Is there any meaning in the Christian God being tortured to death on the cross? Is it meant to show to Christians what they should not do? Or is it meant to demonstrate what they should do?
Is there any meaning in the Christian God being tortured to death in all the brutality that Mel Gibson depicts in The Passion of the Christ? Some of us, as children, thought it was meant to show to Christians what they should not do. They said he was the God of love who urged everyone to love each other to cure the never ending bloody strife between people. His own cruel death showed exactly what he meant.
Why then do Christians not notice this simple message?
• They have committed worse atrocities than did their own God’s tormentors. •
New. No comments posted here yet. Be the first one!
Before you go, think about this…
Among the advocates of the non-historicity of Jesus, John M Robertson and L Gordon Rylands are widely known. In his Evolution of Christianity, Mr Rylands contends that the name Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Joshua. Joshua, it seems, was an ancient Hebrew sun-god, who was demoted to the status of a man by the priests of the Yahweh cult. However, the worship of Joshua was continued in secret by his devotees, until the fall of Jerusalem. After that event, secrecy was no longer necessary, so that the Joshua cult again came out into the open. The sacrificed Jesus, or Joshua, according to Robertson and Rylands, was not a historical personage, but a character in a mystery play. “What is clear,” declares Mr Robertson, is that the central narrative of the gospel biography, the story of the Last Supper, The Agony, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion, is neither a contemporary report nor a historical tradition, but the simple transcript of a Mystery-Drama.
Dr John G Jackson, Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth
Give or take a few, it’s been 23771 months since the first coming of Christ ended. The Rapture can’t be long now… Can it?
AskWhy! Books
Support independent publishers and writers snubbed by big retailers. Ask your public library to order these books.
Available through all good bookshops
Permission to copy for personal use is granted. Teachers and small group facilitators may also make copies for their students and group members, providing that attribution is properly given. When quoting, suggested attribution format:
Adding the date accessed also will help future searches when the website no longer exists and has to be accessed from archives… for example…
Dr M D Magee, AskWhy! Publications Website, “Sun Gods as Atoning Saviours” Updated: Monday, May 07, 2001, www.askwhy .co .uk / christianity / 0310sungod .php (accessed 5 August, 2007)
Electronic websites please link to us at http://www.askwhy.co.uk or to major contents pages, if preferred, but we might remove or rename individual pages. Pages may be redisplayed on the web as long as the original source is clear. For commercial permissions apply to AskWhy! Publications.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, 1986) describes skeptics as the New Inquisition, but Sagan points out that no sceptic compels belief, and the reverse is actually true, that it is the skeptics who are deprived of an adequate voice. The media treatment of the skeptical approach is dismal, and the media hacks, hosts and presenters are all convinced that religion is far more important than science, mainly because they are scientific illiterates themselves, and proud of it! New agers are not being called up before inquisitorial tribunals, nor whipped for contradicting orthodoxy, as critics of received religions were, and they are not being burned at the stake. Their beef is the same as that of the Christian Churches, they cannot stand having their fancies criticized. They are offering stale religion because they have not the bottle or discipline to oppose the politicians and corporate executives who make the decisions about our world. When they are not right wing tricksters, they are moral cowards.
Moses and Exodus
