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Jan. 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:15
599 Jesus versus Morals
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Hello, everybody. This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, which you can find at www.freedomainradio.com.
And I'm going to have a look at the ethical teachings on life of Jesus, which I think is obviously quite important to do, given the stirring rise of theology in many religious countries, particularly, of course, in America.
And so I thought it would be worthwhile taking a look at some of these ethical teachings so we can understand what Jesus actually said and did, or at least what the fictional character of Jesus in the Bible, in the James Version, I think it's always important not to rely on people's opinions,
and of course you shouldn't rely on mine either, but to look at the source texts, not In the ancient Aramaic, of course, because until I get possessed by a demon, according to movie law, I will not be able to read it and then it'll happen spontaneously and I won't be conscious of it and my head will probably spin right around.
But to have a look at the texts that were written down in the century or two after the death of Jesus, so that we can get a sense of what kind of ethics and morals are espoused within these texts.
And the reason that I think this is important is that I continually get emails and other forms of communication wherein people take me to task for my criticisms of the ethics within the Old Testament, which Have been part of my podcast series since I started a little bit over a year ago, doing podcasts on philosophy and theology and art and psychology and economics and so on.
And they say, well, yes, the Yahweh of the Old Testament is a rather genocidal and trigger-happy fellow who enjoys raining frogs and drowning the world and killing people and suggesting that people sell their daughters into sexual slavery and hand out their other daughters like candy so that men don't get raped in their house and Where you have fathers almost killing their sons until God stops at the end, and you have Lot, and you have the story of Job, and so on.
So having gone through a moral analysis of some of the Old Testament myths, I do get rebuked with fair regularity by Christians who tell me that Jesus came along and rewrote all of that, although, of course, Jesus did say that he stands by every law and example within the Old Testament.
That doesn't seem to be enough, so I thought it might be worth taking a little bit of time To look at the ethics of the Jesus character as written down in the New Testament, and of course having been translated and so on throughout the ages, but all we have is this material to work from.
So I thought it would be worth having a look at this, and I mean, I'll read a little bit, and I'll apologize for looking down ahead of time, but I think the important thing to understand about this kind of approach, I don't want to be nitpicking at this fictional character,
but... I think that it's important to compare the greatest moral entity that has ever been manifested on Earth with some ethics that we would pretty much take for granted now as being good.
And without getting into a lot of moral justifications for these kinds of ethics which I've gone into in my Introduction to Philosophy series and perhaps at near endless length in my podcasts, I think it's worth...
Looking at the standard that is held up for Jesus as a living man-god, as a fragment of the Holy Trinity who manifested himself on earth, whether you believe that he was more human than divine in the Kundera model, or whether he was more divine than human in the Catholic model.
Either way, we do assume, not just on his miracles, because of course every religious figure claims miracles, But it would really be due to his superior wisdom and virtue that there would be some evidence of the divine.
So, if, for instance, Jesus had ethical theories that were so far in advance of the generally accepted ethical theories of his time, That 20 centuries passed, and then we finally figured out that he was right about certain things.
If, for instance, Jesus had been for the rights of women, or if Jesus had been against slavery, or against racism, or against the state, or pro-democracy, if we consider that democracy was an advance of what was going on during the time that he lived in.
Then we would say, well, there was obviously something quite remarkable about this fellow who was able to come up with ethical rules or approaches that were really far in advance of his time, and that would not necessarily prove his divinity, but it would prove some superior wisdom.
Of course, the bar is extraordinarily high because he has to be wiser and more virtuous Not even by a little bit, but pretty much by an infinite amount.
He has to be wiser and more virtuous than any human being who could conceivably have lived at his time or afterwards, right?
This is quite a high bar to have.
You really could, I think, get away with criticizing Jesus by simply pointing out one aspect wherein his ethics fell short, or at least fell far short, of what we would generally today consider fairly ethical norms.
So, if we did find, for instance, that Jesus was pro-slavery, then I think doubt says to the eternal wisdom and virtue of his life and beliefs and teachings and preachings, Would be fairly well established, because we are pretty much down with the whole no-slavery thing these days,
which of course is a very good thing, but if we find that in looking at Jesus' ethics, that he really appears to be a mirror of 1st century AD beliefs, and of course you can look at it in the rolling cycle of the things that were written down about Jesus and translated and rewritten and edited and translated and rewritten and edited,
apparently always with the hand of God guiding them, Then if it turns out that Jesus simply has his ethics reflect what would be the most common ethical perceptions or beliefs of his time, obviously his divinity becomes seriously questioned because if he's supposed to be a fragment of an eternal,
omniscient, all-powerful consciousness, Then one of the ways that you could prove that would be, you know, if E equals MC squared was written in the Bible far before Einstein came up with it, that if everything that was in the Bible and everything that was taught and manifested in the ethical teachings of Jesus was very common to his time, then obviously his divinity somewhat falls into question.
If I say I can read the future but I get everything wrong, my psychic powers become somewhat questionable and I don't pick up my million dollars from the amazing Randy.
Yet, not only does his divinity fall into question, but his ethical standards as well, even if we say that they fall short of the divine, his ethical standards would be not particularly better than those around him who were writing, if he was a fictional character and not part of anything divine.
And by fictional I don't mean that he never existed, because there's no proof either way of that.
But by fictional, I simply mean a heavily reinterpreted character, subject to all of the retranscription errors and all of the political pressures, theological pressures, and other types of belief systems that were flowing through the Roman world, through the formation of Christianity and through the Council of Worms and off into the Dark Ages.
Reinterpreted and with no factual basis, but simply reinterpreted and rewritten to reflect the norms of the times.
That's what I mean by a fictional character, because I don't know.
Who knows whether the guy existed or not?
But all we can do is have a look at what was written about him.
I've taken this from a website called nobeliefs.com.
You can go to nobeliefs.com forward slash jesus.htm.
They have quite nicely put in not just the quotes, but also the context.
You can click and see the quotes within the context of the biblical verses.
And that can be very helpful because, as Christians have told me, the Bible says, there is no God, and then you expand it out and it says, the fool in his heart has said there is no God.
Which, of course, is a perfectly wonderful rational argument to call someone...
Well, I think you know where I'm going.
So... Let's have a look at some of Jesus' belief, and I apologize for glancing down for the reading, but I just think it's worthwhile because I think the Bible is up there with the brief history of time as some of the most bought and least read pieces of literature in the world.
So, family values, of course, is a fairly big thing in the modern Christian movement, particularly in the United States.
What did Jesus have to say about family values?
Well, of course, he never married, never fathered children, at least according to tradition.
So he has no personal experience of a family, and his words from Matthew 10, 35 to 36 are as the following.
For I am come to set man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
And this, of course, is somewhat in contradiction to the biblical injunction from the Old Testament, which is to honor thy mother and thy father.
But this, of course, is a growing religion.
And during the Christian time, during the split from Judaism into Judaism slash Christianity, which mirrored the later split between Protestantism and Catholicism, there is a growing religion which is fermenting dissent within households.
The traditional Jewish households then have children, sons who follow Jesus.
And so, of course, in the Old Testament, they're trying to hold a community together in uniformity.
And so naturally, they'd say, honor thy mother and thy father.
Jesus comes along and says, I'm going to make everybody fight like cats and dogs, actually worse than cats and dogs who know nothing of these silly things.
But naturally, that's what you would expect according to what Jesus was trying to achieve, or at least those who wrote down this kind of stuff.
Now, not only does Jesus say in the Bible, and again, with all the caveats, I won't mention them again, not only does Jesus say that he has come to set man in variance with his family, but Jesus demands that anybody who wishes to follow him as a disciple must in fact hate his family.
As he said, if any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, I almost thought it should be sisterhood, Yea, and his own life also.
He cannot be my disciple.
If he doesn't hate his own family and his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
And whoever calls Jesus the Prince of Peace, which is a phrase that never shows up in the Bible, obviously never read the Gospels, for Jesus claims not to have come for peace's sake, but rather to divide the family, in his words.
Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth?
I tell you, nay, but rather division.
For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three.
The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father, the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother, the mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
And Jesus, of course, reveals the bribe and reward for forsaking your family.
And everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.
Well, the bribery for virtue, who knows, right?
And I don't know why they keep...
They can't just say your family. They have to keep going through the whole genealogy every time, but I'll try and sort of skip some of those.
About marriage, Jesus says,"...the children of this world marry and are given in marriage, but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.
Neither can they die anymore, for they are equal unto the angels and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection." So, the greatest virtuous people, of course, don't marry, don't have children, and so on. This has been responsible for a lot of rather twisted monasteries, and of course, the Catholic priests, of course, go through this kind of nonsense as well.
That's not too nice an approach, I would say.
I mean, it's fairly well known that cults are fairly keen on dividing you from your family, and this is, of course, one of the things that happened very early on.
Now, let's just say, imagine that you work for some guy, and your father dies, and you say, listen, boss, can I go and bury my father?
His funeral is this afternoon.
And your boss says, no, you cannot go.
You must follow me. Let the dead bury the dead.
So, a disciple who wished to attend to his father's funeral, Jesus says, follow me and let the dead bury the dead.
Not so much the highest virtue in the land, I think.
That would be pretty much worthy of a lawsuit these days.
When a man decided to follow Jesus, he wanted to say goodbye to his family, Luke 9, 61, but instead of leniency, Jesus replied to him, No man, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
And this is, of course, exactly what you'd expect.
If he goes to speak to his family, his family might change his mind.
So, again, this is the culty thing.
And then Jesus stares at his mother at one point and says, Woman, what have I to do with thee?
It's kind of stone cold, I think.
It's not a lot of warmth in that kind of statement.
That's not bad or whatever, right?
But she is the Virgin Mary, right?
So... Judas, right?
So this is his conversation to Judas.
He says, And you don't see a lot of anti-abortionists quoting that particular concept.
So living peacefully is considered to be a virtuous thing, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace, but he says in Matthew 10, 34, Think not that I am come to send peace on earth.
I come not to send peace, but a sword.
He also says, but now he that hath a purse, let him take it.
And likewise his scrip, and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.
Not quite so princely, actually a little bit more princely than peacely.
Sell all your clothing to buy a sword, not necessarily for cutting cheese.
And an all-powerful God could stop violence of man against man, and so on.
Jesus accepts the concept of war with these admissions.
What are the greatest evil in the world, right?
And ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of wars.
See that ye not be troubled.
For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
For nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.
And for the 40 to 50 percent of Americans who think that Jesus is coming back within their lifetime or within the next 30 or 40 years, war is kind of like a fulfillment of these prophecies.
So these things do have quite a strong effect in the world.
Jesus offers no advice for disarmament.
Jesus says nothing about the free market, about capitalism, about property rights, about these sorts of things, which have led to quite a bit of peace throughout the world.
And that amount of violence that is talked about in the Bible has been quite a lot of, caused quite a lot of problems in the history of the world.
so Generally, if somebody puts forward a moral rule that they themselves don't live by, so if I say that it's immoral to kill and then I go and kill someone and then continue to claim that it's immoral to kill, do as I say, not as I do, these people we generally call hypocrites and we rank them not very high in the rungs of the virtuous.
So, lots of Christians believe that Jesus represents God, is God sent to earth in human form, or is a component of this weird trinity, because, you know, it's a monotheistic religion with three gods and six thousand saints.
Now, of course, I've talked about this before in the Old Testament.
That God has, there are endless examples of God smiting and killing and murdering in the Old Testament, much against his own moral commandments in the Old Testament and so on.
So some Christians don't believe in the Trinity or that Jesus equals God, but rather that he lived as a flesh and blood man created and sent from God.
Unfortunately, this does not dismiss Jesus from his attitude towards killing.
According to the New Testament, Jesus upholds all the laws of the Old Testament.
This slice and dice of the Old Testament, bad, New Testament, good, doesn't really cut it.
Again, according to the Bible, which is the only source we have for these beliefs, personal drug-induced visions accepted.
So, Jesus says about the Old Testament, Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets.
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
For verily I say to you, till heaven and earth part, not one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.
Not a little bit, not a comma, not an eyelash that dropped into somebody's ink and fell on the Bible and changed a word.
None of that shall be changed until the whole biblical destiny explosion rapture thing is fulfilled.
Not so good. To fulfill all the laws of the prophets means that Jesus must have approved of all of these, quote, lawful atrocities, including the killing of unbelievers, right?
I mean, I have a certain amount of hostility towards the Old Testament religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the New Testament stuff, simply because...
I kind of feel like a black guy surrounded by a whole bunch of KKK members all telling me, no, no, you know, we don't believe that stuff.
But it's like, but it's in the book you worship as the highest moral ideal that I be put to death, that my wife be put to death.
And that's not particularly comforting.
There's tons and tons of examples in the Old Testament of God commanding that the highest moral ideal is to put unbelievers like myself to death.
So people will say that I'm mean towards Christians, but I think that that's not particularly valid, considering that they worship a book that says I should be put to death.
I take that seriously, even if they don't.
And historically, there's good reason to do that.
Now, killing appears quite acceptable to Jesus, not only for himself, but as ordered by him as the nobleman in this parable.
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither and slay them before me.
This is from Luke 19.27.
But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither and slay them before me.
And slay them before me.
Well, of course, I do not believe that fictional characters should reign over my life.
Certainly not those who say that if I don't believe in them, I should get murdered.
The red-letter edition of the King James Bible has Jesus making a statement towards the killing of children from Revelations 2, 23.
And I will kill her children with death.
Not only does the biblical Jesus make the claim to kill the children, but supposedly it serves to punish the mother, the prophetess, as the metaphorical Jezebel, for committing adultery.
Few people hold to the concept of punishing innocent children for the wrongful sins of their parents, except the Catholics.
That's not really a very highly moral thing.
Some people say that Revelations 2.23 is a metaphor in terms of children, as those who follow heathen religions, non-Christian religions, but saying that those people should be killed simply expands the genocidal net.
It doesn't really solve the problem.
Now, slavery would be another thing that, of course, was a multi-millennial struggle to overthrow the yoke and evils of slavery from human society.
We would expect that if slavery were immoral, That Jesus should condemn slavery as the highest conceivable moral ideal.
Because if he's not the highest conceivable moral ideal, then whoever is more moral than Jesus must be more divine.
Because we worship...
Theoretically, we worship God because God is good, not just because God is powerful.
Otherwise, that's just having a fetish for some sky ghost.
So we worship virtue.
We praise virtue.
We don't just worship power.
Otherwise, it's a sort of Stalin-esque in its manifestations.
Jesus does not offer any solutions for slavery or poverty or women's inequality, and of course the rights of children are completely dismissed by Jesus.
Jesus says in Luke 12, 47,"...and that servant which knew his Lord's will and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes." So we're not just talking about slavery, we're talking about slavery with whipping for slaves that don't obey their lords and masters.
The word servant here means slave.
Slavery was flourished all throughout Jesus' time, never spoke one word against it, actually spoke in favor of it, that it was very important for a slave to obey his master, particularly if his master himself was a Christian, then it's very, very important.
And of course, as a religion spreads, if you start inciting the slaves to fight against the slave owners, you're not going to get very far, right?
So you have to... And then if slave owners have a religion that is flourishing, that is causing their slaves to become more obedient, and translating obedience to them as a virtue for the slaves, that's going to be more successful.
But that's not what we would really call moral.
Either slavery is right, in which case Christians should be fighting to reinstate it, or slavery is wrong, in which case Jesus is a hell of a long way away from the highest moral ideal that we could conceive of at any time throughout the universe.
So, medical treatment, Jesus' manifestation of the divine knowledge of God, breathed life into the clay and made it all come around, you'd think that God would know quite a bit about the body, and therefore his son should also.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus believes that the demons, or Satan, a satanic possession, causes deafness and dumbness.
A spirit of infirmity results from a bind from Satan, He restored sight by spitting in the eyes of a blind man or anointing the clay made with his spittle or by telling them to have faith.
If Jesus was all-knowing, or at least a fragment of someone all-knowing, you'd think he could have mentioned something about germs, or wash your hands, or don't trust the doctors till the 19th century, or whatever.
That's not particularly good, and the kinds of scientific errors that are in the Bible are common in Legion and well-documented, and of course we would expect that an all-knowing God, who had created both the universe and human life, would know a lot about these things, everything about these things, And wouldn't make basic scientific errors unless, of course, it was just written down by people according to the knowledge of their time, which, of course...
So, the biblical Jesus teaches people to seek the kingdom of God and to ignore future plans in Matthew.
You don't need to work for food, says John.
It's in John. You don't need to save your money.
You need to encourage people to persecute you in Matthew 5.11.
Give away everything you own to every man who asks.
And if he steals it, don't try to get it back.
Sell everything you have and give it to the poor.
If someone hits you, Invite them to hit you again.
Don't ever marry a divorced woman because then you've committed adultery.
Don't even look at a woman in a sexual way because that also constitutes adultery.
And don't think about your life, what to eat, the health of your body or the clothes you wear, anything like that.
That's not something that I see a lot of Christians teaching their children about.
So, celibacy and chastity, there's a lot, of course, this kind of stuff in the Bible.
He says, in Matthew 19, 12, Jesus says, For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men, and there be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake.
He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
So, if you don't sacrifice your sexual life, you're not as moral.
You're not a moral human being.
So, if Jesus did exist, he would have to have lived as a virgin, either as a born eunuch, a forced castrated eunuch, A self-castrated eunuch or from self-imposed celibacy.
It's fairly common knowledge that suppression of the sex drive is unnatural and produces very strange deviations within the mind.
And this is pretty wretched, right?
It's pretty wretched commandments that people have suffered from and suffered under for thousands and thousands of years.
Which is not particularly healthy.
So, forgiveness, right?
Forgiveness is supposed to be the big thing that Jesus was into.
So, let's see. Mark 3, 29.
Well, that's not so much with the forgiveness.
Matthew 12.31 Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.
So, Holocaust, murder, rape, theft, pedophilia, pedophilia, of course, anything that you could imagine that would be considered evil, that's forgivable.
But don't speak against or curse the Holy Ghost, whatever that is.
You won't be forgiven.
Is that really what we would consider to be the highest moral good, that we would forgive a genocidal murderer, but we would not forgive somebody who says damn to the Holy Ghost or whatever?
He says in Matthew 12, 36, But I say unto you that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.
And he also says in Matthew 12, 37,"...for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." So there's not exactly freedom of speech, right?
This is not exactly, if you've got Tourette's, you're going to roast.
He also says in Matthew 18, 15 to 17,"...moreover, if thy brother shall trespass against thee, tell it unto the church," But if you neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican.
Go complain to the church.
If he doesn't listen, then cut him out of your life.
In the parable of Devis and Lazarus, Abraham gets resentful as justified in not forgiving the rich man tortured in hell or even in saving the rich man's brother as requested by the victims of Jesus' policy of punishment.
As Jesus said, Matthew 10, 33, Whosoever shall deny me before men, him also I deny before my father.
So if you deny Jesus, you get to go for eternal punishment with no chance of forgiveness.
So this is not Jesus being forgiving.
But also, will I deny him to my father?
It's not saying, I have to, it's written, God tells me to, it's his choice.
This is, of course, exactly what you would expect from a religion that is trying to spread.
He also says, Mark 3.29, Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.
He also says, The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all the things that offend.
Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but your inward parts is full of ravening and wickedness.
The Pharisees, representing the Jewish leaders in Luke, get treated as enemies of Jesus.
And of course, there's a lot of anti-Semitism behind this.
Alright, so I'll just do a few more of these.
I think you get the general idea.
This is not the most virtuous man who could ever be conceived of, or we are completely immoral for having equal rights for women, some rights for children, getting rid of slavery, not killing unbelievers and not inciting war and so on.
Of course, Peter, the first pope, and so on, right?
Jesus says, And I also say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, which has been used by the Vatican for 2,000 years to build up its plunder.
But then five verses later, incredibly, we have Jesus calling Peter Satan, where Jesus says, But he turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan, thou art an offense unto me, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of man.
Well, So I tell you, you're doing great, you're doing a wonderful job, and then I say that you're Satan, and you're evil, and so on.
Eh, not that great, right?
So, do many Christians know that the Biblical Jesus actually strongly opposed public prayer, and that it was entirely a private matter?
Matthew 6, 5, 6.
Jesus says, Don't pray in public.
Jesus' command, not so good for the church, so not particularly focused on.
And this fragment of universal omniscience and omnipotence, who knew everything and saw everything, says in Matthew 16, 28, Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
Of course, all the disciples died without seeing this guy come back, and so on.
So this is not particularly occurring in a sort of believable kind of way.
Jesus says that he's going to send his followers as sheep in the midst of wolves, be as wise as a serpent, as harmless as doves.
Of course, doves do, in fact, act aggressively towards other birds and sometimes kill their own young.
But you wouldn't expect the guy who invented doves to know that.
He says, But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the left cheek, which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire.
There shall be a wailing and gnashing of teeth.
He also says, Matthew 25, 46, And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous unto life eternal.
Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
In Matthew 23, 33, he says, Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
Threats, intolerance, violence, eternal hellfire, and so on.
Many people think of Jesus as sort of calm and gentle and loving and so on.
Here's some of his texts.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer.
Therefore shall ye receive the greater damnation.
Matthew 23, 17.
Ye fools and blind, blah, blah, blah.
John 8, 44. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.
He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the earth, because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.
O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?
If I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like unto you.
So you can have a look at this more.
He says, It's very much tribal.
It's not love everybody overseas and love everybody yet to be born and love the people in Borneo or anything.
It's very much around love your own community, your own group, which of course we see this kind of stuff.
Even if you did believe that as a Christian, I haven't heard a lot of Christians say that they love Osama bin Laden, say, or Pol Pot or Stalin or anything like that.
That is not particularly believable.
Well, and of course, the question is, did Jesus know that he was going to come back from the dead?
If he knew that he was going to come back from the dead, which you would expect a God to know, his sacrifice wasn't really a sacrifice.
It's like me going to sleep, you know, with a bellyache or something.
So there's some pain, but I know that I'm not going to die.
So that's not going to be particularly believable.
And then there's some more details about all of this kind of stuff.
But it is really something to look at, to look at the life of Jesus and to really try and understand where it sits.
And there's two ways of looking at this.
Where it sits relative to the highest conceivable moral ideal that any human being could possibly achieve.
Moral perfection that makes Socrates look like a street pimp.
That is the standard that is being held up that would have some element of his divinity that would at least be some...
You could at least worship that if you didn't believe in his divinity.
You could worship that man.
as a highest moral ideal far far ahead of his time able to put together amazing syllogisms but the Jesus who speaks in the Bible is not a rational debater, is not a philosopher, doesn't work with syllogisms, doesn't work with proof. Doesn't work with empirical evidence.
Speaks mad, vituperative, spitting kind of visions.
Is alternately sentimental and hostile.
Is incredibly hypocritical.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I have come to set nation against nation.
Turn not the other cheek.
If those who do evil to you do good back to them, but those who don't follow me I'm going to throw into the fires of hell.
This is all just hypocritical, random rambling, and frankly, psychologically psychotic nonsense.
But I think it's very important that we go to the original source text to have a look at this mad character, because people just make up stuff about Jesus, and he seems to...
Continually be reinterpreted according to the spirit of his times, which means that the spirit of those times, the zeitgeist, is moving somewhere other than where Jesus is.
Jesus trails the zeitgeist, right?
So in the Spanish Inquisition, when they're out killing people left, right, and center, and in the witch burnings in Salem, and all the other religious atrocities that have contributed to the murders of about a billion people worldwide since the age of Genesis,
if we understand that when evil is being done in the name of religion, if we understand that when evil is being done in the name of religion, religion is used to justify that evil, when society changes due to the efforts largely of philosophers and economists and those who have more of a humanistic bent, when society changes for the better, then people just start cherry-picking different But that really won't do when it comes to wanting to prove or wanting to put forward the highest moral ideal that has ever existed in the universe.
You have to look at the darker side of people's behavior in order to get a fully rounded picture of who they are and not listen to the sentimental twaddle that's put forward by people who are trying to make this mad, cruel, vindictive, hostile, deranged, fictional character somehow conform with modern moral sensibilities, fictional character somehow conform with modern moral sensibilities, Everything that's written down in the Bible is exactly what you would expect, according to the very primitive, very superstitious, sort of, quote, moral norms at the time.
And show no evidence whatsoever of any kind of moral foresight or any kind of morality that would even be slightly ahead of the times in which Jesus lived.
So obviously this is a fictional character that is not worthy.
The Yahweh of the Old Testament is even more ghastly and horrible and more hypocritical.
And vicious and genocidal.
But Jesus does command unbelievers to be killed and stoned and drowned.
And this kind of mad religious hostility is not something that we would ever respect from a preacher coming forward now.
If you take the words out of Jesus' mouth and you put them into a modern preacher, he would be condemned as a sociopath.
And this is not a high moral ideal for us to be worshipping.
And it's high time that we put these extraordinarily violent fairy tales to rest in history where they belong.
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