Was Jesus a Stoner?

Thanks for that clarification, Walter. Another A2Ker was kind enough to send a PM. I'm guilty of making too many off the cuff statements without going back to read what's been said. Sorry, if I offended anyone! c.i.

Dumb? I may be stupid (and damp), but not dumb!

That was due to my steamed glasses, patiodog, sorry!

Of course I wanted to quote your location correctly and didn't intend at all to refer to something else :wink:

patiodog, Sometimes I'm dumb, and sometimes I'm stupid. It depends on what kind of mistake I make. c.i.

LOL ... I think all of us occasionally engage our keyboards before we get our brains fully spun up



timber

Really, it's best to always be dumb when stupid, but I've yet to work that trick out.

Old cliché my grandparents had up in their house was, "It's better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're an idiot than to open it and prove it."

BTW, if Jesus was a stoner, he sure was one who could stay on topic. At least, he would seem to be from such bits as the Sermon on the Mount. There is no mention in the text, though, of how long it took him to move from piece to piece; a baked Jesus might have said the same things but taken many hours to do so...

ROTFLMAO

Rivulets of coffee are trickling down the screen of my monitor.



timber

Well now we've sorted out where everyone lives, and that we can all be dumb or stupid or both at times (but not me of course, I'm infallible like the Pope, and very wise), and that we agree that Jesus (if a little pedantic) would at least stay on message, and while we give Timber time to get up off the floor and wipe off the coffee, can I suggest,... er suggest now what was it I was going to suggest?, something really important...and germaine to the thread... nope sorry its gone. Oh well can't be infallible all the time, its hard work being infallible. Try it if you don't believe me.

I used to be infallible, but it was really killin' my social life, so i gave it up for lent . . .

Oh, hey, Setanta,... you've got weeks yet. Be as infallible as you want, this is Ordinary Time!

I thought nobody learned how to smoke ANYTHING until after the explorers came back from America.

I'd have to guess that most (if not all) religions had ecstatic roots. And it seems that pretty much anywhere psychotropic substances grow they are incorporated into religion, since they aid in the ecstatic experience. (The Quakers and Shakers and Buddhists and others try to get their sans drugs, but there's plenty -- especially in tribal societies, which the ancient Hebrews would seem to me to be -- that rely on good old drugs to do it.)

It popped into my head that they talk a lot about wine in that Bible thing and not at all about old weed (except for the burning bush, eh?), and that this could be cited as evidence that they didn't smoke it, but I reminded myself that sanitation is a relatively recent invention and it was safer back then to drink wine instead of water. (Hence the water into wine miracle isn't just about getting drunk; it's about making the water safe to drink -- which you'd think would have been the provenance of the Romans, what with their aqueducts and all.) And being able to drink stuff in the desert is a pretty big deal.

That more germaine?

Excellent patio! Good boy have a biscuit.

Is cannibalism more than just eating people?

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2797&highlight=

For those who have had their fill of canniballism, to get back here- can canniballism be classified as a religious ritual, that is does it have a mystical or religious aspect over and above just eating people?

I think it does.

Therefore I don't rate all religious practices as of equal moral value. I would put canniballism, if you classify it as a religion, just about at the bottom.

So if we make a rank order of religions in terms of moral worth, whats in the top ten, and which is number one?

Is Islam better than Christianity? Is Judaism better than Islam?

Now these are of course specious questions, but it just shows how ludicrous it can get when you start to trade off one aspect of a religion against another.

Steve, No religious. Just hungry folk. c.i.

From whence does the more against cannibalism spring? Most animals, so far as I know, are adverse to eating their own kind, even as an act of scavenging. Certainly this would have some evolutionary consequence, as any parasites and/or diseases in the victim could be transmitted to the diner. Safer to eat other animals, since diseases and parasites are generally host-specific, and can only survive in a few animals.

That said, there have been human cultures for whom cannibalism was and apparently is not a taboo -- though I suspect it IS taboo to eat someone of your own group. It may be a question of whether you view the other person as being like you or not.

Also, you've got the folks in New Guinea who ate (not sure if the practice survives or not) the brains of their dead as part of the funeral ritual. Not sure if this was ever, in human history, a more widely spread practice. Difficult to evaluate morally, as well, as there is no murder involved. Certainly the taking of the Christian sacrament is a symbolic act of cannibalism, as has been so often noted. Is anybody at all familiar with the origin of this? Surely the whole symbolic god-eating didn't make its Middle Eastern mythological debut in the New Testament. These things tend to have a lineage.

Good points patio

But its way past my bed time here, so good night and don't eat anyone.

and to what extent is the christian "sacrament" or communion not a symbolic cannibalism?

I don't think there's any way in which it is not a symbolic cannibalism. I think that's exactly what it is, at its root. Might tie into the whole "lamb of God" idea, esp. as a lamb would have been a perfectly logical thing to sacrifice to God. I mainly wonder if there isn't a whole undercurrent of ritualistic cannibalism in human mythology that I'm missing. The eating of enemies is obvious, though abhorrent; that much is clear in the House of Atreus.

I'm really getting far out of my element here. Will have to do some reading at some point...

The Roman Catholic Sacrament of Holy Communion entails a belief that The Host (or wafer) has been transubstantiated into Christ's physical flesh, and the wine His Blood. These are consumed by the faithful that they might have eternal life.



timber