The other day my brother told me that the right-wing attempt to rewrite the Bible to contradict the words of Jesus is ongoing. Their goal, apparently, goes beyond having Jesus saying that he got it wrong, you CAN serve both God and Mammon, but that serving Mammon is a positive virtue and moral requirement. It is telling that the fundamentalists are not up in arms over this essential and obvious act of sacrilege, something they apparently are up in arms over is Pope Francis telling Catholics that Jesus really meant what he said. It's especially amazing in those who turn the King James translation of the Bible into an idol, rejecting all other renditions and editions. I might have suspicions about the complete accuracy of that House of Stuart effort, but they really believed that those moral commandments and teachings, so inconvenient to their affluence, had the effect of divinity behind them. These latter day distorters of scripture and those fundamentalists who go along with it instead of fulminating against it, obviously don't.
But it is also as telling that the liberal churches and the non-fundamentalist churches aren't loudly calling these latter day Christ-killers out. It's as if they have lost confidence in their belief, that Jesus said those things BECAUSE THEY ARE TRUE. And not only Jesus, but the entire Jewish prophetic tradition of which he is a part. Perhaps if they had not been suckered out of confidently asserting the truth of the teachings of Jesus by secularist and materialist coercion, of developing the counterproductive, not to mention cowardly, habit of suppressing their religious expression, they could find a louder voice with which to condemn this highly financed act to turn Jesus into the AntiChrist. And that is worse than a tragedy, it pulls out the very basis under which any movement towards a just, equal and good society and government can exist. It is unpopular to point it out but it is a fact of history that the only proven basis of that kind of change has been a religious one, in the United States, in Europe, it has been done by those people who really believed the Jewish prophets, including Jesus. It has been done through a belief in the very teachings that the Mammonist Bible revisers are attacking. And that is the reason for their highly financed and promoted efforts.
I realize that the title of this piece is provocative, I am anything but a fan of the last book included in the cannon of The Bible. It has been the source of some of the more unfortunate dogmas and beliefs, a book that even those who advocated its inclusion said should not be read literally, though that is how it is most often cited. But the prediction that there would be false use of Jesus comes from the gospels, Jesus foresaw it and warned about it. I am not someone who believes that something was true because Jesus said it, I believe Jesus said it because it was the truth. And there was nothing more true than his warnings about the corruption of wealth, the absolute moral obligation to share wealth till it hurts those giving it.
The Jewish prophetic tradition he was a member of also warned about the consequences of governments that did not do justice to the poor, the dispossessed and the aliens living under them. That tradition denied the possibility of such a government being legitimate, they called for the destruction of such governments. That, folks, amounts to some of the most radical talk that has ever been spoken and written, that is no less than a declaration that the Mammonists are drawing down destruction on the United States. I would think that liberals who believe there is something to the teachings of the prophets, who see the extremely radical call for a just society and government in it, could be bothered to protect it, not only from this right-wing attack on it, but also take the risk of being seen as unfashionable in doing that. If we are afraid of being socially shunned or blog mobbed over that, the Mammonists have already won so far as we are concerned. I will be going into that a bit in upcoming posts.
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