Old Seer wrote:

The world is in a box that nothing "is" until one in authority says so.

This intellectual tendency was brilliantly sent up in George Bernard Shaw's The Black Girl in Search of God. It's ages since I read it so I can't remember the details but the scientist character in it is just such a guy.

Somewhat inspired by Shaw, I later wrote a fable of my own using some similar gags. It was a response to the frustration I was feeling arguing with both Christians and atheists at the time of the release of The Passion of the Christ. It's called The Two Shaky Towers and is a satire on the twin follies of overly mechanistic science and mystical religion. If you are interested you can download a free ebook copy from here.

brian, i really think you're not getting what he's saying, and i'm starting to think it's deliberate.

it seems to me (to ME, mind you) he started this thread to lay out his beliefs and open them up to comments.  you call them hogwash.  fair enough, but it seems to me you don't call them hogwash on their own merits.  you continue parroting that holy books and imaginary beings are not "necessary," and he continues telling you he never said they were.  he seems to be saying that at least tentatively accepting some portions of holy books and some sort of benevolent being has been helpful to him, and him alone.  if you want to try telling him those things can't possibly be helpful to him, fine.  that would seem to address his arguments on their own merits.  anything else would be your interpolation.

on the whole, i have to say you seem to have rote arguments that you pull out at every opportunity, and a situation like this, where those arguments are not entirely relevant, only serves to underscore that.  i honestly think you don't hear people sometimes.  i also have to say, as someone who studied religion in a purely secular, academic setting, that your cavalier way of lumping together all religions--christianity, islam, judaism, buddhism, ancient pagan religions, etc.--as if they were all one mass of interchangeable fairy tales is troubling.  often, statements you make about religions i specialize in--for example, buddhism--are just plain ignorant, and i think that comes from an attitude that one only needs one set of arguments against any and all religions, because all of them are basically the same sort of nonsense.

truthfully, i think you should take a crash course in world religions for awhile.  i can even recommend some books, if you'd like.

Was Jesus a Rationalist Who Tried Largely Unsuccessfully to Use Metaphor to Free the People of His Time from Dogma?_End Quote  what our interpretation is about, and from that understanding we can plainly see that's what the mission of the book is, and leads to. But---the worlds mental direction is opposite and to get another to see it is quite a chore. The book is going East and everyone is going West and can't get the ship turned around.  The trick is to get people to see what the rudder is for.  Any time someone who sees the rudder and says, hey floks this is the rudder over here, he gets persecuted and keel hauled so the captain can't be shown to be the problem because he doesn't want to be rated a fool. JC is the Captain of another ship so the "authorities" keep their ship in a perpetual fog so the people can't see the other, and threw the compass overboard mellenium ago so they themselves can't be questioned. That way they're always right. When the ship hits a rock it's the people's fault for not being able to see through the fog and one guy is picked for the dupe or fall guy and all go back the their quarters thinking justice has been served. But they're still going West. The guy on the sextant is allowed to only speak to the Captain, so when he says to the captain---say there sir, we're in the wrong place. the captain says ---Hmmmmm-OK, go back to your post and I'll think about this (for another 500 years) to see what can be done.    

And as I have said consistantly, you can find pleasent memes in non religious texts in both fiction and biogrophies. The only reason religion exists isn't because it is nessesarry, but because people think they need it. We now live without the polythistic gods of Egypt or Rome, and if we scrap Jesus or Buddism as a species are private parts will still function and we would still make babies. 

He is not going to move the goal posts and pretend that is not what he is doing.

EXC wrote:

What do Jesus' words do to inspire you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise do? If doing something is noble and good, why do you need the bible to inspire you to do it?

Religious books can only make you delusional about reality. So you do harm while believing you are doing good. It is like if you believed that curing people of disease was a good thing to do. But then instead of studying science you studied homeopathic cures. You're trying to do good without the facts, you can't.

Charity, kindness, friendship, family values? Atheists ans other religious people do all of those things without inspiration for the New Testament.

I think the neurosis religious people suffer from is the fact of their own mortality. Jesus' solution was to live in denial, to tell yourself you will live forever in paradise. Denial hardly seems like any kind of a cure, just snake oil.

Moralism is nothing special. There were philosophers preaching morals long before Jesus and there are plenty of them around today. It is not morals that I get from Jesus. In fact one of my beliefs that I feel he backs up is that it is futile and sometimes dangerous to try to live a moral life. This is one of the dangerous aspects of religion, something which served to poison society before Jesus and after. Conventional morality is based on personal or socially imposed discipline, i.e. repression. And repressing any aspect of our psyche means bottling it up and adopting ever greater levels of self-control. Since love is spontaneous, open, honest communication with our fellows, imposed morality makes love, the source of creativity and healing in society, impossible except in very limited circumstances.

What I get from Jesus is not morality, but advice on how to gain deeper emotional and sensual enjoyment of life, how to become less neurotic, less repressed.

Denial of death is a large part of many people's religious belief, but I don't believe that it was the origin of religion. I believe that religion began as a response to neurotic guilt arising from conflict between males and females amongst our prehuman ancestors. If they felt bad about fighting with each other and then a lightning bolt hit a tree nearby they would have come to feel that there was some angry supernatural being that might punish them.

The essence of the human neurosis is that we feel bad about ourselves and feel we need to prove our worth by being smarter, stronger, prettier, more fashionable, richer, or whatever, than someone else. Instead of simply accepting ourselves as we are and sensually enjoying all the things that life has to offer we become ego-embattled. And ego-embattlement can lead to paranoia, in which we indentify those aspects we refuse to acknowledge in our own psyche with the behaviour of others and fight against them in some way. So religious people who wish to deny their own capacity for reason often feel the need to argue with atheists. And atheists who wish to deny that powerful irrational forces still lie beneath the superficial skin of the their rationality feel the need to argue with religious people.

When Jesus talked about not having to die, I don't think he was talking about physical death. Each of us is an expression of the creative principle of the universe, a little parcel of life itself, bounded by a physical body and an ego, both of which will one day cease to exist. (Actually the concept that the ego and body are fixed entities is not really sound. Each is a system which is always changing but which has many qualities which tend to persist.) To the extent that we may be able to experience ourselves as eternal it can only be by identifying with that aspect of of ourselves which is life itself rather than with any aspect of our individual personality or bodily structure. But I believe that what Jesus was talking about was the living death of ego-embattlement which leaves us severely limited in the ways in which we can interact with other people (inhibited by a rigid character armour as Wilhelm Reich put it), physically and emotionally obtunded. Neurosis can turn us into virtual zombies. We weren't born that way. Jesus quite often used children as examples, he pointed out that they were already living in "heaven" and that they lived in a real world which was hidden to the "wise and learned" (that is those who used their rational mind not to explore reality but to build convoluted intellectual hiding places for their wounded egos).

Jesus basic advice was : be honest, be non-judgemental, be generous. There is no bogie man in the sky who will judge you, so just relax and open up to your deepest desire, which is to be unconditionally loving.

Lets take the example of sex. The joy of sex is the healing union of two or more individuals through the giving and receiving of pleasure. If we are ego-embattled we may want to take pleasure but be unable to give it. This means we are denying ourselves the essential ecstasy of the experience. And this is true of all of life. The degree to which we can enjoy it and the degree to which we can be creative is the degree to which we can open up to it. If we are closed off within the lonely cage of our own ego, we can't enjoy much at all.

As Wilhelm Reich put it :

"Outside the trap, right close by, is living Life, all around one, in everything the eye can see and the ear can hear and the nose can smell. To the victims within the trap it is eternal agony, a temptation as for Tantalus. You see it, you feel it, you smell it, you eternally long for it, yet you can never get through the exit out of the trap. To get out of the trap simply has become an impossibility. It can only be had in dreams and in poems and in great music and paintings, but it is no longer in your motility. The keys to the exit are cemented into your own character armour and into the mechanical rigidity of your body and soul.

This is the great Tragedy. And Christ happened to know it."

Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ, 1953.

Once again, when it comes to references to "Heaven" and "Hell", I don't believe that Jesus was talking about something which occurs after death, but rather states of mind we can experience here and now. As a person who had a long battle with bipolar disorder, I've spent time in both Heaven and Hell. We tend to make our own Hell when we try to run from the truth. Take the example of a man who has the desire to have sex with other men. If he tries to deny these feelings he will bring hellish suffering upon himself. If he lives out his desires in a surreptitious way, pretending to the world at large that he is not gay, he will still be unhappy and probably fearful of being found out. But if he finds the courage to live honestly then, even though he might be subjected to persecution, he will find within himself the rich rewards that come with the integrity of being himself without pretence. All of us, in one way or another, are liable to be like that. Most of us put on some kind of a front, and thus are, to some extent, at war with ourselves. For me one of the principle lessons taught by Jesus is that we should come out of our own personal closet, that we should be honest about ourselves. Reputedly he liked to hang around with the drunkards and the whores. They were his people, because they didn't try to be something they were not. But he heaped scorn upon the Pharisees, calling them "vipers", because they were full of shit, they were complete hypocrites.

Unfortunately, the human neurosis contaminates everything it touches, and so, no sooner was Jesus cold in his grave than the medicine he had been offering to those around him was converted by his followers into the deadliest of poisons. His advice to be honest, non-judgemental and generous and live in the real world, with all the bliss and creativity that that makes possible, was recast as a supernatural belief system which viewed his death and the myth that he had risen again as being of more significance than anything he said. And in time the church which grew out of it would become an authoritarian monstrosity just like that of the Pharisees.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Mine is the gospels are collections of street plays used to gather crowds or illustrate points. I say this because they have essentially no description of people and places. It is what we find in plays so any actor can play any part and the required scenery is minimal such as a fig tree. The scenes are almost monologs so a member of the audience (invited for audience participation or a plant) needs only say one line that leads to a Jesus monolog.

So if you ask about content these would have been stories refined for decades before live audiences.

As a person who has a great interest in the process of theatrical improvisation this concept interests me. On of my biggest inspirations is the book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. While I find it hard to imagine a writer creating Jesus the character, it does not seem impossible to me that a tradition of theatrical improvisation in which performers opened up the depths of their subconscious through spontaneous performances might have given birth to a fictional archetypal creation with a kind of life of his own in the minds of those who participated or observed. This is much like the concept of "channelling" which I don't see as something supernatural but rather an opening up of something within  the individuals own deeper psychology. As Johnstone says, there is more is us than us. Our conscious mind is less than the tip of the iceberg of what we are.

Old Seer wrote:

I've been looking closely at this post and I,m baffaloed. You are so close to to our determinations I am betting with my self that in a couple of weeks I'll be getting a note from Alpha Smurf with a welcome into our world---or maybe ---be welcomed into yours. This is definitly not two worlds colliding lemme tell ya. I'll to go over this again. By the way I got on site to your writings and looking forward to some downloads. Gotta see where I can store them on this here machine, I'm not that up to snuff on computors. a little practice is needed.  Say---is the sun upside down where you are ---  I wunder what its like looking at North backwards.       

I'm glad to hear that it strikes a chord with you and that you have been developing similar ideas. While many people have had good things to say about my ideas what I long for is colleagues who can help in developing them, applying them and testing them out.

The sun and me are both upside down, and at this time of the year it gets a bit hot. Due to the force of gravity the sweat drips up towards the earth though.

Aussiescribbler wrote:

EXC wrote:

What do Jesus' words do to inspire you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise do? If doing something is noble and good, why do you need the bible to inspire you to do it?

Religious books can only make you delusional about reality. So you do harm while believing you are doing good. It is like if you believed that curing people of disease was a good thing to do. But then instead of studying science you studied homeopathic cures. You're trying to do good without the facts, you can't.

Charity, kindness, friendship, family values? Atheists ans other religious people do all of those things without inspiration for the New Testament.

I think the neurosis religious people suffer from is the fact of their own mortality. Jesus' solution was to live in denial, to tell yourself you will live forever in paradise. Denial hardly seems like any kind of a cure, just snake oil.

Moralism is nothing special. There were philosophers preaching morals long before Jesus and there are plenty of them around today. It is not morals that I get from Jesus. In fact one of my beliefs that I feel he backs up is that it is futile and sometimes dangerous to try to live a moral life. This is one of the dangerous aspects of religion, something which served to poison society before Jesus and after. Conventional morality is based on personal or socially imposed discipline, i.e. repression. And repressing any aspect of our psyche means bottling it up and adopting ever greater levels of self-control. Since love is spontaneous, open, honest communication with our fellows, imposed morality makes love, the source of creativity and healing in society, impossible except in very limited circumstances.

What I get from Jesus is not morality, but advice on how to gain deeper emotional and sensual enjoyment of life, how to become less neurotic, less repressed.

Denial of death is a large part of many people's religious belief, but I don't believe that it was the origin of religion. I believe that religion began as a response to neurotic guilt arising from conflict between males and females amongst our prehuman ancestors. If they felt bad about fighting with each other and then a lightning bolt hit a tree nearby they would have come to feel that there was some angry supernatural being that might punish them.

The essence of the human neurosis is that we feel bad about ourselves and feel we need to prove our worth by being smarter, stronger, prettier, more fashionable, richer, or whatever, than someone else. Instead of simply accepting ourselves as we are and sensually enjoying all the things that life has to offer we become ego-embattled. And ego-embattlement can lead to paranoia, in which we indentify those aspects we refuse to acknowledge in our own psyche with the behaviour of others and fight against them in some way. So religious people who wish to deny their own capacity for reason often feel the need to argue with atheists. And atheists who wish to deny that powerful irrational forces still lie beneath the superficial skin of the their rationality feel the need to argue with religious people.

When Jesus talked about not having to die, I don't think he was talking about physical death. Each of us is an expression of the creative principle of the universe, a little parcel of life itself, bounded by a physical body and an ego, both of which will one day cease to exist. (Actually the concept that the ego and body are fixed entities is not really sound. Each is a system which is always changing but which has many qualities which tend to persist.) To the extent that we may be able to experience ourselves as eternal it can only be by identifying with that aspect of of ourselves which is life itself rather than with any aspect of our individual personality or bodily structure. But I believe that what Jesus was talking about was the living death of ego-embattlement which leaves us severely limited in the ways in which we can interact with other people (inhibited by a rigid character armour as Wilhelm Reich put it), physically and emotionally obtunded. Neurosis can turn us into virtual zombies. We weren't born that way. Jesus quite often used children as examples, he pointed out that they were already living in "heaven" and that they lived in a real world which was hidden to the "wise and learned" (that is those who used their rational mind not to explore reality but to build convoluted intellectual hiding places for their wounded egos).

Jesus basic advice was : be honest, be non-judgemental, be generous. There is no bogie man in the sky who will judge you, so just relax and open up to your deepest desire, which is to be unconditionally loving.

Lets take the example of sex. The joy of sex is the healing union of two or more individuals through the giving and receiving of pleasure. If we are ego-embattled we may want to take pleasure but be unable to give it. This means we are denying ourselves the essential ecstasy of the experience. And this is true of all of life. The degree to which we can enjoy it and the degree to which we can be creative is the degree to which we can open up to it. If we are closed off within the lonely cage of our own ego, we can't enjoy much at all.

As Wilhelm Reich put it :

"Outside the trap, right close by, is living Life, all around one, in everything the eye can see and the ear can hear and the nose can smell. To the victims within the trap it is eternal agony, a temptation as for Tantalus. You see it, you feel it, you smell it, you eternally long for it, yet you can never get through the exit out of the trap. To get out of the trap simply has become an impossibility. It can only be had in dreams and in poems and in great music and paintings, but it is no longer in your motility. The keys to the exit are cemented into your own character armour and into the mechanical rigidity of your body and soul.

This is the great Tragedy. And Christ happened to know it."

Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ, 1953.

Once again, when it comes to references to "Heaven" and "Hell", I don't believe that Jesus was talking about something which occurs after death, but rather states of mind we can experience here and now. As a person who had a long battle with bipolar disorder, I've spent time in both Heaven and Hell. We tend to make our own Hell when we try to run from the truth. Take the example of a man who has the desire to have sex with other men. If he tries to deny these feelings he will bring hellish suffering upon himself. If he lives out his desires in a surreptitious way, pretending to the world at large that he is not gay, he will still be unhappy and probably fearful of being found out. But if he finds the courage to live honestly then, even though he might be subjected to persecution, he will find within himself the rich rewards that come with the integrity of being himself without pretence. All of us, in one way or another, are liable to be like that. Most of us put on some kind of a front, and thus are, to some extent, at war with ourselves. For me one of the principle lessons taught by Jesus is that we should come out of our own personal closet, that we should be honest about ourselves. Reputedly he liked to hang around with the drunkards and the whores. They were his people, because they didn't try to be something they were not. But he heaped scorn upon the Pharisees, calling them "vipers", because they were full of shit, they were complete hypocrites.

Unfortunately, the human neurosis contaminates everything it touches, and so, no sooner was Jesus cold in his grave than the medicine he had been offering to those around him was converted by his followers into the deadliest of poisons. His advice to be honest, non-judgemental and generous and live in the real world, with all the bliss and creativity that that makes possible, was recast as a supernatural belief system which viewed his death and the myth that he had risen again as being of more significance than anything he said. And in time the church which grew out of it would become an authoritarian monstrosity just like that of the Pharisees.

I've been looking closely at this post and I,m baffaloed. You are so close to to our determinations I am betting with my self that in a couple of weeks I'll be getting a note from Alpha Smurf with a welcome into our world---or maybe ---be welcomed into yours. This is definitly not two worlds colliding lemme tell ya. I'll to go over this again. By the way I got on site to your writings and looking forward to some downloads. Gotta see where I can store them on this here machine, I'm not that up to snuff on computors. a little practice is needed.  Say---is the sun upside down where you are ---  I wunder what its like looking at North backwards.       

Lets first start with all that being long discarded Jungian and Freudian cult gibberish. That is how they ran their psychoanalysis con that L. Ron Hubbard copied.

heaven: a state of mind of peace and contentment, the mind of a child in no right or wrong and only the applicable knowledge of good and evil.

Hell: the state of death/nonexistence, condition as before one existed. But total lack of condition. Zero person

Lets first start with all that being long discarded Jungian and Freudian cult gibberish. That is how they ran their psychoanalysis con that L. Ron Hubbard copied.

 A while ago on these boards I asked for some advice on what term I should use to describe myself. Elsewhere some people were implying that they viewed me as an atheist while others called me a theist. A number of different names for different kinds of belief were suggested to me. I went away and read the definitions, and the conclusion I came to is that I'm a pantheist. I believe that everything is god. But I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in received dogma that is accepted on faith. I only believe what conforms to my own sense of intuition and reason. And I don't believe in worshipping anything. This would be ridiculous in for a pantheist. If everything is god, then I too am god, so why would I worship myself? Now you could say, "Why call everything god? Why not call everything the universe?" To identify the universe with the god concept is to view the universe as essentially unified. To view it as one interrelated thing. And also to view it as something which is inherently creative. But this is not a supernatural belief. To believe in the supernatural is to be a dualist - to believe in some magical realm (a kind of parallel universe) which is mostly separated from the natural universe but can invade it at any time and temporarily overturn its laws. I believe there is only the natural universe with its steady reliable laws (some of which we are no doubt yet to understand). The creative principle is intrinsic, not extrinsic. A seed grows into a tree by realising its genetic potentials in its environment. This is how creation takes place, not by some supernatural artist designing a pretty tree.

How does this belief system influence my writing? This is well expressed by William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell :

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.

Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.

All of my writing is an experiment. I make no claims for it. And the only test I have for whether any of it is true is whether it has a beneficial effect on others. As Jesus said : "By their fruits shall ye know them." If my ideas bear fruit then I will conclude that there is something to them. If they die on the vine, well then, it is back to the drawing board.

On one item. The state one is in (in death someone can't be a "one", as I see it-one is gone) in death. The greek biblical statement "the grave" denotes dead body, as there's no logical reason for a grave except to encompass a dead physical. The hole in my head is---what is that. The conclusion would be no person present. But that's not the hell of the world. The hell of the world is punishment after life.  So the person is a nothing and the physical is just that---an item incapable of carrying on life. Neutral works OK. But what does one do with the Greek point of view. It could be some thing one needn't take into account. I haven't gone that thought line before. We don't see hell as a punishment either--it's a consequence of a previous physical or mental event.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

The words survived though military force backing the religion. They survived by killing off dissenters. They survived by killing off all competing religions other than Judaism. One need not invoke miracles when one has the sword.

You may dismiss that as crude but the primary reason for conversion was when the law permitted only Christians to be protected by the courts including in matters of inheritance. Only Christians could write wills and only Christians could inheret. If there was a property dispute with a Christian the courts would not hear the case unless the complainant was also a Christian. But still if one refused to convert where was one going to worship when temples were being destroyed and their priests murdered in the streets? And still if one held out one's best hope was a quick lynching by one's loving, christian neighbors.

When one looks at the reality only a fool would think the reality is not a complete and sufficent explanation for the successful spread of Christianity. Further looking at the facts of how it did spread I have to wonder where this idea of loving Christians converting with kindness and prayer got started. They bragged about their methods at the time.

I can only assume you have never taken the time to look into the facts but instead have not progressed beyond the lies the preachers tell you. AND the things I recited above are taught in all seminaries and divinity schools so when I say they are lying they do know the facts were as I recited them and if they tell you anything else they are lying by all definitions of the term.

I think that my statements about believing that the orthodox Christian church is an obscenity should make it clear that I'm aware of its dark history. I've learned nothing from preachers. I'm not a religious person. I've only attended church services a handful of times in my 50 years, and that was as an observer not a participant. I'm an anarchist. I hate any form of authoritarianism.

Now it is quite possible I could find something useful in other religious texts. I haven't got around to reading any.

All I've read of the New Testament is the Gospels and Revelations. I've probably read Matthew all the way through about three times in my life. The other gospels I've probably only read once each. Revelations I have a tendency to re-read when I've been a bit psycho. I always think it will make sense then and it never really does. But just reading these books those few times, and re-reading passages when I want to use a quote from it in my writing is enough for Jesus words to have seeped into the depths of my consciousness.

 Again I must refer to real history. At the time of the events I referred to and for centuries afterwards there was only one empire and one church. There was no split between Constantinople and Rome at that time. It was all the same church. The kinds of things I mentioned occurred as commonly and as readily in Rome and Egypt as in Byzantium and all with the same approval of both church and state which were still one. 

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Without the cultural additions and context Jesus is as cardboard  as TV characters but to their fans including Jesus fans they are much more.

If you think Jesus is not cardboard in the gospels and assuming you have watched Buffy would you care to go one on one as to what we know about Buffy but not about Jesus? I think we can agree neither one wanted to be chosen and both were regularly called upon to exercise superhuman powers. When it comes to Jesus tell me about his family life, his relations with his friends and family, his height/weight/voice/eyes or any other personal characteristic. What was his favorite color? personality quirks? Did he even get an education or have a job skill? If you are a writer you know what cardboard means and Buffy is not cardboard. And if you were to presume Capt. Kirk were portrayed by an actor with talent the character would have been portrayed with more than calm/anger/grimace as a range of emotions and we would know more about that character than Jesus. Note calm/anger/grimace is about the emotional range of Jesus also.

I've only watched about a half an episode of Buffy. Perhaps I've been unfair on her.

You seem to have a very different concept of what makes for a complex and "living" character. All you mention here is trivia. Favourite colour? Really? Character for me is almost exclusively conveyed by dialogue. Dialogue and actions. Nothing else contributes much to making a character alive for me in a fictional work. We don't know about Hamlet's childhood experiences but we don't need to, we have have is soliloquies. All we really have of Jesus is the dialogue. The action mostly consists of miracles, which I don't believe in and have no interest in. The character of Jesus, for me, is exclusively in the dialogue. Or rather, mostly, the monologues. The descriptions of his emotion are not needed.

The emotion is in the words. His words howl like a mighty storm through my imagination.

And, as I've said, i have only read most of the gospels once or twice all the way through. Otherwise I pick up the Bible from time to time to find a quote to use for my writing. I really have spent almost no time in my life reading the Bible. And I'm not a religious person. I don't go to church. I spend far more time looking at pornography than I do reading about or viewing movies about religion. But the words are so powerful in me that I have no need to read them or think about them, they just pop back of their own accord. I feel like they are part of my psychological DNA.

I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and examine the ideas of cultural context and add-ons.

Christianity is the dominant religion of the society in which I grew up. If I were going to be a religious person I would have almost certainly been a Christian. I never was. I did, however, attend a Catholic school for two years in order to study Latin. Maybe I felt a little superior because I didn't take religion seriously and the other boys had to be scared about their God. In religious studies I asked the Brother teaching whether someone who did good but didn't believe in God and didn't expect a reward in Heaven wasn't better than someone who was only doing it to profit by it. He admitted that I had a point. I do like Jesus movies as I've always felt a sense of identification with him. I cry during the crucifixion scene in Ben-Hur. I hated The Passion of the Christ though. The ear-reattachment miracle made me laugh. Otherwise it was essentially a religious snuff movie with an almost sexually fetishistic and voyeuristic approach to the whipping and crucifixion. I kind of wondered at the time whether the Christians who loved and were supposedly moved by the movie, on some deeper subconscious level, were "getting off" on seeing the man tortured who was the supposed reason for them living lives full of guilt and sexual repression. I've always seen Christianity as something very oppressive myself. Maybe it isn't for them.

How would this context affect my feelings about what I have read in the gospels. Well, if I were going to be charitable to myself I could say that, if Christianity was oppressing those around me, then it would be a good idea to get to the heart of it and try to break the spell that enslaved them. If I were going to be cynical I could say that if I wanted to be a rebel then the most rebellious thing I could do in this culture is to find a way to subvert Christianity and combine it with my philosophy of anarchy and sexual liberation.

I leave it for others to come to their own conclusions about my motives. But I do feel that Jesus is my imaginary friend in this enterprise. Maybe one day it will prove to have all been just one more delusion to follow on from all the others I've had in my life. Or maybe my flatmate is right and I'll end up burning in Hell.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Then getting to the teachings of Jesus the most all of them are not only derivative but can be found in all cultures at all times. There is no need to consider memory for the simple and "proverbial" nature of these so-called teachings.

There is bound to be commonality across cultures. Wisdom is the same regardless of culture, otherwise it would not be wisdom but mere opinion. Myths also have great similarity across cultures, even cultures which had no contact with each other. Meaningful patterns in one culture are liable to be meaningful patterns in other cultures as well. However I see a consistent philosophy in what I have read of the words attributed to Jesus which I have not come across elsewhere. This doesn't mean that it isn't out there. I do very little reading really.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Next ALL gospels are of equal merit and value as are all the contents of each.

This may be your opinion but I see no more reason to say this than to say that all Shakespeare's plays are of equal merit and all parts of each play are of equal merit.

A_Nony_Mouse wrote:

Picking and choosing negates any value to any gospel as a whole. In other words, if you are going to pick and choose things withing the 30+ gospels then there is no rational reason to limit oneself to gospels. And if one agrees one can find ideas one likes in sources other than gospels why would one put gospels into a separate category simply because they have a guy named Jesus as a central character? If one picks and chooses regardless of attribution to the central character what is the point of the central character?

I don't  put gospels into a separate category. I take my inspiration and ideas where I can find them. There are things I've read in Keith Johnstone's Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre, the works of William Blake, Oscar Wilde, Carl Jung, R. D. Laing and Wilhelm Reich which are just as valuable to me as anything I've read in the gospels. And there are some things I've read in the gospels that are valueless to me. Who cares about Jesus' family tree?

The point of the central character is only that he provides a point of reference for the philosophy being expressed. I could read a bunch of random unidentified quotes which, unbeknownst to myself, were from R. D. Laing and I might find them insightful, but I would have to know they were from the same person to see that they were supposed to be integrated into a consistent philosophy of how social interactions effect consciousness.

 I picked that as what I thought was a safe bet on familiarity. Obviously an error. What I want is a fictional construct to compare with the fictional construction Jesus a century after his purported life. I believe with the memory and the literacy of the gospels we have agreed whatever this Jesus was the gospels can only be fiction with indeterminable factual content. Which is why I cannot see why you continue. There is no way to establish what might be factual content if any.