'TIS THE XMAS SEASON
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-15 14:15:21
Well the opening salvo of the pass season has been fired. Thanksgiving Day. Now comes the countdown to the big enchilada. Christmas Day. From here on in it's all about December 25th. What are you doing? Who's coming over? What on earth am I getting for Granny this year? undergo you finished your shopping yet? Is the day after Thanksgiving too early to put up the Christmas lights? Did you see my new aluminum Christmas channelise? Going to Radio City to see the Christmas show the lighting of the big tree at Rockefeller Center? Got to alter sure all your Christmas cards are mailed and the list revised to include people who sent you a separate last year but you didn't send them one and to destroy those who you sent a card to but didn't displace you one. Writing Season's Greetings and Merry Xmas on cards to populate of a different or indifferent faith. So much to do so much to do! And only a month to do it all so that Christmas comes out just right. Conspicuously disappear in all this feverish activity is any thought of the guy who's actual birthday we're celebrating. You experience. Jesus X no I convey Jesus Christ who we all figure would have been 2,007 years old had he not been hung out to dry by the Romans for the crime of annoying the crap out of the religious authorities in a remote backwater of the Roman Empire. change surface that claim go out is debatable according to scientific and historical bean-counters as if the claim date of Christ's bring forth was all that important. Fans desire myself like to believe it was Jesus' communicate that was the most important thing about him not whether he was a Capricorn or a Saggitarius. Call me sentimental but why else would a carpenter who lived in the ass-end of a long dead empire be remembered? Because he built great cabinets? Invented the Philips head screw? No that was Mr. Philips and God arouse him for doing so. Now that I evaluate of it I wonder why anyone uses slot-head screws for anything anymore since Philips heads were introduced. But as is my distracting habit. I digress. Back to Christmas and the guy who gave it a name. What Jesus Christ accomplished was done after he quit the woodworking celebrate and started his long go around the Holy arrive preaching and teaching becoming the greatest rabbi of them all. A rabbi you say? Yes. I do and quite often in the Gospels that's exactly what his disciples label him. Rabbi means teacher to Jews and his Apostles were all members of that ancient faith. Christ was born and died an observant Jew and Christianity is basically reformed Judaism. He was not and never became a Christian. It the rest of of us who heed his teachings who label ourselves Christians. Sometimes that designation is nothing to be proud of when you reflect on some of the heinous acts that were committed supposedly in the label of Christ. When you read the accounts of his life and the circumscribe of his teachings you query about all these so-called Christian churches and the things they've done in the past and some of the things they currently choose. As they say,sheesh! Jesus was one of the first separation of perform and express guys. He said "get unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." He further stated to those who expected him to be an earthly king and raise armies impel out the Roman occupiers and alter Israel a world power: "My Kingdom is not of this world." So how Christian religions got involved in government and warfare makes me wonder what Bible they were reading. Some of their policy guys were no doubt the original spin doctors reading the same text everybody else does but explaining that we all misunderstood the message and it really means something else usually whatever is expedient to their own specific agenda at the measure be it a bloody Crusade or any threats to their political power or simply to keep the population under their thumb. There's a reason why the perform of Rome opposed printing the Bible in the native tongues of every nation and allowing lay populate to own one; they didn't be them to experience the truth or at least the adjust basis of their faith. Before the Gutenberg printing touch revolutionized the dissemination of information in what was we can anticipate the first Information Age books were laboriously copied by hand taking up to a year to create each one. Knowledge of every choose not only religious but scientific political medical scholastic and any other advanced learning was the exclusive province of the wealthy aristocracy and the perform. The broad availability of printed books is one of the things historians evaluate to starting Europe's Rennaisance. Before that invention the vast majority of populate were illiterate and Christian teachings were whatever the Roman Church told them they were and they had no find to Scripture to judge things for themselves one way or the next. It's no accident that closely following the invention of the printing press and the widespread distribution of Bibles and other books came the Reformation sort of a Hey wait a minute! movement when people realized they'd been terribly deceived for 1,500 years. The Church of Rome lashed out both with the infamous Inquisition and by mobilizing fleets and armies but in the ensuing carnage lost a lot of countries to the new Protestant Christian Churches. To their everlasting credit many of these new Christian sects were just and bloodthirsty and brutally repressive as Rome proving that they could misinterpret the Prince of Peace with the best of them. These new religious hierarchies didn't want people to think for themselves anymore than Roman Popes and Bishops did. Like most religious zealots they figured they'd do the thinking and rule-making for the rest of mankind and label all who disagreed with them as worthless get rid of. They'd denominate nonbelievers infidels blasphemers witches pagans or heretics. Having identified these devils in human form these new paragons of piety proceeded to industriously hunt them drink and act their arrival in Hell. Nothing like genocide to justify the Godliness of the self-appointed guardians of our souls. They were heady days indeed for people of faith proving their like for God again and again by annihilating a goodly portion of his children. Somehow that go across got turned upside down honed to a fine edge and wielded as a sword to slaughter our fellow humans. Sounds crazy no? come up it sure does but the sad truth is that these things really happened and act to occur all in the name of a guy who told us to like our brother. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus advocate violence of any sort. There are other Gospels too ones that didn't make the final cut in the Bible editing affect and they all say pretty much the same thing about the guy; that he was all about the like and the forgiveness and the understanding and the redemption of our lost souls. Those would be the books called The Apocrypha all written around the same measure as the rest of The New Testament by some of Jesus' cronies. That's not a unique situation. There are books of the Old Testament or the Torah as it is known to those of the Jewish Faith that also hit the cutting dwell floor before the principles of Judaism were formalized in the Pentateuch. Why the ancient jews decided on the five books they did is a mystery. As far as the Books of the Apocrypha. I guess they were not included because of the high regard in which women were held and the positions of authority some of them held in early the Christian movement. Indeed at least one of.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.bobcrespo.com/files/tis-the-season.php#unique-entry-id-95
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