Cheap Tricks for Jesus
They are Evangelical Christians claiming to be young professionals. Sporting “Religion is a lie” t-shirts, they hand out an informational card implying Christianity is a false religion and naming names; Lutheran, Catholic, et cetera and comparing these to Buddhism, Islam and more.
But what they are really getting at is, none of these religions are good enough, fellow Christian sects included .. when you go to their website and see the testimonials, they have Jesus and truth monopolized. Yes, ‘religion is a lie’ and these young Evangelicals have proved not only their religion employs a lie, but proved also they are individually liars. Do you suppose Jesus would approve a cheap trick to pull people in? It recalls his quote “You hypocrites!”
Honestly, their shirts should say “Cheap tricks for Jesus”
Or how about a narcissistic Evangelical spiritual metaphor: “Turns cheap tricks for Jesus” @ turnscheaptricksforjesus.com
For a bit of authentic scholarship concerning the historical Jesus, check out the ‘Jesus Seminar’
“For Paul, the Christ was to be understood as a dying/rising lord, symbolized in baptism (buried with him, raised with him), of the type he knew from the Hellenistic [Greek] mystery religions. In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role.” –The scholars of ‘The Jesus Seminar’
Smug, smirking, these ‘young professionals’ turning cheap tricks for Jesus stand in a line promoting abdicating personal responsibility for your life, and there is no sense of shame in they’re misleading people and promoting an exclusionary theology in violation of not only the great teacher Jesus’ instruction “Do not judge” but giving little attention to their real guru, the psychotic St Paul who invented the lie of the “Christ” and pinned it on Jesus. St Paul also claimed ‘’the devil is the father of all lies” and so must the devil be these young professionals father as well; young professionals who cannot see the violations of their own scripture. Well, well.
A religion that advocates abdicating responsibility for one’s personal life by ‘giving yourself to Christ’ as opposed to taking responsibility for the hard work necessary investing in oneself to arrive at an honest understanding of, and comfort within the self, is a cop-out. When lies are employed to perpetrate that cop-out, it should come as no surprise one lie will easily lead to another lie. To read up on shameless Evangelical lies concerning the USA and its historical relationship to Christianity, check out liarsforjesus.com
For a condensed explanation of the fantasies of St Paul and his invention of ‘The Christ’ that smears the historical Jesus, read HERE
For those who’d like to limit themselves largely to what Jesus had actually taught, Thomas Jefferson anticipated ‘The Jesus Seminar’ nearly two centuries previous with his ‘Jeffersonian Bible’ attempting separating the “diamonds from dunghills” in the New Testament:
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” -Thomas Jefferson
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Ronald Thomas West 