Buddy Yeshua and the Theological Virtues
Jul. 28th, 2011 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinJack, reading some of my recent blog posts, asked me about my religious views. In his words, I sound very Christian and he wondered if that related to my culture/upbringing.
In a way, I suppose it does... but only insofar as my upbringing included a lot of reading and critical thinking.
I don't know what I think about the historicity of Jesus, apart from the fact that 99% of everyone who begins a sentence with words like, "Actually, Yeshua ben Joseph was..." is a smug douchebag about to make an assertion for which he or she has no more factual basis than does a person who asserts that Jesus was the son of God, the word of God made flesh, etc. This is true whether they're about to assert that Buddy Yeshua was an alien, a witch, a master of yogic secrets, or just a good man... and believe me, I've heard that sentence finished in all of those ways and more.
It's always bothered me that so many skeptics are so quick to agree that Jesus was a historical person, especially when the people they're arguing with seem to be following a kind of reverse logic where if one part of something is true then it's all true. If remnants of a wooden structure that once held animals found on a mountain may be taken as proof positive of the story of the ark and thus the entire Bible (personally, I rather suspect it's more in the way of being proof positive of goatherds), then conceding that Jesus was a real person in the absence of corroborating evidence seems like a real misstep for skeptics.
This concession is usually made on the strength of "contemporary" accounts apart from the gospels, by which I mean accounts that were written by people who lived their entire lives in the period after which Jesus was said to have ascended into the heavens, written by people who never met the man or claim to have met anyone who did meet him.
1st century historians writing down what people professed to believe had happened some decades before is no more a contemporary account than 21st century historians writing down what people professed to believe millennia before.
...
But I digress. This was going to be a post about my beliefs and upbringing.
The point is that I've mostly come to my Christian sensibilities in my adult life, through the writers and thinkers I've read from and what I found in their work that struck me as good and true.
In that process, I've come to stand sort of in the opposite of the Smug Skeptical Hipster who is happy to believe that there are reams of historical documents that proved some guy walked the earth and everyone noticed and everything if it lets him stand in the corner at a gathering, nodding and smiling knowingly as people proclaim their belief/disbelief and then break in with a "Actually, Yeshua ben Joseph..." but who has no use for Christian thought, as well as the person who more sincerely proclaims that Jesus was a man, maybe a good man, but there was nothing of the divine in him.
I stand in opposition because I can make no claim that there was ever a man Jesus, good or otherwise, but this man I can't claim existed... I admire the divine in him, and wish to reflect it with my own life.
(This is a work in progress, obviously. Some days I'm reflective. Other days I'm reflexive.)
Maybe it's a shade of my youthful Discordianism reasserting itself, or maybe it's my state of being as a writer and reader of fiction, but existence isn't a prerequisite for me to find meaning in someone or something. When I write about faith, hope, and charity, does this mean I believe that someone or something has ordered the universe and set these three concepts up as some sort of ideal object called a "Virtue"? No. There's no such animal as a virtue.
They don't exist.
Yet they hold meaning.
In a way, I suppose it does... but only insofar as my upbringing included a lot of reading and critical thinking.
I don't know what I think about the historicity of Jesus, apart from the fact that 99% of everyone who begins a sentence with words like, "Actually, Yeshua ben Joseph was..." is a smug douchebag about to make an assertion for which he or she has no more factual basis than does a person who asserts that Jesus was the son of God, the word of God made flesh, etc. This is true whether they're about to assert that Buddy Yeshua was an alien, a witch, a master of yogic secrets, or just a good man... and believe me, I've heard that sentence finished in all of those ways and more.
It's always bothered me that so many skeptics are so quick to agree that Jesus was a historical person, especially when the people they're arguing with seem to be following a kind of reverse logic where if one part of something is true then it's all true. If remnants of a wooden structure that once held animals found on a mountain may be taken as proof positive of the story of the ark and thus the entire Bible (personally, I rather suspect it's more in the way of being proof positive of goatherds), then conceding that Jesus was a real person in the absence of corroborating evidence seems like a real misstep for skeptics.
This concession is usually made on the strength of "contemporary" accounts apart from the gospels, by which I mean accounts that were written by people who lived their entire lives in the period after which Jesus was said to have ascended into the heavens, written by people who never met the man or claim to have met anyone who did meet him.
1st century historians writing down what people professed to believe had happened some decades before is no more a contemporary account than 21st century historians writing down what people professed to believe millennia before.
...
But I digress. This was going to be a post about my beliefs and upbringing.
The point is that I've mostly come to my Christian sensibilities in my adult life, through the writers and thinkers I've read from and what I found in their work that struck me as good and true.
In that process, I've come to stand sort of in the opposite of the Smug Skeptical Hipster who is happy to believe that there are reams of historical documents that proved some guy walked the earth and everyone noticed and everything if it lets him stand in the corner at a gathering, nodding and smiling knowingly as people proclaim their belief/disbelief and then break in with a "Actually, Yeshua ben Joseph..." but who has no use for Christian thought, as well as the person who more sincerely proclaims that Jesus was a man, maybe a good man, but there was nothing of the divine in him.
I stand in opposition because I can make no claim that there was ever a man Jesus, good or otherwise, but this man I can't claim existed... I admire the divine in him, and wish to reflect it with my own life.
(This is a work in progress, obviously. Some days I'm reflective. Other days I'm reflexive.)
Maybe it's a shade of my youthful Discordianism reasserting itself, or maybe it's my state of being as a writer and reader of fiction, but existence isn't a prerequisite for me to find meaning in someone or something. When I write about faith, hope, and charity, does this mean I believe that someone or something has ordered the universe and set these three concepts up as some sort of ideal object called a "Virtue"? No. There's no such animal as a virtue.
They don't exist.
Yet they hold meaning.
no subject
on 2011-07-28 11:43 pm (UTC)I also happen to have faith in the existence of the historical dude, who was possibly a Messiah of some variety, but even on the days I do not believe there ever was such a man, I believe the teachings and ethics have an intrinsic value that is far more important than whether or not he was a real or fictional personage, or whether or not he was human or divine, and even whether or not a supernatural afterlife of any kind exists. As a teenager, I became deeply disenchanted with Christianity, and it's the meaning of the words alone that drew me back, before/without any kind of broader faith.