JackRiddler wrote:Dave McGowan shows the downside of being the sharpest knife: you just can't stop stabbing.
Very little in the way of conspiratainment is actually entertaining, but he is a talented humorist, so he pulls it off.
Random Thoughts at the Dawn of the Year 2012
February 13, 2012
I thought I’d begin this rant by sharing some of my thoughts on the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth. I think we can all agree that, unlike some of the other subjects I have weighed in on in the past, this is one on which people do not tend to have strongly held points-of-view, so there is little chance that I will offend and alienate readers right off the bat.
So let’s jump right into it then with observation #1: When the likely outcome of an unwed pregnancy is death by stoning, people can be really creative liars.
Nothing in the least bit controversial about that … right? Let’s move on then to observation #2: It is fully understandable why the lie was told, and even why many people in that era might have believed it; what is more difficult to understand is why tens of millions of people around the world still believe it 2,000 years later.
I doubt that I’ve lost anyone yet, so let’s quickly move on to observation #3: Jesus was initially described as coming from a line of men who worked with their hands, which was later interpreted to mean that he was a carpenter. Given though that the primary building materials in the land of his birth were sand and rock, it is far more likely that Joseph and his sons were stone masons. Just saying …
Observation #4: Jesus of Nazareth’s real father was undoubtedly a Roman citizen. Some have speculated that he was the product of rape by one of the notoriously ruthless Roman storm-troopers, but his later actions suggest to this completely impartial observer that it was more likely a consensual coupling and that the father was someone of considerably more importance than a mere soldier.
Observation #5: Jesus was very likely a controlled Roman asset. Just as, nearly two thousand years later, the obviously controlled asset known as Jesse Jackson replaced the slain Martin Luther King, and the equally controlled asset known as Louis Farrakhan replaced the eliminated Malcolm X, so it was that Jesus was maneuvered into position to replace the executed John the Baptist, who had, I’m guessing, become a bit of a problem for the Roman overseers.
The message that the emergent messiah delivered to those living under the brutal hand of those Roman occupiers was, by any rational analysis, exactly the wrong one. It was a message brimming with advice about loving neighbors and turning cheeks … a message that constantly reinforced the notion that it was better to be poor and oppressed than wealthy and powerful, for the poor, you see, were going to spend all eternity in the glorious ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ while the rich were going to burn in the fires of Hell (unless they were somehow able to steer their camels through the eye of a needle, or something like that).
It was, in other words, a belief system seemingly designed specifically to suppress any thoughts of rebellion amongst the unwashed masses. And the beauty of it was that no one would find out if the fabled Kingdom of Heaven actually existed until it was too late for them to get a refund.
I know what you’re thinking here: “But Dave, didn’t the Romans execute Jesus, and do so in a horrifically brutal and sadistic manner – you know, like in that Mel Gibson torture-porn flick?”
SNIP etc. etc.
As often the case, I enjoy this long after the point
of derailment, when he makes one of his inevitable switches from logical speculation (I'm sure his observations #1 and #2 and
possibly #4 have occurred to most of you, as they did to the Monty Python writers of Life of Brian) to an extended novelization of a possible scenario, treated as though proven.
Even though, of course, the likeliest scenario of all is that Jesus is a character made up decades after the time of the supposed crucifixion. And that the form Christianity had taken by the time of Constantine was, in fact, fathered by Romans as a slave religion, even if not in the literal sense McGowan suggests above.
.
LOL!
I knew LoB was the most realistic, historically-grounded Jesus movie ever, but...
Nope, it had
never occurred to me that Python had grounded
that part in a real, substantive theory.
I don't necessarily agree with #5, not if it's the Gospel Jesus, as opposed to Paul's Jesus.
Gospel Jesus reads very much like a radical lefty new-age manic hippie. Well, maybe schizophrenic.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2322 ... t=AbstractTo which I wrote to friends:
"Well, there are a few ways to interpret it. First, one can chuckle at the scientists who hope the world will condescend to feel more compassion and understanding for the kind of helpless, pitiful bastards who have...oh yeah, monumentally influenced Western civilization. I guess ever feeling
respect for such people would only encourage delusions of grandeur like, say, fantasies about monumentally influencing Western civilization. Second, one can acknowledge that, yeah, these prophets were almost certainly having psychotic experiences, and some were probably full-blown schizophrenics. Which doesn't
necessarily discredit their experiences, maybe that's just how a God would operate, by channeling advice through insane people's wide-open, less-filtered frequencies. Or maybe an actual experience of the divine (and attempt to communicate it) will inevitably drive even the sanest person crazy. Then again, it could also be that people's most sacred beliefs are derived from the equivalent of the rantings of a bum who sleeps on a park bench, and so should be reconsidered, to put it lightly. Third, one could note that pretty much the
only documentation of schizophrenia in the ancient world, or for that matter the world before the mid-19th century, would be such religious revelations. Maybe that's because, well, what would a schizophrenic hallucinate 2500 years ago? Slightly scarier or more numerous beasts than the ones already literally prowling the land, or that someone might be conspiring to steal your sandals? There wasn't much to delude oneself about, as opposed to today's rich menu of cinematic nightmares, ubiquitous celebrities, omniscient technology. There also wasn't much to fail at doing, to qualify as debilitating dysfunction. Jobs back then were extraordinarily simple and any schooling was rare and informal. Perhaps this points to the ideal treatment for schizophrenics today: Send them to a farm, to live life anachronistically, like an ancient -- then their "disease" will cease to exist, or at least not be much of a hindrance."
[What about the pragmatic interpretation, "Shit happens, we save the good stuff and disregard the rest."]
"Is that really what happens with revealed religions? Seems to be more: Crazy guy proclaims some stuff (however noble or deranged), then generations of followers build a massive complex of myths, rules, and institutions around that stuff. The operative heuristics of these revealed religions, combined, would only fill a single 8x11 page, if that. And while the heuristics as words technically survive millennia -- as lived day-to-day they wind up twisted, overwhelmed, ignored. What seems to be antifragile is the other stuff, the superfluous stuff. The tall tales of magic, the rigid political hierarchies, the laws and the footnotes to the laws. That's what is reinforced when shit hits fans. All calibrated to optimize transmission of and adherence to itself, rather than improve the usefulness of the original heuristic stuff. The selective force behind what gets kept and discarded being whatever propagates the religion, not whatever works. (p.s. I strongly recommend the book "Mind Wars" and its concept of tenetics.)"
[Evolution depends on mutation. Madness is a mutation generator.]
(A great point, I had to agree.)
