The God Problem 3 (and finally)

[SarahM32]

39. Very well said, Charles. Good work.

I just have some comments about one paragraph:

It is my personal conviction that no one better articulated this notion of God than Jesus, who knew that love lay at the heart of reality. If God is not a person up there somewhere, perhaps Jesus is all of God we can see in human form—or as the early church saw him—fully God and fully human. Yet like all religious people and religious structures, he only pointed to that deeper reality by what he did and what he taught—even by how he died.

I think it is true that Jesus did articulate the most accurate notion of God at that time, if we consider both the official church canon and the gospels that were not included in it, and if we realize that some of what is in the canon was fabricated Pauline theology based on a misinterpretation of the Hebrew Torah and Tanakh.

The essential message of Jesus is there even in the canon, though, and Christians who understand it recognize it (while Theocrats who masquerade as Christians don't).

The part I disagree with is your mention that "perhaps Jesus is all of God we can see in human form—or as the early church saw him—fully God and fully human." Even the official church canon is contradictory regarding that subject, since Jesus said: "You have not heard God's voice or seen God's shape at any time," and "God is greater than I." I believe Jesus said that acknowledging that a servant of God is not equal to the Holy One who sent him, and that, as Isaiah wrote, no man can be compared to God.

I, like Thomas Jefferson (who said: "Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.&quot love the essence and heart of Jesus' universal teachings, but I believe much in the canon is problematic, as it has proven to be during the last sixteen centuries.

During the Enlightenment many great thinkers realized that. And Jefferson even wrote: "Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Jesus by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being."

Therfore, I believe that while it is important and crucial that we redefine or better describe what God really is, it is equally important and crucial to bring about a New Reformation of all religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions.
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