Reply #55: I mean the stuff like saying that unless you hated your immediate family, you cannot love Jesus.

[stopbush]

I mean the stuff about Jesus saying that he himself will cast non-believers down into eternal hellfire. And for what? Why, for not confessing him as their eternal master. In others, the kind of "stuff" that always has and always will define the slave-master relationship that Jesus DEMANDS from his followers.

I mean stuff like Jesus declining (3 times!) to heal the daughter of the Canaanite woman, first by totally ignoring her, then by saying she wasn't a Jew and then by saying that to treat her daughter would be like throwing children's food to the dogs. It was only when the woman groveled at his feet and agreed with Jesus' words that she was a dog that the "loving" Jesus deigned to heal her daughter. Was Jesus "loving this woman as he loved himself," up to and including his actions that made her grovel at his feet and say she was a dog?

Couple this with the partial laundry list of reasons to despise Jesus as enumerated in post #41 above, and you get the picture. Nice stuff, huh?

THAT, my friend, is Xianity based upon the very words of Jesus.

The Jesus of the Bible is very much like today's republicans. His actions - taken in context and as a whole - reveal a self-centered megalomaniac who is on a major power trip. it's all about Jesus. Like the republicans, he seeks to soften the blow by tossing out a few humanistic things that people can relate to, all of which come down to a variation on the centuries-before-Jesus-was-a-glimmer-in-a-fiction-writer's-imagination Tenet of Reciprocity (Golden Rule). Republicans toss out words like "family values" while enacting policies that hurt families. Jesus tosses out the Golden Rule while telling people they don't have it within themselves to follow the Golden Rule, and that even if they try their best to do so, they're damned to hell for eternity if they don't confess HIM as saviour.

Does it get any nastier than that?

I assume that's what you're talking about.