... So how did Jesus get demoted, and why? A reading of the gospels will make that quickly apparent. The Sermon on the Mount alone is enough to rattle those who use the Bible to enforce their personal prejudices.
Jesus was a troublemaker in his days and in ours because he stood up for those who were reviled and persecuted by religious authorities under the banner of faith. He taught people the Good News: That they should see God as a compassionate, accepting parent to love, not as an angry, violent, punitive authority figure to fear." -Dr. Teresa Whitehurst, The Christian Minority Coalition
Whether you see Jesus as the God-become-mortal or as one of the most powerful great teachers and sages in human history, one important question in this current time of religious controversy needs to be more seriously addressed. As the "founder" of Christianity did Jesus intentionally establish or lay the groundwork for a formal organization from within which would evolve doctrine and dogma written in irrevocable heavenly granite?
Historical human propensity seems to have viewed the "civilization" of a society or culture in terms of formal construction of rigid rules, cultural mores and an insistence on blind but trusting conformity. Everyone must do what the "founders" have said and written - as if those founders sat around in some sort of marathon sessions out of which the documentation and authority of the group evolved.
Most religious human beings affiliated with a formal belief set within a culture or society tend to stand on the sort of documented and authorized orthodoxy that forever looks back for assurance rather than forward with hope.
Disagreement and/or disapproval of the behavior of fellow members, fellow citizens or outsiders then tends to find its basis in that backward looking framework of orthodoxy. Concerns about "education" of children and proselytes to the culture have to do with instilling that which is limited to what can only be seen through the rear-view mirror upon which is based definitions of what is seen through the windshield as movement forward continues.
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