All that excitement over nothing.

… I guess you don’t know much about Second-Temple Judaisms…

Well, I’ve been saving up good links and stories all week, but haven’t gotten around to sharing them. So, for your edification and reading pleasure, here goes: A tip of the hat to information junkie extraordinaire Avedon Carol, on whose…

This makes me giggle.

They have the mysterious address of “Black Star Ops at an undisclosed location know only as Black Ledge”. A super hero hide out, no doubt. I imagine they while away the hours, manufacturing their own armor piercing bullets, and talking jesus dolls. Let’s just hope that when those pesky feds come a knockin’, the good people at Black Ledge remember which pocket holds the talking jesus, and which holds the Luger. “Was it my left or my right?”

your 4/15 postings are nice–a little of that ole time religion.

but for a more secular discussion of what’s going on, please visit us at:
velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com

Peace,
rkent@mslaw.edu

I just listened to the talking jesus at Vicale, and long about the 4 second mark, he says, (in deep, reverberating English – not Aramaic. Apparently Gibson got it wrong) “you shall not make yourself an idol or misuse the name of the Lord.” What.. a load.. of CRAP

The statement that Jesus came to get rid of that ‘old testament crap’ is silly, and also implicated in a particularly nasty narrative in which christians care for the ’spiritual’ and those course jews are only interested in the ‘legalistic’ and the ‘external’, which has been superseded.

My use of words like “legalistic” is in no way an attempt to elevate Christianity. As an atheist, I don’t really find either faith to be more spiritually enlightening than the other.

That said, I don’t think it’s historically inaccurate to point out that the great appeal of Christianity has been its simplicity (especially in comparison to orthodox Judaism). Compared to the seemingly endless string of laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the laid-back hippy Jesus telling everyone to love each other would obviously be a breath of fresh air. I hadn’t heard similar quotes attributed to his contemporaries, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Then again, perhaps I’m attributing too much to Jesus and not enough to the people who have spent the last two thousand years twisting his life into a religion that all but ignores its Jewish roots. While I say that Jesus appeared to “reject the sort of legalistic crap in the Old Testament”, I should have made clearer that this interpretation is based on the fact that the Christian Bible is bisected into Old and New Testaments and not based on Jesus’s teachings directly.

After all, the Christian Bible is essentially a really long, meandering novel that takes a few hundred pages to get to the point of it all. The way things are now,a the only reason for the continued inclusion of the Old Testament it to buoy fairytale-like beliefs (Jonah swallowed by a whale, Noah’s ark, garden of Eden, etc.), establish “prophecies” that pop up later as “proof” of Jesus’s divinity (as if we’re supposed to forget that the New Testament writers/compilers weren’t familiar with this stuff when throwing together their sequel), and serve as a prologue to the gospels. The Old Testament makes Jewish life seem pretty goddamn dreary, but that’s probably the whole point.

Going back to the “legalistic” stuff, while I find the strict adherence to some religious laws to be archaic, at lest those people have more than a passing familiarity with their religion’s orthodoxy. By contrast, I have little respect for the beliefs of someone so ignorant about their own religious traditions that they don’t know what their god did or didn’t say, aren’t familiar with the basic history of their religion, and can’t explain why their religion is more appealing than someone else’s. Like I said before, I don’t think sticking to a series of religious codes makes someone more or less spiritual, so I hope my post wasn’t interpreted as an attempt to boost Christianity or malign Judaism in any way.

The only point I was trying to make is that having a Jesus doll recite the Ten Commandments is fucking retarded.