It is not a secret. I get it from the one whose name is so readily suppressed in Christian party programs and who is readily respected merely as "honorary chairman without a real influence.
I will break into this paragraph to say that is one of the most astonishing things about the "Christianity" that is pushed in the American media, elsewhere as the real, official way to be a Christian in the right wing TV production syndicates, the organized neo-fascist pseudo-Christian corporations, the gangster-reverends and bishops and cardinals who are never slow to make common cause with the likes of Steve Bannon. It is true of such a large proportion of what is called "Christian" it has been that way for large stretches of time in big-official Christianity that the origin of most of the ammunition of the anti-Christians, the ones who really, truly hate it, is the very acts of those so denominated as "Christians". What is astounding is in how all of them, the gangsters, the gangster's allies, the media that pushes the allegedly Christian allies of total depravity - that all of them are marked by their constant and consistent violation of all of the actual teachings of Jesus as found in the Gospels and the Epistles, the only sources we have of what he taught. And they do it in ways that they must know they are violating it, despite the excuses that later writers gave them to pretend otherwise.
Ah HA! I can hear the atheists say, there, you see, that PROVES! it's rotten.
Well, as anyone who has worried about being bombed - the myriads who have been bombed - could find the origin of those bombs in science. Those who are the victims of chemical poisoning by modern synthetic substances, by artificial opioids, by a myriad of other chemicals could find their origin in science. Science largely fuels the destruction of the planet, geology done for the extraction industries might be what gets us all killed. That is if the nuclear weapons scientists who most knowingly, with complete understanding of what they were doing, have created and put in the hands of the very same gangster governments and their military wings, the means of ending life on Earth even by accident. Such scientists, among them some of the most praised and honored being paid by those gangster governments. And at times fully credentialed scientists having given or attempted to give nuclear secrets to some of the worst people who have ever lived and held power, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Kim regime in North Korea, etc. The sins of the scientists dwarfs those of religion in the modern age, they outdo the inefficient evils of past "Most Christian Majesties" (in one of the most putrid of pseudo-religious non-requiters on multiple levels) and their like.
For Americans, I will point out that many of our greatest evils in the world were done in the name of "democracy," George W. Bush invading Iraq on the pretext of illegally overturning their dictator in order to impose democracy by fiat by an unelected leader of the United States on People who never voted for him and who, by a huge majority, have been given every reason to despise the concept of "democracy" by the Bush crime family. The same can be said of innumerable people on many continents. The genocide practiced against the original People of this continent on what became the United States as a result of that genocidal lebensraum program which that continues, the American apartheid system born in the enslavement of Black People and which continues in modified form even after the extra-Constitutional Emancipation proclamation, . . . . I could go on and on and on listing sins attributable in exactly the same way to something called democracy.
I would, though, never reject democracy - so long as it is understood as egalitarian democracy - because of the sins done under that label. Nor would I reject the valid discoveries of science, though I think more often than not its products are dangerous at best and deadly quite often. Note I didn't use the mixing of democracy and science in that topic I've studied in such depth, American eugenics, though that is certainly a good example of the point I'm making. Nor will I, for the time being, bring up the Darwinian origin of eugenics as practiced by the Nazis, though, as Marilynne Robinson has pointed out, that religion of American secularism, Darwinism is pretty much always floating in very dark waters, indeed. Unlike Christianity, its proponents never acknowledged its far greater culpability for that emblematic crime.
I get these essential Christian values from Jesus of Nazareth, who is a
historical figure and not a myth, and who is for that very reason the
Christ who is authoritative in all things for Christians at all times. He proclaimed the one and only God, who had already spoken and been addressed in the history of the people of Israel, in the experiences of men and women, he proclaimed this God with a human face, as living and close. In his whole life and in everything he did he made this face of God shine out. When Jesus poke of this God and acted in his name, he made clear what was vague in the Old Testament, made what seemed ambiguous there unambiguous. The one true God of Israel is now understood in a new way. We might sum it up by saying that he is understood as the Father of the Prodigal Son, indeed as the Father of all the lost and not simply as the Father of the devout and those who are righteous from the very beginning.
As a sinner, myself, yes. I have come to decide that is true. As a gentile, yes to the God of the Jewish scriptures. Yes to Jesus who spoke out of the Christ Spirit to us. Still a sinner, still going on.
The sins of the Christians do nothing to negate the character of Jesus and of the Gospel, no more than someone who fudges the books negates the facts of mathematics.
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