Theos-Talk Archives (April 2003 Message tt00146)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Etzion Becker <etvionbb@n...> 
wrote:
> He said concerning Jesus, that he didn't die
> on the cross, that he survived the serious injuries, his disciples 
smuggled
> him out of the country, and he went to India, were he lived till 
age of 84

Muslim legend is that he lived to be 102.

> He was buried in Harvan, Kashmir.

Srinagar.

> There is
> some truth in the Gospels, but it was largely altered. My view is, 
that the
> founders of the Christian religion, made Jesus some kind of *god* 
in heaven,
> and we miserable sinners have to worship him, be *good*, so he will 
give us
> a nook in heaven (conditioned if you tithe the church properly), 
etc. Same
> with any other religion - the people have to be dependent of some
> *authority* to make the right decision in order to *get* into 
*heaven* -
> such a childish nonesense.

Isaac Luria thought he could descend into hell (in imagination) and 
somehow rescue the "sparks" which were imprisoned there. Gershom 
Scholem says Luria was the first to write about this idea, and that 
it therefore originated in the thirteenth century. If the Jesus 
story proves anything, though, it proves that this notion goes back 
well over a thousand years before Luria was born and was transmitted 
mouth to ear during that time. I neither know nor care whether 
Luria's ideas make any sense, but I am fairly confident that several 
hundred years after his death he is not doing much of anything, let 
alone rescuing people from hell. Anyway, whatever its validity or 
invalidity, this idea is Jewish, and specifically kabbalistic.

As for JC, as a kabbalist he was a Jew mystically, but he was not a 
Jew theologically. He apparently believed the whole Jewish legal 
system should be completely dumped in favor of an ethic which was 
rational and humanistic. I have to say, I rather like that. Having 
no use for the Jewish law, he also had no use for their god and 
proclaimed one of his own who agreed with him that the law should be 
abrogated. He also wanted to bring down the temple cult which was 
centered in Jerusalem and which sucked money out of the indigenous 
peasantry like some sort of vampire. After his death the Romans took 
care of the temple and put an end to the family owned business which 
ran it. When the garbling got started he was posthumously reunited 
to the Jewish religion and the Jewish god and there he remains 
today. If he were alive he would be turning over in his grave.

Since kabbalism was secret in the first century and for many 
centuries afterward, Christianity is to some extent the product of 
honest confusion and misunderstanding. Beyond that there was 
deliberate misrepresentation and suppression of known facts. The 
result is a crass commercial enterprise which is worrisome when it is 
not downright laughable. Priests have been exposed as a squalid gang 
of faggie child molesters, like Theosophists such as Leadbeater. 
Catholics are taught that some old man in Rome is God. Presumably 
that means there are no toilets in the Vatican, except for the use of 
tourists. Jimmy Swaggart goes on stage and "dances like a prick" to 
borrow a phrase from Ali G, while stealing from his congregation and 
hanging out with whores. There are Christians who want to scrap our 
constitution and set up a theocracy on the Saudi Arabian model, 
complete with stonings for transgressing some idea or other in the 
Old Testament.

It is time to completely dump this religious legal system and replace 
it with an ethic which is rational and humanistic. It is time to bid 
Yahweh adieu and proclaim a new deity which favors brotherhood over 
lawyering. It is time, in short, for a second coming, not 
necessarily of a man, but of ideas which are still ahead of their 
time. I am not going to hold my breath waiting for it, though. 
After 2000 years somehow I don't think it is going to happen.