When It Was OK To Be Poor

 

If we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.

1 Timothy 6:8

What Kind Of Faith Is It When You Say Jesus Is Your Husband And The Father Of Your Child?

From The New York Times, here:

Evangelicals are assuring single moms that God has a plan for them, and it still includes marriage — just not in the way they expected. Rita Viselli found herself pregnant at age 35 with the child of a man she was casually dating. She was a recovering drug addict, the troubled daughter of a single mother herself, and a recent convert to evangelical Christianity. In 2000 she began a Bible study for single mothers in her living room in Southern California. She taught them what she had realized: “I have a husband. His name is Jesus Christ. I have decided that he will be my daughter’s father, and she has grown up being told that God is her father. He is real in our house,” she told me. “He has provided for me and my child better than 10 husbands could have.”

This connubial language pervades the small but growing world of evangelical single mothers’ ministries. It has deep roots in Christian spirituality. In mystical marriage to Jesus, medieval nuns and laywomen found one of the few paths to spiritual authority open to them, an escape from repressive reality. When Margery Kempe, an English mystic born around 1373, heard Jesus say “I take you, Margery, for my wedded wife,” she “felt the fire of love burning in her breast.”

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What if Mary the mother of Jesus thought the same way? That God was the father of her bastard baby? Is that how the Son of God idea started in Christianity, and the idea of the virgin birth, as a kind of spiritual rationalization of a poor woman's predicament which fatefully imbedded itself in the mind of Jesus because that's what Mary kept telling him all his life?

"And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven."

-- Matthew 23:9

Ideological religion: Jesus as terrible simplifier

Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

-- Luke 10:38ff.

Sleepin' On It

I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.

-- Psalm 16:7

The Children Of Hell

Gustave Dore "Hypocrites" in Circle 8

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."

-- Matthew 23:15

Little Lord Lesus

It was embarrassing enough when Pope Benedict resigned before the assembled cardinals in Latin and no one understood him. Was "Francis" in the crowd?

Now a papal medal with a favorite line of the new pope misspells "Jesus" in Latin, as reported here:

"They went on sale on Tuesday but it was not long before it was noticed that the word Jesus, stamped around the edge of each medallion, had been spelt wrongly, with an L in place of the J."

Even more embarrassing is that this gotcha gets it wrong also, not realizing there is no "J" in Latin. The Vulgate spells it with an "I", so for example Jesus becomes "Iesus" as in "et lacrimatus est Iesus" (John 11:35). So did I.

Until I saw in the comments section that philology and textual criticism aren't quite dead yet out there after all, as one Seth Murray explains how the error must have occurred:

The Latin capital "I" was taken for an "l" in the lower case as in "lover", and re-capitalized "L" unthinkingly at the mint.

Francis' papal motto, incidentally, comes from the venerable Bede:

The motto of Pope Francis is taken from a passage from the venerable Bede, Homily 21 (CCL 122, 149-151), on the Feast of Matthew, which reads: Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me’. [Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, ‘follow me’.]

More Than Half Of All Christians Have Their Wafer Worship, But 1.57 Billion Muslims Worship A Rock 5x/day

And must visit it and circumambulate it 7x at least once in their lifetimes.

Idolatry is a global phenomenon.

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything."

-- Acts 17:24f.

Holy Spirit Inspires Bill O'Reilly To Write Book KILLING JESUS Which Conflicts With Gospels

1 packet serves 1.2 billion. It's miraculous.

Quoted here:

O’Reilly is a devout Catholic, but Killing Jesus is not a religious book. He doesn’t refer to Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah, and some of his points are in direct contradiction to what the Bible teaches.

For instance, O'Reilly argues that Jesus did not say “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” from the cross. He says it wouldn’t have been physically possible.

“You die on a cross from being suffocated,” he says. “You can hardly breathe. We believe Jesus said that, but we don't believe He said it on the cross because nobody could have heard it.”

Despite his controversial remarks, O’Reilly says the Holy Spirit inspired him to write Killing Jesus. He claims he woke up in the middle of the night and thought, “Killing Jesus.”

“I believe because I'm a Catholic that comes from the Holy Spirit,” O’Reilly explained in Sunday’s airing of 60 Minutes. “My inspiration comes from that. And so I wrote Killing Jesus because I think I was directed to write that.”

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Uh huh.

Reza Aslan proves some PhD's are worth more than others

Reza Aslan makes the simplest of mistakes in a recent Washington Post column, here:

'[N]owhere in the New Testament is “adelphos” used to mean anything other than “brother.”'

Well of course it is, as when the gospels portray Jesus making distinctions between his natural, biological family and his more real family, his hearers, whom he calls his real brothers, sisters and mother. And the following instance, where the term is deliberately bent to deny its natural meaning, is noteworthy for how the gospels, and presumably Jesus, made the term elastic in its meaning in the first place:

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

-- Matthew 23:8

Quite apart from some humanitarian notion of the brotherhood of man, eschewing all earthly definitions and entanglements is part and parcel of Jesus' apocalyptic proclamation, expecting the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and with it, final judgment, which can be escaped only through turning away, even from your family if necessary. That's the whole point of his redefinition of "brother". Strictly political interpretations of the historical Jesus will of necessity ignore this, or worse, deny it.