Christianity would be OK if it weren’t for
the Christians.
A “Christian” woman of my acquaintance, for
example – let’s call her Grace – tells me often that she’s praying for me: She
knows that I drink, and that I never keep the Sabbath. When I point out to her
that Jesus himself preferred the company of wine bibbers and whores and Sabbath
breakers to that of respectable people, she frowns.
That’s because the real personage of Jesus
is an inconvenience to her.
Jesus was impatient with those who stood on
formality – those who designated a day as particularly holy, for instance, or
who wanted to forbid certain activities and mandate others. All the rules and regulations, he said – all
the fever to formalize and legislate plain love and respect for one another –
obscured the simple truth of what he taught.
And what he taught was as stark and
uncompromising as could be. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Turn the other
cheek,” and “Give up everything and follow me” are injunctions lovely and
splendid as theory, but impossibly daunting in practice. Even Jesus had trouble
with them from time to time, what with everyone pulling him in a different
direction, doubting him, fearing him and finally forsaking him. He was sometimes
out of sorts with even those closest to him, his disciples (“Ye of little
faith”).
After Jesus was gone, of course, he became a
cult figure, and the imbecilities began to pile up, embellishing and encrusting
his austere and beautiful creed and sometimes, down through the years,
rendering it almost totally unrecognizable. Jesus would weep anew to know that
such thundering absurdities as the virgin birth or the doctrine of eternal
damnation or the wiping away of sins by Atonement have been, and are being,
inculcated in his name.
The Christians beginning with Saint Paul set
out to fashion a Jesus who would be popular and palatable to their recruitment
base – a Jesus whose warning, “I come not with peace, but with a sword,” would
be modified or ignored, and whose assertion that we must be like children would
come to justify the utmost credulity and the most infantile beliefs, instead of
a rallying cry for what Jesus meant: That we must cast off worldly desires and
become like a child again, full of wonder.
I call this perversion of Jesus’s teachings
and the subversion of his spirit and character: Christ-inanity.
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