2 posts tagged “christ”

The argument for gay Jesus

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr...

Judging by the anger among many Christians toward the Da Vinci Code book and movie, some find it difficult to wrap their minds around the concept of Jesus having been sexually active. The thoughts that he might have been gay are even more difficult to handle.

"J Richards" suggested that Mark 7:14-16 shows that Jesus approves of homosexual acts. The critical phrase reads: "There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him..." Richards suggests that Jesus gave great emphasis to this teaching, directing it to everyone. Richards suggests that the sentence refers to dietary laws and also extends to  "blood transfusions, medication, organ transplants, and artificial insemination" and to homosexual acts as well.

Christianity has more than its share of problems.  It's been so long since the last time God appeared as burning vegetation and ordered us to carve His word in stone, that people can now pretty much use the Bible to prove or disprove anything they darn well please.  It's no secret anymore: the Bible has been repeatedly mistranslated over the centuries.  Sometimes by accident, and sometimes deliberately, to further the agendas of various fringe factions.  (And some of them were massively successful... we now call them Roman Catholics!)

Yes, there are plenty of sensible, logical reasons for us to abandon Christianity altogether.  Unfortunately, sanity and logic still aren't enough to prove, finally and conclusively, that Christianity is just a huge crock.  There remains the slim chance that everything the Bible says about the afterlife is REAL.

Can you imagine, for a moment, that you played the same lottery numbers every day of your life, never winning anything (or, at least, not much), and then one day, you said to yourself "This is silly... the odds of me ever winning this thing are astronomical!"  And so you stopped playing the numbers.  And then, the very next day, they picked your numbers to win a multi-million-dollar jackpot.  Can you imagine how bad that would be?  Well, abandoning Christianity has the potential to be millions of times worse than even that!

Which is why I endorse the "Cover Your Ass" school of religious belief.  Learn a little about as many different religions as you can, try to loosely adhere to the spirit if not the letter of their teachings, and hope whoever turns out to be in charge of everything will let you get off on good behavior, or at least good intentions.  I figure SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE has to be the Ultimate Power in the Universe by the rules of semantics alone, and I definitely get the impression that it isn't a human, or even our collective unconsciousness.

(Here's a helpful hint for you: ignore Judaism as much as you can!  It turns out that Jewish people believe that people who haven't heard about it will simply be judged on Seven Noahite (or Noahide) Commandments, which for the most part read like a stripped-down version of the Christian Ten Commandments!  It's two... two... two religions in one!  But Jewish people will try to get you to learn about a million other little rules if you seem interested, which helps them win points with their Big Guy In the Sky.  In the meantime, you might burn in Hell for disobeying these rules once you learn them.  Good deal for them, bad for you.  So mainly just try to avoid eating the flesh and drinking the blood of live animals, and just worry about Christianity.  Also, note that lots of religions promise to go easy on those who have never "heard the Good Word," though few so explicitly offer the sweet deal the Jews have given us.  This is what makes the Jellynail "Cover Your Ass" system work for you!  Thanks, guys!)

I recommend studying not just popular religions, but also unpopular and even dead religions, for the same reason stated before: there's just no way of knowing for sure they're wrong.  Can you really be sure a god doesn't exist just because all his followers died out?  Of course not.  (Would you know what to do if you died and found yourself standing on a rainbow bridge in front of a pumped-up Norwegian wielding a double-headed axe?  There are even stranger hypotheses than that out there!)  Similarly, it might be a good idea to study a few fake religions, just in case they actually knew more than even they suspected.  And why not make up a few of your own?  You've got a good imagination, right?  Face it, whatever's waiting for us on "the other side" is probably actually weirder than any of us have so far anticipated... even in our wildest dreams!

But let's get back to Christianity and its Bible again.  Sure, the King James Version is good enough... if you don't mind reading a book that's been run through history's longest game of "telephone."  A book that has been translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to ancient French to Old English to Middle English to Modern English... probably with a few steps in between which I've forgotten.  A book which has clearly been mistranslated and altered repeatedly along the way.  A book which existed only in spoken form for centuries before ever being written down to begin with... and which was probably already a little screwed up at that point in time.

And some people really don't care.  Some just think of the Bible as a great work of epic science fiction; they're fine with either the "original theatrical release" or the "director's cut."  And some would argue that all these alterations must surely be the work of God Himself, slowly nudging the Bible over the millennia into an ever-more-perfect form.  Fine; but if you really believe that, then what is God trying to tell you by letting you read this, right now?

What you need is a Bible that has been screwed around with as little as possible... which resembles the earliest Aramaic versions as much as possible, while still being written in English.  To this end, I'm officially endorsing the Dr. Lamsa translation, available new in paperback for $35 through the Noohra Foundation, or used for half as much through Campusi.com.   As far as I know, this is the only direct Aramaic-to-English Bible you can get.  Dr. Lamsa, born on the Iraq-Turkey border, isn't just a scholar of ancient Aramaic; he was also raised in an area that speaks a modern descendant of the language, and has been slow to change over the centuries since Biblical times.  (Nice to see xenophobia and dogmatism actually being good for something for a change, isn't it, folks?)  This puts the late Dr. Lamsa in the unique position of being able to explain some of the idiomatic expressions used throughout the Bible.  For instance, did you know that "hell" was an ancient Assyrian slang term for "mental torment?"  Kinda like when we say someone is "wack" nowadays.  So when they said that people would burn in hellfire forever without God, they were just saying that people without God would be forever messed-up in the head.  Gee, you'd think your preacher would've mentioned that at some point!

Or how "turned to a pillar of salt" meant "had a stroke and died."  Not to say we know for sure that Lot's wife didn't actually turn into a pillar of salt, mind you.  It just might be worth knowing that when Ba'ahb down at the ancient Assyrian Bar & Grill would tell his drinking buddies that his aunt turned into a pillar of salt last week, they would assume she died of a stroke.  They would no more assume she actually turned into a real pillar of salt than your friends, upon hearing you had "water on the knee," would grab some cups and expect a geyser of Evian to come gushing out at any minute.

Dr. Lamsa found over twelve thousand major differences between his version of the Bible and the King James version, and countless minor ones.  I can't promise you that he wasn't trying to push his own agenda, or that his version of the Bible is the "real" one.  (Even if his translations were perfect, there's still the matter of the generations of oral repetition that transpired before anyone bothered to write this stuff down.)  Your local reverend will probably pooh-pooh the whole thing, especially since it causes many of the modern tenets of Christianity t come crashing down.  But as best I know, you just can't find a less meddled-with Bible anywhere in the world.  Not in English, anyways.