Even if we set all that aside in favor of the great light of Jesus’ teachings, Jesus Christ, as a god, sold out early to the dominators and has been in their service ever since, his teachings perverted to meet their needs. Wealthy and powerful men put on the robes of bishops and popes and claimed the right to rule through the authority of the Church. Conquerers and princes claimed Jesus for their own purposes in the fourth century CE, and the control of the body of Christ (a phrase Christians use for the Church) was nearly complete by the fifth.
I find it interesting, however, that Christianity has constantly and doggedly continued to splinter, in part as a reaction to this dominator takeover. Throughout the past 2000 years, Valentinus and Gnostics of all kinds, Manichaeins and Marcionites, the medieval Cathars and the heretics of the inquisition period, Luther and the Reformationists, the Baptists and the Mennonites and the Jesus Freaks, to name but a few, pounded at the doors of the corporate church and demanded a return to the Jesus of the people. All but a few of these movements and leaders were either destroyed by violence or assimilated and turned to the service of the dominator elite. Christianity has become a kind of religious Borg.
We can only imagine that Jesus, on his throne by the right hand of the Father, weeps for his fallen church. The bible has become an idol, worshiped and followed above the Holy Spirit. The churches are in thrall to money and celebrity. Christian leaders break bread with warmongers and capitalist Caesars, and support a politics that would take away the very things that Jesus asked us to give: our money, our healing, our love for the poor and oppressed.
Why do I care? I care about Christianity two reasons. First, because some Christian people I know have a deep, personal, almost erotic relationship with their savior god and they are the only ones with whom I share this experience. I’m heart-broken that they are so blinded by dogma they can’t see how they are being used. Second, as a polytheist, I believe that the god called Jesus is not the god that Jesus taught us about, and that the god that Jesus taught us about was a god of love, the Creator, Progenitor, who made love to the Flesh and brought forth the human people and the tree people and all of the children of Earth. I love that Father god. He doesn’t belong to the dominators and he can be reclaimed.
3 comments:
Yeah I have totally noticed the erotic feelings women tend to have about Jesus. He's actually become this sort of Fabio of compassion and love, when many women have the reality of men who beat them, cheat on them, and abandon them. Jesus would not do that. Jesus loves them. He's become the perfect boyfriend. I love meeting Christian women who have that relationship with Him. Most of them are African Americans, although when my Mom was in seminary, it was a real love in for Jesus. I wish people loved each other as much as they love Jesus. (Although Bongwater lyrics state "It is easy to accept Jesus as your personal savior when he looks like William Defough."(sp)) And yet the early Christian church wouldn't even allow married people to have sex!
The splintering off I see happens in EVERY religion. My Uncle is in an evangleistic sect of Buddhism which means they go door to door annoying people and sending Buddhist scripture til your email box is too full, the way some people are very triggered and upset by Christianity due to Fundy family, I cannot see a phot of Buddha without feeing invaded and abused. Anyway, in neopaganism, look at the denominations! There are like, oh, one for every pagan?
In studying American (not Haitian or Cuban) Vodou, so much about Southern Protestant African American churches makes sense. ALL religions and their denomiations make sense when I find out the conext of the history and lifestyles and land. There are new forms of Christianity that are adapting to the ecological crisis - even Fund'ies are having to deal with their Fundy Born Again pastor kids talking about Creation Care, still totally off the mark for a deep ecologist like me, but it's tearing up the Fundy Christans who think that God made everything so perfect, how could weak dumb humans mess up an all powerful God's world? It is sacriligile to say that humans can destroy what God made. Religions evolve with the needs of the people. Right now there is so much post-modern cynical vagueness/info overload I think people are desperate for a church to make it black and white for them.
Exactly. Totally agree. With one minor difference: I believe that the ancient and "original" deity, is the Great Mother, not Father. And in fact, as the myths suggest, it is those aggressive and domineering father gods, eg Jehovah, Zeus who got their start in life by murdering the previous generation of gods, Great Mother included.
To me, the problems of today, in virtually every culture, can be ascribed to the patriarchal nature of the spirituality now accepted by, and if not accepted then imposed upon people and cultures worldwide.
However, IMHO The matriarchal and patriarchal natures of deity should not "stand on their own" but rather embrace each other for a more complete package.
Then we would have the Arrow of Time as well as the Eternal Return. We would have teleology (purpose) and direction as well as pure ontology/phenomenology. We would have immanence alongside transcendence. We would have "being" as well as "doing" and/or "having".
I SO appreciate my readers' comments. They add to the discussion and help me sort things out. Thanks! MM: I'm with you on the embrace of the male and female deity. Out of that sacred embrace, we humans were conceived. Heather: re: the splintering in every religion, maybe religions weren't meant to be solidified in the first place, and they are constantly seeking their full expression in the unique experience of each individual or community.
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