ihavebeenfloated

That’s all I could think of when titling this, maybe it makes sense.

I read something extremely, extremely offensive last night. It should be offensive to all believers in Jesus, even you freaky Christians out there. It really should. The following is a direct quote from Jamie Richard, an assistant pastor at… some place, somewhere. It comes from this article on The Da Vinci Code.

“Gnosticism is not really a subgroup of Christianity; it’s an alternative religion altogether. With the Gnostic Jesus, there’s no cross, no virgin birth, no resurrection – there’s no real Jesus.”

Completely ignore the major hardcore dig on Gnosticism, that’s not really important to me, but needed for contextual reasons. Some moron can insult Gnosticism all he wants with whatever ridiculously fabricated bullshit he wants—Gnosticism isn’t related to Christianity? Yeah, how about the fact that the Gnostics follow the teachings of Jesus?—and that’s fine, he’s a moron.

But to actually insult the existence of Jesus is, well, a bit much. Admittedly his points are a little off, being that in Gnosticism, Jesus does indeed die on a cross as all historical/biblical texts attest, and Jesus does resurrect, not really in a literal sense but in a more spiritual one, and I’m not entirely clear on the whole virgin birth thing and how it factors into Gnosticism. I’m not even reasonably certain enough to go one way or the other on the whole virgin birth thing, not much of a Gnostic am I?

But the point is…

Is Jesus really only important for the superhuman acts he performed? Without the virgin birth, is Jesus less important? Without the resurrection, is Jesus no longer an important figure of faith? If he wasn’t tortured and murdered, would we have never heard of him? Can you really say that? How about the walking on water, healing, and turning water to wine?

If you remove all of those things from Jesus, what have you got?

His teachings. Teachings which are apparently not important enough alone to make Jesus an important enough figure for Christianity.

Kind of sad when you think of the few religions of the world (perhaps even more dominant than Christianity) that don’t depend on their prophets and teachers having super-human attributes.

That’s kind of my whole reoccurring outlook on this Da Vinci thing. (I have not read the book nor do I plan on seeing the movie.) Why does it matter if Jesus was married and had lots of sex? Why does any of that stuff matter? Who really cares? You can prove that Jesus was born from a virgin, it doesn’t change my belief any. Why do people consider it so damaging when someone proposes that Jesus wasn’t born from a virgin, or even suggests that he wasn’t really the Son of God?

Why does any of it really matter? We’re all just believing in things that we can’t prove one way or the other. You can’t prove you’re right, and you can’t prove their wrong, because that’s what faith is all about. The fact that people have to shove their faith in other people’s faces and declare that it is the only way has always made me wonder…

Who are you really trying to convince?

I don’t need to shove my beliefs down other people’s throats. I can tell people about them, but I will never say that you should or must believe exactly what I believe. It doesn’t matter to me if you believe in what I do 100%. Fact is, I believe, and that is way more than enough for me. Say all you want about Jesus. It doesn’t change what I think any.

Wish the rest of the world could take the same stance on their respective religions. Too bad that’ll never happen.