Christianity
A Christmas Carol: Evolved Morality Separates Secular from Pauline Christianity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 23 December 2009
All real living is meeting.Martin Buber
Society and Personal Values
It is human nature to be responsible, that is, to consider the consequences for others of our words and deeds. It requires that we should be responsible too in our thinking, for we can think of the consequences of our words and deeds before we utter or do them respectively. The Zoroastrian religion’s central tenet was to be pure in thought word and deed, a reflexion of our need, as social animals, to be responsible.
We have evolved as social animals, and cannot be human without the cultural influence of society, the conglomerate of our fellow humans around us. Society has given us the advantages that have taken us to our technological civilization, and is the reason why we need to respect our fellow humans—to accept them as having as much right to the benefits of social living as we have, and indeed to benefit from our care and attention, just as we benefit from theirs.
Personality involves the sharing of personal life with other people, with mutual respect for one another’s freedom and responsibility. Such qualities are what constitute those that categorize what is personal about us. We are caring and attentive to others—it is the Christian meaning of love. We value them and their contribution to our existence. The Christians call their God a personal God for just this reason—He is concerned about them! But truly God is society, not a supernatural phantom. See “A Christmas Carol”.
It is society—our fellow beings—that cares for us as we would like God to. When it is functioning properly, it succours, protects and saves us from danger and destitution, but when it fails, it does the opposite, allows us to be exploited, deprived of necessities and exposed to danger and poverty and even forced into it despite our best efforts. It happens when more powerful people treat weaker ones as nonhuman, as objects or things, or even as undesirable or evil, rather than as equal personalities with their own human persona as valuable as ourselves.
The central personal value of human beings as social beings is to value other people and to value ourselves as contributing to the good of others—the social good. That is why self abuse is wrong as well as abusing others, although self abuse is only criminal when others suffer as a consequence.
It is our responsibility to think of the consequences of our words and deeds. The authority for behaving in this way has nothing to do with any ultimate authority in the universe that prescribes in advance what is good and bad. What is good and bad is certainly prescribed in advance, but it is prescribed by our situation in life, by where we find ourselves as a result of a particular line of evolution. We are social animals, and it is that which prescribes our morality. That, not God’s laws, is what is given, and what cannot be avoided if we hope to remain human. By ignoring other people’s humanity, treating them badly or even killing them off, as if they were bacteria or blades of grass, we bring about the weakening and ultimate destruction of human society.
That is on the cards when we see certain signs, most importantly when government itself—those elected or appointed to rule us—ignore social necessities, ignore morality whether towards us or towards the people of other nations, in its decisions. When this disdain for human values descends to everyday society, we know it is not long to a collapse of society into chaos, and all that is likely to prevent it is a decline into authoritarianism and virtual slavery in a police state. The destruction of society is most often preceded by a decline in personal values and morals, a decline in our regard for each other!
Society as the basis for human morality is a much clearer and easily understood basis than God. It is real! It depends on mutual love. Even if you believe God is real too, it is plain that God means us to live socially and with mutual respect and kindness. If everyone could be greedy, and selfish, and do just as they wanted without censure, civilization could not exist. Lying, thieving, fraud, sexual exploitation, and murdering, once they become commonplace will destroy all incentive for social living. If they are to go unpunished, then we might as well all join in. We must decline to the level of the liars, thieves, fraudsters, pimps, and murderes—solitary animals out only for themselves. It is the logic of the capitalist ethic, the victory of selfishness over lovingkindness. The co-operation essential to civilization cannot exist… civilization dies.
The main religions of the world consider human life as sacred, an awareness from early times that society is necessary for human life, but, at first, the society that mattered was purely local—the tribe. People beyond the pale did not matter as much as those within it, but that is no longer true. The human tribe is now world wide. Dunne urged us not to ask for whom the bell tolls. He was right, it tolls for us all. We have a common fate. Love of God is necessarily love of our neighbour, love of other people. No Christians, or few, seem today to comprehend this simple fact.
Christianity above all religions identifies humanity with God, the human person with a personal God. It is stated explicitly that the failure to love others—even the least among us—is to reject God. Even those who cannot escape their addiction to a supernatural father, cannot evade the plain fact that He, in the person of Christ, a man, made the love of others the requirement for salvation. Neglect society, neglect suffering people, or worse, add to their distress, and you are causing suffering to Him, God. He said it Himself in lucid words. For the believer in the supernatural, it is a profound metaphor, but as God is a personification of society in fact, it is a profound truth.
Christianity
The poor seek food for their stomach, the rich stomach for their food.
It was Jesus himself—God!—who said that the test of worthiness for the kingdom of heaven is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless:
As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me… As you did it not… you did it not unto me.Matthew 25:40
Could God, in the human shape of Jesus, be clearer about how to be saved? He is clearly saying that every human being, however insignificant they seem to you, is actually God Himself! You Christians judge a man to be evil and kill him—a poor Afghan, a Vietnamese peasant, a Moslem Arab—then you are killing God. How then have you any claim to be saved? You rejected God’s own word. Your personal values are as far from those that God taught as it is possible to be, yet you still expect Him to save you! He even said you ought not to judge others, lest you be judged. But you do not care. Why? Because you can be no Christian while ignoring what God told you. You can have as much faith as you like but you are not being a Christian! The apostle, Matthew, did not write:
He who hates is born of God and knows God,
yet that is what most modern Christians seem to think.
It is very difficult to be a good Christian. Most Christians are a poor advertisement for their religion.M V C Jeffreys, Institute of Christian Education
Mostly, they are taught they are saved because of their faith, and that is sufficient. They do not have to actually do anything. But Christ not faith is the measure of Christians. His behavior is recorded in the bible. For what purpose, if faith is all that is needed for salvation? The reason is that people were meant to live in a particular way to be a Christians. They were meant to live like Christ—thinking as he thought, teaching as he taught and doing what he did.
Yet throughout history, ever since the formulation of the false doctrine of faith as a magic charm, Christians have burnt and murdered other people, especially any of them who tried to live like Christ. What is the lesson of the crucifixion? Surely it is that we ought not to do it. We are not supposed to go around torturing people and cruelly killing them, because we are doing it to God, just as He said! Every person Christians kill, is God being crucified again. Matthew 25:40 said so. If they believe Christ is God, Christians cannot escape this conclusion.
Jeffreys thinks the Church made an error in getting involved in the controversy with science. By accepting that God explained whatever science did not, the greater the success of science, the less the space in truth for God and Christianity. Archbishop Temple also saw it as the greatest folly, and sensible Anglicans since classified science as a tool revealed by God for human use. Then the evangelicals took over! For the typical educated Anglican of old, religion had no quarrel with science.
It does not stop science having a quarrel with religion over the very virtue Christians admire about themselves most of all—their faith. As it stands, Christianity is built on faith, belief in incredible and untested fables. Science will not accept anything that is not thoroughly, even ultimately exhaustively, tested and shown to be true. It is an unbridgeable gulf. Christianity wants people to be credulous—to believe just what they are told. Science requires people to be skeptical—not to believe anything until it has been tested and proven.
Some eminent scientists like to simultaneously profess Christianity, but they can only do it by accepting two incompatible systems as being true at the same time. They must reserve a different compartment of their brain for their religion from that of their science, but others, equally and more eminent, cannot see why there should be some artificial line drawn to stop skeptical questions being asked of religious belief, or to permit unproven answers to them to be sufficient, when they are not elsewhere. There is no reason. The simultaneous belief in Christianity and science is unreasonable, irrational. The credulous and skeptical approaches to life are immiscible.
Another weakness in Christianity is its alliance with the political right, not a new thing, but quite contrary to the evidence of the gospels and Acts of the Apostles. The church supports certain personal morals that promote social cohesion, such as honesty and refusing to allow divisions between couples by adultery, but it says nothing, or nothing very audible, about financial conspiracies, banking irresponsibility and corporate greed, or about the growing corruption of politicians, or about arbitrary imperialist wars that only the owners of huge corporations find justifiable by their raking in the war bucks.
Nor do they have anything much to say about international hypocrisy, double standards and the revival of torture by we supposedly civilized people, again to serve no one except the insatiable mega rich. Why should ordinary people listen to the clergy spouting about sex, drugs and rock and roll, when they virtually ignore the bigger and grosser sins of the corporate bosses, and governments, not to mention the clergy themselves? If the churches really advocated that Christians should live according to the morality of Christ himself, there would be a lot more respect for them.
No one could be considered a Christian who did not lead the life of Christ, like the Cathar Perfects. Since the poor are blessed, the churches would advocate poverty as the holy state, as they once did[†]Poverty Principle. That is why Christianity has an established tradition of poverty and giving, from its earliest days, in anchorites, monks and nuns, and even Santa Claus, who all tried to stick to the Essenic poverty principle of Christ, but were always marginalized by the power and wealth of mainstream clergy, bishops and popes., and frugal living should be essential to Christian status, while personal aggrandizement would be condemned. Honor would come from service to society, not to personal financial gain. Constantly, the churches faced dissension by those who saw Christ being sidelined by the followers of Paul. Constantly, movements arose demanding a return to apostolic principles, but always they became corrupted by the freeloaders.
Even though the Christian God of the gospels appeared on earth, acted in certain ways, gave his disciples lessons in how to live correctly, and related parables and maxims encapsulating his teaching, Christians escape the obligations this places upon them by pleading that God has to remake them first! This whole nonsense comes from Paul not from Christ. The message of Christ was that Christians remade humanity by their example, and their persistence—by their discipleship. The teachings of Christ were lessons in self help, not an encouragement by God to do nothing.
The point was to do it, then the supernatural father would approve, and the psychology is plain—many people had to want the approval of a traditional God to do anything. That is the role of faith, but the desired effect is achieved by action, by deeds, by works! So, if you need to believe God has to approve as your motivation for doing as He said, then fine, Believe! But the outcome is that we all benefit from moral behaviour whether God is smiling on it in approval or not.
And the point is that we should be moral, not that we should pray God will make us moral. Belief in the supposed moral assistance of God is why Christians are all too often totally immoral. Whether you believe God exists and will help you or not, the onus is personal. If you believe in God and the gospels, you should realize that by appearing in the flesh, He has already helped you by teaching you what He understands by morality, and demonstrating the moral life Himself. He said we should do likewise, and presumably the believer accepts what he said, taught and did. Then do as he told you! Excuses are Satanic.
But the excuses come! Christians reply that human beings are too imperfect to make anything good of themselves. Human failings throughout history prove the necessity of God’s help. It is a Satanic excuse. God has actually done His bit. If He is to do more, then He could have done it at the outset, and saved everyone a lot earlier, and saved a great deal of grief. God is, Christians tell us, almighty, so He could make us all perfect at any time at all, but why should He? He has told us, if we are to believe the gospels, what we must do. Surely, He has a right to think that anyone calling themselves a Christian will read, take note and act on His teachings and example. But they do not! They read, take note and act on Paul’s example!
Some Christians do it, and they are the ones the rest of Christianity call the “real Christians”. Real Christians get on with being a Christ. Fake Christians boast about their faith. In 2000 years of the history of Christendom, God could have waved his wand, or raised His right hand, and transformed every one of the faithful. He has not done it, because he has done as much as any Christian can expect—shown the way! Yet they expect Him to do everything. Surely they must see that is a trick of the trickster God—Satan. Or in simple psychological terms, most supposed Christians are fobbing off the difficult decision actually to be Christian—that is to be moral, and show some lovingkindness to other people, particularly the poor and meek.
Morality
Being moral is a social duty. Faith is empty of all meaning unless the faithful Christian displays their social duty to others. Do they know and understand their own most famous parable of Christ—the Good Samaritan? Brought up to date, it would be called the Good Arab, forty years ago, the Good Vietnamese, seventy years ago, the Good German or Japanese. God is our neighbour. God is our enemy. God is any one of our fellow human beings. God is a personification of human society. It is meant to help us, not kill us. We make ourselves by building a sympathetic society, or we shall fail by not trying. For those who had not noticed, we are failing! There are questions to be asked about human failure to be humane, even to strangers, but the answers are social and environmental, not “spiritual” unless spiritual simply means realizing what is necessary and doing it.
People have evolved to live in small bands of less than 200, and in groups of less than ten such bands agglomerated in a tribe or village, but now we live in a world sized group. Our nature is to trust people with the same culture as ourselves. At one time that would have meant the 200, or at most the 2000, but now it is a whole nation, and it must become the whole world, if nation sized tribes are not to destroy us all, and the world too. Then, if any survive, they will be back to the 200 or so people who started out, back to the stone age.
The kingdom of heaven of Matthew can be realized in actuality by the continuation and growth of civilization as a caring society, and the chance of us spreading into the universe. God will not do either, we shall do it ourselves—reach for the stars or return to primitivism. We must overcome our suspicions and senseless hatred of others, and care for them and co-operate with them, or indulge in an orgy of unstoppable self destruction for which there is no grandstand seat in heaven unless you are on the international space station at the time. You will be thanking God you missed a quick and painful death, only to realize you face a slow and lonely one.
So forget divine grace except perhaps as a psychological prop. It is not the gratuitous mercy of a superbeing that will save us, but our own willingness to hear the message of the Good Samaritan, and help other people as if they were God. The fobbing off to God or Christ of our personal moral responsibility is the very reason we do not adapt to the modern social situation. Christians congratulate themselves on their faith and kindness to their friends and relatives while declaiming on the idleness of the poor, and the evilness of foreigners, and boasting of their own hard work. They pride themselves on their charity while disdaining the poor as workshy, and refusing to offer the hand of kindness to them. They should read again the attitude Christ, their God, avowed. They are hypocrites.
Many tell their children the story of the Good Samaritan while advocating the invasion and bombing of poor countries. Admittedly, not all Christians are as hypocritical as many US Protestants, but even the concerned ones are never heard as voices against their more odious coreligionists. It seems that none of them will deny that someone who professes Christianity is a Christian even though they do not measure up to Christ’s standards. Bush and Blair witness to this truth! As long as people are encouraged to rely on the saving grace of God, they will not be addressing the question of what they need to do to save themselves.
Faith in God
“Of ourselves we can do nothing” is the Christian admission of defeat. Pauline Christianity is defeatism. It relies on the Christian theory of the existence of a supernatural God being true. What if they are wrong? Their theory of God saving them for their faith releases them from having to do their moral utmost in practice. All the have to do is satisfy themselves that they have shown God they have faith that He will save them, and He will save them, indeed He is honor bound to save them for their faith, most of them think!
Reliance on Gods and spirits is the human disease that might be fatal to the species. We have to cure ourself of worshiping the magnified image of ourselves as if it were an independent superpower. It is the delusion of a flowing oasis in the middle of the reality of a scorched desert that we have to work out how to cross safely by our own co-operative social efforts.
Pious people and many less pious opportunist believers have relied throughout history on the leap of faith, a belief that the cliff before them is only a narrow chasm easily leaped over with little or no effort. But they are invited take it on trust in the dark, without even seeing whether whether there is another side accessible with minimal effort, or it is just a dangerous cliff and a plunge into death. Perhaps they would have done better to be less gullible, more skeptical, and chosen more self effort to find a safer surer path. It is the safe path we have to find by eschewing the Christian invitation to take the leap of faith that has failed for 2000 years, and indeed many years before albeit with somewhat different myths attached.
And what is this salvific superpower that Christian put their faith in? We described it as a magnifed man, and Christians must concur because they accept that man and God have the same image. For Christians, God made man in His image, so the image of God is the image of man all right. The question is whether God or the man is the original, the primary image. God is hypothetical, but we have no doubt about the existence of humanity. Humanity, for Christians, is the problem. The problem about God is His existence.
It follows that God has been created in the image of man, not the reverse, and science supports this view. Scientists at the university of Chicago led by Nicholas Epley have shown that believers attribute their own opinions to God, and that their consideration of what is God’s will corresponds to activity in regions of the brain that are active when they formulate their own views. When people formulate what they infer are other people’s views, different parts of the brain are activated, the ones that ought to be active when thinking about God’s will, because God, in Christian theory, has His own personality. The work shows that everyone attributes their own opinion to God. Any perfect being, even God, cannot hold contradictory opinions simultaneously, so that He can agree with every one of His contrary worshipers. From another viewpoint, though, we have a clear explanation of why every believer thinks they know exactly what God thinks—He thinks whatever they do!
It is odd that, over the last 2000 years, Christians have claimed, and still claim, to be realistic, while they accuse atheists and humanists of being unrealistic. Thus the evidence of history is held to show that humans cannot improve themselves, yet in most of that time Christianity has dominated the western world. The evidence of history therefore indicts Christianity even if it also indicts the human species—Christianity is supposed to be the cure for sin!—yet Christians are blind to the failure of the nostrum they claim to be administering. Surely Christianity has proven it is no better than blood letting as a cure all, and has too often descended into blood letting anyway.
It is a philosophy of despair to keep applying the same poultice when it has repeatedly done nothing to relieve the symptoms, but Christians continue to tell nonbelievers that humanity has nothing but despair without God. The answer for Christians is fantasy—salvation is the cure for original sin, even though the agent of salvation is no more than their own fancy labeled as the “grace of God”. In practice, it is “Christian love”, something that so few of them apply themselves to practising, and something which needs no God to understand except as a metaphor for us all, for “love” or lovingkindness is necessary for society—it is care, compassion and help for others, especially when they are suffering and in need.
The most obvious meaning of history is that every nation, culture and civilization brings destruction on itself by exceeding the bounds of creatureliness which God has set upon all human enterprises.Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man
The bounds that “God has set”means the social necessities of humanity, what is needed to preserve the sociality that is our essence. They boil down to personal values, the value we place upon our relationships with other human beings who are in every important respect the same as us, and the value we hold important to remain true to it. This we must hold to, in our everyday existence, now, every minute, and forever, with allowance only for minor lapses. It is how we all live together as human beings, and resides in our inner selves as a consequence of our evolving as social animals.
We have also been endowed with thought, and can suppress and override our instincts. The gospel message was that we must not do it, leading to callousness and disdain for each other, yet it has become the principle of capital accumulation. Christ warned against it, and told us how to avoid becoming indifferent to each other’s plight, but Christ’s modern disciples generally ignore it. The reason is the Christian has been encouraged to take only an incidental interest in this life, this temporary sojourn in a vale of tears, for an eternity of bliss is up for grabs. Their whole attention is on this dream. They chorus:
The redemption of mankind lies beyond this world.
If that is true, what was the purpose of God coming to earth to show and tell them how they should behave in this sinful world? It makes a farce of their own God’s mortal life and teaching. If it is true, every bit of love expended in this world is a waste of effort, and to no avail. The admonition of God is not that this fiction will save you if you cannot save yourself, it is that you should be making the effort to save yourself.
God is a large warning notice in the schoolroom of life saying, “Love one another, or you will destroy one another”. There is no small print that adds, “but don’t try too hard, for if you fail, I will save you instead”. Paul, the apostle of Satan, added that. God is the human intuition of what is required for the preservation of human society, and that means humanity itself. Our intuition is that we must love one another, or suffer dire consequences—the breakdown of society and civilization as it is, and at some stage the breakdown will be final.
Paul or Christ?
As long as Pauline Christianity influences us to think more of the fantasy of an afterlife and thereby less of the world we know and occupy, we cannot reckon with the human condition realistically, nor take our responsibilities seriously. Christians have to realize that God has not given them an opt out. Those who were meant to be a moral vanguard cower at the back shivering that they are not worthy, while boasting of the irrepressible faith that will save them. If they have the faith, why are they not at the front showing the moral way according to Christ’s precepts. Why do they value riches when Christ could not have been more definite about the moral virtue of poverty? Even their dream of life after death is conditional on what they do in this life, yet they use faith as an excuse for avoiding good works!
To love others, even strangers, foreigners and enemies, brings salvation, not singing hymns, silent prayers and lighting candles. Christ, God incarnated as a man, Christians tell us, was unequivocal about it, yet they ignore God and pursue the do nothing faith of Paul. Faith and doing nothing is not an option. Even in Christian terms it is self defeat and deception, for Christ told them precisely what they had to do. By kidding themselves that faith was sufficient, that universal love was unnecessary, they condemn themselves. If people fail to preserve human society, humanity dies, and God dies with it, for God is human society.
It is quite impossible, however you look at it, for the Christian to retreat from the claims of this world into a mystical other world. They know, even in their own beliefs, to pass through the Pearly Gates, they must meet the necessary conditions, conditions tested in the here and now. It is no coincidence that the conditions are the basis of a successful human society. The set of Christians beliefs can be condensed and summarised in the Golden Rule, a simple expression of the human empathy necessary for society to function.
Christ told Christians they had to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, not feed the bankers and evict the poor. Yet where was the Christian protests over social injustice on a grand scale like the baling out of the mega rich at the expense of the poor? The only realistic way to interpret the kingdom of God is that it is what we can achieve here on earth when Christians actually begin to do what God told them to do.
God plainly said it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Christians have consistently tried to get round this very clear statement with all sorts of excuses and inventions, but their own God said it, and meant it. A camel cannot get through the eye of a needle. The message is lucid. The kingdom of God is a human society of lovingkindness, a perfect human society.
Rich men, by whatever means, have taken more than their fair share out of society, and God expects them, the Christian writings tell us, to give it to the poor. Successful people can get fulfilment from their success, and then double it by giving what they have earned back to society. Christianity is a way of telling us all to think about, respect and help out other people when they need it. If we all do it, we all benefit. What is difficult about that?
It is simply our social instinct, the social instinct common to social animals, expressed verbally because we can use language. It was a rule of small scale early human societies, which became a rule of God when tribes adopted Gods to stand for them, to encapsulate tribal culture and offer a basis for enforcing it. Then the origin was lost in the allegory. Good for the tribe is God of the tribe.
Once, and still, Christians asked how atheists and humanists could be moral themselves, as they believed in no God to enforce it. Only fear of getting on the wrong side of God makes Christians moral, but infidels had nothing to make them good. Why then are atheists no less moral than Christians? Indeed, plenty of evidence shows Christians generally are less moral than atheists. Christians thought they had the source of morality on their side. That is wrong. The source of morality is the objective need of an instinct of care for others in a society, when animals, that in the wild solitary state would be competitors with each other, are to live co-operatively together.
The moral instinct is fundamental. It is religions that are derivative. They derive various expressions of moral laws as a codification of our natural behaviour to be social. Religions are hypocritical in supporting an opportunistic system like capitalism based on an assumption of human selfishness as the mortivating principle of life, despite the age old maxims of their holy books. Self aggrandizement and greed supplant the caring and sharing religions once supported.
It follows that religions have lost their social raison d’etre and should be abandoned unless congregations demand a restoration of their original principles, unless they begin again promoting human fellowship, genuinely and sincerely, and not merely exclusively but universally. The Universal Church is not at all universal, it is highly exclusive. Secular Christianity is the genuinely Universal Church, eschewing sacraments and ritual in favour of thoughts, words and deeds—living the life of Christ to the very best of anyone’s ability, and that amounts to being kind.
The social purpose of Christianity is self evident but has been distorted by the emphasis of Pauline Christian bishops and ministers on rigmarole, for that is what keeps the churches and their ministers rich and influential. Christ, in modern Christian practice, is not treated as if his word counts as God’s word. Christians believe in a Trinity of God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, supposedly all equal but different aspects of God, but treat Paul, who has no claim other than his own even to be an apostle, as if he not Christ were God.
Few honest scholars demur from the view that Jesus was an Essene, their teachings being essentially the same, the notable differences being entirely because Jesus thought the apocalypse—the Day of God’s Visitation—was imminent whereas most Essenic writings expected it at some unspecified future date. Jesus was wrong. The apocalypse was not due then, and has still not happened. So, later Christians had to make changes to Jesus’s reported words to match the reality.
Essenes were a highly social sect of Judaism who held their goods in common as the apostles did. They kept nothing significant in their own possession, believed in hard work for the common good, helped each other, orphans, widows, fallen women and the elderly, had lodging houses, hospitals, and had decided riches were sinful, so they called themselves the Poor.
It is hardly surprising that modern US Christians refuse to accept that Christ was an Essene, and overlook Christ’s teaching in favour of Paul’s. Christ and the Essenes to all intents and purposes were communists. American economic ideology goes completely against Christ’s teachings, so Christ—God!—has to be sidelined. Americans have been indoctrinated that communism is evil, yet God was a communist in an earlier period. They claim to be God fearing, but ignore God in practice, and naturally ignore love in practice, except where it takes or ought to take no effort, loving one’s relatives and best friends. The communist God, US Christians rejected, wanted them to love their enemies. That is too hard! So, they reject God for Paul. Paul said they were fine just having faith, and they took the easy option.
Since Paul, Christians have had almost two millennia to justify their revisions of Christ’s social teaching. They convince themselves it is human to hate most other humans, but, with the help of the Holy Ghost and no effort on their own part, they will eventually learn how to love. The Holy Spirit is God again, or some aspect of Him able to change people’s nature. They have lost the metaphorical meaning that it is the security people will feel in a society in which people do act towards each other with lovingkindness. It is the product of mutual love, not some catalyst of it, though it becomes self catalytic when people begin to help one another rather than doing them down. Love as empathy and assistance unites what were entirely separate and self reliant animals—they are united in the society they form in their joint purpose in forming it, co-operation to their mutal advantage. When Christians say that love unites people in God, God is a metaphor for society.
Seeing the Big Picture
For the Christian, deflecting all their attention to their fantasy world somehow means they are better able to deal with the real world, though they have abandoned it in fact. Doing nothing except wallowing in the spiritual jacuzzi of faith solves social problems? That is the problem. It obviously solves nothing, but it is sufficient for most of two billion Christians.
Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him, but I will maintain mine own ways before him.Job 13:15
If this insane trust in fantasy means society collapses, then we shall all be slain, and there will be no more ways for us to maintain before Him. The trust will have been misplaced.
Christians miss the point of the supposedly divine statements in the bible. They take them each separately and miss the big picture. Practical social advice dominates the big picture, yet they miss it entirely through their determination to find mysticism. They miss that personal implementation of the teachings are needed for salvation. Faith is merely to give confidence in the practical social teachings of Christ. It is a type of self hypnosis meant to stiffen resolve, but its psychological purpose has been subsumed by an overlaid fantastic delusion. Christians have made faith itself into a divine object which magically and effortlessly endows them with salvation.
From one end of the bible to the other, salvation is social.M V C Jeffreys, Institute of Christian Education
Indeed, Christians are social up to a point. They make themselves into little self congratulatory tribes called congregations centered on a local temple called a church, where they pursue their own rituals with no concern for society at large, except to vote for the candidate their pastor recommends in his sermons. Of course, they are mainly friendly and helpful to most of the Christians with whom they share the church, but otherwise their principles amount to loyalty to city, state and nation. In workaday life and at these various levels, little of their Christianity shines.
At these levels, Christian children can buy hand guns and even machine guns, and it is an offence to their parents that anyone else in society who might feel threatened by the preponderance of deadly weapons in irresponsible hands should object. Their God, the biblical Christ, refused to carry a weapon, advocating passivity when struck, and urging people to turn the other cheek, defying the aggressor to continue to strike a defenceless man. In a society such as Christ envisaged, it would never happen. No one would strike a defenceless man once, let alone twice, but it requires the example of someone refusing to strike back to start it off.
How many US Christians would do it? Their leading lights are obsessed with revenge, a primitive emotion that Christ was trying to stamp out. God, if Christ is God, as Christians claim, was a pacifist, and practiced in His sojourn on earth what He had preached centuries before, according to the Jewish myth of Moses—thou shalt not murder. American Christians boast of the kill ratio—how many of the enemy is killed for every US soldier. Most of the enemy are, of course, innocents caught in the cross fire, a situation that arises because Americans always start wars in someone else’s country, so the innocents are always the enemy. And this is the same America that calls itself a Christian nation.
Christian congregations voted into power, for a second term, a Christian leader, the mindless joker called George W Bush, after he had spent billions of US tax dollars on the mass murder of a million Arabs… in revenge! Either these Christians do not understand what God is saying to them, or they do not consider Christ to be as important as they pretend. Their congregational sociability is just a veil they can hide behind, hoping that God does not notice what they have been up to, like an infant hiding behind its mother’s skirts. In their little groups they define what it means to be a good Christian, with little or no reference to what their God told them. They decide good Christians are just like themselves, so they conclude they are all good Christians! That being so, it is the rest of the world that is wicked.
Most Christians make up the principles of their religion to suit themselves. They pick bits of Christ’s teaching, but ignore most of it as being outdated, and unsuitable for modern life. They prefer a lot more of Paul, though Paul taught something utterly different from Christ, with only a little of the original practical teaching sprinkled here and there to be able to maintain the pretence of Christianity. Yes, Paul spoke of love, but emphasized faith, so that faith is what engages Christians today, not love—except of themselves!
They also like quite a lot of the primitive parts of the Jewish scriptures, though Christ had said his own teaching fulfilled the Jewish law, and elsewhere added that it had abrogated it. The Jewish law, in short, is irrelevant to Christians who follow Christ correctly. Otherwise they pick what they like from the opinions of their friends and relatives, from popular prejudice and from political propaganda, even when it is utterly contrary to what Christ was saying.
Needless to say, members of the church on the next block prefers a different montage of beliefs, but most agree children and madmen should have access to lethal weaponry because it was essential to pioneers 300 years ago fighting their way across the west, annihilating the native people of America so as to be able to take what belonged to them. So, the right to carry guns was enshrined in the constitution, and there it remains even though it is contrary to every principle and necessity of civilization, and contrary to God’s own teaching. A gun is, after all, meant to kill people, yet murder is expressly forbidden by the God of these people. Is that not a tad contrary? Is it not contrary to Christianity?
Of course it is, but these Christians are not followers of Christ, but followers of Paul, perhaps even followers of Satan, if we are to believe what they tell us about this other Christian God—the evil one! Satan, according to the Christian gospels is the tempter God, the one who tries to persuade them to sin. He even tried to persuade Christ to sin, but Christ turned down all his tempting offers. These stories are related to show Christians how they are supposed to react, but what do they actually do? They fall hook line and sinker for the temptations, and still think they are good Christians!
US Christians insist they need hand guns to protect themselves, yet their own God needed no weapons, and tried to show them why weapons were superfluous in a civilized world. Obviously, they have no real faith in their God. So, the faith they boast about is tinsel, it is decoration, it is cosmetic, meant to show to others how wonderful they are. They just cannot comprehend that once guns are made illegal there is no reason to have one. The same goes for riches. Christ was offered all the riches in the world, he was offered the world itself by the Devil, but refused. But Christians cannot accept it. They all want to be rich, at whatever cost it is to the earth, and others who live on it. God said the poor, not the rich, were blessed—they would be rewarded. Christ pointed out that birds and lilies had no more than Nature had endowed them, yet were dressed in more splendour than Solomon with all his riches. They were following their nature, and human beings should do the same—be civil to each other, be kind to each other, and we are all rich.
Secular Christianity
Christianity is incoherent, not least because most of its adherents do not follow Christ, and, for all their spouting, do not know the first thing about what he taught. They think he taught what Paul taught. They also seem not to appreciate there is a whole lot more to the world than their own church, and that it is our duty to understand it and treat it with compassion. Nor do they understand that to be a Christian they have to be like Christ, not like Tony Soprano or Tony Blair.
Christians call Christianity a communion. It means a fellowship, a community, and it is, not because it is meant to be distinct from society but because Christians are supposed to be role models for others in society to follow. People are not to be compelled to be social, but to be encouraged to be. Lovingkindness spreads by usage not by coercion, and there is no way it will spread when Christians put odious antisocial monsters into power, and tolerate a society in which social principles are actually frowned upon in favour of selfish ones.
It is more important that society should be moral than that it should be Christian, but Christians have seen their main duty as getting converts rather than getting people to be moral. Recruiting anyone and everyone has been their aim, and the local vicars and pastors love it because they are the benefiaries from the extra dollars on the platter. Congregations are cash cows for churches and their clergymen with ambitions of their own TV channel and trophy mistress.
If the shepherds are greedy, how can the sheep not be? Ministers vie with each other to get bigger congregations, and do not care how they do it, using grossly commercial and very unChrist like methods, and antiChristian nonsense. They treat Christianity as a brand to be tailored to popular demand. Their congregations seem not to notice. They believe what they are told, instead of believing what they read, and they are blind to Christianity as a social framework for living peacefully and securely together.
Christians boast their uncritical discipleship, but they are not disciples of the biblical Christ, but merely of their own pick and mix of arbitrary teachings. All they require is a set of behavior that other Christians will accept as adequate for them to profess Christianity. The criteria, though, are not Christ’s own.
Of course, it is true that Christ’s teaching is not always free from ambiguity when separate maxims and parables are compared. They have to taken in their historical context which is not always clear, and they have to be taken as a whole, by their overall significance, not picked apart, the way Christians and their theologians do.
The four gospels split into the three synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, and John, and modern Christians beyond Sunday school prefer John. It is a good reason for rejecting it. It is the closest to the conventional mystical concept of Christianity, but the synoptics are closer to the original Christ, both in time and teaching. The synoptics express the simplicity of Christ’s original message, and are closer to the purity of our inate biological morality. They are better, therefore, than the works of John and Paul, the real founders of the Christian mysteries in which the original purer moral message was diluted by the religious approach popular in the Roman empire when Paul began to spread his hybrid brand of Christianity which became the Roman Church.
The synoptics are not mysterious, except in the bits added later, and they are not as pure and simple as they once were, through later interpolations to suit gentile Romans and their ambitious bishops, but the speeches of Christ are simple and to the point, offering social and moral standards for his disciples to live by. Much has been changed and omitted even in the synoptics, but we can still identify our natural instincts in many of their succinct sayings.
If you must believe that Christ is God, then you should take note of what he is saying where he is saying it most clearly, and not where it is hard to comprehand and even to read. You should have faith that the almighty being you worship can tell you what He means with clarity, and if it is not clear then it is a reason to think it has deliberately obscured to leave you vulnerable to the machinations of those who purport to explain it.
But belief in God as a superpower is unnecessary. We believe in these saying because they match what we feel internally, our fundamental moral evolution as social beings. If we accept the standards and attitudes of our social group, we accept them because we feel them to be right, but we ought not to feel they are right just because our peers accept them. Most of us feel instinctively it is right to help others and wrong to harm them. Christ’s sayings make total sense to us without needing God. That is secular Christianity.
