News to Me: Jesus Was a Fascist?

[gipper]

I've written elsewhere, briefly, on the Pope's blunder in proclaiming Jesus Christ and specifically the Catholic Church as the only path to salvation. I call it a blunder because it is religiously and politically tone deaf, but much more fundamentally is a perversion, in my conception, of Christ's very mission. Without leaving room for alternate paths to the mountain top (in the old Hindu (?) adage, there are many ways to the top of the mountain), the Pope brazenly and blatantly neglects core messages that Christ not only imparted but which were absolutely central to His mission: tolerance, peace, cooperation and a host of others living in His theology not as abstract concepts but as real projects of the heart and soul for which daily predicates must be cultivated to achieve the end results He prescribed.

[BT]

Denominations are nothing more than brandng of the same product.

Tastes great, less filling

Does it matter.


Beer is beer

[Brassmask]

And in fact, the case could be made that beer is a problem and shouldn't be consumed.  Correct?

However, that case could nearly NEVER be made for something like clean air or clean water.


So, love and charity and togetherness should be practiced and not religion (beer).

[Universe Prince]

Beer is beer

Blasphemy!

[Michael Tee]

Jesus was a fascist?  Jesus was whatever you want him to be.  To a fascist, he was a fascist and to a communist, he was a communist.  What Jesus was supposed to be says more about the person telling you what he was than it does about Jesus.  That's the problem with obscure semi-mythological beings who leave a minimal historic record behind them.

[Lanya]

I'm sad this has happened.   
In the mid-60s  we got to have an ecumenical kids' group at our Protestant church every day after school.  I met some very nice people I otherwise wouldn't have met--I mean priests and brothers.    And some of the Catholic kids got to go to this because of the new encyclical.

Now, we're back to where we were in 1960: "You're not a Catholic? You're going to hell!"   
Only maybe people won't believe this now.  I hope not.

[Richpo64]

Good for the Pope.

The ole Nazi is correct.

 

[Amianthus]

Now, we're back to where we were in 1960: "You're not a Catholic? You're going to hell!"   
Only maybe people won't believe this now.  I hope not.

And the Protestants are still going "You're Catholic? You're going to hell!"

[Richpo64]

>>And the Protestants are still going "You're Catholic? You're going to hell!"<<

That's pretty mild actually.

[BT]

However, that case could nearly NEVER be made for something like clean air or clean water.

Are you making a case that the ecology movement is akin to a religion?

I saw where Robert Kennedy Jr. said anyone who doesn't believe as he does is guilty of treason.

[MissusDe]

I'm surprised that this is considered to be newsworthy, to be honest. The Pope didn't say anything that hasn't been heard before. The Mormon church holds that it is the one true church.  So do most other organized religions throughout the world.

What would make headlines is if every religion announced a plan to focus their efforts on encouraging their members to truly follow and practice the Golden Rule.  After all, it is a basic tenet of almost all of the world's religions.

[_JS]

In this instance I agree with both Domer and Missus.

I agree with Domer insofar as I think that Pope Benedict did a real injustice to ecumenism by overly focussing on the differences between other Christians and the Church than focussing on our many similarities. This is especially peculiar coming from a Pope who claimed that ecumenism, especially with our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Orthodox church was a top priority of his papacy. I truly find this a sad development.

I agree with Missus in that this is not really news. I posted the articles of the Vatican II conference that were reaffirmed by the Pope. As Missus said, the documents are nothing the Church has not stated since the first century. The Bible itself makes the very statement Domer, that through Christ is salvation. Most Christian Universalist theologians do not defy that, they simply find ways through which Christ's mercy saves even those of other religions and faiths.

[_JS]

>>And the Protestants are still going "You're Catholic? You're going to hell!"<<

That's pretty mild actually.

It is, but that doesn't make it right for us to return the favor.

[Richpo64]

>>It is, but that doesn't make it right for us to return the favor.<<

I've never heard a Catholic say anything about other religions like I've heard Protestants say about Catholicism. Especially in the South.

Now there are also Protestants who don't come right out and call you a bead-rubber or the Pope the whore of babylon, but they don't seem to mind coming right out and demeaning your religion to your face. I've never heard a Catholic do that. Then there's the flyers I've been handed by the born agains that condemn Catholics for "worshiping" Mary.

No, I don't return the favor, but I do hold some people and their religion in contempt for attacking the one true church. 

[gipper]

The history that Missus and JS point to is of course correct, replete with the Biblical authority JS alludes to. Yet, taking Christ's mission as a whole, that is, the totality of His life as "revealed" coupled with its necessary extrapolations, I suggest that a tolerant, respectful and cooperative model of human life is what He stood for (and still stands for) and not some venal, triumphalist game declaring one Man's centrality to the endlesss expanse of time and the infinite reach of the universe. The Church's (and any other religion's) parochial claim to the only (and fixed at that!) truth pales to an absurdity in the maw of the crowning glory (earth-version) of God's creation: humankind's mind and its contemplation of God. All the rest, hoary as it may be, is simply a fixation disserving God.