IF JESUS WAS A RADICAL, HOW COME
FUNDAMENTALISTS ARE SO CONSERVATIVE?

From AlterNet:

Don't Bow To God's Bullies

To picture God in terms of power is also one of the great bait-and-switch gimmicks of all time. People within the power hierarchy proclaim that God is the ultimate authority, and then appoint themselves as God's interpreters and enforcers. They are God's humble bullies. It has been one of the most successful con games of all time.

The real Jesus was born illegitimately. He called himself "the human one." Just like Buddha, his authority came from truth, not power. He taught whoever has love has God. He said those who work for the common good are his church.

The real Jesus was an anarchist. He spent his life refusing to claim power over anyone. He said that God is understood in terms of love not power. We add nothing to the majesty of "the human one" by adding a throne or a crown. If he did not want to rule over others in life, why should he want it in death? That is why Jesus is called "lamb of God"; he spoke not as the king of the universe, but from its heart.

If you want to know why Americans are so frightened and why we are attacking anything that would challenge our dominance over others, read the Bible. Like Cain we have murdered members of our human family. Even when we silence our victims, the ground beneath our feet cries out against us.

Click here for the rest.

It may be a bit of a stretch to refer to the man who said "render unto Caesar" as an anarchist, but the essay's writer makes a pretty unassailable point: by today's standards, Jesus was a far-left extremist. That's pretty obvious when you sit down and read the Gospels without having the priest class there to tell you what it means. Indeed, one of my earliest posts here at Real Art does exactly that. There's just no way of getting around the fact that Jesus' major concern was not individual salvation, but social justice.

Why, then, are so many Christians these days so frackin' conservative? Why is Christianity's history so brutal and bloody? My general take on those questions is that Christianity, as an institution of power and ideology, tends historically to bend toward the prevailing attitudes of powerful elites. Generally, powerful elites couldn't care less about social justice; consequently, Christianity doesn't either. But, then, that's no answer. I'm simply describing the situation, which leaves us with that haunting question: why isn't Christianity the force for social good that it ought to be?

From CounterPunch:

Jesus, the Political Insurgent?

The early followers of Jesus found it safer to dissociate themselves from the Roman-despised and ­persecuted Jews. Safer to reinterpret Jesus' messiahship in theological and evangelical rather than political and institutional terms. Safer to appeal to the Gentiles because the survival of the early followers lay in spreading a Christian gospel to the Romans. The gospel of a resurrected Messiah and saviour of the world. Whose miraculous resurrection proves, rather than negates, his being the Messiah and also the only Son of God. Therefore, his followers hold the one true religion in the palm of their faith.

The conversion of Jesus from Jew to Christian is seen in his dissociation from Judaism and accommodating appeal to the Romans. This distortion of historical reality involves the shifting of blame for Jesus' crucifixion from Romans to Jews. The anti-Semitism in the New Testament is seen in reputedly cruel Roman prefect Pontius Pilate agonizingly sympathetic to a would-be liberator of Jews from Roman domination; in Pilate dramatically washing his hands of responsibility for Jesus' death, even though he alone had the power of life and death over Jesus. (John 19:10)

The distortion of historical reality is also seen in Jews being set up as "Christ killers." A "whole battalion-backed, yet uneasy, Pilate giving in to the "will" of subjugated, powerless priests, elders of the people, and other Jews who repeatedly cried out, "Crucify him!" (Mark 15: 12-16) Portraying the Roman Empire in such a favorable light in New Testament books written 50 to 100 years after the fact, may have advanced the evangelizing of Romans by the early followers of Jesus, but it cast a horrible curse on the Jewish people by putting into the mouths of their oppressed descendents, "His [Jesus'] blood be on us and on our children." (Matthew 27:25)

Around 300 years later the apparent conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine led Christianity to not only be recognized, but favored by the state. Finally, the persecution and martyrdom of Christians ended.

Click here for the rest.

So, in other words, for political expediency, early Christians betrayed Jesus' teachings in order to legitimize their religion. From it's beginnings, Christianity was about sucking up to oppressive state power, rather than challenging it as Jesus did; early Christians even found a class of people to persecute, the Jews, so as to advance their own status and power. Today's Jews, then, are feminists, liberals, homosexuals, and others, Jews too sometimes, but that hardly matters for this analysis. The point is that the remarkable contradiction inherent in institutional Christianity, reading and meditating on Jesus' words of social justice while at the same time twisting them to mean their exact opposite, is the philosophical device by which the religion swept through the Roman Empire, ever after embedding itself as a major aspect of both Jesus-worship and Western civilization. Who would have thought that Orwellian "doublethink" dated back that far?

The bottom line here is that irrationality, and preference for oppressive state power, are historically built into Christian practice, indispensible parts of it, in fact. That's why so many American Christians back in the spring of '03 were able to say "love one another" on Sunday, and "bomb the hell out of Iraq" on Monday through Saturday. Well, Sunday, too, in between prayers and hymns.

Pretty depressing.

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