Tag: Bible

Jesus Must Have Changed His Mind

May 23, 2013 / Tom

Here I sit, my Bible in hand, trying to find that part where Jesus changed his mind. I look through Matthew. Nothing. I look through Mark. Nada. I search through Luke, still nothing. I get past John and, surprisingly, I still find nothing.

Given what I see from those who say they worship Jesus as “God”, I figure somewhere Jesus must have changed his mind. The book I was taught while suffering through Catholic school must have miraculously changed at some point since those lessons. I wouldn’t be surprised, after all the God of the book did all kinds of wild stuff, so certainly changing the entire text on which His superstition, er, I mean religion was based certainly could be done.

Yet I can’t find a single edit.

I can’t see where Jesus suddenly turned his back on the poor, calling them “lazy freeloaders” along the way. I can’t find that notion where the poor were put on notice that they were “on their own” to either starve or beg for mercy to some church as a part of their poverty. I can’t see where Jesus said that the wealthy were deserved of special treatment or any kind of hero-worship.

Nope, my book still says the wealthy will have a hard time getting into heaven. My book still has Jesus eating with the most hated of his society. My book still has him working to feed the poor without conditions. Hhhhhmmmm.

I can’t find where Jesus is pro-death penalty in my Bible. I can’t find where he condemns people to death for violating the laws of the land. I’m sure it has to be in there somewhere because, after all, the Christian part of our society seems strongly in favor of the death penalty. I must have to reread it all over again because certainly those who follow Jesus as Lord and Master could not be for something he was not.

I also can’t seem to find that part where Jesus seeks wealth. I can’t find the capitalist Jesus every conservative Christian seems to know. I look for the man named Jesus who worships money and puts nearly everything behind amassing wealth and power. I can’t find that Jesus though and I can’t find where he even held a job let alone created a company. I am fairly certain that the Americanized conservative Jesus would have had one of the twelve carrying a cash register while another of the twelve carried a sandwich board stating the prices for being healed. I think it’s also fair to say that Americanized conservative Jesus would have had a 501-3(c) as well as a Political Action Committee all at his disposal.

I’m also fairly certain the Americanized conservative Jesus also only raised the dead of the highest bidder. That’s the capitalist way!

Not to get on a tangent, but if the afterlife Jesus described was so wonderful, why did he raise people from the dead anyway? If I had died, was in heaven, and then was brought back by Jesus, I’d get off my stone slab and beat him with my shoe. I know, heaven didn’t exist until Jesus died…or something like that. Uh huh.

Ok, back to the gist of my thought.

I also can’t find where Jesus felt the need to have a weapon to protect himself. I do realize that anyone who can walk on water probably would have no need for a sword, but even when he could have used one he did not and commanded others NOT to use theirs. Certainly the Bible has undergone a Divine edit there. I’m sure it reads,

Then the men stepped forward, seized Jesus and arrested him. ⁵¹With that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear.

⁵²“Give me that thing,” Jesus said to him, “we must defend ourselves against this terror.” And with that Jesus killed everyone save those who agreed with him, and the world was safe for capitalism and democracy.

The fact check is all done and, well, mine still says “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” No caveats, no conditions, just a simple statement of fact.

Yet, it seems conservative Christian America is addicted to our modern version of the sword. This conservative Christian America not only suffers from this addiction, and would not only draw the sword, but would also use it with reckless abandon despite the fact that God (or Jesus) did not sneak into our homes in the middle of the night and change the texts to be more agreeable their version of America. Of course he may have feared being shot.

Then there is our “War on Terror.” Our “War on Drugs”. Our imprisonment of more people by percentage of our population than any other industrialized country. Sexual repression and oppression. Guantanamo Bay. This isn’t even going back into our history of racial persecution, slavery, gender oppression, and slaughter of indigenous people.

It leads me to wonder what version of Christianity conservatives suggest we were founded on; the one Jesus lived in the story or the one they have created in their heads as their own. That’s an easy answer because the Jesus I have read about is nothing like the Christian conservatives of America. That is unless the only Bible not changed to fit their model of Christianity is the one I am reading.

I suggest we end this pretentious fallacy that this nation was founded on any version of real Christianity.

Real Christianity doesn’t exist, much like Jesus didn’t exist. No one has ever raised a person from the dead after days on a slab. No one has ever reattached a limb without surgery.

The greatest proof I have found that Jesus did not exist is Christianity itself. The greatest proof I have found that the God of the Bible doesn’t exist comes from those who say they believe in Him.

If Christians really believed Jesus existed and that everything in the Bible existed and was truth, they would have no need to defend their life and property. Gun sales would plummet because they are all on their way to that wonderful place in the sky Jesus talked about. Why defend a life here when something like heaven awaits you out there? Pass the wine and bread, I need a good buzz.

If Christians really believed they would not be so different than the Jesus in the Bible. They’d all be loving those liberal Arab hippies who are like Jesus. They’d all be washing the feet of others. They’d be eating with Democrats and hugging crack addicts. They’d be rushing into prisons to save the condemned, and they’d be loving the hell out of “terrorists”. There would be no cheers over drone strikes. There’d be no joy over the killing of anyone, regardless of their sins.

There would be, however, an awful lot of bruised cheeks, both left and right side.

After all, do any of us know sin-free Christians? If not, how can one of them throw the stone as Jesus asked? Ah, the devil is in the details, and the proverbial Jesus seems to have given conservative American Christians an impossible example to follow. Either that or Jesus certainly changed his mind about everything he taught since ascending into that board room in the sky. Whichever, it seems that despite some notable exceptions in history Christians have given up being like Jesus and have rather sought to make Jesus more like them.

What clearer failure can a religion endure than when the Master it is founded on becomes as irrelevant as a bumper sticker?

What surer failure can a religion find than when the teachings of its founder are less important than the wood on which it is believed he died?

I don’t mind if someone holds on to a rosary believing it will get them to some place that their actions could not. I don’t care if someone believes unreasonably that the world is only 9,000 years old. What I do mind is open hypocrisy on which we have to endure lecture after lecture and statement after statement from these misguided people who who I am is decided by what they believe. That’s when I mind.

So, stop with the nonsense that America is a Christian nation. Stop telling me how wrong gay marriage is and about how homosexuality is a sin. Stop telling me about the value of life when discussing abortion while you are hoping for the death of a convicted criminal. Stop with the clarifying statements that somehow reconcile your anti-Christ-like thoughts with the teachings of the story you pretend to believe in.

Harsh words, I know, but necessary to me nonetheless. I don’t apologize to those who find these words offensive unless they can prove me wrong. I welcome the debate, but please don’t start it out with how the earth was created in less than a week and how each and every woman I know owes me something for my rib. Instead, show me something tangible that doesn’t take a lifetime of conditioning and a lack of intelligence to believe. Do that, and I will apologize wholeheartedly and beg for forgiveness.

The Parable of the Moving Ball

August 11, 2011 / tomgrasso

“There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are all impaled on the crook of conditioning. “ ~James Dean

There’s a certain magic in that quote. It tells an entire story in two sentences. Even those few we cherish as “great” are only so because we allow a certain perspective to dictate to us who and what they are. Change your perspective and they cease to become “great”. George Washington and Gandhi were not “great” people to the British of their time. Mother Theresa was not “great” to the starving hordes in Northern Africa. Jesus was not “great” to the Sanhedrin or the Romans. Republicans are not great to Democrats and vice versa. It simply is a matter of how you choose to see something.

I often use the Hawking example of the “ping pong ball on a train” applied to my spiritual practice to understand perspective (a view by which we cast all judgment) so that I can extrapolate the effects of perspective, conditioning and attachment on our reality. Here’s

My Sacral Chakra Ball...(Source: http://www.assistedseniorliving.net/)

this analogy in all of its glory:

There is a ping pong ball sitting on a table on a train in a way that causes it to sit perfectly still. The train, however, is moving at 65 miles per hour.

To some people conditioned to be ON the train, the ball is not moving, never moves, and remains perfectly still.

To others conditioned to be on the side of the tracks, the ball is moving at 65 mph as it whizzes by.

Each has its own perspective because of its own conditioning. The ball is still a ball, but when we add ideas of conditioning to it we create a “moving ball” or a “ball sitting still”. If each is unwilling to waver from its perspective we have the conditions for war, violence or, at the very least, anger and fear.

Yet, each is right in their observation. Where they make a fundamental mistake is when they attach themselves to their idea of what they see or have learned and not what is REAL. The reality of this example is that there is a ball and an Observer, plain and simple. If they could agree that there is a ball then the BELIEF about the ball becomes MEANINGLESS! After all, all one has to do to change the way you see the ball is to change the view. (Change the world by changing the way you see the world.)

They would not have to add phrases from a book (in this case any religious text) that

Who is doing wrong here in the picture and why?

proves they are right and the other is wrong. They would not have to create “wickedness” in others who see things differently. They could simply “allow” the description by simply not needing one in the first place. (Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.)

In this analogy, no one has actually seen the ball. These people have READ about the ball and what it is doing. For the purposes of this post, the book says that the ball is moving.

Now because these people (we will call them Xtians) have never seen the ball but only have a book to rely on describing what the ball is doing (or was doing), they have created “faith” to ensure that the countless generations of conditioning that taught about the moving ball remains intact. They can’t prove the ball is moving, or that the ball even exists, yet this faith allows them to not only believe in the ball and what it is doing, but also condemn those who either don’t believe in the ball’s existence or have different conditioned ideas about what the ball is (or was) doing. After all, their parents taught them it was moving because they themselves were handed down the countless generations of conditioning that have gone into creating this “faith”.

In this example, the Xtians not only have created an idea of right and wrong, but are using someone else’s idea to do so. They are taking someone else’s experience or inspiration and making it necessary for everyone to have it. It isn’t real, it’s an imagined idea of an experience someone else had thousands of years earlier MADE real in order to support their own conditioned thoughts.

They could point to verses in that book that allowed for the conclusion that “I am right, you are wrong, the ball is moving,” and “I will be saved and you won’t be because I believe the ball is moving”. I mean something supreme told them that the ball was moving (or is), right? The book said that anyone who said the ball was still was a false prophet!!! BEWARE but remain hopeful because a savior is coming to prove to everyone that the ball was, in fact, MOVING.

The faith in the book itself would keep you from experiencing the TRUTH about the ball. You would not be able to experience the ball as still because, frankly, you could not get out of your box long enough to have the experience. So, you could not say for sure if the ball was moving or not, you’d just have to have faith that it was. Experience would be secondary to the conditioning and the belief in you it created.

Silly, huh? When you achieve a level of consciousness that allows you to experience the ball as moving and still, either idea becomes equally meaningless and equally valid. Ultimately though, it is not as important as the experience itself. You die when you stop having the experience of existing, and strict adherence to any religion, dogma or belief (religious or otherwise) is a death experienced by those who have forgotten their own breath. Once we start honoring experience as the basis for our purpose, we not only live for the experience but also find a deep desire to let go or it in order to see the sunrise as if for the very first time. Experience is dynamic and ever-changing, religion is not.

The New Experience of Religion (Source: http://www.canyonridge.org)

There is MUCH value in religion. It removes people from horrible darkness and debilitating despair as well as providing the impetus for humans to come to a deeper understanding of who we are. However, religion seems to be the “puberty of spirituality”, that stage of development that allows us to learn about ourselves in tremendously unique ways while still only being one stage of many. Unfortunately, it has been our history that we stop developing at this pubescent stage. We find comfort in religion, particularly if our parents are the ones who indoctrinated us into it or if it has pulled us out of some deep abyss, and remain in this stage rather than mature beyond it.

Religion is nothing more than an experience. You have it, and then you should let it go. Or else you begin to have the experience of stagnation as you live like a veal-calf in a box. You soon forget how to walk, and become so soft as to be desired by wolves. It would be like finding comfort on the seat of a roller coaster and never getting off to experience the rest of the rides.

Now, before you decide that I am judging religion while demonizing judgment let me just suggest to you that I am offering a unique way to describe my experience of religion not only from the inside looking out but from the outside looking in. I am not JUDGING, I am DESCRIBING. I am describing the ball while I was standing by the tracks and now as I stand on the train. I am not saying I am right to you, I am simply describing what I have experienced which, of course, makes me right to me.

In my experience, religion gave me a grounded understanding of my society’s morality, or at least a rosy picture of it. It also seemed to create a lot of society’s inner turmoil. Because of that, it remained for me just a step toward higher levels of consciousness. There was no comfort in the religious stage, only questions that would force me upward and beyond the confines of a book that taught me that ball was moving. I needed to experience it, to know it, to feel it and to understand it and then fortunate was able to let it go. In doing so, I stepped out of its confines into an experience that hasn’t stopped pushing me into deeper and more meaningful levels of understanding. Religion was a gift for me, it got me to a point where I wanted something it could not offer. It has also been a curse because it has cost me friendships and countless hours of guilt and fear as I began growing away from it.

So when someone says to me “you are wrong, the ball is moving” while unfriending me on Facebook because of what I see (or how I describe what I see), I can simply say “yeah, I saw that once too and this is what I saw once I stepped onto the train.” I now focus only on the ball, and keep my “eyes” firmly fixed on it as I let go of all the ideas I have created about what it is, what it does and how it does it. I simply experience the entirety of the ball, and have found something very powerful in this focus.

The ball does not exist. But that’s for another story…