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.
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.
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!