“Buried”? That was the conclusion of Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy. And how was he buried? By Paul’s Christ myth that contradicted entirely the main themes in the actual original message of Jesus (“Q Wisdom Sayings” research as a subcategory of the “Search For Historical Jesus” research). Notably Paul contradicted Jesus’ anti-sacrifice protest by reconstructing him as the ultimate cosmic sacrifice of a godman. Also Paul contradicted Jesus’ “stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory God” with his re-affirmation of retaliatory deity- i.e. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Paul’s statement of his theology in Romans 12:17-20). And Paul contradicted another central theme in Jesus life as expressed in his statement that true greatness was not in lording over others but in serving others. Paul then recreated him as “Lord Jesus”, the ultimate Dominator of all to whom every knee would bow under eternal “rod of iron” rule. And more…
Quotes from new material below:
“Before starting, let me note that, in regard to Niemietz’s summary of Jonathan Haidt’s point above, here is a project for all of us. Yes, emotional satisfaction dominates our choice in beliefs, even choice for beliefs with a long history of destructive outcomes. Yet such beliefs still dominate religious traditions and billions hold them.
“Why do we feel as we do in response to certain beliefs that we choose and hold? Now that pushes us to consider what we have inherited in deeply embedded archetypes, archetypal themes/beliefs that have been shaped across previous millennia by primitive myths that trace back to the very origins of humanity. And those deeply embedded archetypes profoundly influence, even today, how we think, feel, are motivated, and then respond/behave.
“This site deals with such things and offers alternatives to the archetypal themes that we have inherited, even though this project arouses anger in some at the confronting of what has long been protected “under the canopy of the sacred”, revered as “divine revelation”. Just remember that the earliest shaman, and then subsequent millennia of priesthoods, created the sacred canopy, the “holy scriptures”. Fallible people just like us. They were finding their “emotional satisfaction” in the inherited beliefs of their ancestors based on archetypal myths that distorted reality and life.”
See notes below on reformation/moderation in religious traditions like Islam and Christianity. What is the critical moderating influence? And core (i.e. as in deity theory) versus peripheral reform projects.
This site affirms the single most profound insight to have ever emerged out of a human mind and mouth– i.e. that the core of all reality is love, a stunningly inexpressible, transcendent love that is universally and ultimately “no conditions”, and that toward everyone. That was the central breakthrough insight of Historical Jesus, someone entirely opposite in person and message to Paul’s Christ myth (i.e. Paul’s oxymoronic merger of Jesus with Christ in his “Jesus Christ”, or “Lord Jesus”), Wendell Krossa
Insert: “Core of reality”=”theology”, as in creating reality, creating Consciousness/Mind/Intelligence/Self.
The Near-Death Experience movement, the latest stage in human spirituality, affirms the Jesus’ insight with its similar discovery that God, or “the Light”, is an inexpressibly wondrous unconditional love. NDE people come back to claim that there is no angry God, no judgment, no punishment, no exclusion of anyone, no hell. Just as Jesus had said long before, “Sun and rain are given generously, unconditionally, non-discriminately to all alike, to both good and bad people”.
A notable NDE example: A lady with a degree in Christian theology was stunned to discover during her NDE that God was an inexpressible unconditional love. She returned to state, “My Christian religion is all wrong. There is no angry God. There is no judgment. No punishment. No hell. Only wondrously inexpressible unconditional love.”
She echoed the central discovery in many of the better NDE accounts- i.e. the stunningly wondrous unconditional love of God. Emphasis on the adjective/feature of “unconditional”.
The Jewish man, Jesus, was the historical first to clearly state that God was no conditions love. He taught (and exhibited in his behavior) his unique version of a nonreligious “wisdom tradition” with insights on universal tolerance and inclusion, non-domination in relationships, and restorative justice. Themes that do not originate with any previous mythological or religious tradition, aside from some antecedents/foreshadowing from the Old Testament prophets. His themes of universal inclusion, non-domination, and restorative justice and are best expressed today through Classic Liberalism, or liberal democracy, with its principles, systems of common law, and representative institutions that protect the rights and freedoms of all individuals, equally, that “serve” the people.
Insert: And of course, lest some minds immediately derail here with- “What about ‘justice’ for victims?”- we need to affirm the usual qualifier that any form of love, unconditional or not, is responsible to restrain the violent (incarceration) in order to protect the innocent. That is the fundamental and first responsibility of any government at any level of society. But then we move into issues of “punitive versus restorative” justice in the treatment of offenders and prisoners of war.
With his new theology on an unconditional God, the wisdom sage Jesus gave us the most profound insight into TOE (Theory of Everything) ever offered. He presented an entirely new and unique take on the actual nature or character of ultimate reality, the core of all reality, the creating Consciousness that gives existence to all, that is the Source and basis of all else.
The creating spirits/gods found in primitive mythologies, had from the beginning been defined as entities that were threatening- i.e. gods as tribal, dominating, and punishing people through the natural world, with further threat of after-life harm. Jesus stated that entire previous history of human speculation on theology had been wrong. God, to the contrary, was only love and love that was inexpressibly wondrous, infinitely beyond the best humanly imaginable.
Note his illustration of this unconditional feature in deity in his parable of the Prodigal Father who makes no demand for sacrifice/payment. Jesus took up the protest of the Old Testament prophets against sacrifice but took it further to unconditional absoluteness.
God as nonreligious/anti-religion reality
The features in the theology of Jesus revealed an entirely nonreligious God. How so?
The primary feature of his theology was “unconditional”. That counters the main feature of all religious traditions- their highly conditional nature. Religious conditions such as sacrifice/payment to appease angry deity. Such is the logical response to the threat theology that is the central feature of all religious theology. Threatening deity leads to religious demands like sacrifice/payment.
The pattern and essential nature of religion, from the beginning, has been about conditions to appease and please gods. That began with the introduction of fear based on threats from the spirits/gods. And that establishes the basis for the follow-up conditions of religious traditions- i.e. how to appease and please the dominating and threatening gods of any given tradition.
Add here that religious traditions have from the beginning been framed by views of justice as retributive, punitive. Eye for eye. Hence, the basic condition of sacrifice as payment.
The understanding of Historical Jesus that God is an unconditional love reality, changes everything. Entirely, absolutely.
Again, his new theology was a profound rejection of the threat theology that had dominated human narratives for millennia, an image of deity that had darkened and enslaved human consciousness and spirits with fear of divine retribution for being imperfectly human. Deity, threatening punishment, had from the beginning of human mythmaking burdened people with unnecessary fears based on metaphysical realities/constructions, fears that incite unnecessary anxiety, shame, guilt, despair and depression, fatalism, resignation, nihilism, and even violence.
Then 2 thousand years ago we are told that God is something entirely nonreligious/unconditional and nonthreatening. That was the offer of ultimate liberation at the core of human being, from deeply embedded archetypes of our subconscious that have long been shaped by primitive mythology and religion, archetypes that generate personality-deforming fear of the metaphysical world. All subsequent religious conditions are a response to the initial threat- sacrifice to appease divine anger/threat, beliefs, ritual, religious lifestyle to please the tribal deity, etc.
The gods of ancient mythologies and down through to the great world religions had all threatened to harm people through the natural world (natural disasters, accidents, disease, etc.) and then continue the divine threat into the next life with ultimate judgment, exclusion, and destruction in hells. Again, such primitive theology had deformed people with fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, despair, depression, nihilism, and violence as detailed by psychologists Harold Ellens and Zenon Lotufo in “Cruel God, Kind God.”
Historians (e.g. John Pfeiffer) have also argued that the earliest forms of religion were founded on fear of the metaphysical, fear of threatening deity, and early tribal men put themselves forth as those who knew the secrets to the invisible metaphysical realm of spirits and how to placate those angry deities. That was the initial emergence of elites in human societies, those elevating themselves over fellow tribals as more enlightened and thereby demanding to manipulate and control others ignorant of the secrets of the metaphysical. Creating fear was a significant factor in such manipulation and control of others.
Historical Jesus rejected that primitive fear-engendering mythology and re-oriented human consciousness to something entirely new and profoundly liberating. He stated that God was love of an inexpressibly unconditional nature.
That made the God of Jesus contrary to religion, profoundly anti-religion.
His “stunning new theology” was a complete repudiation of the old theologies of God that had long been defined by evil triad features as tribally exclusive deities (favoring true believer devotees), dominating Kings/lords with human subjects created to serve the gods via servitude to their priesthoods that detailed the onerous religious conditions demanded by the gods as necessary to appease and please, and all buttressed with the threat of punitive retaliation for lack of obedience. Add the divine requirement for followers to engage righteous battles to defeat and destroy enemies.
The element of sacrifice in the mix of religious conditions deserves special attention:
Bob Brinsmead, among others, has argued in a couple of new essays (links posted above) that Historical Jesus was put to death for protesting sacrifice. Jesus’ anti-sacrifice protest was a profoundly anti-religion protest as atonement/sacrifice is a central theme of conditional religion, sacrifice as the supreme condition to appease angry, threatening deity.
Jesus anti-sacrifice protest was dismissed out of hand and buried when Paul took him and reconstructed him as something entirely opposite, as the ultimate cosmic sacrifice to appease an angry, threatening God. As Paul states in his main letter on atonement- Romans 3-5:
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement… we are saved from God’s wrath through the death of his Son”.
This leads me to conclude that conditional religions like Christianity, and all religion as most essentially conditional, cannot communicate the unconditional nature of deity to people. With its conditions, religion deforms the unconditional reality of God entirely.
Continuing…
With the stunning new theology of Jesus there would be no tribal exclusion of anyone, no ultimate retaliatory punishment for sins, no demand for sacrifice or payment, no demand to embrace a religious belief system or lifestyle. No obligatory loyalty to a religious tradition.
The central point that Jesus summarized and concluded his message with- Do this, do the things listed and you will be just like God. You will be acting just like God. God loves just like this list of precepts:
The behavioral ideals in the teaching of Historical Jesus point to theological reality:
Again, the critical qualifier- These are some of the highest ideals for human behavior and life. But they are not prescriptive for situations such as assaults by violent people. They are not advocacy for pacifism, or for business practise, economics. While they do orient people to restorative justice approaches in criminal justice they do not advocate for, or validate, the extremism of, for example, leftist woke progressivism policies such as the de-carceration of violent people. Every person must be held responsible for their behavior and most fundamental to human responsibility is the obligation to restrain and incarcerate violent people in order to protect others.
Jesus understood how offensive his new theology was to those locked into the long-standing belief in justice as retribution. When he first publicly mentioned his new theology of a non-retaliatory, unconditionally loving God, his enraged audience tried to throw him off a cliff. He then recounted the angry response of others to his unconditionally generous theology- i.e. the pissed older brother (Prodigal parable) upset at the father’s unconditional mercy toward the useless younger brother, and the all-day vineyard workers pissed at the owner’s generosity toward the late-comers.
Here is his central teaching and the list of precepts that illustrate his stunning new theology of an unconditional God:
“Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Everyone finds it easy to love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Everyone can do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Most will lend to others, expecting to be repaid in full.
“But do something more heroic, more humane. (Live on a higher plane of human experience). Do not retaliate against your offenders/enemies with ‘eye for eye’ justice. Instead, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then you will be just like God because God does not retaliate against God’s enemies. God does not mete out eye for eye justice. Instead, God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Be unconditionally loving, just as your God is unconditionally loving”. (My paraphrase of Luke 6:32-36 or Matthew 5:38-48.)
This list of ethical standards can be summarized in the single statement: “Love your enemy because God does”. Be unconditionally loving because God is.
That is the concluding point in his list. The outstanding new theological insight of Historical Jesus is based on the list of behaviors that precede the summary conclusion. Jesus states- If you act like this then you are acting just like God does. This is how God acts and hence, what God is like- i.e. unconditional love toward all.
These unconditional behaviors reveal the unconditional character, nature of God. Jesus’ theological conclusion is based on the preceding list that presents the best of human behavior. And of course, where we fail in behaving in such a manner, we understand that God is perfection, infinitely, transcendently better. Such is the nature of perfection in deity.
Again, Jesus also emphasized this generous love in his short stories or parables: The Prodigal Father story in Luke 15:11-31. The Father (representing God) did not demand a sacrifice, restitution, payment, apology, or any other condition before forgiving, fully accepting, and loving the wasteful son.
So also, we see the nature of an unconditional God in the story of the vineyard owner giving the latecomers the same payment as the all-day workers.
We further see this unconditional love in Jesus welcoming “sinners” and social outcasts into meals.
The theological insight presented by Jesus- that God is no conditions love- takes us to the core of the real TOE, the true core nature of all reality, that which creates and sustains all in existence. There is no threat of harm from that metaphysical reality. No demand to fulfill religious conditions, absolutely none. Ultimate Reality is not just a materialist-defined reality at the core of all (i.e. just at the level of quantum fields, energy, etc.). It is something of the nature of Consciousness/Mind/Intelligence/Self/Spirit and most critical- it is defined by “Love”, astonishingly, inexpressibly transcendent Love. Materialist versions of TOE miss this entirely. But neither is it something “spiritual” in the traditional religious sense of that (associated with mythical or religious views of such).
And this is why I have affirmed with all humanity from the beginning, believing that there is Something bigger than us that we cannot see but that is responsible for our existence. And the nature of That explains what should be the purpose of our lives, what should ideally guide us in how we should live as human. If it is wrath, revenge, and destruction of differing others then OK. But if it’s not that, then it is critical to know what exactly it is because it intuitively functions as the reality and ideal that gives us our purpose.
It has always been understood that Ultimate Reality is more than just energy or force. It is more than quantum fields. It has long been understood, even by early humans, to be something of the nature of Mind, Consciousness, Intelligence, and Self with personhood (eventually anthropomorphized as “gods” similar to human persons). But then, at the beginning, all went to hell as the ancients in their impulse to explain then projected the primitive features of their then existence onto That. Features like (1) tribal (deities of groups/tribes of people), (2) dominating (deity as Lord/King/Ruler), and (3) punitive destruction of competing tribes. Those features defined the deities of religious traditions and became the core themes of religious theology. That was followed up with divine demands for appeasement/atonement and loyalty to the true religious tribe, versus other tribes. Religious tribalism was based on myths of “cosmic dualism” (as per Zoroaster).
That primitive mythology completely misrepresented deity from the beginning. So I reject all that and I take the nonreligious explanation of Historical Jesus that rejected that primitive theology and stated- “No, there has never been any such God”. Instead, God has always been unconditional Love, as per his statement, “There must be no more ‘eye for eye’ but, instead, love your enemy because God does”. Further, God has always been unconditionally inclusive (i.e. “sun and rain generously given to all alike”). God is inexpressible wondrous unconditional love. And again, that is not prescriptive for justice as pacifism but is a guiding ideal for the best of being human, how to live as heroically humanity in a manner that enables us to embrace opportunities to tower in stature in our struggles to break the endless history of violent cycles that result from “eye for eye” retaliatory justice, from the dead ends of that traditional religious belief and justice.
The striking new core reality taught by Jesus transforms everything in human narratives. It overturns the archetypal themes that have dominated mythologies and religions across history- i.e. the complex of grand mythical themes that included the fallacies of (1) Original paradise ruined by early corrupted humans (originally perfect beings), a “fall into sin” that made all subsequent humans inherently “sinful”. (2) Life after the fall of humanity has been declining toward a worse state, heading toward an apocalyptic ending. (3) Subsequently an angry God (pissed at the ruin of his paradise) demands sacrifice, payment, blood atonement in order to pay for salvation. (4) Further, God demands suffering for redemption (subsequent to the ruin of paradise the world became a place of suffering as punishment). (5) God also demands that true believers must pledge loyalty to his true religion and engage a righteous crusade against evil enemies that must be exterminated (the tribal impulse, based on Zoroastrian cosmic dualism, that incites fear and hatred of differing others, and validates the impulse to defeat and conquer, to dominate others, to vengefully destroy differing others as “justice”). And then (6) God offers the promise of salvation if people fulfill the varied religious requirements. They are granted utopia or “salvation” that comes through destruction (i.e. apocalyptic purging of the world to make way for the restoration of the lost paradise).
An unconditional God overturns this entire complex of primitive themes that have dominated mythologies and world religions from the beginning of human mythmaking. In the modern era these archetypal themes have even shaped “secular” ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and environmentalism (the “secularization” of mythology).
Once again- Why go after the bad ideas in Christianity and upset true believers? Wendell Krossa
To paraphrase Bill Clinton- “It’s the history of outcomes, stupid”.
The same complex of bad ideas/beliefs/myths frame the narratives of Judaism and Islam. Historians of religion/mythology have also exposed the same themes in Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism (e.g. Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell). Eliade, for example, notes the belief of decline toward apocalypse exists in Buddhism in the myth of the human lifespan declining across time.
Few have done a better job than historian Richard Landes exposing the devastating influence of bad religious ideas on modern era mass-death movements, notably in the 20th Century. He revealed crusades like Marxism to be profoundly religious crusades shaped by the most primitive of mythical ideas, not the modern secular ideology and science that they try to cloak themselves with.
The comments below are from his chapters on Marxism and are also true of Nazism and environmental alarmism. Especially notable among the primitive ideas is the belief in “salvation through violent destruction of the world order that exists”. In the case of Marxism, the world order that must be destroyed in order to attain salvation is the capitalist civilization of Western liberal democracies.
His comments below highlight how world savior zealots deform the Hero’s Quest where the hero must engage a righteous war against evil enemies/monsters and the divine imperative is the demand to defeat and exterminate enemies in order to emerge as the hero savior. Such mythology is based on the Zoroastrian archetype of cosmic dualism- i.e. there exists a great war of Good against Evil where evil must be purged in order to attain salvation/utopia. This is what Arthur Mendel warned about in regard to the belief in “Salvation through destruction” (“Vision and Violence”).
My takeaway from Landes research? He illustrates why we need a thorough cleanup of our religious traditions if we are to responsibly end eruptions of violence for the long term future. As the military guy said- You can stamp out eruptions of violence with military force but they will continue to erupt until you go after the ideas the fuel them. Landes warned the same with regard to Nazism and the Christian ideas that fueled that madness.
Note that when Landes uses the term “apocalyptic millennialism” he is referring to Paul’s Christ myth that is the central theme of contemporary Christianity.
“(Hitler) is not so much the measure of the unthinkably, the impossibly evil, as he is the measure of how, with modern technology and an only partially developed civil polity, a nation, a people, seized by, ridden by a millennial passion, can become one of the great dealers of death in human history”. He preceded this with the statement that the only way to properly understand Hitler’s appeal is by appreciating the role of religious millennialism as the central problem with the Nazis. That means the Christ myth of Paul.
This also explains why I challenge Grok for his soft-pedalling of the danger that an apparently (in Grok’s short-sighted estimation) innocent Mamdani poses to the US. Mamdani represents the ongoing shift of Woke Progressives toward the far-left, toward Woke neo-Marxism/collectivism, with the added danger from their apocalyptic climate crusade, a crusade that now evidences decline and failure. Failure incites desperation and that feeds authoritarianism and then the outright shift to violence as we are seeing in the public declarations of Progressive leaders that incite actual eruptions of violence (i.e. the Tesla burnings, the rioting against ICE, the assassination attempts against “Hitler”, etc.). All part of same general movement.
The sample of Landes material below undergirds my repeated point here that we will never thoroughly and properly solve the problem of violence in human history till we recognize the myths in our main systems of belief that incite, guide, and validate the worst of human response and behavior. These are profoundly religious ideas and they dominate our main world religions, and have now been “secularized” in our main ideologies, notably in the crusades of Marxism and environmental alarmism. Islam is also guilty here.
Here is Landes on the role of Christian religious myths in the mass-death violence of movements like Marxism:
“Far from distancing himself from millennialism, Marx was modern millennialism writ large…
“Marx’s millennial ideology operated as he hoped: it triggered repeated attempts at violent, active cataclysmic apocalyptic movements (revolutions)…
How did Marxists use Christian apocalyptic millennialism to promote their crusade?
“To bring redemption closer, one needed to force things by (worst case scenario). If the millennium had not yet arrived, it was because things were not yet bad enough… Like so many disappointed apocalyptic hopefuls, the revolutionaries opted for coercive purity… the worse it got the better it would get…”
Then Landes comments on the early Marxist leader/thinker, Mikhael Bakunin, who along with fellow Marxists embraced the profoundly religious nature of Marxism,
“(Bakunin) eloquently tells the tale of Communist millennialism and its active cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario… Few other thinkers reveal so clearly the deep connection between religious and secular apocalyptic thought, in particular the adoption of an active cataclysmic scenario in response to disappointment… Bakunin gave himself over to religious passions that slid easily into messianic grandeur in which he saw himself as another Jesus…
“(Bakunin) transmuted his religious passion to (save loved ones)… into a secular one to save the oppressed of the world… He learned not to leave the world of suffering, but to destroy it. In the abandonment of formal religion and the zealous adoption of a (new religious) revolutionary creed we find the roots of secular apocalypse… (Bakunin’s infantile fantasy) the dream of a vengeful apocalypse…”
Landes continues, explaining the Marxist striving for “volcanic eruptions of destructive fury on the part of the people, the annihilation of ruling elites, and in the aftermath, to shape the new world”.
He then details the later phase of apocalyptic movements when it appears the crusade is failing the apocalyptic prophets then shift to the violent phase of “exterminate or be exterminated”. In desperation, they turn to murderous violence to exterminate those who oppose them. That is their response to disappointment, to disillusionment with their failing crusade.
Commenting on the turn to violence out of disappointment with evidence of growing failure…
“Often enough, the newly empowered zealots who see their earnest effort to generate the millennium turn rancid before them, take to imposing their will… (what they claim is) the “general will…”
This is a common claim of leftists of varied stripes, that they are acting on behalf of the common good, or “for the people”, on behalf of the “general will” of the common people. A “will” that they impose on populations coercively, violently.
Landes continues… “Indeed, the more fervently apocalyptic the believer, the more disappointed he or she is by the inevitable failure. In some cases, these disappointed ‘secular’ zealots surpassed even the most terrible forms of ‘religious’ millennialism in the violence and destruction they brought to those they sought to ‘save’. Righteous, technologically endowed terror in the hands of apocalyptic paranoids is far worse than the worst of the Spanish Inquisition, which only killed thousands. Totalitarianism… represents the modern secular form of coercive purity so characteristic of hierarchical (authoritarian) millennialists in the later stages of cognitive dissonance…”
Landes is explaining what his colleague Arthur Mendel describes as “salvation by destruction”, a central theme of Paul’s Christ religion, whether illustrated in the divine demand for bloody sacrifice/murder as essential to salvation, or the final apocalyptic purging of evil from the world to make way for the millennial paradise/utopia.
Landes explains further how apocalyptic millennial beliefs work on human personality, deforming consciousness that leads to horrific violence toward all who dissent from the apocalyptic crusade.
The Marxist messiahs, desperate to save people, then “force the unwilling to be ‘free’ by enslaving them to a perfectionist image of freedom. ‘Make’ the millennium, whatever the cost to the recalcitrant who stand in the way of true good: they are demons, they are evil… Totalitarians want to run history forward at top speed to achieve their millennial goals.”
Hence, those who resist them must be crushed. In their crusade for salvation by destruction, things must get worse before they can get better, things must “reach apocalyptically catastrophic proportions before they can be “millennially” better”, says Landes. Hence, Marxists have “indulged an almost limitless appetite for death”.
We can include contemporary Islamicists who are also motivated by the very same beliefs in salvation by destruction. Just as Christians were motivated by the same core approach across past history.
Landes then details the profoundly religious nature of these movements. He notes that modern secularists insist they have rejected all forms of religious superstition but “rather than having abandoned millennial beliefs, ‘modern’ industrial society invented a new, secular variant”. Marxism.
Landes, in his summary of Marxist leaders, notes the similarities with Nazis. He says, “Any attempt to put this totalitarian system (i.e. Marxism) in the category of a closed and barbarian theocracy is very often vehemently refused… Everybody to dares to take the Bolshevik world as a religious community is considered a traitor betraying the humanitarian ideals of the modernity of the French Revolution. If you see it in this sense, say the proponents of the project of modernity, the distance between the old world and the new modern world would shrink too much and the debts to the Christian tradition would become too heavy. Thus, when you treat the Bolsheviks as a millennial sect you are going to betray the project of modernity and treat the Bolsheviks, despite their very modern efforts to industrialize backward Russia, as a medieval sect of obscure believers.”
He goes on to affirm that the similarities of the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian systems were in that both were “active cataclysmic, apocalyptic millennial movements”. So also, environmental alarmism today, along with the general movement of far-left Woke Progressivism that is threatening Western liberal democracies.
Conclusion: The above from Landes is a sampling of the research by a lead member of the apocalyptic millennial group that presents the stunning evidence on how core Christian themes/beliefs were influential in inciting, guiding, and validating some of the worst violence and murder in human history, just decades ago. That research affirms again how highly irresponsible it is to just tinker at the periphery of these belief systems and not go to the core ideas, notably the most dominant of all- the theology at the core.
Most egregious in this is the failure to recognize that Historical Jesus did just that- He went to the core theology and rejected that image of God as punitive and retaliatory, demanding violent sacrifice to appease divine wrath. Two decades later Paul rejected the stunning new theology of Jesus and retreated to re-affirm retaliatory deity demanding blood sacrifice. It is highly irresponsible of Christian leadership to continue denying this and to continue affirming Paul’s destructive theology that has incited and validated so much mass-death across the last two millennia, notably in the Twentieth Century in Marxism and Nazism, now in environmental alarmism.
Added notes (speculations on the metaphysical):
If Jesus is right on the nature of God, and I believe he is, then there is no heaven or hell. There is something infinitely better than the tribal heaven of Christianity with its divide of humanity into true believers saved and unbelievers cast into the lake of fire, for eternity. Cosmic dualism forever. Nah. Too primitive and religiously limited. There has to be something far better, unimaginably, inexpressibly, infinitely better for all. Not something that validates the urge for the vengeance that typifies this dualistic realm of good versus evil, a temporary reality constructed as a learning arena for humans. Surely an ultimate “Oneness” in love will have none of the base impulses, motivations, and experiences of this realm.
Reviving religion? For just more of same old? Clean it up first, Wendell Krossa
People talk about a “crisis of faith, lost moorings, etc.” (e.g. Michael Shellenberger, Jordan Peterson, writers on Bari Weiss’s Free Press, Tucker Carlson, etc.). They then offer their solution to such issues in some generalized, unspecified return to a religion like Christianity.
But without doing the work that Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy pointed to, i.e. to distinguish between “the diamonds and the dung”, the good and bad ideas/beliefs in religious traditions, then the advocacy for a generalized revival of religion solves nothing. You get, for example, the same old threat theology that will continue to deform and harm human minds and lives whether through the personality-deforming fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, despair/depression, nihilism, or violence, as noted by psychologists like Harold Ellens and Zenon Lotufo in “Cruel God, Kind God”.
That personality-deforming influence then feeds into the larger mass-harm or even mass-death impacts of such ideas on crusades like Marxism, Nazism, and environmental alarmism. This historically more recent stuff is aside from past millennia of such mass-destruction.
Grok on my arguments here re “bad religious ideas”- “You’re correct that the major Western religions, Christianity, Islam, and including Judaism, preserve ideas that can be weaponized… The old theologies of the world religions perpetuate violence”, says Grok.
We need the thorough overhaul of a “death and rebirth” process, the experience of “disintegration of the old and then reintegration around the new”, something that historians of mythology/religion, like Joseph Campbell, have explained in relation to the shamanic transformation. What Historical Jesus offered with his stunning new theology of an unconditional God.
My choice for greatest historical conceptual/psychological tragedy is that Paul, in his Christ myth, rejected the theological breakthrough of Jesus that would have initiated the process of radical transformation of narratives and human consciousness like nothing else in human history.
Paul retreated to re-enforce the same old threat theology of all traditional religion that preceded him. He re-affirmed deity as highly conditional reality- i.e. God demanding tribal loyalty from true believers in opposition to unbelievers (undermining the fundamental oneness of the human family), submission to deity as “Lord, King, Ruler” in his reframing of Jesus as “Lord Jesus” (a domination mediated via submission to priesthoods claiming to represent God), payment via blood sacrifice, embrace of religious belief systems (buttressed with threats of “heresy, blasphemy” for dissent from orthodoxy), fulfilment of religious ritual and lifestyle as identity markers of true believers, and threats of the punitive destruction of unbelievers, etc.… Religious conditions, conditions, and more damn conditions.
I would offer that there is no authentic and complete rebirth to new life, no full reintegration around a new narrative, unless that occurs around the core Jesus insight on unconditional deity. If his stunning new theology is not central to the transformation of narratives and consciousness, then we only continue to tinker around the periphery of needed change.
We need much more than just the revival of the same old, especially as we understand more today of the outcomes of the bad ideas in the mix of Western religious traditions like Christianity. As noted above, especially in light of the evidence we have today on the influence of the apocalyptic millennial ideas of Paul’s Christ in validating mass-death movements like Marxism, Nazism, and environmental alarmism (i.e. Richard Landes in “Heaven on Earth”, and his colleague’s research on “apocalyptic millennialism”).
Moderating influences on religious traditions, Wendell Krossa
Muhammad did not pick up on the basic teaching of Jesus from his mentor Waraqa, the Ebionite priest, and cousin of his first wife Khadija. Waraqa used the “gospel to the Hebrews”, an earlier version of the gospel of Matthew, along with Matthew’s gospel, to instruct Muhammad in theology and religion. That gospel to the Hebrews and Matthew’s gospel significantly shaped the Quran. But Muhammad did not include the central teaching of Jesus from Matt 5-7 (summarized in Luke 6:27-36), a body of humane precepts that would have provided a potent input to moderate the harsher features of the Quran’s theology (i.e. angry God demanding hell for infidels). It is unfortunate that Islam did not get that moderating influence as Christianity did. (Sources: Joseph Azzi’s “The Priest and the Prophet”, among other sources)
Nonetheless, I affirm with Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy that even in Christianity the influence of Jesus’ teaching has been largely buried by Paul’s Christ myth, hence the violent history of Christianity. That influence of Paul’s Christ, notably the elements of “apocalyptic millennialism”, was at its worst in validating Marxism and Nazism, and now environmental alarmism. As James Tabor says, the Jesus material has largely been lost to our Western civilization because of dominance of Paul’s Christ in our religious and secular narratives.
Tabor’s points are worth repeating here…
James Tabor in “Paul and Jesus”:
“There was a version of ‘Christianity before Paul’, affirmed by both Jesus and his original followers, with tenets and affirmations quite opposite to these of Paul… the message of Paul, which created Christianity as we know it, and the message of historical Jesus and his earliest followers, were not the same. In fact, they were sharply opposed to one another with little in common beyond the name Jesus itself” (p.xv1).
“Paul is the most influential person in human history and realize it or not, he has shaped practically all we think about everything… the West in particular… the foundations of Western civilization- from our assumptions about reality to our societal and personal ethics- rest in a singular way upon the heavenly visions and apparitions of the apostle Paul. We are all cultural heirs of Paul, with the well-established doctrines and traditions of mainstream Christianity deeply entrenched in our culture. In contrast, Jesus as a historical figure… has been largely lost to our culture” (p. xv11).
“Paul operated with a strongly apocalyptic perspective that influenced all he said or did” (p.15).
(My note re this: Jesus was clearly anti-apocalyptic as per his statement that there should be no more “eye for eye” retaliation but instead love the enemy because God does. Apocalyptic in Paul is ultimate divine retaliation against evil enemies, ultimate destruction that has no hint of “love the enemy”. Paul’s theology of “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord is all “eye for eye” at ultimate scale.)
“The entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production…” (p.19).
“The ‘Jesus’ who most influenced history was the ‘Jesus-Christ’ of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus… Paul transformed Jesus himself (and) his message of a… kingdom of justice and peace on earth, to the symbol of a religion of otherworldly salvation in a heavenly world”, (21).
“The form of Christianity… (that thrived in the late Roman Empire)… was heavily based upon the ecstatic and visionary experiences of Paul. Christianity as we came to know it, is Paul and Paul is Christianity. The bulk of the New Testament is dominated by his theological vision”, p.24).
“Paul’s view of Christ as the divine pre-existent Son of God who took on human form, died on the cross for the sins of the world, and was resurrected to heavenly glory at God’s right hand becomes the Christian message”, (39).
“The Q source is the earliest collection of the teachings and sayings of Jesus… the most striking characteristic of the Q source in terms of reconstructing Christian origins is that it has nothing of Paul’s theology, particularly his Christology or view of Christ”, (41).
Continuing…
Let me be clear in affirming the reformers and moderates in these religious traditions, people whom I view as majorities in these traditions. Though often their voices are not loud enough in protesting against the extremists in their traditions. Is that due to too much cowing in fear of the extremists and their threats?
Further, another quibble with the projects of reformers in these religions. It appears that they are not recognizing the bad ideas that are still dominant and revered in their religions, especially the bad ideas that define their deities- i.e. tribal Gods favoring true believers and excluding unbelievers/infidels, Gods who embody domination/submission relating (God as King/Lord/Ruler), and Gods of wrathful retaliation and punishment (i.e. casting unbelievers into hell).
Reform projects that do not confront these elements in religious traditions are nor thoroughly engaging the death/rebirth or disintegration/reintegration project that is necessary in all areas of life, the basic responsibility to discern bad from good and to reject what we all today know as the bad, the subhuman or inhuman in our narratives. What is referred to as “separating the wheat from the chaff”. This is about making basic distinctions between right and wrong, between good and evil. And not protecting the bad elements in the mix in cognitive dissonant mergers of opposites, as in Paul’s “Jesus Christ”.
But then, I guess it’s better to have some tinkering at the periphery than no effort at all to reform something.
My larger point- Historical Jesus went right to the core of the problem in challenging the old deity and replacing that with his stunning new theology of an unconditional God. That was going to the root of the problem to cut the tap root.
More notes:
The point here of using this term “unconditional” is to make the sharpest contrast with the essential nature of all religion as a highly conditional tradition or social institution, as embodying the divine conditions required to appease and please deities, according to the priesthoods that developed religion across history.
Other extremely sharp contrasts would include the anti-sacrifice protest of Historical Jesus with Paul’s later re-construction of Jesus as the supreme sacrifice in his Christ myth. Then the non-retaliatory theology in Jesus (“No more eye for eye retaliation but love your enemy because God does”) contrasts with Paul’s re-establishment of divine retaliation as central to his theology Paul (Romans 12- “’Retaliation is mine, I will repay’ says the Lord”). So also, the clear teaching of Jesus against “lording over others” set against Paul’s framing of him as “Lord Jesus”. And so on.
It is impossibly contradictory to mix and merge such profound opposites in one myth, yet for two millennia now that has been presented in Paul’s myth of “Jesus Christ”. And we have, still today, the amazing cognitive dissonance of billions living with that dissonance and not even blinking in any sort of recognition.
Qualifier:
The historical Jesus material in the New Testament gospels, though deformed by the context and buried by Paul’s Christ myth still presents enough potency to counter the darker themes of the Christ that have incited so much mass-damage, as historians like Richard Landes have recorded. The Jesus material has enabled many Christians, especially over the past two centuries, to moderate their thinking and behavior, becoming less tribal and moving away from vengeful retaliation. Arguably, most Christians today have learned to focus more on the humane elements in the Jesus teaching and to ignore or downplay the other stuff.
Unfortunately, though Islam embraced Jesus as a prophet of God (i.e. but not a divine Savior) they did not embrace the actual teaching of Jesus and, hence, do not have a body of moderating teaching, similar to the New Testament.
Paul is also notorious for ignoring the actual “wisdom” teaching of Jesus in his letters, even demonizing it in his Corinthians letters, discrediting and dismissing it as “worldly wisdom… foolishness”. Jesus was a wisdom sage in the wisdom tradition of his time (Source: “Q Wisdom sayings” research).
Another note:
Re-hammering the critical point above… Even with moderating influence of the Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament, Christian history was overwhelmed by the influence of Paul’s Christ myth and the violence that mythology incited through Councils, Crusades, Inquisitions, heresy and witch hunting, and religious wars (i.e. “European wars of religion”). Even with the moderating element of Jesus’ teaching, Christianity still went through a dark history of violence.
My point? Contrary to some comment (i.e. Stephen Pinker) and the view that Christianity has now moderated itself, especially over the past few centuries, things have actually gotten worse, far worse, over the Twentieth Century with core Christian themes inciting Marxist, Nazi, and now environmental alarmism mass-death movements. It appears that even Christianity, with it’s moderating element of Jesus’ teaching, has not really fully moderated itself but has arguably gotten worse in terms of harmful outcomes according to the research of historians like Richard Landes, Arthur Mendel, and David Redles, among others.
This, again, affirms Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy’s point that the diamonds of Jesus have been, and still are, buried. James Tabor affirms this same point in stating that the teaching of Jesus has largely been lost to the West where Paul’s Christ myth still overwhelms and dominates.
And on the other hand…
I listened to a man in Texas cry (Fox News video clip) as he described the quickly rising flood waters and heard the screams of children being carried away in RVs. There was nothing he or others could do from the shore. He then explained, in terms of his Christian faith, that “the Lord had allowed this to happen and so something good would come out of it”.
I can’t agree with this theology of deity involved and permitting such horror, but I felt his empathic emotions and his desperate attempt to find some form of meaning in something horrific and meaningless. I strongly affirm the empathy that drove his explanation- i.e. his desperate grasp at meaning in terms of his belief system. As a fellow human, like all of us horrified at the loss of young life in that flood, I felt yes, go for it if that is how you make sense of life. Your obvious spirit is one of profound love and longing to help. Hold on to whatever enables you to make some sense of that horror and get on with life.
But what I am doing with analyzing Christianity on this site has to do with larger background and long-term historical issues/problems, i.e. bad ideas in the mix that have validated violence and suffering across history. I have never antagonistically engaged individuals over their personal faith/religion or tried to reason them out of what enables them to negotiate life to the best that they can. I have too many good Christian friends and family to feel any antagonism toward such good people. I feel the same toward Muslim and other religious friends.
And on the climate file (i.e. the “human-cause catastrophic climate change” narrative)- Meteorologist Chris Mertz, May 12, 2025
“Life expectancy has more than doubled since the mid-19th century. The number of deaths from weather-related natural disasters has decreased by over 96% since the 1920s. Also, if you look at the number of hurricanes, they are not increasing on a global scale. The number of tornadoes has remained about steady in the United States since real-time data collection began in 1954. Similarly, the number of floods and droughts is not increasing globally, and wildfires have gone down….
“There is no ‘climate crisis’. The rush to tie extreme weather events to climate change through dubious ‘event attribution’ studies is the latest attempt to shakedown coal, oil and gas companies for billions of dollars. ‘When people say that there is a “climate crisis”, they think about how climate change is impacting humans in a negative way. But, if you look at the actual data on that in terms of the relevant metrics of human welfare, the state of the human condition has never been better than it is now’”.
This from MSN news page…
“Steve Coogan on Peter Sellers: ‘Selfish, narcissistic- and a genius’”, July 2025
“He never learnt that happiness comes from being a functioning human being. From understanding that kindness, unconditional love, and the generosity of the human spirit are where contentment lies.”
Bob Brinsmead on the Jesus versus Christ issue in his two essays:
“The Historical Jesus: What the Scholars are Saying”
https://bobbrinsmead.com/the-historical-jesus-what-the-scholars-are-saying/
“The Doctrine of Christ and the Triumph of Hellenism”
https://bobbrinsmead.com/the-doctrine-of-christ-and-the-triump-of-hellenism/
And some links to similar material from this site:
From Retaliation to Unconditional love- the story of humanity’s exodus/liberation from animal existence to become human.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9809
Humanity’s worst ideas, better alternatives (Old story themes, new story alternatives).
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=9533
The Christ myth buried the singularly profound insight of Historical Jesus. The project to recover that insight involves “separating diamonds from dung” (Thomas Jefferson, Leo Tolstoy).
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=8664
Speculating with Joseph Campbell on the meaning of life– the hero’s journey and conquest. The intensely inner battle to conquer the monster of inherited animal impulses, along with the mythical themes that validate such impulses, and thereby tower in stature as maturely human.
http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=8661
And then some repeats of good sources and comments on this and that…
“Climate Data Refutes Crisis Narrative: ‘If you concede the science and only challenge the policies… you’re going to lose’’, Climate Depot, Nov. 13, 2023
Quote:
Edward Ring: “If you concede the science and only challenge the policies that a biased and politicized scientific narrative is being used to justify, you’re already playing defense in your own red zone. You’re going to lose the game. Who cares if we have to enslave humanity? Our alternative is certain death from global boiling! You can’t win that argument. You must challenge the science…”
Best summaries of climate science available at “co2coalition.org”, “Wattsupwiththat.com”, and related sites.
Notable counter-point to warming alarmism: 10 times more people die every year from cold than die from heat (Lancet study).
And more on the varieties of Collectivism, from Robert Owen’s communalism, to Marx’s communism, to contemporary versions like Woke Progressive DEI, and now this… They categorize people as one of either two classes- i.e. victims or victimizers (one all good, the other all evil). In the version described below it is “colonized or colonizers”. All are categorized as one or the other, based now on skin color, a new discriminatory racism, “Woke Racism”. No matter your individual character and history, you are all one or all the other, by your skin color.
“Race socialism is coming to the West. It will start in New York: Zohran Mamdani has doubled down on taxing ‘whiter’ neighbourhoods more heavily”, Geoff Russ, July 5, 2025
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/geoff-russ-4
Russ’s points:
“Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is on a mission to bring race socialism to New York City. That is not speculation, it’s in his public campaign platform.
“’Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighbourhoods.’”
As Russ says, despite his denials, this race-based approach is essential to Mamdani’s vision. Russ suggests this could be “the start of a tremendous shift in global left-wing politics, considering the influence of the United States. The buildup to race socialism has been decades in the making, and Mamdani could be the politician to make it mainstream.
“These ideas have been gaining traction in the West, including in Canada.”
(Rest of article at link above)
This new comment
My interest in the central Jesus insight (“His greatest contribution to the history of human ideas”, James Robinson) is because it towers above all such insights that point us toward the most humane forms of response/behavior, behaviors that enable us to maintain our humanity in the face of offense, evil, violence. The Jesus insight on unconditional shows us how we can avoid falling into the same old cycles of eye for eye retaliatory vengeance, often validated/cloaked as “righteous justice”. His central insight shows us how we can break such cycles and resolve violence for the long-term future, ending the insanity of too many wars.
It doesn’t change our responsibility to respond to present violence with counter force to protect innocent people, as in restraining and incarcerating violent people. But it offers insight in how to re-orient human narratives with a stunning new central ideal, a new cohering center (i.e. the ultimate ideal and authority of deity) that removes the traditional validation for bad human behavior (i.e. the deities of major religious traditions). It offers an entirely new supreme ideal that functions to inspire new ways of thinking, feeling, new motivations and responses/behaviors.
Further notes on the Jesus insight/message:
Kristian Niemietz: “Emotional satisfaction, not rational thinking, and despite contrary evidence, dominates our choice in beliefs.”
Before starting, let me note that, in regard to Niemietz’s summary of Jonathan Haidt’s point above, here is a project for all of us. Yes, emotional satisfaction dominates our choice in beliefs, even choice for beliefs with a long history of destructive outcomes, yet such beliefs still dominate religious traditions and billions hold them.
Why do we feel as we do in response to certain beliefs that we choose and hold? Now that pushes us to consider what we have inherited in deeply embedded archetypes, archetypal themes/beliefs that have been shaped across previous millennia by primitive myths that trace back to the very origins of humanity. And those deeply embedded archetypes profoundly influence, even today, how we think, feel, are motivated, and then respond behave.
This site deals with such things and offers alternatives to the archetypal themes that we have inherited, even though this project arouses anger in some at the confronting what has long been protected “under the canopy of the sacred”, revered as divine revelation. Just remember that the earliest shaman, and then subsequent millennia of priesthoods, created the sacred canopy, the “holy scriptures”. Fallible people just like us.
Now moving along…
The Christ myth of Paul is his intentional project to overturn the stunning new theology of Historical Jesus and restore the primacy of justice as retaliatory punishment. Yes, its about “emotional satisfaction”, as in re-affirming the longest-standing belief in human history, and thereby satisfying the human impulse for vengeance, Wendell Krossa
Paul had to bury the actual message of Historical Jesus because he understood what Jesus had done in overturning the core ideal that had long affirmed human justice as retaliatory vengeance of some form, as payback punishment and the destruction of evil enemies. Paul understood that re-affirming divine retaliation was critical to validating his related atonement beliefs.
I will set aside just for now other background myths that have long affirmed the satisfaction that many people feel in embracing retaliatory vengeance, myths such as Zoroaster’s cosmic dualism of good versus evil and the related divine demand to engage righteous wars to defeat, dominate, and destroy evil enemies. That has long validated the deforming of the hero’s quest with a tribalism and hatred that is fulfilled in the extermination of differing others.
But back to the theme of retaliatory justice…
Paul wrote the entire book of Romans, his main letter, to reaffirm the basic primitive mythical themes that supported eye for eye justice required to support atonement theology- i.e. themes of a God angry at human sin/imperfection, God promising punitive destruction of sinners, God demanding the supreme price of the sacrifice of a godman as punishment and payment for human sin. And God requiring faith in the Christ myth of Paul as necessary for salvation from the divine threats.
In his Christ, Paul re-affirmed, most critically, the nature of the deity that was the core ideal necessary to define justice as punitive retaliation. He states his view of God in Romans 12: 17-20, “’Vengeance is mine, I will retaliate’, says the Lord”. That re-affirmation of retaliatory vengeance contradicted entirely the new theology of Jesus of a non-retaliatory, unconditional God.
Paul understood that to restore public perception of justice as vengeful retaliation he had to re-affirm that ideal in theology, starting at the very top- i.e. with the ultimate ideal and authority of the human image of God. He saw that Jesus had gone to the very top, to the core ideal of deity and had overturned that primary validating ideal and authority with his new unconditional theology.
Paul reversed that key insight of Jesus. Buried it entirely with his Christ.
Paul replicated the same approach as Jesus. He went directly to the theology to reject the main insight of Jesus and restore the old theology of divine retaliation. He re-affirmed the previous history of theology where deity upheld “eye for eye” justice.
In the construction of his Christ myth, Paul reframed primitive theologies with a newish version of God, a new deity that took up the old themes of retaliatory vengeance and presented them in a new religion that reaffirmed for subsequent billions of true believers the emotional satisfaction of justice as punishing retribution and destruction of enemies.
In his Christ Paul re-affirmed the sense of tribalism (us true believers favored/saved, dissenters rejected/destroyed), domination of enemies, and punitive destruction of enemies. Paul, himself, was responding emotionally not rationally in his choice of themes/beliefs/myths to reassure the human impulse for vengeance as “justice”. This emotional impulse was the driving inspiration behind his Christology, not some actual revelation from the heavens, as he claimed.
Just as an aside: All founders of new cults appeal to such personal experiences as foundational to their new religions- i.e. Moses on the mount receiving the ideas for Judaism, Buddha receiving enlightenment under the tree, Paul, Muhammad receiving his cave revelations, etc.
The test of any belief system is the content of the ideas or beliefs. Are they fully humane or not, in terms of modern sensibilities regarding authentically humane ideals as per our constitutions, human rights codes, and so on? What is the nature of the God at the center of a belief system? Is that ultimate ideal and authority humane or inhumane? Is the deity tribal or universally inclusive? Dominating or liberal democrat? Punitively destructive or restorative? We reject, or we hold as true and real, according to such criteria. And nothing, not even deity, is excluded from such evaluation.
Paul reaffirmed themes that arise from deeply embedded archetypes in human subconscious, archetypes that continue to powerfully shape human thinking, emotions, motivations, and life.
Notes on the real nature of what Historical Jesus was pointing to in his unconditional theology: Wendell Krossa
Unconditional God transforms everything in narrative themes/myths, ideals, archetypes, and in ethics and justice. It orients human consciousness to restorative treatment of offenders, as in “Love your enemy”. As qualified often here, this is not about feeling mushy, fuzzy, or soft toward horrific offenders and offenses (not love as just emotion). Authentic love has very much to do with the intention and commitment to treat even the worst of people humanely, despite valid rage at their bad behavior. It is about maintaining our humanity in the face of the worst evil that we encounter in life. What Simon Wiesenthal wrestled with as he hunted down and held Nazis responsible for their crimes- “Justice, not vengeance”.
Dealing seriously with this unconditional ideal of Jesus is never an easy discussion because of the distortions of what love means and the directions that some people pull this toward. Some take unconditional to the extreme of pacifist response which appears to not take seriously the primary responsibility of states to protect their citizens from assault. Something that Woke Progressives, having embraced “suicidal empathy” in their obsession to virtue signal for moral status, are doing through “de-carceral” policies (de-carceration) that let violent people go free. That is simply the abandonment of common sense.
There is also an element of collectivist distortion in Woke Progressivism in that criminal justice is approached through the ideology of simple-minded collectivist dualism of victim/victimizer. This is too often defined by “Woke racism” where skin color decides which class you belong to. If black/brown, then you are of the victim category so you are innocent due to historical wrongs committed against your race, and hence you should be released no matter your personal history and character.
Moving on…
The stunning new unconditional theology of Historical Jesus was highly offensive to people whose minds had long been shaped by retributive justice as the ultimate right, good, and truth. Human understanding of justice had, from the earliest emergence of human consciousness, been framed around belief in righteously angry spirits/gods threatening punishment and then offering relief in some form of eye for eye retaliatory justice as in the demand for blood sacrifice- i.e. vengeful punishment, hurt for hurt, equal pain for pain caused by an offender. That had formed human understanding of “justice” for past millennia- how to rebalance the scales of justice unbalanced by any human offense that had been committed. That was based on what had always been the common understanding of “right, holy, good, proper and fair retribution, punishment, payback as in ‘eye for eye’.”
Atonement mythology idealizes “the murder of the right people as the way to make things better”, even the murder of innocent people. The history of atonement religion has been a form of “salvation through destruction”. Harold Ellens has bluntly exposed the validation of “causing harm as the way to achieving good”, as well as anyone. I repeat this from Ellens for the gazillionth time:
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (see Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“’With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“Hence, in our culture we have a powerful element that impels us to violence, a Cruel God Image… that also contributes to guilt, shame, and the impoverishment of personality…”.
As Harold Ellens says, “If your God uses force, then so may you, to get your way against your ‘enemies’”.
Atonement mythology/religion embraces retaliatory justice as central to its logic, Wendell Krossa
You can’t just forgive outright, freely, without some payback. You can’t freely, unconditionally love some offender. There has to be some form of payback punishment before forgiveness can be shown and love offered. Love cannot be free, not as Jesus taught in the Prodigal Father parable, or the vineyard owner story. You cannot freely forgive the social outcasts as Jesus did. God cannot freely give sun and rain to both the good and bad people, not aside from a framework that is undergirded by some form of atonement with punishment, full payment for wrong.
(Again, it needs to be inserted that this generosity, mercy toward even offenders should not be taken to extremist “turn the other cheek” responses to violent people. Holding people responsible for their behavior, as in restraining/incarcerating violent people, is the fundamental obligation of states to protect innocent people. Such restraint/incarceration, as a natural consequence of behavior, is also critical to human development toward mature humanity. Again, this needs to be stated in response to Woke Progressive policies today. And of course, the mercy element in what Jesus was saying would orient us toward the restorative justice treatment of incarcerated offenders. Add here that there are many nonviolent offenses where incarceration makes no sense.)
Moving along…
Jesus understood how offensive his new theology of unconditional love was to people who held to justice as grounded in retaliatory vengeance. He illustrated the offense that was felt by good moral/religious people when their traditional views on justice were set aside for displays of unconditional mercy, forgiveness, and inclusive love. Such displays offended people to the point of murderous rage and that reaction illustrates the stunning nature of what he was introducing- i.e. absolutely unconditional love. Love of the enemy as family. Something radical and fundamental beyond anything ever conceived before. And that was what God was like. That unconditional love was the true nature of God.
Jesus’ new theology of such a merciful God, a God who loved and included even enemies, was intolerable to those who demanded a tribal eye for eye vengeance. Jesus first presented his new unconditional deity by reading the first part of Isaiah 61 in a synagogue (Luke 4):
“The LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor…”
But then he intentionally left off the last part of that passage that ended with an affirmation of traditional retaliatory deity- “the day of vengeance of our God”. The audience, aware of what he was doing, were enraged that he refused to fulfill their deeply held hope for divine vengeance as true justice. Further inciting the anger of his listeners, Jesus then added the illustrations of God inclusively loving their enemies- i.e. by sending Elijah and Elisha to help, and not harm, enemies. That was pushing the stunning new theology of an unconditional love and mercy too far for his audience.
(Insert: If you think this material has no application now- Look at how some react to any calmness shown, or rational peace-making response to Putin/Russia, today. Some appear to aggressively revel in more harsh confrontations, and more destructive responses, even with nuclear warheads in the background.)
Continuing…
Their (the angry synagogue crowd listening to Jesus) response to his new unconditional theology?
They tried to kill him by throwing him off a cliff. He had refused to grant the emotional satisfaction of harshly destructive vengeance and violence toward enemies.
The harshest possible retaliation toward offenders/enemies is relentlessly affirmed in standard Hollywood movies framed around violently vengeful resolution stories, the most common elements in contemporary movie structure (contemporary public story-telling).
The common Hollywood movie pattern: Start with a situation of (1) stasis, a family of good people together enjoying their day. Then present the feature of (2) disruption by bad guys who assault/offend the family in some way. Then (3) resolution is achieved through a series of bloody, violent retaliatory acts against the offenders, often ending in a crescendoing orgy of violent bloodiness, as for example, in Liam Neeson movies. And all go home satisfied that justice has been done and restored. Emotional satisfaction re-affirmed. The audience goes home feeling that justice has once again been properly meted to the bad guys. No wonder our pleasant surprise at a “Railway Man”, or “The Forgiven”, stories that break free from this all-too-common movie affirmation of eye for eye retaliation.
Subsequent to the initial violent response to his new theology in his first public presentation at the synagogue, Jesus then told stories of how a merciful, unconditional God enraged listeners, notably in his short stories of the angry older brother, pissed at his father’s merciful no conditions love to the useless younger brother. Or the thoroughly pissed all-day vineyard workers who bitched and whined over the inclusive generosity of the owner shown to the latecomers that they felt were unworthy of such generosity.
Paul was also offended by the unconditional theology of Jesus:
And so, barely two decades after Historical Jesus was murdered, for protesting the sacrifice/atonement industry, we get the greatest fraud and scandal in religious history (extend that to all history) where Paul rejected the theological breakthrough of Jesus and restored the traditional theology of divine vengeance and destruction in his Christ myth. Paul gave the required emotional satisfaction necessary to win converts. With his retaliatory Christ he satisfied the primeval longing of people for justice as retaliation, vengeance in some form. Justice.
“Lord Jesus will return in blazing fire to destroy all who do not believe my Christ gospel” (Thessalonian letters).
Paul wrote Romans knowing that he had to confront the critical core idea in the teaching of Jesus- i.e. his new theology of an unconditional deity. So with an intentionally clear statement of rejection, he overturned that new theology of a non-retaliatory God and reinstated the old deity of retaliatory destruction. He retreated to re-affirm justice as ultimate eye for eye retaliation, divine retaliation initially in the apocalyptic destruction of life, and then eternally in after-life punishment and destruction in hell.
Interestingly, Paul used the same pattern of “behavior based on belief” to present his retreat to monster God theology. He saw what Jesus had done in presenting his new theology as illustrated by the best of human behavior. Paul used that same model in his rejection of non-retaliatory theology and then re-affirmation of retaliatory theology.
The Romans 12:17-20 statement:
Stating the behavior part first, Paul initially appears to agree with the non-retaliatory ethic of Jesus (no more eye for eye but love your enemy). Paul says, “Don’t retaliate against your offenders, show kindness instead”. But then instead of backing that with a similar theology of a non-retaliatory God, he contrarily backs it with the promised affirmation that God will retaliate on believer’s behalf- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord.”
That initially appears to violate the “behavior based on similar belief” pattern that Jesus had used. Didn’t Paul just state a nonretaliatory ethic before then backing that with the contrary retaliatory theology? No, the perception that his initial statement on a non-retaliation ethic was actually non-retaliatory was wrong. Well, maybe not entirely. But it is how he then frames the intention or incentive behind his urging his followers to be non-retaliatory toward offenders.
In his follow-up comments we see that Paul actually promoted a “non-retaliatory” ethic that was retaliatory in its intent. He said basically, Do this and you will ensure that God will retaliate against your enemies. Be kind to your enemy and that will “pour coals of fire on their heads”. Meaning- Your apparent non-retaliatory kindness will ensure their judgment and punishment by God, the ultimate retaliatory vengeance. There, he catered to the “emotional satisfaction” element in the beliefs that we choose and hold.
Paul began his re-enforcement of retaliatory deity in his very first letters to the Thessalonians, stating, “Lord Jesus will return in blazing fire to punish/destroy all who did not believe my Christ myth”. Then John in Revelation (notably the final chapters) fleshes out what that divine retaliation will look like as the enraged, vengeful Christ destroys the entire world and wraps up human history by casting all unbelievers into the lake of fire to fry forever (as in “toss another on the big barbie down under”).
Re-establishing the core element of threat theology (i.e. retaliatory deity) then revives the entire complex of archetypal themes that had dominated mythologies and religions across history. That becomes clear in the full complex of primitive mythological themes that are restated to flesh out Paul’s Christ myth.
Note, for example, that Paul re-affirms the myth of original sin that ruined paradise. He states this in his letter to the Romans in relation to the myth of Adam’s sin: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way, death came to all people, because all sinned”, 5:12.
He also frequently reframes the apocalyptic myth in his Christ in terms of the imminent return of Christ, “the coming of the Lord” or the “day of the Lord”. It is a reference to the day of ultimate destruction by Lord Jesus.
The New Testament book of Revelation details what that return will involve in the violent destruction of this present world. “Paul’s apocalyptic vision includes the idea that the present world order will be transformed, with the defeat of evil powers and the establishment of God’s kingdom”, (AI Overview).
And central to Paul’s Christ myth is the restatement of the divine requirement of sacrifice/atonement, “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,[i] through the shedding of his blood”, Romans 3:25.
Further, Christianity often frames the cosmic dualism myth and related requirement to engage a righteous battle to exterminate evil enemies in terms of spiritual warfare against satanic forces/spirits. But across the history of Christianity that “spiritual warfare” has repeatedly moved over into actual physical wars to eliminate enemies, as in the Crusades, Inquisitions, etc.
And then there is the theme of salvation into a Christian utopia in a heavenly realm.
The New Testament repeats these primitive themes in its varied books that were included to affirm Paul’s theology and Christology.
Overall, Paul reaffirmed the primitive mythology of retaliatory “justice” that had long granted emotional satisfaction to so many, even at cost of deforming human personality and inciting wider harmful societal outcomes when the human obsession with vengeance is validated by deity.
No matter the outcomes in destruction to others, many still succumb to the intuitive felt need to satisfy the deeply embedded, archetypal longing for justice as retaliatory payback of some kind. Their mental orientation is that you can’t just freely forgive and love anyone without first someone paying something. That is the basis of atonement thinking. It has long been locked in as a cosmic reality.
Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy were right to state that the Jesus message was “buried” by Paul’s Christ myth. Paul’s retaliatory God demanded the conditions of long-standing forms of salvation religion and that buried entirely the nonreligious, unconditional theology of Jesus.
With his new religion of “Christ-ianity”, Paul short-circuited the greatest liberation movement ever presented to humanity. Historical Jesus had presented a core idea/belief of an unconditional God for human narratives and that would have radically changed everything in human existence. His new deity would have liberated humanity from the subconscious archetypes that had shaped all human thinking, feeling, motivation, and responses/behavior across previous millennia of mythology and religion.
My point in these comments on the varied elements in the teaching of Jesus (i.e. the angry reaction of varied characters and crowds) is that we get some sense of the stunning new nature of his theology, and that it transforms everything at the deepest levels of human consciousness and narratives. People hearing him understood just how radical his new theology was and what it meant. From our contemporary historical position, we have a difficult time seeing exactly what he had taught because of the distortion of that message from two millennia of burial under the Christ myth of Paul.
Jesus had stated a new theology that is beyond radical and transformative and fundamental. It is a complete death to something old and a rebirth to something entirely new. Disintegration and reintegration like nothing else in history, anywhere.