Category Archives: Christian extremists

Sowing seeds

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The early church had multiple problems, many of which Paul and other New Testament writers refer to. Any reasonable person would have taken these problems as a sign that the faith they were pushing really didn’t work; didn’t produce new creations powered by a holy spirit. Some, including a number of the very earliest followers (Matthew 28.17), were leaving the church, disappointed and disillusioned. How were leading figures in the cult to explain this? Having supposedly encountered the supernatural Jesus these people were now having doubts that he was real and were turning their backs on him. This shouldn’t have been happening!

The writer of 1 John accounts for the departure of those who had come to their senses by suggesting they were never really true believers:

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. (1 John 2:19)

It’s significant that the writer of this letter doesn’t allude to Jesus’ parable about the sower of the seeds from Matthew 13. Not one of the letter writers in the New Testament who address the problem of defections does so. This can only be because none of them knew of it when they were writing decades after it was supposedly told. The reason they don’t mention it is because it had yet to be written.

The parable of the sower is Matthew’s attempt to have Jesus address the problem of those who fell away from the cult. Matthew’s explanation is it’s because the good news – the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom on Earth – only takes root in the spiritually astute. Others, who might initially accept the gospel, are like stony ground on which birds gobble up the seed. They are those who allow the cares of this world – metaphorical weeds – to choke the message before it can flourish.

It’s a very colourful explanation designed to reassure those persisting in the faith that they are the favoured, while those who have defected have fallen prey to the shallow soil, birds and weeds. It’s neat and it gives reassurance and encouragement to remaining cultists.

Jesus could not possibly have known what was to become of his ‘church’ and the (non)arrival of God’s Kingdom – his good news – following his death. The parable was created for him, or more specifically, as Matthew makes abundantly clear in 13:11-12, for devotees of the early cult decades later. What it emphatically is not, is a story originally delivered by Jesus.

Show Me Heaven

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On the radio this Sunday, a couple of presenters were discussing a woman’s Near Death Experience. Lynda Cramer claimed that in 2021 she had been clinically dead for 14 minutes when she visited Heaven for five years. You can see her raving about it on YouTube, while the Amazon synopsis of her book, Five Years In Heaven (of course there’s a book; four in fact) reads:

In May 2001, Dr Lynda Cramer died. This is the story of her Near Death Experience, outlining the five years that she spent in Heaven. Starting when she found herself “floating” in the living room for over 45 minutes, she then went on a journey where she entered Heaven, she then processed her Life Review prior to meeting her great-great-great-great grandmother who explained what Life Lessons, Life Contracts and Reincarnation are all about. Backed up by Medical Records as well as diagrams she drew, this is her personal account for anyone intrigued by what happens in the afterlife…

So, is this real? Did Lynda Cramer visit Heaven while she was dead for 14 minutes? She’s a doctor, after all, so superficially at least, she has credible credentials. Until you see that her PhD was obtained researching Near Death Experiences  themselves. Vested interest or what?.

But, let’s not be cynical; she has diagrams too, for God’s sake. What more proof could we ask for? We know too, because our resident Christian tells us, that dreams and visions like this are most definitely from God. Lynda’s experience ticks all the boxes, no matter what we sceptics might think.

Except, no. Lynda was not dead for 14 minutes. We have only her word for it that she was declared clinically dead, while she describes her experience as a Near Death Experience. The clue is in the name. If she was near death, she was not dead; her brain was still alive, if only just. Her mind was still active, creating, if this happened at all, a reassuring experience for itself as it came close to shutting down. There is well documented evidence that this is what the brain is capable of doing when it is close to death (but not actually dead).

Significantly, the scenario her mind created was informed by cultural, quasi-Christian images of Heaven, just as believers’ dreams of God are informed by the same images and characters that occupy their waking minds. My own dreams, for example, are populated by people I know and places I’m familiar with (though sometimes only vaguely; my subconscious fills in the details often in bizarrely imaginative ways.)

Nonetheless, Lynda’s life-changing 5 years visit to Heaven (during which she seems to have done nothing except admire mountains and buildings while blue balls, hijacked from science-fiction, danced around her) is just as real, just as divine, just as valid as the God-given dreams and visions Christians claim they sometimes have. Naturally, we sceptics can’t possibly appreciate these until we’ve experienced them for ourselves.

Lynda’s experience was a subjective, emotional experience while she was unconscious. But such ‘spiritual’ inner experiences are ‘real’ according to at least some Christians, and we can’t argue with that which we have not experienced  for ourselves.

Right, Don?

 

 

Saved by Faith Alone

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For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Hi!

I heard this fabulous new speaker last night and have given my life to Jesus. All the things I’ve said and written critical of God, Jesus and the Bible, I take back and repent of. Jesus now lives in my heart. Through God’s grace I am saved, and his grace alone. I have done nothing to save myself. The speaker explained I am saved by faith alone through the atoning blood of Christ. Hallelujah! Saved from sin, from the wrath I merit and from death and hell. I am going to live forever in heaven with God.

There’s nothing I need to do. God has done it all.

There was a wonderful Christian lady, Donna, whom I spoke to afterwards. She knew everything about God and Jesus, she really did. She’s been saved for most of her life. Amazing! Anyway, Donna told me it was really important I should start to work out my salvation. I wasn’t sure what she meant when the speaker had said faith was all I needed, but I will try. Donna also said that now I’m a Christian, the devil will increase his attacks on me. I never really thought about the devil before but now I know he’s real, I’ll be on the lookout for him. Satan and his demon hordes rule the world, but only because God lets them. Of course there’s the angels too, taking care of us, which makes up for Satan’s wickedness.

Donna said I should talk with Jesus as much as I can. He’s always listening and will guide me in my walk with him. She said I will hear him speaking to me. He wants to give me anything I ask for, which is just amazing. Or maybe it’s God who does that. I’ll have to check. She also said that I need to join a church and gave me the addresses of some locally. It’s important, she told me, to worship Jesus on a regular basis and to thank him for saving me. I must make sure I take part in the Lord’s supper too, sharing his body and blood, till he comes back to Earth to take us all to heaven. ‘Us’ just means those who believe in Jesus, obviously.

Donna said it was vital I read my bible as well because it’s the Word of God and is full of his Truth. I’m should get to know more about what the Lord requires of me in my daily walk with him. She recommended I join a bible study group, so I’m going to do that. I asked her about the stuff in the Bible that says to give money to anyone who asks and to forgive people loads of times, but she said that that was all metaphorical and I needn’t bother with it.

She told me I have to tell everyone I can that I now belong to Jesus. I’m never going to be ashamed of proclaiming his holy name and telling others how they can be saved, through his precious blood alone.

She told me my life should reflect the fact that I now belong to Jesus, so no more swearing, smoking or drinking for me! Not that I did those much anyway.

Which brings me to why I’m sending you this message, apart from telling you how wonderful it is to be saved by faith alone, of course. Donna was, I have to say, a little taken aback when I mentioned I was gay. She explained very patiently that it’s a sin God really, really doesn’t approve of. She said Jesus would help me defeat it and as a start I really, really couldn’t live with someone of the same sex any longer, not if I wanted to claim my inheritance from the Lord. I have to turn away from sin, especially that one. Donna says it seriously offends God and he’d never let me into the Kingdom of Heaven as, well… you know, as an abomination. So I’m giving up my previous life.

I know you’ll be a little upset by this, but it’s really why I’m writing. By the time you see this, I’ll have moved out. I still love you, course I do, but it’s for the best. I have to make all the sacrifices I need to preserve my salvation. And think of it this way, it’ll help you give up your life of sin too, so you can be redeemed.

Well, that’s it. Remember, you too can be saved by faith alone and the blood of Jesus and all those other things I’ve mentioned. Simple really. I hope and pray you’ll give your heart to Jesus soon.

Love in Christ who saves us,

Sam

God’s Design for Sexual Relationships: the Gospel According to Don

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A digression:

A little while back, a Christian commenter (we’ll call him ‘Don’) made the point that homosexuality and other non-conformist sexualities are ‘not the order of creation God intended‘. Yes, Don knows the intentions of a God whose purposes are unknowable (Romans 11:33-34)! 

‘And what are those intentions?’ I hear you ask. It is that everyone be, or pretends to be, heterosexual and involves the marriage of one man to one woman for life, for the procreation of children. I know this because it says so in the Book of Common Prayer, originally composed in 1622:

The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.

But how did the writers of this book know this was God’s plan? How do evangelicals today, who subscribe to the same ideas, know that this is what God intended? How does Don?

The Bible. Surely the writers of the prayer book consulted the Bible and created their summary of God’s plan from that. Surely the evangelicals who promote one-man one-woman marriage draw their inspiration from God’s Word. Surely this is how Don knows too.

Let’s see. Here’s what Paul has to say about marriage 1 Corinthians 7:28-29:

…if you marry, you do not sin, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of marriage!

Paul goes on to say,

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord…So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better. A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord. In my judgment, she is happier if she stays as she is—and I think that I too have the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 7:32-40).

In other words, avoid marriage if you can, the better to devote yourself entirely to the Lord. How many Christians actually do this? How many preachers and evangelists promote it? None that I know of.

I can already hear Don arguing that Paul’s views are his own and were not handed down from on high. Let’s then turn to what Jesus says about marriage. If anyone knows God’s views on the matter, it must surely be his very own Son. I don’t for a second, believe he was of course, especially as Jesus’ script was written years after Paul and owes a great deal to him. Nonetheless, here’s what Jesus is made to say about God’s plan for marriage:

Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age [i.e. that of the Kingdom] and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage (Luke 20:34-36).

Surely he can’t be saying that those who want to rise from the dead and make it into the Kingdom of God shouldn’t marry? That they’re not worthy of that Kingdom if they do? Yup, that’s exactly what he’s saying.

Similarly, in Matthew 19:10-12, after discussing divorce with the Pharisees, Jesus responds to the disciples’ remark that ‘it is better not to marry’, with –

…not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.

Even interpreted figuratively – though it’s not evident from the text that Jesus is speaking figuratively – this means Jesus thinks it’s preferable to be sexless: chaste, celibate, single. How well that’s worked out for the Catholic church!

Finally, there’s Luke 14:26 where Jesus makes it clear what following him entails:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate… wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.

Not much ‘mutual joy’ there.

Unlike Jesus and Paul, I’m not knocking hetero-marriage or the procreation of children. I’ve been involved with both. If these are what floats your boat, that’s great. But they’re not what the Bible promotes. Just the opposite. After the tales of incest, polygamy and adultery in the Old Testament, the New teaches that marriage has had its day. It is to be avoided, the better to follow Jesus, prepare for the coming kingdom and be worthy of eternal life. Only marry, Paul advises, if you can’t control your sexual urges. But, according to Jesus, you are risking your place in the coming kingdom if you do. You can improve your chances by shunning sex altogether.

This is the Bible’s teaching about marriage and God’s intentions for the sexual beings he created. Strictly speaking, it’s the New Testament’s teaching; that of the Old is even more bizarre.

‘Aah but,’ I hear someone say, ‘it’s all about context.’ Certainly it is; and the context is that Paul and those who created Jesus’ script believed the current age was about to end. Marriage, such as it was (very different from the modern concept, particularly for women who could be bought and sold aged only 12 or 13), would also then be coming to an end. With the arrival of the Kingdom of God on Earth, marriage would be redundant. Better, Paul and the gospel writers argue, to have done with it now to conform ahead of time with the new system, with God’s plan: ‘those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.’

But God’s plan – the arrival of his kingdom on Earth in the first century didn’t come to fruition. His plan for marriage to end likewise fell by the wayside. Instead, and without the assistance of any deity, the very human institution of marriage persisted and evolved, eventually being hijacked by the Catholic church in the ninth century. It emerged more or less in its current form – though not for everyone – in the 17th century. Whatever this signifies, it was not what ‘God intended for his creation’ nor his ‘design for sexual relationships’ (Don again, doubling down on his position.)

If the Bible is anything to go by, God has never been very impressed by marriage. His long-term plan for it, if that disreputable book is to be believed, was to scrap it altogether. Yet we still have Christians who use its continued existence to disparage and denigrate those of us who express our sexuality with other adults of the same sex, with whom we share a mutual attraction.

Shame on them.

The Evolution of Jesus II: from Life Giving Spirit to God the Son and beyond.

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A couple of decades after the first visions of a risen Jesus, a Jewish zealot called Saul decided he’d seen him too. He came to imagine a vision he’d had in his head was this same Jesus, who then revealed to Saul – all entirely within his head as he admits – what his death and return from the dead really meant. Paul, as he renamed himself, announced that God had decided Jesus was a good man and returned him to life after his execution. In doing so, God made Jesus his Son (you can read all this poppycock in Romans 1:3-4). Jesus was now a life-giving spirit, the Saviour Christ: 1 Corinthians 15:45. (Maybe though Jesus always had been this; it’s kind of confusing, but in Philippians 2:6-8 Paul seems to think Jesus was some sort of quasi-divine being from the get-go. Take your pick. Whatever.)

Memetic selection ensured the survival and perpetuation of Paul’s bizarre idea, one that was, after all, not unfamiliar to the Hellenised people of the first century. The superstitious embraced and transmitted it without knowing a thing about any itinerant Jewish preacher. 

The next stage of Jesus’ evolution came twenty or so years later, when a believer we now know as Mark decided to write a back story for this Christ. He created his story using Jewish scripture, Paul’s ideas and the rules of the sect to which he belonged. Who knows if Mark believed Jesus had ever been a real person who trudged around Palestine preaching the good news about the end of everything, but in Mark’s story he had him do just that. He decided, crucially, that he wouldn’t have Jesus become God’s adopted son at the time of his spiritual resurrection. Instead, Mark had him become God’s son at his baptism (Mark 1.10-11).

This wasn’t quite good enough for the next two cultists who attempted a Jesus narrative. While they plagiarised much of Mark’s story, they changed details and made up more for Jesus to say and do. Importantly, where Mark had avoided suggesting Jesus’ resurrection appearances had occurred in the real world, Matthew and Luke showed no such reticence. Their Jesus(es) showed himself not in visions but in the flesh. It’s likely Matthew at least knew he was creating a symbolic, literary representation of others’ visions.

At the other end of the story, Matthew and Luke invented largely incompatible birth stories for their hero. For Matthew, Jesus was the Messiah from the time he was born, fulfilling all the prophecies Matthew borrowed to create his nativity story (he doesn’t: the Messiah, according to the very ‘prophecies’ Matthew manipulates is not divine but a human warrior).

Luke, on the other hand, is determined to push Jesus’ divinity even back further. For Luke, Jesus became divine when God magically made Mary pregnant; Luke’s Jesus is quite literally God’s son (Luke 1.35). Unfortunately, Mary forgot all about being impregnated by the Holy Semen Spirit later on in Luke’s ridiculous story. Nevertheless, Jesus’ status had evolved again; he’d become God’s son from the very moment of conception.

Even this was not good enough for the next version of the Jesus’ story. The writers of the fourth gospel decide to make him eternal and part of God himself. Plundering Greek philosophy and Paul’s ruminations from Philippians, they declare Jesus the ‘Logos’; the Word or aspect of God responsible for the creation of everything (John 1:1-5). And despite this being as far from an itinerant peasant preacher as it’s possible to be, even more gullible folk came to believe it.

Jesus’ evolution was still not complete, however. The council of Nicaea in 325 decided that Jesus was ‘begotten not made’ (whatever that means) – but couldn’t quite decide whether being the Logos and the Son of God actually made Jesus God Incarnate. It wasn’t until the Council of Constantinople in 381 that a collection of bishops decided Jesus was, after all, officially part of the Godhead. The apocalyptic preacher from the backwoods finally became God the Son, a mere 350 years after he lived (if indeed he did).

Jesus has continued to evolve ever since, becoming all things to all people; a God pliable enough to be whatever his followers want him to be: Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Evangelical, Mormon, fringe cult. He’s evolved into a schizophrenic deity capable of being both meek and mild and bellicose; best buddy and chief executioner; Christian Nationalist, socialist and capitalist, gay and anti-gay, pro-family and anti-family; anti-abortion and pro-gun; environmentalist and iconoclast; the one who promotes a prosperity gospel and the ‘One True God’ known (only) to a select few. Every contradictory manifestation is supported by the Bible, the Church or tradition. Every one is non-existent and ultimately pointless.

That’s some evolution.

Only The One Book

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Some years ago I visited friends where another of their guests told me he had been reading a remarkable book. It was he said, about Atlantis and demonstrated beyond any doubt that the ancient city had really existed and had sunk beneath the ocean where it still waited to be found. I asked him how he knew this (a polite way of asking what his evidence was.) He looked at me incredulously. ‘Because the book says so,’ he explained.

It’s the same with all the claims made about Jesus: that he was the Saviour, the Messiah and the Son of God. All such claims are found only in one book written by people who already believed such things about him.

Outside of this book there’s nothing: no Roman records of his death and subsequent resurrection; no reports of post-resurrection visits by witnesses who weren’t already invested; no contemporary, independent accounts of his remarkable miracles; nothing from historians of the day about his return from the dead and subsequent ascent into the sky; no mention of him at all in any documentation for the first 80+ years of Christianity outside of this one book. The Son of God appears on Earth and nobody but a handful of superstitious zealots notice.

Not very convincing, is it? 

Jesus And The Resurrection Metaphor

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While choosing Jesus quotes to use in an earlier post, it struck me how the risen Jesus never declares his resurrected status. He doesn’t say, ‘I am risen’ or indeed anything similar. Instead it’s left to others to claim, ‘He is Risen!’ That’s because the resurrection is a declaration of those others’ visionary experiences and their subsequent faith in those visions. Rather than have him declare himself risen, the Jesus in the (much later) gospels goes about ‘proving’ his reappearance is ‘in accordance’ with scripture (Luke 24:25-27; Acts 1:3 etc).

For those who insist Jesus resurrected physically, this is a bizarre turn of events: Jesus having to ‘prove’ he’s alive again by referencing bits of scripture? In fact, this is the biggest clue we’re dealing with a made-up story. ‘Proving convincingly’ over forty days that he’s risen because it somehow fits with a few unrelated quotes from scripture is an attempt by the gospel writers to ‘prove’ to those in the early Jesus cult that the visions of its founders were completely kosher: ‘visions they might have been, but they really were Jesus, honest: scripture says so!’ If Jesus had really risen in his physical body, he would have had no reason to ‘prove’, convincingly or otherwise, he had resurrected. Eye-witnesses would have seen him in the miraculous flesh. All the ‘proof’ needed, surely.

In fact, the gospel authors knew Jesus’ resurrection was nothing more than inner-visions experienced by a few fanatics. We know this was the case for Paul and John of Patmos. The risen Jesus’ real world appearances were invented by Matthew, Luke and John (Mark of course doesn’t even attempt it) and retain the visionary nature of those original spiritual ‘encounters’. In the stories they created for him, risen Jesus is frequently unrecognisable, even by those who supposedly knew him in life, appears as if by magic in locked rooms, vanishes at will and levitates into the sky.

The gospel authors were well aware they were fleshing out, literarily, the visions of those with overactive imaginations. Nonetheless, despite having him eat fish and inviting others to poke his wounds, they stop short of making Jesus declare explicitly he had returned in the flesh. They knew he had not. The point of the resurrection appearances was to bring to life those visions and to connect them with Old Testament ‘prophecies’. It was not to recount an actual event.

The resurrection is a literary trope, a metaphor intended to illustrate supposed Old Testament prophecies; literature begetting literature. Except in people’s heads, nothing else happened.

Jesus Quiz

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Sort these statements of Jesus’ into the following categories: a) metaphor, b) hyperbole, c) literal:

Be perfect as your father in Heaven is perfect

Judge not that ye be not judged

Remove the log from your own eye before attending to your neighbour’s

Slay my enemies in front of me

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.

Turn the other cheek

Give to all who ask

Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life

Whatever you ask for in prayer believe that you have receive it and it will be yours

If you have faith enough you can move mountains

Love your enemies

There are also eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

After three days I will rise again

Some who are standing here will not see death before they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom

I am the Resurrection

Do works even greater than mine

Answers? Damned if I know (and no doubt damned if I don’t.) I do, however, know a man who thinks he knows. He says as a rule of thumb, if you don’t like the sound of something Jesus says, it’s definitely not literal. But if it fuels your fantasy then of course it is.

Thanks, Don.

If It Walks Like A Duck…

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Psychology Today has this to say about cults:

Destructive individuals and cults use deception and undue influence to make people dependent and obedient. A group should not be considered a cult merely because of its unorthodox beliefs. It is typically authoritarian, headed by a person or group of people with near complete control of followers. Cult influence is designed to disrupt a person’s authentic identity and replace it with a new identity.

Let’s break this down a little:

Destructive individuals: But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them – bring them here and kill them in front of me (Luke 19.27).

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).

He said to them, ‘But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, “And he was counted among the lawless”; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.’ They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ He replied, ‘It is enough’ (Luke 22: 36-38). [This is evidently a fictitious episode created around a supposed prophecy (Isaiah 53:12).]

Use deception: The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news! (Mark 1:14-15). Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11.24).

Undue influence: Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple (Luke 14.33). No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. (Luke 9.62).

To make people dependent: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14.26).

…and obedient: If you love me, keep my commands (John 14:15). Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honour the one who serves me (John 12.26).

Typically authoritarian… with near complete control: You are my friends if you do what I command you (John 15.14).

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’ (Matthew 7.21)

Disrupts a person’s true identity: If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Luke 9.23). 

And replaces it with a new identity: Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18.13).

(John said,) ‘He must become greater; I must become less’ (John 3.30).

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Luke 5: 31-32).

Whether Jesus said these things or they were put into his mouth by his early followers, it is still the case that if it looks like a cult, talks like a cult and behaves like a cult… it’s a cult.

As it was in the beginning, now and ever shall be.

Just Like Jesus

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Some parts of this post have appeared before.

Early in the first letter of John, we read,

By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, “I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked. (1 John 2: 3-6)

Isn’t that interesting? John, whoever he was, says that Christians can know they’re saved because they keep Jesus’ commands and ‘walk’ as he walked. Likewise, others should be able to see these traits too because, as Jesus is (later) made to say, cult members can be recognised by their ‘fruits’ (Matthew 7:16).

Just what are Jesus’ commands that converts can’t help but demonstrate? Here’s a few:

  • Cutting themselves off from family – hating their parents, in fact – just to follow him (Luke 14.26);
  • Deny everything about themselves (Matthew 16.24-27);
  • Forsaking home, job, wealth, status, credibility and comfort to help bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth (Mark 10.29-31 etc);
  • Slaving tirelessly in the service of others (Mark 10.43-44; Matthew 23.11 etc);
  • Selling their possessions so that they can give the proceeds to the poor (Matthew 19.21; Luke 14.33);
  • Turning the other cheek, repeatedly going the extra mile and giving away the shirt and coat from off their backs– if they’ve still got them after giving everything away – (Matthew 5.38-40);
  • Welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting those in prison (Matthew 25.35-40);
  • Forgiving again and again and again (Matthew 18.21-22);
  • Avoiding judging others so that they won’t  be judged in turn (Matthew 7.1-3);
  • Loving their enemies (Matthew 5.44);
  • Regarding persecution and injustices as blessings (Matthew 5.11);
  • Doing miracles even more impressive than Jesus’ own (Mark 16.17-18; John 14.12);
  • Healing the sick, raising the dead and casting out demons (Matthew 10.7-8);
  • Asking for anything in prayer, which will be given to them (Mark 11.24; Matthew 21.22);
  • Telling others that the world is about to end (in the first century) and that only Jesus can save them from God’s wrath (Matthew 28.29-34; Matthew 28.16-20).

How many of these things do we see Christians doing? How many of these commandments are Christians compelled to ‘keep’, as letter writer John puts it? Some, it’s true, make attempts with the last (if only they wouldn’t) and a very limited few have a go at a couple of the others. But as far as most Christians are concerned, these commandments may as well not exist. They don’t see Jesus’ instructions as applying to them. I know from experience that they have ready made excuses for not obeying them, let alone feeling an inner compulsion to realise them in their own lives.

Their excuses necessitate them reinterpreting Jesus’ words. They’re metaphorical, they say. ‘He didn’t really mean give everything away because where would that leave us?’ – or they insist his commands have been taken out of context, or have only a spiritual meaning…

Which is to say, nothing Jesus said is to be taken literally, even though the most straight forward reading of his pronouncements is that this is how he meant them. It’s how his early followers, the people who preserved or created his words in the gospels, understood them. Why record them otherwise?

But Jesus’ moralising is inconvenient, impractical, exacting, extreme; ridiculous, in fact, and Christians know this. Still his commands must be dealt with somehow. So the Righteous™ work round them or ignore them completely, replacing his priorities with ones of their own: worshipping him; defending his reputation; striving for power; complaining about secular society; whining about the media;  promoting aggression; acquiring wealth (there should be no such thing as a millionaire Christian); claiming persecution; equating faith with guns; trying to control others’ behaviour; interfering in their sex lives; suppressing LGBT people; arguing that religious rights trump those of minorities; opposing abortion.

None of these figured in Jesus’ agenda. Some are even in direct opposition to what he’s made to say in the gospels.

When we see Christians doing the things Jesus tells them they should be doing – what God’s love perfected in them compels them to do – maybe then we’ll listen to what they have to say. When they demonstrate credibility rather than hypocrisy, maybe they’ll have earned the right to be heard. But as there’s not much chance of that happening any time soon, it’s way past time we ignored them, and their superstition, in much the same way they ignore their Lord and Savior™.