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Special Thoughts
In the time of Jesus, the Roman and Jewish authorities had established a system that was creating a mass shift of wealth to an elite few. Taxation was forcing many ordinary people to sell their lands in order to pay the taxes. There were land taxes, head count taxes, and many taxes. At the same time, the Jewish priestly class demanded a tithe of about 15%… and the tithes were, like the taxes, taken away by violence.
So, what was actually happening was a significant shift of wealth and real estate to the rich, elite, wealthy class…
Hmmm… sound familiar? Over the past 30 years there has been a dramatic shift of wealth in the United States to the upper 1% of the population… and like the Jesus-era Jews, people are increasingly feeling that the deck is stacked against them. They have no real representation in the government. Is this taxation without representation?
Is the time getting right for another major religious movement? Interesting speculation, isn’t it.
Posted in Special Thoughts
I wonder if we are managing to slide backwards in the ascent of mankind. Despite all our technical whiz bang stuff, it seems like we are moving away from what really matters and makes our world a good place to live. I saw a great series of shows on NOVA (PBS) about the latest scientific evidence concerning the ascent of mankind on the planet. Over a million year time frame, humans have come from humble beginnings in western Africa to inhabit the entire earth. We’ve come from creating simple tools like a stone axe to space shuttles and iPads. It’s remarkable to think about.
One of the most moving segments was about the fossilized remains of a homo erectus that were found by the Leaky team. The evidence is that homo erectus came on the scene somewhere between 1.8 and 1.3 million years ago. They represented a very distinct evolutionary shift because, among other things, there was a doubling of brain size, particularly in the frontal lobes. The remains that were found were of an elderly male who had no teeth and had apparently had no teeth for at least two years.
The homo erectus was a hunter, living on the game he killed. Now here’s an interesting question… How did this fellow with no teeth eat his food? The conclusion of the scientist is that somehow the community came together to empower him to be able to eat, even to the possibility that they chewed his food for him. That’s really incredible. Those “poor”, “stupid” creatures had enough emotional caring about each other to chew food for one of their elderly.
It makes me wonder if we are seeing people who are willing to throw other people under the bus for this imaginary thing called a dollar are really human beings after all. Perhaps they are the emergence of a new sub-human species. You make this world a better place by opening up your heart and shutting off the overly rationalizing mind and helping your fellow humans get through it all.
Posted in Special Thoughts
The Message of Easter
Yesterday people around the world celebrated Easter… and the focus of Easter and the Christian church is on the Passion of Christ, perhaps most graphically portrayed in Mel Gibson’s movie of the same name. In churches and museums throughout the world, paintings and crucifixes depict the incredible suffering of Christ at the hands of the Romans. The message is that Christ endured all that pain and suffering for our salvation in an incredible act of selflessness… of sacrificing for everyone else.
Think about the implications… this raises enduring pain and suffering to a virtue. It tells ordinary Christians that if they experience pain, suffering, and even death, particularly in the name of religion, then they will be rewarded in the afterlife.
The Early Christian Message
Interestingly enough, the passion/crucifixion centric view of Easter did not make an appearance until about 1000 CE (AD). Prior to that, the focus of Christian theology was on the Resurrection. It’s impossible to find images of Christ on the cross before about the year 965 CE. Think about the theological implications… Adam represented the expulsion of man from paradise on earth… The Garden of Eden. Christ literally paid mankind’s dues, inherited from Adam, and that reestablished paradise on earth. In the Book of Thomas, one of the earliest of the Gospels, Christ clearly says that the Kingdom of Heaven is all around us, but we just fail to see it. That was the message of the early Christian church.
Paradise Lost
St. Augustine (354-430 CE) is generally considered to be the first to justify a “Holy” war within Christianity. That fits rather nicely with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. This also coordinated nicely with the elimination of the Gnostic Christian movement from Christianity culminating in 1229 with both the Albgensian Crusade that killed the Cathars and the institutionalization of the Inquisition. The Gnostics’ viewpoint simply would not do in a violence-centric theology that sacrificed paradise on earth for the justification of war and glorification of death in the name of religion… the Gnostics taught that Christ brought wisdom to men to restore the lost paradise… but by 1229, paradise was lost again.
The emergence of the crucifixion in Christian art in 965 also fit nicely with the beginning of the First Crusade, that made going to the Middle East in order to acquire fortune OK as a Holy undertaking.
The picture here is the replacement of the real Christian message with a system of belief that justifies war and glorifies suffering and death in the name of religious and political empire. The substitution of the idea that the goal we should strive for is the establishment of paradise on earth… the correction of the ills that cause suffering and the loss of paradise… to the acceptance of suffering as somehow “Holy”.
The Easter Message
So, your question for this Easter is which view you will pursue. The idea that violence and suffering are justified on spiritual grounds or the idea that we are all here to help each other establish paradise on earth.
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