The west needs a more human Jesus - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14787126
I've been going to a lot of Buddhist things lately and I think to myself, Buddha is so much more approachable than Jesus because you can actually try to do what Buddha did.

One of the issues in the west I think is that they have basically redefined Jesus into being something that no one can attempt to be. There was this book that was famous in the west for hundreds of years, I think it was called the Imitation of Christ. People need to be able to try and be like their religious/spiritual idol. If he isn't accessible then how are people supposed to work on things spiritually?

Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.
#14787132
If you believe Jesus was divine, then it's a matter of doing what he told you to. The books with his words have been stable for about 1700 years, so it's not a matter of "the west" redefining him; the churches involved were in what we now call the Middle East - Rome was a western outlier of them. For a god, Jesus is remarkably "accessible" - he went to people's weddings, eat meals with them, got framed by the authorities ...

From a Christian's point of view, the problem is the people who treat Christ-like people as 'cucks' (dear god, that's a tedious meme that the alt-right are pushing). The whole point of Christianity is to give up the attitude of "fuck you, I've got mine".

If you're not Christian (and I'm not), then you can just see the character of Jesus, as depicted in the chosen books, as one more suggestion on how to behave.
#14787138
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:If you believe Jesus was divine, then it's a matter of doing what he told you to. The books with his words have been stable for about 1700 years,

Which is 300 years after he died. In fact none of it was contemporaneous.
So who can accurately assert that they were his words?
#14787139
Well, I had to google cuck and I assure you that isn't at all how I imagine Christ to be. Then again my take on religion is very liberal. I am so horrifically fallen that I wouldn't see the point in reverence to the divine anyway.
#14787163
Hong Wu wrote:I've been going to a lot of Buddhist things lately and I think to myself, Buddha is so much more approachable than Jesus because you can actually try to do what Buddha did.

One of the issues in the west I think is that they have basically redefined Jesus into being something that no one can attempt to be. There was this book that was famous in the west for hundreds of years, I think it was called the Imitation of Christ. People need to be able to try and be like their religious/spiritual idol. If he isn't accessible then how are people supposed to work on things spiritually?

Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.


I have read several books about Buddhism and I once had a Buddhist friend. She was one of the most serene and calming persons that I have ever met in my life. The books changed my life. I never knew true peace and tranquility until I found Buddhism.

The problem I see with Christianity is that it inspires its followers to be soldiers and to fight in God's name. That goes out of control whenever psychotics claim that God told them to kill their children or spouse or something. Christianity is so much more accessible to the masses sadly.

Christians raise up their God onto this high pedestal. Ohhh, he walked on water and such. Buddhism does not do that from what I know. Buddhism focuses more on the beliefs, the journey to enlightenment. I especially like the meditation aspect, which is the Zen part.
#14787171
Besoeker wrote:Which is 300 years after he died. In fact none of it was contemporaneous.
So who can accurately assert that they were his words?

But making up new words for him now would look even worse. It would be an admission that they haven't a clue. So Christians aren't going to do that.
#14787215
MistyTiger wrote:I have read several books about Buddhism and I once had a Buddhist friend. She was one of the most serene and calming persons that I have ever met in my life. The books changed my life. I never knew true peace and tranquility until I found Buddhism.

The problem I see with Christianity is that it inspires its followers to be soldiers and to fight in God's name. That goes out of control whenever psychotics claim that God told them to kill their children or spouse or something. Christianity is so much more accessible to the masses sadly.

Christians raise up their God onto this high pedestal. Ohhh, he walked on water and such. Buddhism does not do that from what I know. Buddhism focuses more on the beliefs, the journey to enlightenment. I especially like the meditation aspect, which is the Zen part.

There's a passage in the Old Testament that says God would specifically not tell someone to kill their children. A lot of people in the west have a flawed conception of Buddhism ("it's just a philosophy") but even more so about Christianity. Part of this is because every religion is also a philosophy but the basic philosophy of Christianity is harder to grasp than the basic philosophy of Buddhism. Add in how they've basically outlawed the necessary study of Christianity (separation of church and state) and it's no wonder that western people generally don't understand Christianity anymore.

To wit, the nice stuff is really only about 2/3rds of maybe 3/4ths of Jesus in the NT, which itself can't be understood without referencing the OT, which is a completely different context than the modern west.
#14787216
Hong Wu wrote:I've been going to a lot of Buddhist things lately and I think to myself, Buddha is so much more approachable than Jesus because you can actually try to do what Buddha did.

One of the issues in the west I think is that they have basically redefined Jesus into being something that no one can attempt to be. There was this book that was famous in the west for hundreds of years, I think it was called the Imitation of Christ. People need to be able to try and be like their religious/spiritual idol. If he isn't accessible then how are people supposed to work on things spiritually?

Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.

The problem isn't with Jesus, the problem is with the physical expression of Jesus on Earth (the Church). Since the beginning, they have attempted to suppress Jesus's humanity, starting all the way at the letters from Paul. Paul was an odd choice to begin the physical embodiment of God on Earth because he had never encountered the real physical embodiment of Jesus, only a vision thereof. So of course his vision of God would be unattainable, because it was an expression of Paul's lack of experience with God.

Plus I am sure that much information about the humanity of Jesus has been suppressed. It seems that Jesus had a wife, siblings, family, but he is only ever cast as the doomed messiah. Nobody can really know the weight of the world on their shoulders. Nobody can really know perfection. Nobody can really embody undying faith in the face of certain doom and suffering. There are aspects of Jesus and God's ideal that no human can actually attain, only strive for. Whereas contrast this with enlightenment, anybody can attain that.

edit: Changed Peter to Paul.
Last edited by LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX on 18 Mar 2017 17:33, edited 1 time in total.
#14787219
You should watch The Last Temptation of Christ, aside from showing the most human Jesus in any narrative since the Bible, it's a pretty good movie by Martin Scorsese with William Dafoe, Harvey Keitel and David Bowie. The treatment of the movie and the novel by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches sort of justifies your argument here. As it was controversially banned on the premise that the Jesus it portrays is way too human, even though anyone who has watched the movie will know that there is no disrespect to the figure of Jesus in anyway.

#14787222
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:But making up new words for him now would look even worse. It would be an admission that they haven't a clue. So Christians aren't going to do that.

Worse to whom if we don't know that they were his words in the first place?
#14787295
Hong Wu wrote:Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.


Accept Islam if you want Whites to stop being a cuck. Did the Pagans call the their Nordic brothers Cucks for betraying their beliefs for Christianity. Your master history has always been a cuckold, they betray their own "white" beliefs for some Jew in the Desert. Europe is already cuckold no matter if their Christian or Not, I say at least say Islam favors the strong.
#14787362
Besoeker wrote:Worse to whom if we don't know that they were his words in the first place?

Worse to anyone who might doubt the correctness of whatever new was claimed.

At the moment, the 4 canonical gospels are thought to have been mainly written 40 to 60 years after the events they describe in his adult life, which allows a certain amount of believability, without being in any way certain (all the miracles take away credibility from what it's claimed he said, of course, for a non-believer - if they've made up magical stories, they may well make up what he said too). They may have been edited or added to a bit after that.

But if someone said "look, I've got a previously unknown account of his life", it'd need very good evidence of being genuine for anyone to pay attention to it. I don't think anyone could forge it to the standard that would be required. So they'd be recognised as recently made up.
#14787368
Hong Wu wrote:Add in how they've basically outlawed the necessary study of Christianity (separation of church and state) and it's no wonder that western people generally don't understand Christianity anymore.


Excellent post. I don't think Christianity is designed to be dissected quite that much otherwise it doesn't work in practice and is also vulnerable to exploitation. Politics and state mirror one another at different points in time and if you hang around long enough you will truly witness some "spooky action at a distance".
#14787378
Vasili Blokhin wrote:Accept Islam if you want Whites to stop being a cuck. Did the Pagans call the their Nordic brothers Cucks for betraying their beliefs for Christianity. Your master history has always been a cuckold, they betray their own "white" beliefs for some Jew in the Desert. Europe is already cuckold no matter if their Christian or Not, I say at least say Islam favors the strong.


I knew you were a Muslim.
#14787379
Hong Wu wrote:I've been going to a lot of Buddhist things lately and I think to myself, Buddha is so much more approachable than Jesus because you can actually try to do what Buddha did.

One of the issues in the west I think is that they have basically redefined Jesus into being something that no one can attempt to be. There was this book that was famous in the west for hundreds of years, I think it was called the Imitation of Christ. People need to be able to try and be like their religious/spiritual idol. If he isn't accessible then how are people supposed to work on things spiritually?

Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.


The real Jesus can be found in the words of the Holy Bible. Jesus is both a perfect man and the Son of God. As the Son of God, Jesus was the Creator along with God the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus was the only human that was able to obey the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God. God raise Jesus from the death as proof and took Him up into Heaven. We still have the proof of this by the empty tomb in Jerusalem and the grave clothes, which included the face cloth and the body cloth that was left in the tomb after the resurrection. The head or face cloth is the Sudarium of Oviedo and the body cloth is the Shroud of Turin.

The Sudarium of Oviedo and The Shroud of Turin



#14787384
The Latin Church began to distinctly develop Jesus' humanity at the Council of Chalcedon (diverging from the mystical theology of the East) and carried this humanistic impulse right into the modern age. It is a bit of a double-edged sword; the Counter-Reformers and the Jesuits consecrated Jesus' humanity in the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus while the Reformers and Pietists attacked the spiritual inertia and inhumanity of industrial capitalism. The final consequence of the humanistic critique of society was the overthrow of Jesus himself in Rudolf Bultmann's dialectical theology, particularly in the failure to locate the historical Jesus.

Being like Christ today is basically treated, in many places, like being a cuck who folds on literally everything. This is pretty unfortunate and I think history shows that it's not a necessary conclusion.


Agreed. One of the things that stuck out for me during my faith formation was that priests were able to absolve any sin (except, of course, despairing in the Holy Spirit). We can pretty much do whatever we want as long as we feel bad about it afterwards. Far from being a cucked religion, it is the only religion that had integrated the violence of necessity into its logical framework, which is also how Christianity became closely intertwined with Western institutions of power (this might explain why leftists hate the church so much).
#14787387
Hong Wu wrote:There's a passage in the Old Testament that says God would specifically not tell someone to kill their children. A lot of people in the west have a flawed conception of Buddhism ("it's just a philosophy") but even more so about Christianity. Part of this is because every religion is also a philosophy but the basic philosophy of Christianity is harder to grasp than the basic philosophy of Buddhism. Add in how they've basically outlawed the necessary study of Christianity (separation of church and state) and it's no wonder that western people generally don't understand Christianity anymore.

To wit, the nice stuff is really only about 2/3rds of maybe 3/4ths of Jesus in the NT, which itself can't be understood without referencing the OT, which is a completely different context than the modern west.


Tell that to Andrea Yates...oh wait, she is clinically insane and it is too late for her.

I can see how westerners think that Buddhism is just a philosophy. It does not focus on praising a deity nearly as much and the prayers do not have to start like "Dear God...", it just seems more flexible to me.

Christian leaders dish politics in the sermons which I find disturbing and a form of indoctrination. So I am glad that there is separation of church and state.

The Bible is wacky. It is a hodge podge of text and no one knows who all the authors are. Why put all the chapters together, the OT and the NT do not seem to fit together. The creepiest chapter is probably Revelations. I tried to read it all, could not do it. It was so strange to me when I was in my early teens.
#14787422
MistyTiger wrote:The Bible is wacky. It is a hodge podge of text and no one knows who all the authors are. Why put all the chapters together, the OT and the NT do not seem to fit together. The creepiest chapter is probably Revelations. I tried to read it all, could not do it. It was so strange to me when I was in my early teens.


It is the Holy Bible. The church fathers gathered these books and put them in the order that they are now because it made sense to them to be in this order. The human author of most of the books are known. But most Christians believe it was written and arranged as it is now by inspiration on men by the Holy Spirit. So Christians believe God is the ultimate author and the Holy Bible is often called His word.

The Old Testament includes all the books in which Israel was under the old covenant with God before Jesus came to establish the new covenant as explained in the New Testament.

The book of Revelation is a vision given to John to pass on the the churches in Asia. It relates to the end times and the coming of Christ in his full power and glory as King of kings and Lord of lords to judge the world. I lot of symbolism is used from the Old Testament. So a good understanding of the Old Testament is necessary to understand it. Most of it refers to the future, so it will only be completely understood as the events begin to occur. One should keep in mind 1 Peter 1:12 and 2 Peter 1:20-21, because as the time approaches, what is now obscure will become clear to those for whom it was written.
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