Chapter 18
- Verses 7 - 8: "And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly." His chosen ones? So everyone else in the world is a depraved baby-eater who talks on his cell phone during movies, and therefore doesn't deserve justice. And have his chosen ones received any justice? Hard to say who his chosen ones are. Certainly not children, given the number of them in the world who are starving and/or enslaved and have been since time immemorial. Certainly not women, given the number of them in the world who are oppressed and treated as property, and have been since time immemorial.
- Verses 13 - 14: The tax collector who groveled "went home justified before God." Yet another way for Jesusians to get into heaven. In your face, Paulines.
- Verses 29 - 30: I've mentioned this in my other series, but it's so horrible that I have to point it out again: "No one who has left...children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come, eternal life." Yeah, a real promoter of family values there, richly rewarding anyone who abandons his children to follow Jesus.
- Verse 34: "The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about." Truer words were never spoken. Jesus is so full of shit that no one knows what he was talking about. Millions of people have spent their entire lives devoting themselves to studying his insanity, and have still come up with conflicting answers.
- Verses 8 - 9: Another way into heaven according to Jesusianism! Zacchaeus gives half his possessions to the poor and promises to pay back fourfold anything that he has ever obtained by cheating people. Jesus' response: "Today salvation has come to this house".
- Verse 27: "But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them--bring them here and kill them in front of me." Try some anger management therapy, dude!
- Verse 44: "[Enemies] will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls." This "prophecy" is equivalent to "prophesying" that the sun will come up tomorrow. Yahweh sends people to murder children (or gleefully does it himself) all the time. Some prophecy.
- Verse 48: "...all the people hung on his words." Yeah, straining their brains to figure out what his words are supposed to mean.
- Verse 35: "...those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age..." Now if I were to stick to asking only Paul-friendly questions, I might be inclined to ignore this. But taken in the context of all the other possible ways to salvation that he mentions, this phrase just strengthens the case that Jesusian salvation is nothing like Pauline salvation.
- Verse 37: "...even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord 'the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' He is not the God of the dead..." This is another one of the glaring weaknesses of Christianity, and in fact all religions based on supernatural ideas: how do we know the "rules" of a realm that we have no knowledge of? How do we know that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still alive in some sense? We don't. We have no way of determining their metaphysical status. One might say that we know it because Jesus said so, but that's a circular argument. How can we know whether Jesus knows what he's talking about? We can't. We just can't. I'd say that the fact that he thinks he knows something about the "rules" of the supernatural realm really turns out to be a strike against his credibility. If he'd shown a bit more knowledge of the natural realm, I might have been more inclined to listen to his ravings. But he gets even that preposterously wrong most of the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment