Sunday, July 15, 2012

Jesus

The stories about  Jesus were embellished with miracles for the benefit of the writers, to awe the simple and inspire the faithful, and they had the very best of intentions, just as the previous Jewish patriarchs did when they were composing the Old Testament. They wanted to improve humanity and reduce evil in the world, but also build their own power and secure a livelihood for themselves.

It is likely there was an extraordinary, charismatic, intelligent, and imaginative man such as the one we name Jesus. He probably was at least as gifted in speech as Oscar Wilde and was probably gay, with a reduced desire for a wife and family and increased adaptability for living with other men. When the Roman soldiers came to the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest him, Jesus was found with a naked man:
And there followed him a certain young man,
having a linen cloth cast about his naked body;
and the young men laid hold on him:
and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.
- Mark 14:51, 52
Jewish authorities were annoyed by Jesus's magnetic ability to attract followers, his heresy in declaring himself the son of God, certain of his moral teachings that strayed from orthodoxy, and his criticism of their practices, so they petitioned the Roman authority to have him crucified to discredit him in the eyes of his followers by revealing him to be an ordinary man. Their plan backfired, because the followers were so invested with love for the man that their imaginations devised and their reason accepted a fantastic alternative reality in which Jesus rose from the dead, and this story was repeated often until many came to believe it, and today two billion of our species are officially Christian, while one and a half billion are officially Muslim and accept Jesus as a prophet of God.

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