize Christ's communal-sharing ethics, and cannot in the end avoid defining equality of opportunity by equality of outcome. Meanwhile, exceeding-abundantly Rolexers like Joel Osteen piously receive as their just due a goodly portion of what is Caesar's, with account balances, body-counts, and shopping malls an expression of divine favor.
Christ himself was both, or maybe neither. While property wasn't quite theft and accumulation not quite sin, they were radioactive to the soul for all that. Yet when the final trumpet sounds, the sheep WILL be separated from the goats with intolerant rigor and with implacable finality.
Lastly, if Wallis is too stupid or too weak to acknowledge that Mormonism isn't even a branch of Christianity --- it's a neo-pagan, works-driven, stair-step-initiation mystery religion which wisely adopted Christ & Apple Pie branding (think Masons holding crucifixes while they Become As God, just like the Serpent said --- his prescription for dealing with the likes of Beck is somewhere south of worthless.
The gospels were written, what, fifty to seventy years after Jesus died? And even the epistles of Paul came a good thirty years after the crucifixion. Who the fuck knows what Jesus said or why he said it?
That's like asking, Christopher, how Melville knew what Ahab said on the deck of the Pequod.
Answer: It was kind of like Plutarch's speeches. Or Judy Miller's leaks.
I am the walrus.
Perhaps it's too obvious a point to make, but IOZ, you protest too much.
Am I delusional to think this guy was once a somewhat decent journalist?
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/03/adventures_in_obsolescence.php#more?ref=fpblg
Somehow I am only now reading annie @ 7:35. Makes my night.
Shomer fucking shabbos!
Inky's acceptance of dialectic as a concept, whilst still insisting on the relevance of "marxism," all in the service of a point about political ethics that sputters atop a nearly self-refuting observation before devolving into a useless metaphor, reeks of the sort of projection one can only generate tugging one out in a mother's basement. Jonah?
I mean, pray for Glenn Beck? ... Shit, Wallis, you better pray that Fox cancels his goddamn contract, because that's the only thing that's going to shut him up. Oh, what, wait, you thought his shit is for real?
Why do I get the impression that Monsieur still hangs to the hope that a somewhere in the Donk is a tiny part of The Donk, if only as a potentiality, as opposed to the complete slobering oligarchy servants they are.
...
Wallis IS on the game, Monsieur. He & GB might have simulatneously snorted off the same 'paid professional's' crack, for all that we know.
Capt'n Obvious
Am I delusional to think this guy was once a somewhat decent journalist?
Yes.
Hosea Micro-Marshmallow is about as journalistically relevant as the little white pillows in a Swiss Miss hot "chocolate" mix pack.
The linked essay is pretty much consistent with the usual crap he churns out. Consumerist yuppie bullshit, in other words.
There were thousands of Jesuses.
The Romans were slaying or crucifying prophetic Jews, Greek cynics, and the occasional Hindu gymnosophist all over Palestine. The slapdash barely-connected narratives of the "Gospels" are merely a collection of cool stories and bon mots said or did by all those hippies.
Through a religio-literary-political process all the stories get eventually whittled down to one Jesus of Nazareth (who was yet born in Jerusalem, and counted in Egypt).
@Clusters--
Maybe burying the lead.... Our little marshmallow is the emir of a little village in Donkistan. And if you peek at Steve Jobs's balance sheet, what do you suppose you find?
That ain't yuppitesse, that's ad space.
Wow. Some truly wack shit here.
Someone already tagged davidly's "the text sure as hell cannot be considered adequately translated." I'd only add that of ancient texts, the Bible is probably most adequately translated. People worked pretty hard to do it as well as they could. Of course, translate = traduce = betray, every translation has its problems, but still.
Moloch-Agonistes overlooks a few points in his fundamentalist exegesis of "I bring not peace but a sword." Look at the literary context: Jesus says that he's come to set family members at war with each other. I'm not saying to take "sword" literally, and I believe someone pointed out that the parallel in Luke has "division" rather than "sword. Of course Jesus wanted his followers to be, like, tight wid each other, but in order to build his cult he had to steal the members of existing cults, and that never goes over well. Second, a lot of the material in the gospels was probably either invented or preserved to deal with current issues for the churches when they were written: if families were being torn apart when some members but not others joined the Jesus cult, it was okay, because Jesus not only foretold it, it was exactly what he had in mind.
Solar Hero: "The Romans were slaying or crucifying prophetic Jews, Greek cynics, and the occasional Hindu gymnosophist all over Palestine." Um, no. Greek Cynics and especially Hindu gymnosophists were in short supply in Palestine in those days. And not all the Jews they crucified in Palestine were "prophetic" -- some were political rebels, some were simple gangsters. I always wonder what this sort of rhetoric is meant to signify.
But still....adequate?
Huh. And in what particular bailiwick was the Great Sky Pilot bringing "division"? Why, interpretation of texts with deliberately dialectical meanings! As I said, a parable of exegesis. Or translation, if you prefer.
M-A, your delivery better explains the buttering of Hosea's challah.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Man I'm tired of this quote. Somehow this became the go-to quote for atheists whenever they need to show how the J-Dog was actually a big mean jerk.
It usually seems to show up to somehow prove that Jesus didn't really mean that turn the other cheek shit, but it's worse here, because it's not like there's a shortage of Bible passages that paint the guy as an egotistical cult leader.
Get some new material, man!
Get some new material, man!
From Jesus? That'll be tricky
@Moloch-Agonistes
It is what it is: empty of room for interpretation. No nuance of the Law, even as slight as punctuation or a capital letter, is to change.
"Uh, you believe that shit?"
Not even remotely. Sad for anyone who does. :( As I've been harpying lately, there is not a jot of historical evidence outside the Gospels that He even existed. The Gospels have so many historical holes in them they look like Sonny Corleone.
@Christopher: "Man I'm tired of this quote..." Then how about this one: Revelation 2:23? Turns out He, who is really His DAD after all, has a penchant for child killing too. But since it's just a metaphor for the Judaic societal ideal, everything is okay!
M-A: "Why, interpretation of texts with deliberately dialectical meanings!" Um, no. Not that it matters much.
Christopher: "Man I'm tired of this quote." Well, I got plenty of 'em. But 1) it was brought up by other people; and 2) it doesn't strike me as showing Jesus as a bad guy, since as I said, it's quite reasonable for a cult leader to foment division. It is, however, at odds with the notion of Jesus as some sort of super guidance counselor who spread harmony wherever he went, so beloved of lib Christians and their fellow-travellers.
Uh, Pro. Really. En garde, biblical lit-crit at 20 paces. And leave that English translation at home.
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