{"id":4312,"date":"2022-01-27T17:55:31","date_gmt":"2022-01-28T00:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/?p=4312"},"modified":"2022-01-27T17:55:31","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T00:55:31","slug":"christianity-and-that-rat-bastard-paul-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/spiritualreligious\/christianity-and-that-rat-bastard-paul-pt-2","title":{"rendered":"Christianity and that rat bastard Paul pt 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, one interesting question that occured to me is whether Paul genuinely believed that worshipping Jesus was the best idea – that God wanted worship, that one shouldn’t emulate Jesus but rather consider Jesus above one and a different type of creature – whether in fact the message of the sacrifice being necessary for God to forgive us and Hell being what would happen to anyone who didn’t believe in the sacrifice – and of course the ever-dangerous-and-stupid message that Christianity was the One True Way and all non-Christians were Less Than – whether he believed all that, or whether he found it a convenient thing for Rome to make others believe that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Remember, Paul was originally Saul, who was tasked with squishing these peace-loving hippies before the love started to overrule the desire to run a militaristic empire. Gee, this story’s never happened before – or again … anyway, maybe he figured out that he couldn’t *actually* squish them like grape, but what he *could* do is subvert and confuse their beliefs into patterns that were useful to the empire, or at least not as dangerous to it.<\/p>\n

Or, maybe he genuinely believed himself in all the things he wrote. He clearly had some moments of genius – as I said, 1 corinthians 13 has the ring of eternal truth and is some of the best poetry in the whole book – but he also had a lot of moments of confusing local truths (the customs of his tribe) for eternal truth, and he encouraged a lot of things that have hurt us memetically for centuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, one interesting question that occured to me is whether Paul genuinely believed that worshipping Jesus was the best idea – that God wanted worship, that one shouldn’t emulate Jesus but rather consider Jesus above one and a different type of creature – whether in fact the message of the sacrifice being necessary for God […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4312"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4313,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4312\/revisions\/4313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}