In a nearby town is a man who was taught that he can do no wrong. No matter what problems he caused, his own father bailed him out, got him off the hook, bought off the victims, erased the legal record. He was taught that there were no adverse consequences for stealing, for rape, for incest, for battery, for laziness, for dishonesty, for greed. And just as you cannot take a pill to make the pain in your right arm go away without also numbing the left, he failed to learn that he must eventually pay the price, even when he, himself, is the victim. So, thanks in part to his father, he gets a cheque each month, and when it comes he makes a pilgrimage to the city to replenish his stash of pharmaceuticals. A man who once had his choice of careers now aspires to remain high and inebriated. His odd jobs allow him, at times, to scrape together enough change to buy beer and vodka, between the monthly payments.
His father, in teaching these things to him, raised a monster, just as he himself was taught monstrosity by his own father before him. In turn, the man in the next town, true to family tradition, spawned his own crop of monsters. A family of sociopaths, it is.
Although you will not find him in a church, the man in the next town is a perfect Christian. He learned the plan that the Christian God had for humanity: someone else can foot the bill, someone else will pay the price, because Christians are “forgiven”. Christians can, in the end, do no wrong, either. So they believe.
The Christians created a Supremely Evil God, a god with rules which can be ignored because all is forgiven in the end. Rules without significance, force, or import. A justice system with universal amnesty, so there is, finally, no justice at all. It all becomes lies, including the fraud of their “salvation”. No just god would thus corrupt the system, just as no just father or mother would fail to expose his child to the consequences of that child’s actions.
Do not kill? Of course, there are convenient exceptions.
Do not steal? Of course, there are convenient exceptions.
Do not lie? Of course, there are convenient exceptions.
It’s all convenient exceptions. Whatever works, whatever is expedient, is acceptable, because you are forgiven.
They bred more monsters. Men and women who would not call themselves Christians, but who adopted their teachings of exceptionalism, proved themselves able students. The Christians took over the morally bankrupting Roman Empire, so everyone could tell themselves that the new god had arrived, and moral bankruptcy was a fine thing. Everyone would be forgiven. “In this sign you will conquer”, said they, and felt no remorse. It was a triumph of lawlessness over conscience. Secular Western civilization is Christianity’s heir. It does not matter that you are not a Christian, because you are taught in school, on television, on the Internet, and in books, that you are special and will suffer no consequences for your sins. The Big Lie, bigger than any lesser lie taught by anyone else, has infected their monster offspring. The little monsters bred and bred again, and attained levels of killing, rape, plunder, and dishonesty never before seen in history. The Christians and their evil spawn enslaved more, murdered more, stole more, and deceived more than anyone else, proving that they were better. They destroyed civilizations, peoples, and the planet itself. They call this the “triumph” of a “superior” civilization. It is the Christian Burden, the White Man’s Burden, the Burden of all Right Thinking People, to spread the carnage and destruction. Of course, the evangelists are entitled to a little profit along the way. And if mistakes are made along the way, if some people suffer who shouldn’t, then don’t worry: you’ll all be forgiven. Just kill them all, and let the Christian God, the Supremely Evil Christian God, sort it out. You will be forgiven.
Their rituals are empty. You become a Christian, then go about your life with little changed. One would think that gaining eternal life and amnesty and closeness to Jesus and God and all that would be a radical, life-changing event, but no – go back to your normal life, except make a few changes around the edges. For most, the only changes are based on the church to which the proselyte belongs: meetings, a little volunteering and donation, and more meetings. Especially after the novelty wears off, life returns to normal: lie, cheat, steal, kill, and oppress, but with a little more arrogance. Now you can gang up on the non-believers, having company who bought the same story.
This is not what Jesus had in mind. He taught friendship and love, but the Christians brought empire and domination, unprecedented depths of oppression, and large scale commercial slavery. He taught humility, which the Christians perverted into arrogance. He taught that worshipping the One God was incompatible with Mammon, so the Christians chose Mammon. He taught to care for your neighbour, but the Christians teach to look the other way when your government kills in your name. They inverted and perverted and twisted the teachings of Jesus. Everything became an exception.
Jesus taught that the two most important commandments were, Love God, and Love Your Neighbour. (He noted that they were alike, which can have several interpretations.) The Christians dethroned these commandments: now the most important one is to claim that you believe in whatever happens to be the dogma of the day. Membership, “conversion”, “accepting Jesus”, and other rituals are more important than the two selected by Jesus. The label, “Christian”, is what matters. It’s more important to observe the rituals – including ritual professions of belief – than it is to follow the two commandments. You don’t really have to believe, you just have to claim it. If you were to really believe, then you’d follow the commandments, but very few Christians take that seriously. So, despite what they say, Christians are mostly atheists, unless you count belief in the Evil Christian God. Christianity is to religion as bureaucracy is to government: just fill out the right forms. No matter how well you love God and love your neighbour, you’ll not climb as high into heaven as those who have filled out the forms. It’s the doctrine of Jesus, inverted and perverted.
There was a third inversion, as well. They elevated Jesus to a god, then they elevated themselves over Jesus. Jesus said he did not come to change the law, but the Christians feel free to pick and choose from the laws the ones they wish to consider valid. Almost always, when the laws relate to relationships among humans, a modified or re-interpreted law is understood in a way which moves it away from the Golden Rule, which Jesus said was the most important law pertaining to relationships. Jesus taught against usury; the Christians embrace it. Jesus taught the Jubilee; Christians ignore it. Jesus explained that wealth precludes entry into heaven; many Christians go so far as to say it is a sign of their god’s love and favour. Christians don’t have to love their neighbours: it’s quite acceptable, rather, to oppress, harass, and to kill them. Don’t bother to give life in abundance! Give, instead, death and misery. Jesus told, in the parable of sheep and goats, that those who feed the hungry, tend to the sick, visit those in prison, and shelter the homeless, are those who get into heaven; the rest have no hope. The rules for the Christian heaven are different: the property interests of billionaires are more important than food security and health care for both the domestic and foreign working and poor classes. It is no accident that capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism run largely in channels cut by rivers of the blood of the victims of Christianity.
The Christians will argue, “We are taught to follow the Law: not to steal, not to kill, and so on. We are not perfect, but we try.” But they, in the depths of their hearts and in the backs of their minds, believe that they are forgiven, and will continue to be forgiven. A little evil becomes more evil, which becomes slavery, imperialism, genocide, and oppression. The facts, the histories, speak for themselves. Behind the greatest wars and thefts and enslavements known, are usually Christians and their successors, justifying their behaviours in various and sundry ways, confident that they are forgiven, and that there will be no adverse consequences of their actions.
But Jesus did not say this. Yes, he forgave others, as he taught us to do, ourselves. But he did not say that we would not suffer the consequences of our sins. We might come to know God, but we must make amends for our misdeeds. The Christians believe differently, and they act out their beliefs often by saying to themselves, “Well, we’re forgiven, God will forgive us and we will escape the consequences of our sins”. The god they have invented is indeed a fiendish one.
Jesus taught us to forgive. The Christians got the lesson backwards, upside down: to them, it’s about being forgiven, not about forgiving. For every word the Christian’s write and speak about forgiving others, there are hundreds about being forgiven, which they take as a ticket to heaven.
Christians haul out their scriptures, and the writings of their leaders and philosophers, in support of their beliefs. But they don’t like to note that Christianity wasn’t invented until a century after the time of Jesus. When Jesus was alive, no one wrote about him. There is no more proof of Jesus’s existence than there is of Neo, of Superman, or of Harry Potter. The evidence is all hearsay, and after the fact, and the authenticity and accuracy of the scriptures are questionable. Even when evidence appears, later, are they writing of a mythical character, as some today write of Neo and Superman and Harry Potter? And how accurate are the stories that were passed down orally for generations? This is a problem for the Christians, because they have elevated Jesus into a god, central to their philosophy, which makes his existence crucial. They say that the scriptures “prove” that they are forgiven and will not suffer for their sins, but the scriptures don’t prove anything.
For millenia, humans have known that their acts would have consequences. The stories of ancient Greece told of the bad things which would happen to those who defied the gods. From India we get the doctrine of karma, sometimes called an “iron law”. The leaders of China sought, by acting with propriety, to earn the mandate of heaven. At some times and places, what was considered “right action” is alien and wrong to us, but generally the laws of the gods, even if we think them cruel or unfair or irrational, were not to be ignored. There were consequences resulting from wrong and right action.
Except among the Christians. Among them, you can kill or steal or rape or lie, then seek forgiveness from their god, and you can expect to live forever in their heaven. If those are the kind of people they have in their heaven, I don’t want to go. Sometimes they believe that there is an intermediate place, a purgatory, where you might suffer a little before continuing on to heaven. But they can’t take it too seriously: any just suffering for the killing of millions of red, brown, yellow, and black peoples, would make such a place inhospitable indeed, yet the Christians of the world continue to murder, rape, steal, and plunder. They hold almost all the records, have garnered almost all the superlatives, for inhumanity and sin. They are not deterred by their own doctrine. The imagine themselves forgiven, exonerated, absolved.
And where are the victims in all of this? In the Christian doctrine, Jesus tells the victims to get out of the way, it is he or maybe the Christian God who does the forgiving. We don’t hear where the victims fit into this scheme. According to Christian teachings, victims are de-personalized, objectified, and have no say in all of these soteriological questions. Victims are non-entities, which further encourages the Christians to continue to sin against them. Have you ever heard of a church setting up a Victims’ Compensation Fund, for those who suffered because of the church members’ own sins? No, in the Christian world, the victims are forced to grant an irrevocable power of attorney to the Christian gods, and sign away all of their rights. The Christians, promoted by their evil god, owe the victims nothing. I guess that what’s really meant by their “new covenant”, a kind of deal with the Devil. Not only does their god give them forgiveness, but everyone else also is owed nothing.
Jesus warned us that this would happen. He said that, after he passed on, many would come and speak and preach in his name, even performing miracles. However, he added, when the imposters went to their rewards, he would not know them. We know those impostors as Christians.
We are told that we shall know the true followers from the false followers by their “fruits”, just as we can tell an apple tree from a fig tree by its fruit. The fruit of the Christians is materialist culture – the mammon against which Jesus cautioned – as well as wars, suffering, neglect of the poor, dishonesty, exploitation, slavery, and other such crops. Especially, we can decide by the way in which the sick, the poor and the needy, and children, are treated. (Read the parable of the sheep and the goats.) Moreover, he said that rich men would not enter heaven; put otherwise, the rich are going to hell. We worship money and power and material goods – mammon – and aspire to climb the heights of wealth. If we follow the rich, as almost everyone does, then whither go we? Obviously, we also go to hell.
I pray to the One God to save me from Christian thinking! I want to enjoy, or to suffer, the consequences of my actions. I want to learn from my experience and my errors. May I learn to forgive, but not to assume the forgiveness of others!
Edit History:
Wednesday 2017.08.09 — Initial release.
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