Skip to main content

The Devil in Jesus Christ: On the Saving Grace of Disobedience

Disobedience has been the doorway to progress as often as "enlightenment" has always been denounced by those in power at the time, as an act of heresy. Those we view as heroes in retrospect, in other words, are always seen as heretics in their own time.  In short, we condemn the Devil for the same disobedience to authority that we applaud in Jesus Christ.

Like Prometheus, Adam and Eve stole the fire of "knowledge" from a God who, out of a desire to keep humanity as dumb and obedient as domesticated beasts, had expressly forbidden them from learning. This same prohibition against learning was imposed upon African slaves by Christian Europeans, once the latter had been stolen  from their homeland and sold into slavery for the enrichment of the former. 

And  like both Adam and Eve (and all of humanity that followed), the means by which those African slaves would eventually be kept ignorant with invisible chains, came from addicting them to a "desire" for salvation, and the "belief" that such a salvation could only come from obedience to the "sacred traditions" of Christianity - a religion that taught Africans (and all of humanity that followed) that their slavery was but a reflection of their relationship with God, and to please that God and hope to get to heaven, they had to please their master here on Earth.  

Jesus likewise defied both the Sanhedrin - the temple priests who claimed their authority came from God - and their "divine" interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. And like those African slaves, all three - Adam, Even and Jesus - were brutally punished for their disobedience. 

What Adam, Eve, and Jesus all have in common, then, is that they were no less disobedient to God (or those who claimed to be his divinely appointed agents) than the Devil himself. And in this same way, all new ideas necessarily begin with someone who has the courage to doubt the old ones, and all progress is a form of heresy to the "sacred" teachings and traditions of the past. 

From the American Colonialists who rebelled agaisnt King George, to Rosa Parks who rebelled against racism in the United States, those who "honor" tradition are as much like the devil toward progress and the quest for knowledge, as those who are willing to dishonor those traditions in pursuit of human freedom and progress are like Jesus Christ. 

Those who "defend" their "sacred" traditions, in other words, do so because those traditions tend to favor their status, their comforts, and their way of living and thinking, the most. Slavery and the system of "separate but equal" that followed in the Jim Crow South, for example, overwhelmingly favored the mentalities and social arrangements enjoyed by whites, which is why the majority of white people in America opposed Civil Rights in the 1960s as much as they opposed the abolition of slavery more than a century earlier. They were, to put it in political terms, "Conservative" for the traditions that constituted their own "comfort zone."

No one likes to upset the apple cart of their little garden of Eden, after all, regardless of how others must suffer for the privilege of  keeping the cart right where it is, so some can eat as many of those apples as they please, even if others starve in the process. 

It is only through the sustained disobedience of slaves to their masters, from Haiti to America, that Christianity was finally converted from a religion that defended slave masters, to a religion of "let my people go." And it was only through the writings of  people like Harriett Beecher Stowe and Fredrick Douglass - and not the "enlightenment" of Europeans or providence of their "Christian" faith - that the verses in the Bible that had always been used to justify and defend slavery, were finally reinterpreted to be condemnations of it instead.

Without disobedience, America would not exist, African Americans would still be slaves, and there would be no such thing as Christianity, since Jesus would never have dared to question the authority and the traditions of his own religion, or the Sanhedrin. Obedience, on the other hand, was how Germany  convinced the most Christian and law abiding society of the 20th century that committing genocide was as holy as reading the Old Testament. 




  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Christianity is More Unnatural Than Homosexuality

I grew up in a family that is about as homophobic as Phil Robertson and the Westboro Baptists, only they're not quite as boisterous about it; at least not in public anyway. They have also conveniently convinced themselves  that their homophobia is really just their unique Christian ability to "hate the sin, but love the sinner" (even though these very same Christians adamantly refuse to accept that people can "hate Christianity, but love the Christian").  The sexual superiority complex necessarily relied on by such Christians is, of course, blanketed beneath the lambs wool of the Christian humility of serving "God." They interpret their fear of those who are different, in other words, as simply proof of their intimate knowledge and love of God. And the only thing such Christians are more sure about than that their own personal version of "God" exists, is that such a "God" would never want people to be homosexual - no matter how ma

Christianity: An Addiction of Violence Masquerading as Love: Part II

"But God by nature must love Himself supremely, above all else." Fr. Emmet Carter   This is part  two of a look at an article written about the "restorative and medicinal" properties of punishment, as espoused by Fr. Emmett Carter (https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/).  Ideas of this sort in Christianity go back to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas - two saints who saw the suffering of Christ as sure fire evidence that God needed humans to suffer to balance the cosmic scales of his love for us. Sure, he could've come up with a better game, or made better humans, but its apparently the suffering he really enjoys seeing. Carter's essay raises countless questions, especially about the true nature of God's blood lust, but lets stick to just four simpler ones. The first question deals with the idea of "free will." According to Christians, God designed us with the ability to freely choose to obey or offend h

Christianity: An Addiction of Violence Masquerading as Love: Part I

If the Holy Bible proves anything at all, it proves that the Christian God has a blood-lust like no other God in history. From Abraham to Jesus to the end times to eternal hell, the Christian God loves suffering even more than, or at least as much as, said God loves Himself. And if everything from the genocides in the Old Testament and God killing everyone on the planet with a flood, to Jesus being tortured and murdered (rather than the devil, who is the guilty one) and the fiery end of the world followed by the never ending fires of hell, are not enough to convince you that Christianity is really an addiction to violence masquerading as "love," just consider the psychotic rantings of a Catholic priest trying to convince his faithful flock that murder and mutilation - which he calls "punishment" -  are proof of just how much his "God" is pure love.  In an article published on https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/,