froggebip
@froggebip

the belief that the Christian God is actually a malicious failed creation called the Demiurge, created by a more powerful goddess Sophia, imprisoned in a quarantine universe with all of our ænima to play with

and that the serpent that encouraged us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was actually a projection sent by that goddess so we could attain true knowledge and thereby escape the Demiurge's prison

and that Jesus Christ was also a projection of Sophia to accomplish the same

and that's why the Christian God is such a pathetic jealous little piss baby while Jesus is incredibly based


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

Yeshua ben Joseph was a Jewish political revolutionary who engaged in direct action against the local bourgeoisie with a handmade fucking scourge, dude ruled. Pity about his fans.


Anschel
@Anschel

Like, reading through the Synoptic gospels (that's Mark, Luke, and Matthew, which modern scholars believe to be somewhat accurate representations of actual history) it's hard for me to find anything he said that I really disagree with. Just the divorce thing honestly.


ChaiaEran
@ChaiaEran

They were supposed to be there.

They were supposed to be there, they were public servants not random bougie merchants

Their job, which they were doing, was to

  1. Exchange Roman coinage from pilgrims, which bear graven images of the emperor, for Judean shekalim, which are suitable for use in sacrifices
  2. Sell pre-approved ritually pure animals for pilgrims who couldn't risk bringing their own animals on the long and sometimes dangerous journey to Jerusalem. And yes, they did have to sell them, because the ritual sacrifice requires the pilgrims to own the animals so as to, you know, sacrifice something.
  3. Separate out the received money into a) money to pay for the kohanim to, you know... eat, since they had no other trade but were devoted full-time to Temple services b) money to go to social support systems for the poor, redeeming captives, funerals for those who couldn't afford them, and stuff like roads and water canals, and c) money to go to taxes so that the occupying Romans wouldn't murder them all.

They weren't even doing this in the sacred part of the Beit Hamikdash, this whole scenario took place in an outer courtyard called the Court of the Gentiles that was explicitly and intentionally open for commerce. The job of the money changers is quite extensively laid out in the Mishnah (Mishnah Shekalim), including countermeasures against corruption (Shekalim 3:2 and 5:2), and methods for social support systems that allowed anybody who needed help to take what they needed from the Temple vault in private and with dignity (Shekalim 5:6).

And when Jeezy boi came in and flipped over the tables, he mixed those three separated piles of money together and made those public servants' jobs a lot harder, and allowed a whole lot of Christians to later characterize the whole of Jewish Temple society as being corrupt and money-grubbing.

So, no, that wasn't direct action against the wealthy, or against the occupying Romans. It was just him being an asshole. And as for those taxes to the occupiers, paid so that the Romans wouldn't bring in a legion and kill everyone?

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's.

So, yeah.


Fel-Temp-Reparatio
@Fel-Temp-Reparatio

Glad someone else knows that the temple tantrum was kind of fucked up. Even if you sided with Jesus of Nazareth on the morality of the thing, his "solution" wasn't one. Like it's akin to someone being angry that the only grocery store in a remote town was overcharging on groceries, so they responded by burning the whole store down. They just made everyone's lives harder without addressing the underlying problems.

I also feel like a lot of admiration for Jesus of Nazareth by non-Christians is cultural inertia more than a result of critically reading the texts. Like have you seriously sat down and read the Sermon on the Mount? Like trying not to read in all the cultural baggage that's attached to it, but what Jesus was actually saying? Because it wasn't much. It's like "here's a list of people who are cool, being nice is good, if someone hates you then just like them back and act like that's solved the problem, and don't get divorced even if your spouse beats you every day." Like there's barely any more detail than that, and that's the kind of at best vague and unhelpful shit you can get from any wannabe guru anywhere, not the revolutionary teachings of some kind of radical. Heck, given that the much represented Pharisees were much more open about divorce, Jesus comes off like someone pretty conservative.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @ChaiaEran's post: