How an Atheist Knows Christ

I am an atheist who does not believe in god, mostly because such a word can not be defined. The word “god” is so amorphous and abstract that it can mean anything to anyone. And the more broadly we define such a term the more it could be be like something that maybe even atheists would accept, while the more narrowly such a term is defined the more finite, contradictory and thus purely man made it becomes.

As such, when my mom told me she was sad that I did not know Christ, I explained it to my mom this way:

Mom, the word “Christ” means “anointed,” which is a word the ancient Greeks used to describe people like Socrates or Aristotle. It’s what they would’ve called Buddha or Confucius, or Bertrand Russell, or maybe even Noam Chomsky, and lots of other people. It’s what they called people who possessed particular brilliance, in other words, and who often imitated “Jesus” by picking up their cross of speaking truth to the world, even though they knew they may well be crucified on it by one Sanhedrin or inquisition or another for doing so.

 But they do so, because they know that is what the grave inequalities and injustices of this Earthly Eden of ours require, to “save” humanity, and even the world itself, from our collective ignorance, fear, and superstition, which is the cause of all war and suffering in the world; from Socrates for “corrupting the youth” by teaching them to question the gods, to Russell for trying to save the youth by opposing WW I.

In fact, even the Jews had many messiahs! Initially, the word meant “divinely appointed king,” which Pontius Pilate identified with the ancient Jewish king David. Fearing that Jesus was the new king David, and that the Hebrews were going to unify and rise up against the Romans under Jesus as they had under David, is why Pilate posted the sign “king of the Jews” upon his cross, to dissuade any would be revolutionaries. And Jesus, who was not seen as a “god” until centuries later - and it was a long incremental process at that - was only turned into a “god” by the Greek speaking Roman scholars who wrote the NT, because all of the emperors of Rome, going back to Julius Caesar, were made into Gods; in the same way your Catholic Church today turns people into saints.

After Jesus, for example, Simon bar Kokhba became the next “messiah” when he founded a short lived Jewish state before he was defeated in the second Jewish Roman War, in Judea, around 135 AD.[i]  Christ, is not a “person,” to put it more simply, it’s a state of mind; the state of an open mind. And not one that clings to a “father” in heaven for fear of damnation, but which is free to accept anyone and everyone as if they were your Jesus. Because the equality that everyone  shares is we are all equally “the face” of what you call “god.” And to judge others who you think are not acting like the ideal you have in your head, which you call “Jesus,” is to cut off your nose to spite your face. So you see, in that sense, the only way I can have a relationship with the “true Christ” of an open mind, is by not believing in some brand of god some “church” is selling me, and making a killing while doing it.

Does that make sense?”

My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is a 1995 book by James W. Loewen, a sociologist

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[i] It is interesting to note that around the same time of the writing of the New Testament by those Greek speaking Roman scholars, on the military front, the Flavian dynasty destroyed Jerusalem under Titus in 70 AD, following the failed Jewish rebellion of 66 AD. Titus, in other words, by destroying the Jewish capital of Jerusalem, was tantamount to Pontius Pilate crucifying Christ, for the rebellion in 66 was the very thing Pilate was worried about. It was those Jews, by the way, who refused to recognize that Titus was a "god." And instead, the descendants of those rebels elevated one of their on; a Robin Hood of sorts. It is interesting also because Titus was the only biological son of a Caesar, his father being Caesar Vespasian, who would become a Caesar. Titus, in other words, was the only Caesar who was not only seen as a god by the Roman Citizens while he reigned, since all of the Caesars were seen as gods at that point, but also the actual “true”… “son of God.”