Davis Christianity According to Christ

A Gospel Primer for Nonbelievers
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-6678-0090-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten

The gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - are the only books of the bible that claim to recount the actual words and deeds of Jesus. As such, believers must accept their teachings as coming from Jesus himself. My book categorizes and analyzes these passages, covering the life of Jesus, his teachings, his apostles, his quarrels with the Jewish clergy, the miracles, and events preceding and following his crucifixion. Although my observations deviate from Christian orthodoxy, my focus is on examining the implications of the gospel stories rather than challenging their veracity. The implications are often startling and at wide variance from the Christian interpretations that have evolved over the centuries.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davis, Dan

Leseproben

Prologue:
Dark Father Before we examine the gospel depictions of the life and teachings of Jesus, we should review the reasons God deemed his birth, message, and sacrifice to be necessary in the first place. Here we will reexamine the doctrine of original sin and the nature of Dark Father himself, as described in the Old Testament. The Founding Serpent It began, of course, in the Garden of Eden. Here God planted “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” He put Adam into the garden (he had not yet created Eve) and told him he could freely eat of every tree, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” After telling Adam this lie, God went on to create Eve. Although God is all-knowing and omnipotent, he somehow failed to foresee the almost immediate misbehavior of three of his creations—Adam, Eve and the talking serpent. The importance of the serpent, clearly the smartest of Eden’s inhabitants, cannot be overstated. Without him, there would be no original sin and therefore no need for the subsequent birth and crucifixion of Jesus. The snake’s successful temptation of Eve is the anchoring link in the narrative chain of every Abrahamic religion. Of all Eden’s non-human creatures, the serpent was the only one endowed with both the gift of speech and sufficient free will to defy God’s orders and trick the poor, dumb humans. (Indeed, one wonders why the snake’s free will has not received more attention from bible students and whether his descendants, like Adam’s and Eve’s, have retained that attribute.) Without the founding serpent, Adam and Eve might still be wandering through the garden of Eden in ignorant bliss, too dumb even to be bored. They probably would not have known how to reproduce or even had the urge to do so (no knowledge-producing fruit, remember?), which in turn would have precluded the rest of humanity’s being dragged into existence. So God, the omnipotent and all-knowing, gave the gift of free will to Adam, Eve, and the snake. He clearly should have foreseen that this gift would create a never-ending legacy of misery for the recipients, ultimately condemning most of their descendants (possibly excepting the snake’s) to eternal torture in the fires of hell. Some Christian commentators have suggested that the serpent was actually Satan, but Genesis does not support this assertion. In fact, God specifically cursed the snake and his descendants without mentioning the devil at all—note the following verses: Genesis 3:14-15 “So the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. “‘And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’” God clearly categorized the serpent with “all the livestock and all the wild animals” and decreed enmity between the snake’s offspring and Eve’s. (To the best of our knowledge, Satan had no offspring.) It also is noteworthy that Adam didn’t die on the day he ate the forbidden fruit, even though God had said he would. Dark Father had simply lied. God’s Original Sin Adam and Eve were God’s “beloved” children, made in his very image. Their Dark Father may have given them free will, but they also were completely innocent, with no concept of what God regarded as good or evil. Until they had actually eaten the forbidden fruit, they could not have known that disobeying God would be “evil.” Their free will allowed them to be tempted, but they were incapable of knowing that succumbing to this temptation was wrong. Like all innocent children, Adam and Eve had simply made their first stupid mistake. Their father’s response was to curse their future lives, categorize every one of their descendants as innately sinful, and eventually relegate most of those descendants to eternal damnation. No decent human parents would treat their own children anywhere near this harshly. Compassionate dog owners would never condemn their puppies to a future of misery the first time they piddled on the rug. But perhaps God felt he needed to teach Adam and Eve a lesson to “correct” their errant behavior. There are several actions he could have taken that would have been far more just and humane than what he actually did—after all, he was omnipotent, and his powers were limitless. Here is only one of many possible approaches: 1. First, he could have actually let them die from eating the fruit, as he’d threatened. After they’d spent a reasonable “time out” being dead, he could have resurrected them, saying, “See what happens when you disobey? Now don’t let this happen again.” 2. He then could have wiped their minds clean of whatever knowledge he didn’t want them to have. 3. He could have done away with the trees of life and knowledge of good and evil, which were attractive nuisances that served no useful purpose. 4. Finally, he could have revoked the serpent’s power of speech, which he never should have provided in the first place. Clearly the people God created contained a fatal flaw: a propensity to “sin,” i.e., to go against (or want to go against) God’s wishes. As the omnipotent, all-knowing creator, Dark Father must have known what was coming, but he nonetheless decided to punish his creations for being exactly as he’d made them. He could have simply repaired the flaw or recalled the humans and re-manufactured them, but he obviously preferred to punish the entire race. So throughout the Old Testament, Dark Father inflicted various forms of torment against his creatures on a case-by-case basis. He finally settled on eternal torture in hell as the appropriate punishment for humanity’s inherent sinfulness, excluding only a minority he deemed worthy of salvation. The decision was not unlike that of a mother whose baby is born with a neurological defect that causes the child to act out uncontrollably. Angered by her child’s behavior, the mother tortures him continually as punishment, even though he is incapable of behaving otherwise. Yet even this mother is kinder than God, because at least the child’s agony will end when he dies. Jesus—the Divine Kluge A few thousand years after the creation, Dark Father relented a bit and gave a small percentage of humanity the chance to escape being tortured forever. Since he apparently was incapable of forgiving anyone without making somebody suffer, he impregnated a human woman with Jesus, his only son, whose mission was to be sacrificed to atone for the universal human defect that God had included within his original creations. Jesus would become God’s kluge, a device intended (at least partly) to work around the flaw in God’s product. His sacrifice would be preordained and choreographed to unfold in a specific manner: there would be a few hours of humiliation and torture, followed by a couple of days of death, culminating in resurrection and eternal glory in heaven. For God to consider saving individuals from hell, the supplicants must (1) learn about Jesus’ sacrifice, (2) acknowledge and repent their sins, and (3) believe in and accept Jesus as their savior. Those who don’t comply with these specific requirements are irrevocably condemned to eternal torment, no matter how humane and productive their earthly lives might have been. Conversely, God may forgive serial killers and child rapists and accept them into heaven if they express repentance and acceptance of Jesus immediately before their deaths. Despite the injustice of this system and Dark Father’s barbaric history (briefly examined below), God expects (indeed, requires) us to love him “with all our heart and mind.” But to love such a being and regard him as merciful and just requires a level of cognitive dissonance that is, or should be, unattainable by any reasonable person of decency and good will. The Nature of God What did God’s response to the “sin” committed by his creations reveal about himself? That he was angry, unforgiving, unjust, unreasonable, egotistical, narcissistic, cruel, and merciless. He continued to manifest these traits, among others as bad or worse, consistently throughout the Bible. (We will examine his primary character flaw, insane jealousy, separately below.) According to Genesis, God created the entire universe: planets, stars, galaxies, dark energy, dark matter, all of it. Our own planet is an infinitesimal part of that universe, inconceivably tiny compared to the whole. On our tiny planet’s surface, humans are only one species among the millions God created. Yet of all things existing within the vast structure of this universe, Dark Father has concerned himself almost exclusively with micromanaging, meddling in, and generally screwing around with the lives of human beings. Indeed, after indulging his early impulse to drown almost everyone, the pre-Christian God narrowed his preoccupation even further, focusing on one small tribe living on one tiny segment of the planet. After the flood and throughout the entire pre-Christian period, God ignored the vast majority of humanity. During those...