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Christopher Hitchens can tear Mother Teresa down, but how many hospitals did he start, for the most neglected people on the face of this earth--the poor of Calcutta? I'm sure St. Francis had his detractors, too.
My point is that the Christian message, the core teaching, the thing that Jesus repeated over and over and over again, in every way imaginable, in straightforward words, in parable and in action, was "Love thy neighbor." Wrong race? Wrong tribe? Wrong nationality? Rich? Poor? Criminal? "Scum of the earth"? "Fallen woman" ? "Magistrate"? Fisherman? Doesn't matter. They are ALL your "brother."
I think it's quite remarkable how consistent this message is throughout the New Testament, despite its many, many translations, Bowdlerizations, editings, expurgations, banned and suppressed versions, interpolations by people with "agendas" ("Thou art Peter and upon this rock, blah, blah, blah,") and other history, and despite all the questions about its authors, their motives, when various parts were written, the addendums (Paul's poisonous dictates) and so on, the message, "Put aside all these differences and love human beings, period" is astonishingly clear.
I imagine that this was why the "Fathers of the Church" and especially the institution-builders of Rome suppressed the Bible for centuries, because it wasn't what THEY were about. They monopolized reading, tolerated vast ignorance and illiteracy and conducted their affairs in Latin. Virtually no one could read what Jesus was reported to have actually said. The contradiction between what the powermongers did and what the New Testament said is excruciating. It often reminds me of our Corporate Rulers of today and their excruciating lies about "freedom and democracy." They are as monolithic and as undemocratic as the Medieval Church.
So here's what I think happened, which makes it irrelevant whether Mother Teresa had flaws, or whether Jesus even existed or not: Every once in a while, human beings get the notion that they are equal and rise up and challenge systems of inequality. They know that they are equal, despite everything that society imposes on them to the contrary, because human brains are constructed that way--open to independent thought, aware of their own creativity, separateness, importance and EQUALITY.
This notion of equality was erupting among Roman slaves and among the "Plebes" (whom the Roman elite had educated) and even among members of the elite. The Roman elite themselves had some notions of equality. They conferred "Roman citizenship" (equality) on leaders, people of merit, business people and others in the colonies, and even on slaves who became persons of merit. They just didn't extend it to everybody, which was more a practical, economic decision than it was contempt for anyone's race, religion or other status. In any case, their practice of universal education and literacy reflected a kind of recognition that merit may arise anywhere. And there were numerous rebellions among this educated underclass in Rome and everywhere in their empire.
The Jews, as a colonized people, were also rebellious and their kingdom was at a particularly important cultural crossroads of Greek, Roman, Gnostic and eastern and far eastern philosophies. But the Jews were too insular. Their leaders were trying to preserve Jewish culture, traditions, history and beliefs amidst the imposition of Roman rule, and had become a parody of themselves and had enriched themselves as Rome's servants. Possibly there was a Jesus who came along, influenced by the Gnostic equality teachings and/or Mithras and/or far eastern philosophies and/or by some strains of Greek/Roman "demos", and said, "Wait a minute! We're all equal. Everybody counts. Don't cut yourself off from the Samaritans. Don't spit on the prostitute. Love they neighbor!" Whether some actual person conceived this great inspiration and spread it around, or an organizing group invented him, it was a movement--yet another eruption of human beings recognizing and asserting their equality.
I think that "equality" and "divinity" meant virtually the same thing. "You are God." "I am God." "He is God." "She is God." We are all equal. We all have the divine spark--that independent, creative, rebellious thing in our brains, probably evolved because innovative human beings did a lot better at survival than those stuck in rote patterns. Jesus said--or a rebellions social group said, "The kingdom is within you." The later powermongers of the Christian movement--and their inheritors to this day--made the "divinity" of Jesus alone into a fanatical dictate by which to impose THEIR rule on others, but the person or group of people who started this never meant to "deify" Jesus; they meant to "deify" everybody. That is the core message that survives.
When this happens among human beings, it is always a fundamental challenge to the power and wealth establishment of the day. It also acquires the cultural characteristics of the people who start it and re-start it, throughout history. This cultural detritus is a lot of what see and have in "christian" theology and "christian" institutions today--possibly the worst of it in this creaky, creepy monolith in Rome, but also in other strains, like the nutty "Bible thumpers" of our south and midwest, and the Puritan fanatics who greatly influenced American colonial culture.
This imposition of a cultural detritus on the pure notion of human equality is similar to the Russian Tsarist/Stalinist form of communism that got spread around the world. Communism in and of itself is not bad. It is in fact a very good idea to hold lands and wealth in common and to put the common good above individual greed--as small farmers did in England before the "enclosure" laws and as Native Americans did, before the whackos from Europe came over and fenced everything off. But Stalinist communism IS bad--was nothing more than Tsarist tyranny by another name. And THAT's what got imported to the U.S.--not equality but wretched authoritarianism--that is, the cultural detritus of a people who had never known democracy, and who were prey to a dictator, got imposed on the purer idea of equality--economic equality--that communism was and is. This is one of the reasons the communist movement failed in the U.S. It was very strong at one time, but it attracted authoritarians who drove the others out, and Stalinism, of course, gave the capitalists an easy handle on demonizing the idea of the "common good." It was yet another equality movement that got hijacked by powermongers.
It seems to me that you are reacting to this "cultural detritus" that has accumulated thousands of years of garbage in its train--modern Christianity. You don't want to think that it's worth any smart person's consideration, and I can hardly blame you for that, considering the history of Christianity in Europe and England, except that I think it is a myopic view. Would you dismiss the notion of democracy because George Bush claimed he was for it, or because it is such a tattered, broken mess, hijacked by multinational corporations and war profiteers, in the USA today? Would you dismiss it because Thomas Jefferson wrote one of its signature documents and he was a slave owner? You need to better understand what moves people.
Christianity--real Christianity--inspired the civil rights movement in the 1960s (and among slaves and abolitionists long before that). Why? Because Christianity-as expressed in the New Testament--is about EQUALITY. We are all brothers and sisters under the skin and despite all differences. It speaks to the core of human independence, dignity and creativity that we all perceive about ourselves, whatever society tries to impose on us as a self-concept. That message comes through--"love thy neighbor" because "thy neighbor" is EQUAL--in the New Testament. I It has inspired the "Liberation Theology" movement in Latin America, whereby priests and nuns have put themselves in the way of fascist bullets because they believe in the EQUALITY and thus the righteous struggle of the poor. They get this from "Love thy neighbor" not from the Pope. They got it from the same place Martin Luther King got it from--the New Testament (and he, too, saw the universality of it, in Gandhi).
The EQUALITY message of the New Testament inspired Mother Theresa and many others in her movement, whatever her problems with celebrity or her "conservative" theological attachments. Her notion was that a disease infested, starvation-ridden, homeless bit of "trash" on the putrid streets of Calcutta was EQUAL--deserves love and care, just like anybody else. I don't care about her failures, whatever they were (and I really don't trust Christopher Hitchens on this or any matter). What I care about is the IDEA of EQUALITY and how it passes from culture to culture, and erupts as various kinds of rebellions and anti-establishment activities, and moves people to rise above their social conditions and recognize "the spark of divinity" in themselves and others.
And, really, my only point, above, is that Native Americans "got it" better than the "christians" who slew them. They understood the core teaching of Christianity better, far better, than the disturbed, propagandized, so-called "christians" from Europe and England who weren't able to recognize Native Americans as EQUAL, because of the dreadfully bad uses to which the Christian institutions had been put in their native countries
This core teaching had developed among Native Americans on its own, the result of their own wisdom, and included the equality--that is, the sacredness, the "spark of divinity," the dignity--of all creatures of the "Great Spirit" and of the Earth, our mother. This is a recognizably Christian teaching, right there in the New Testament, stated over and over and over again--except for the baggage of the 5th to 21st century patriarchal lunatics who STILL demean and, indeed, hate "God the Mother" in us all. All references to her (the "Magdalen") as being equal were edited out, and only vestiges of her importance remain, because they couldn't be removed without destroying certain stories. But in those vestiges we see that women were equal in this movement, and from the earlier (Gnostic) gospels (the banned gospels) we see this as well. The Gnostics openly acknowledge and worshipped "God the Mother."
That "divine spark" is IN us. It is not some outside force. It is interior--it is our very consciousness, independence and creativity--which we share with every other human being, and, in the Native American and Buddhist view--a bigger, more wondrous form of "Christianity"--which we share with all creation.
This is what the bumper sticker "What would Jesus do?" MEANS. The equality message, the kindness message--"Love thy neighbor"--comes through loud and clear in the New Testament. It is pervasive in the New Testament--whoever is responsible for originating it in circa 1 A.D. in Judea and later writing it down--but it is by no means exclusive to the New Testament. It is found independently everywhere in the world. And it exists within, and independent of, every institution that has adopted and perverted the word "Christianity"--ever subversive of the powermongers who create institutions.
To deny this is too easy. You are denying the core inspiration of millions of people and many great social movements. In a sense, you are denying human beings their equality, by opposing what you think is a superior intellectual notion--that's it's all bunk. Well, it's not. It is the basis, in our culture, of all that progressives and democrats with a small d believe. Where do you think the notion of "human rights" comes from? Why would we advocate "New Deal" and other social programs, if human beings are not inherently equal--inherently worthy of love and care, inherently part of our family, inherently dignified, all born with that "spark of the divine" that unites us?
The irony of early communism is that, though they claimed to be "godless," they were better Christians than the assholes running Europe and Russia at the time. They believed in EQUALITY. Everybody has a say. Everybody eats. Everybody has a chance. We're all in this together. But their historical circumstance was so fraught with contrary pressures that they really couldn't pull it off on that grand scale (--though they seem to have pulled it off on a very tiny scale, in Cuba). Whatever any communist, leftist, progressive or any advocate of equality SAYS about what he or she believes, they cannot really escape where they got that idea FROM, in this culture.
Debunk Jesus all you want. And I really don't care if he was an historical person or not (though I tend to think he was), or what little weird bits there are in the New Testament after about 15 centuries of powermongers messing with it, nor even his alleged dwelling upon "the Father" (which I really think was interpolated into these stories by the 3rd to 5th century patriarchalists and powermongers; i.e., that "the Magdalen" was equally important to him or to the initial group that started this EQUALITY movement, in which they shared communal lives and anyone--a woman, a child, a slave--could preside as "priest" at their religious ceremonies, a function that was designated by drawing lots!). SOMEHOW that message of EQUALITY--that we all share equally in the "divine spark"--remained the pervasive message in the New Testament, and either inspired, or underpinned and justified, virtually every assertion of equality in our culture.
This notion erupted in Judea two millennia ago, from a mix of Jewish precepts and traditions with other cultural influences--and has erupted, time and again, within our culture, ever since--but it has also erupted in other cultures, completely apart from our cultural roots--for instance, in Buddhism and in Indigenous groups in the Americas, with their reverence for all living things. Our notion of equality is focused on human beings and it is our most progressive notion. How many of the western scientists of the 20th and 21st centuries would ever have had the opportunities to do what they have done--the marvels of physics, astronomy, genetic sequencing, engineering, medicine and so forth--if it had not been for the fundamental concept, straight out of the New Testament, that everyone is equal--everyone is educable, everyone has a RIGHT to education, everyone has "the spark"?
The notion of social good simply does not develop in a vacuum. It comes stamped with a cultural story that gets passed down through time, along with core ideas such as equality, which are picked up by new groups of people, and newly inspired leaders and teachers, and applied to their particular set of problems. Equality has a long heritage which came to us through the New Testament. And, once the Bible was translated into the languages of ordinary people, and began to be printed en masse, revolution after revolution began to occur, all aimed at equality. It is terribly tragic that most of the European and English "New Worlders" applied this notion to themselves but were blind to it in the Native Americans. Even the slaves and indentured servants and transported prisoners harbored notions of equality and rebelled again and again, until, at last, those kinds of inequality were ended--by abolitionists and freedom lovers who took their inspiration right out of the New Testament.
I am NOT saying that Christianity is "the true religion" or that anyone has to believe in Jesus, or believe or do anything that violates their inherent dignity and equality as a thinking being. I am saying something entirely different--that Christianity is a strain of the "perennial philosophy" inherent in human beings by which we perceive our equality. This notion comes to us through the New Testament which evolved from previous strains of the "perennial philosophy" in Roman, Greek, Jewish and far eastern culture. The idea of equality is the same as the "spark of the divine" in everyone that Jesus or the group that invented Jesus taught. It is universal, but we got it from the New Testament, and, sad to say--for reasons that are too complex to discuss here--the perversion of Christianity into an institution of control and dogmas and monolithic organization occurred in the aftermath and is with us still. Both things are with us still--the idea that we are equal, and also some rather ugly manifestations of Christian institutional religion, still being used by powermongers.
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