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Calling Christ a drag queen pedophile shows what’s wrong with academia

April 1, 2018 by Bookworm 39 Comments

An academic article calling Christ a queer, pedophile drag queen reveals that modern academics know nothing about anything — and then teach it to our kids.

I finally got around to reading the article about Holy Cross College professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew, who has some interesting ideas about Jesus Christ (whose resurrection Christians around the world celebrate today). Before getting to Liew’s theories, you need to know that he’s not just any professor who’s randomly dabbling in religious analysis. Instead, he’s someone with rigorous training and expertise in Christian religious studies:

Professor Tat-siong Benny Liew received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Olivet Nazarene University and completed his doctorate at Vanderbilt University.  Prior to his appointment at Holy Cross, Professor Liew had been Professor of New Testament at the Pacific School of Theology, and before that taught at Chicago Theological Seminary. According to the Department of Religious Studies webpage, his fields of specialty include “synoptic gospels, gospel of John, cultural and racial interpretations and receptions of the Bible, apocalypticism, and Asian American history and literature.” [Footnotes omitted.]

Those are some serious academic chops. Clearly, if Liew opines about Christianity, we should give him deference, right? Welllllll . . . maybe not.

The above-linked, much-shared article, exposes the theories Liew has been promoting in academic publications. For Liew, identifying Christ as a Jew, a rabbi, a profound moralist, and (if you’re Christian) the Son of God and Man’s savior, is old hat. It’s time for some new thinking about Christ:

The 2004 article “Mistaken Identities but Model Faith: Rereading the Centurion, the Chap, and the Christ in Matthew 8:5-13,” provides a representative example. Professor Liew and his co-author, Theodore Jennings, argue that Matthew 8:5-13, the story of the centurion who goes to Jesus to ask for healing for his servant, ought to be interpreted in terms of a sexual relationship.  Matthew’s account, runs the argument, does not concern a centurion and his servant, but a centurion and his lover/slave. “The centurion’s rhetoric about not being ‘worthy’ of a house visit by Jesus (8:8) may be the centurion’s way of avoiding an anticipated ‘usurpation’ of his current boylove on the part of his new patron [Jesus],” they assert. Furthermore, “The way Matthew’s Jesus seems to affirm the centurion’s pederastic relationship with his παῖς, we contend, may also be consistent with Matthew’s affirmation of many sexual dissidents in her Gospel.” [Footnote omitted.]

Yes, says Liew, Christ is a gay pederast. But wait, folks, there’s more!

. . . . Professor Liew explains that he believes Christ could be considered a “drag king” or cross-dresser. “If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con)figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a “king of Israel” (1:49; 12:13– 15) or “king of the Ioudaioi” (18:33, 39; 19:3, 14– 15, 19– 22), but also a drag king (6:15; 18:37; 19:12),” he claims. He later argues that “[Christ] ends up appearing as a drag-kingly bride in his passion.” [Footnotes omitted.]

Gay pedophile cross-dressing Christ! Appearing soon at a sex show near you!!!

But why stop with that, if you’re Liew? In today’s LGBTQRSTUV etc. world, there are many more labels that can be attached to Christianity’s savior: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Christians, Education, Homosexuality, Identity politics, Religion Tagged With: Academia, Academic, Annunciation, Cal, Christ, Crossdressing, Deconstructionism, Gay, Gospels, Holy Cross, Jan Van Eyck, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Liew, New Testament, Oscar Wilde, Pedophilia, Picture of Dorian Gray, Symbolism, Tat-siong Benny Liew, University of California Berkeley

It’s Progressives, not conservatives, who want to turn America into a Christian theocracy

April 17, 2017 by Bookworm 26 Comments

If one takes Progressives at their word about Jesus and politics, it is Progressives who are working to turn America into a Christian theocracy.

Progressives Christian theocracyIf you go to Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, you will see that the current bestseller is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (see image, left).

Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986, during the Reagan presidency. Back then, Democrats (as Progressives still called themselves) were terrified that Reagan and his supporters in the Christian Coalition were about to turn America into a Christian theocracy, comparable in all respects to Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeni. I, being a young, yuppified, NPR-style Democrat, naturally read the book. At the time, it seemed soooo significant; now it just seems over-heated, paranoid, and quite silly.

For those who haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale (or those who did read it and are trying their damndest to forget it), the plot is a simple one: America is a Christian theocracy run by old white men with sterile wives. To prevent population collapse, the men and their wives basically imprison nubile young women and force them to have three-way sex (in a bizarre Christian fashion) in order to get the young women pregnant. The lead character eventually escapes to freedom where she can make her own choices about her body. In other words, it’s a pro-abortion novel contending that it’s inevitable that, if Christians are politically ascendant, we will have an American theocracy complete with women subordinated, barefoot, pregnant, and in weird ménage à trois relationships with reptilian old men and women.

As Atwood’s return to the bestseller lists shows, today’s Progressives are terrified that we’re again heading for a Christian theocracy, never mind that even Trump’s most committed supporters would not characterize him as a devout Christian. After all, it was Trump who creatively referred to “Two Corinthians,” which sounds more like a hipster bar than Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Progressive hysteria also has it that Trump, who championed gay marriage long before the winds of change overtook Obama and Hillary, is going to copy Muslim Chechnya and kill gays.

To prove that ascendant Christians aren’t just scary, but are also very, very wrong, one of my Progressive friends posted to Facebook a link to a lengthy Progressive post from a couple of Easters ago. The post’s author, Elisabeth Parker, made the usual argument that Jesus is really a Leftist and would bitterly oppose all Republican political initiatives. It’s an endless post, but I’ll quote just a little bit, along with my comments, so that you can get the flavor:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Christians, Government, Lefties on Parade Tagged With: Christ, Christian Theocracy, Jesus, Margaret Atwood, New Testament, Progressive Theocracy, The Handmaid's Tale

Was Jesus a Leftist?

September 9, 2016 by Bookworm 17 Comments

SERMON-ON-THE-MOUNT-MichelangeloThe New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof thinks that were Jesus’s Second Coming to happen any time soon he’d be upset that those religious people most closely associated with him (aka Christians) are rejecting the Democrat party platform. John Ellis does a good job of explaining that Jesus was not a bearded Progressive but was, instead, the incarnate intermediary between man and God. Indeed, Ellis’s article goes much deeper than that, by pointing out that Kristof’s “expert” is, in the classic sense of the word, a “heretic.”

Because I lack Ellis’s depth of knowledge about core Christianity and about heresy, I thought I’d amuse myself by going a different route. I haven’t read the New Testament since 1980, when I took a “Bible as Literature” class at Cal. (Can you imagine a time when a state-funded school could still teach that kind of thing? And yes, even at Cal they still offered traditional learning classes back in the day.)

I’ve placed lessons from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (from the Book of Matthew) in one column and, in the other column, I’ve set out my opinion as to whether those statements mesh with modern Progressive preaching and acts. Please note that, because I am not a religious scholar — especially not a Christian religious scholar — I am taking Jesus’s words at face value when deciding whether Progressives are in sync with his teachings  or not.

I apologize if this post runs too long. The fact is, though, that I rediscovered what I first learned in my class at Cal:  The Sermon on the Mount is vivid, thought-provoking, intensely humanist and, in the King James Version, exquisitely beautiful. In addition to appreciating the philosophy, I enjoy recognizing all the phrases that have worked their way into the English language (although today’s generation has probably abandoned most of them).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Christians Tagged With: Christ, Jesus, Progressives, Sermon On The Mount

Jesus would have supported RFRA

March 31, 2015 by Bookworm 21 Comments

Jesus-and-Cross-BR550The useful thing about the Left’s willingness to expose its ignorance is that analyzing its errors often leads one to greater truths.  For me, the greater truth flowing from a poster highlighting Leftist stupidity is that Jesus almost certainly would have approved of Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as similar acts in other states and under federal law.

Being Jewish, I have to admit that I don’t usually run things through a “What Would Jesus Do” filter.  However, I started thinking along those lines when a large number of my Leftist Facebook friends got very excited about this Easter poster:

Flog a banker

My first thought was that, in general principle, the man who preached the Sermon on the Mount would not have approved of that poster. Jesus was not generally a fan of flogging:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

***

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Still, there’s a grain of truth in that anti-Christian poster. Upon his entry into Jerusalem, Jesus did yell at the money changers and tip over their tables. What enraged him, though, wasn’t their profession, even though he did castigate their enclave as a “den of thieves.” Instead, he was upset because they were profaning the holy area of the Temple.  Matthew describes an angry man:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

John describes a man willing to use the lash to clean God’s house:

And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;

And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

What Lefties, who are “instruction” learners, rather than “principle” learners, take away from John is very specific:  Flog people who handle money.  In fact, that’s completely wrong.  I’ve already noted that, as a general. matter, Jesus did not believe in using violence against his fellow man, even if said fellow man was doing something mean or sinful.  There was a bigger principle at stake here.  What drove Jesus to a violent frenzy was the desecration of the Temple.  Jesus had a clear hierarchy:  Treat your fellow man with love and kindness; but treat God, his house, and his words, with absolute reverence, untainted by government or commerce.

Jesus’s clear delineation between religious and secular matters appears again when he was called upon to talk about taxes. When hostile questioners tried to get Jesus to reject as a matter of faith the taxes that Rome imposed on Jews, he instead drew a bright line in the sand: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

The Founders, all of whom were steeped in the Bible even if they were not practicing Christians, knew about Jesus’s efforts to keep commerce and government away from the purity of faith. They were also aware of their own history: For more than 100 years, Christians and Jews had come to America to escape the stifling, and often deadly, restrictions imposed upon them by European governments because of their faith. It was in this context that the First Amendment came into being:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Thanks to the 14th Amendment, the individual states are also barred from making laws that impinge on religious freedom. The only exceptions are laws that advance a clearly compelling state interest. For example, assuming we don’t lapse into complete dhimmitude any time soon, our laws against murder would prohibit sharia’s insistence that gays are an offense to Allah and must be hanged, thrown off buildings, or beaten to death.  Outside of abortion, which is a discussion for another day, American morality has been such that the State’s compelling state interest is to protect people’s lives, if at all possible, not to take them.

Given that both Jesus and the Founders upheld an inviolable sphere in which people are free to practice their faith without the sullying influences of government and commerce, what would Jesus think of Indiana’s new RFRA laws?  My feeling is that he’d approve.

Rich Lowry sums up precisely what Indiana’s RFRA law is and what it is not:

All the Indiana law says is that the state can’t substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion, unless there is a compelling governmental interest at stake and it is pursued by the least restrictive means. The law doesn’t mandate any particular outcome; it simply provides a test for the courts in those rare instances when a person’s exercise of religion clashes with a law.

The law does not mandate casting stones at gays nor does it require Christians to hate gays.  And interestingly enough, the vast majority of Christians did not cast stones at gays, nor do they hate them (although they disapprove of their sexual practices).

The only thing that the law does is to say, consistent with both Jesus’s teachings and the Constitution, that people of conscience cannot be forced to bring commerce or government diktats into their own inviolable area of faith.  Put another way, to the extent marriage is a core sacrament to the faithful, the law cannot force them to sell themselves out — in effect, to become coerced money changers in their own temple.

Incidentally, while I’m on the subject of the gay lobby pushing ever harder on Christians and Christian doctrine, let me say that all of this was predictable.  Years and years ago, I warned that gay marriage had nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with toppling religion.  Here’s what I had to say on the subject in 2009, when Prop. 8 (defining marriage in California as being between a man and a woman) was a hot ballot item:

As you know, one of my main reasons for supporting Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman, was because I believe that the move to redefine marriage has the potential to put the State and religious organizations — especially the Catholic church — into a head-on collision.

Liberals, when confronted with this notion, will often argue that, while the Catholic Church objects to abortion, that’s never created a constitutional crisis. What they ignore is the fact that, while the church is not in the business of providing abortions, it is in the business of providing marriages. ***

Keep in mind that, for Catholics, marriage isn’t just a white dress, cake and Mendelssohn’s wedding march. Instead, it’s a sacrament. A basic tenet of the religion is the joining of man and woman before God. Marriage is one of the sacraments.

So imagine this scenario: Two men go to the local Catholic parish and demand that it marry them. The priest, sympathetic to their love for each other, nevertheless states that he cannot, at a purely religious level, marry them. The men turn around and sue the Church for violating their Constitutional rights. Suddenly, the judicial system is called upon to examine doctrinal issues to determine whether they mesh with Constitutional issues. It’s a scary scenario for anyone who takes seriously the principle that government may not interfere with religious doctrine.

The RFRA fight is not about protecting gays from discrimination. While the ignorant sheeple who are going around screaming about boycotting Indiana are incapable of understanding this, the people spearheading the charge know perfectly well that RFRA is in essence a shorthand for the established constitutional principle that states may not impose on religion without a compelling reason.

These same operators have a clear ultimate goal, which is to see religion overturned. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, and all the other Leftists who took over Judeo-Christian countries understood that traditional religion, with its emphasis on personal responsibility, justice, morality, and grace, is the enemy of socialism and tyranny. In America, though, because the Constitution precludes direct attacks on Christianity, gay marriage represents a back door way to destroy both the faith and the faithful.  The tactic is working too, as Gov. Pence has already pretty much surrendered.

For more on the upcoming attacks on traditional religions, check out this Ben Shapiro post.

I can’t think of a better way to end this post than to quote Servo1969 about the nature of those groups that seek to overturn the Judeo-Christian tradition in this country — and their nature is not aligned with Christ’s principles about our responsibilities to our fellow man:

The thing to remember about all these modern “rights” groups is that no matter how much they use the word “equal” they don’t really mean it. They don’t want to be regarded as equal with their oppressors; They want to be regarded as better than their oppressors. They want to be given special treatment in all situations and they want it entered into law.

Modern radical feminists are actually female supremacists. They believe they are better than men and that men deserve to be punished collectively for their past transgressions against women.

Modern radical gay rights activists are actually homosexual supremacists.They believe they are better than Christians and that Christians deserve to be punished collectively for their past transgressions against homosexuals.

Modern radical [insert minority here] equal rights activists are actually [insert minority here] supremacists.They believe they are better than whites and that whites deserve to be punished collectively for their past transgressions against [insert minority here].

Christ, with his emphasis on the fact that we are all responsible for ourselves and all equal before God, would not approve.

Filed Under: Christians, Gay marriage, GBLT Tagged With: Christ, Cleansing The Temple, Gay Lobby, Gay marriage, Indiana, Jesus, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, RFRA, Sermon On The Mount

“What’s in a name?” when it comes to a new “biography” of Jesus

August 12, 2013 by Bookworm 4 Comments

I haven’t read Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, so I can’t weigh in on its factual veracity or the quality of the conclusions Aslan draws from the facts he does assert.  This Jewish Review article certainly suggests that Aslan is, if not all hat, no cattle, at least short a few cows.  As for me, I have a bias that leaves me suspicious about Muslim-authored books that seek to re-write Jesus and then are embraced by the Leftist mainstream media.  Suspicions, of course, are neither fact nor proof.

But here’s one thing I can say with absolute certainty:  Reza Aslan’s given name is a brilliant, ironic joke in this context.  You see, for me, there is now and always will be only one Aslan:

C.S. Lewis's Aslan, from the Narnia books.

C.S. Lewis’s Aslan, from the Narnia books.

C.S. Lewis’ Aslan is, of course, an allegorical stand-in for Jesus — the very same person Reza Aslan seeks to deconstruct.

Filed Under: Books, Religion Tagged With: Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Christ, Jesus, Narnia, Reza Aslan

Christmas thoughts from a Jewish blogger

December 22, 2011 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I’m about to wade into theology here, so feel free to beat me around the head (politely, of course), if I’ve committed some egregious doctrinal sin.  Before you do, though, please follow my argument to its conclusion, to see whether I’m on the right track.

I got to thinking about evil today. In my earlier post, I took it upon myself to define what I believe constitutes good (as opposed to evil) at a societal level:  Maximum individual freedom within a framework of stable laws.  What I want to discuss in this post is the evil of the individual, whether it’s just a handful of individuals committing acts of great evil, or evil on the vast scale of Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Kim Jung-Il (as well as their minions, who kept the leaders’ hands free of actual blood).

As I contemplate evil men, what always strikes me is that they are distinguished from “merely” bad people by the way in which they view their fellow man.  Your ordinary bad guy is motivated by greed, fear, anger, jealously, etc.  His own feelings drive him.  He’s not thinking about the relative worth of the people against whom he acts.  He’s simply thinking about his own needs.

People who commit evil on a grand scale, whether their victims are small in number or large, may fall prey to these passions, but these all too human emotions are not what drive them.  Instead, they commit their evil acts because they feel separate from and above ordinary humanity.  In their own minds, they are a superior species, a pleasant fact that entitles them to starve the kulaks, kill the Jews and gypsies, or turn their own nation into a giant prison camp.  The root cause of evil isn’t an unloving mother or a bourgeois upbringing or a racist society.  Instead, it is the evildoer’s fundamental lack of humanity.

Which gets me to the birthday the Christian world celebrates on December 25.  Christ was not like other gods.  The Greek and Roman panoply of gods was filled with beings who, while they suffered from more than their fare share of human foibles, nevertheless were always aware of their separation from mankind, and treated mankind as pawns in the godly games.  Christ, however, embraced human-kind.  His passion was the human passion.  Rather than rejecting human-kind, he took upon himself human pain and, in return, gave grace.  By giving himself over to humanity, rather than holding himself above it, Jesus was the antithesis of evil.

(To those of you who are hoping I’ve converted, I haven’t.  If there is any religion in me, my allegiance is to the Jewish God, an abstract, overarching figure that created human-kind, embraces His creation, and judges human-kind with a creator’s loving objectivity.  To my mind, both good and evil are concepts too small to describe the enormity of the Jewish God.)

So, while I am not now, and probably never will be, a Christian, I join with all of you in celebrating Christmas — a holiday that truly celebrates the good in all of us.

Merry Christmas!

Filed Under: Christians Tagged With: Christ, Christmas, Evil, Hitler, Jesus, Kim Jong Il, Mao, Stalin

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