Coming eventually… xAI Grok’s take on my points. And the applicability of the unconditional ideal to ethics, criminal justice, and at societal scale as in the Nelson Mandela approach. It is not an affirmation of pacifism in the face of personal assault, violence at any scale, and national level attacks, etc.
Disclaimer/qualifier: Wendell Krossa
Is there really any point to make this qualifier, again- i.e. that I this site does not intend to offend religious people, members of the major world religions, when confronting the bad ideas in their traditions?
My view on what I am doing here and why? I am just joining my voice to what Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy said in their exposure of the true nature of what Christianity has told us to believe as ultimate truth. They were admittedly somewhat crude in defining Paul’s gospel of the Christ as “dung, muck, slime and garbage”. They were framing the contrast of Paul’s Christ with the “diamonds/pearls” of Jesus, also included in the New Testament. The two messages were not the same. They were entirely opposites.
Psychologist Harold Ellens, in his own update to Jefferson and Tolstoy, said that the Christian view of the crucifixion of Jesus was to take barbaric child sacrifice and present that as “an act of grace”, or as Paul said, as a display of “God’s love”.
There were no terms two millennia ago to describe ultimate or epitome “oxymoronic” for what Paul did in merging the anti-sacrifice Historical Jesus with Paul’s supreme sacrifice in his “Jesus Christ” myth.
So also Charles Templeton (“Farewell To God”) exposed the true nature of what we were told to worship as divine, as good, as righteous reality and ultimate truth. He pointed out that the God of the bible that many worshipped was actually a dictatorial monstrosity. Templeton stated correctly that someone who demands to be the center of attention and demands constant praise of his greatness, on pain of death for not doing so, is an Idi Amin monster. Historical Jesus had also countered that perversion of deity in stating that true greatness was in serving, not in dominating others. Yet we are taught by our religious traditions to worship such threatening domination as something true, good, and right.
Alex Garcia (“Alpha God”) added to the exposure of the actual nature of religious practices like worship by stating that people bowing in churches was evidence of our animal past where lesser tribe members cowed before the alpha predators. Is that too blunt to even consider? That bowing of heads and averting of eyes, he claims, may be no different from the lesser animals in a group cowing before the alpha predator of the group. I find the shock value in such exposures is necessary to snap us awake from what we are actually doing. It is more correctly understood as a pathology, not healthy human development. Read the rest of the opening comment here