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Except, RR…Men do not know what God looks like. They have only assumed for centuries, that, of course, God looks like them. But God could be a woman, a donkey, a centaur, etc.
White men have always portrayed that Jesus was pure and white as the driven snow. We know that he was more than likely very dark-skinned.
Except, RR…Men do not know what God looks like. They have only assumed for centuries, that, of course, God looks like them. But God could be a woman, a donkey, a centaur, etc.
White men have always portrayed that Jesus was pure and white as the driven snow. We know that he was more than likely very dark-skinned.
Hey, the Evangelicals are a jump ahead of us on this one. A number of them have already gone to their "leaders" and implored them to dispense with that Jesus guy. He's too liberal. Give us more of the grifter, greedy guy who's always talking about himself like he was us.
What they've actually done is jump *backward*. Look up Bruce Barton sometime -- Published in the mid-1920s, his "Man Nobody Knows" portrayed Jesus as a businessman and entrepreneur. It was a mammoth bestseller.
Reinventing Jesus and, by extension, Christianity is nothing new. Also worth looking at is the "muscular Christianity" championed by Theodore Roosevelt and many others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was in part a reaction to the perceived "feminization" of Protestant Christianity -- then as now, women did most of the grassroots work of keeping the churches going, even when they couldn't be members of the clergy.
I never think of any of what they do as a forward thing. And I'd hoped I wouldn't have to indicate my sarcasm here but that's the way of the written ripped off in a hurry word. I have Methodist and Presbyterian ministers threading all through my family tree, both sides and I think I was really an atheist child. Of course you don't know it when you're little. I believe in Spinoza's version of "religion." And anything a bunch of men sat down to write in the worst eras of trying to control and dominate women calls for immediate dismissal of whatever they say.
Good one!
Excuse me Marlene, but I have always thought you knew where I was coming from. Are you trying to tell me something? I'll tell you something. The image of the blond, white Jesus is, in reality, taken from a portrait done by Leonardo DaVinci of his lover. A GAY lover, on the first page of most bibles. As a life long aetheist, and an Original California Girl with the radical Femisist guerilla performance group founded by Judy Chicago, back in the late 60s, I've been around these concepts for quite a while.
HA! Perfecto, RR!
There's a Ray Bradbury story that I love called The Fire Balloons. It's about a priest who goes to Mars to convert the aliens. He shows his fellow priests his Martian crucifix, which is image of an alien on the cross and says, this is our lord Jesus Christ, for the Martians. Because God came to us in human form so we could understand him, he would come to the aliens in their image.
Of course Jesus, a middle eastern Jew of 2000 years ago was probably a brown skinned man, not a white man, but in a theological sense it's irrelevant. Because, if you believe Jesus was God, God could present himself to us in any form God wished - you can't even say "he", since it's illogical to think of the creator having a gender and Jesus could be male or female as God wishes, or in some sense both.
I'm not religious in any traditional sense but entertain these thoughts to annoy the Christians in my family who find it all...annoying.
On that train of thought, does anyone really believe that he wasn't conceived by sex?
More to the point, no one really knows if "God" exists as an independent entity, so of course the field is wide open to create one or more in whatever image one chooses. And as long as "God" doesn't strike them down for apostasy or blasphemy or whatever, they're good.