hephzibah wrote:Setanta, I respect your point of view, even if we may not always agree. So, can you please help me understand what you mean by this?
And . . .
hephzibah wrote:Actually let me clarify that...
It is not so much that I don't understand what you mean as I would like to understand where you are coming from on this. However, if this is a topic that needs to be dropped I am also willing to do that. I must head out to work now. I will catch up with you all later.
First, thank you for your kind remark.
I have no reason to believe that the putative Jesus ever existed--nor any to deny that he ever existed. I do think it improbable, as for someone so controversial, and arousing such emotion a century after he allegedly lived and died, it is a bit much to think that he aroused insufficient remark in his own lifetime not to have had at least a mention in someone else's contemporary account. I think, rather, that the putative Jesus is an avatar, an embodiment of the mystico-spiritualistic Jewish cult known to history as the Essenes. It is, of course, possible that this alleged Jesus is a badly corrupted account of the life of a single Essene, who was not, in fact, politically controversial, and was not crucified by the Romans.
Because, in fact, very specific tenets of the most popular cult in Rome in the era of Saul of Tarsus--that cult was the cult of Mithras--entail an allegation of a virgin birth, from a mother impregnated by god, and a painful death followed by a resurrection, and celebrated by adherents in a "cannibalistic" ritual in which the symbolic body and blood of "the son of god" were consumed. These are tenets without precedent or referrent in Jewish scripture and mysticism. Therefore, whenever one looks at any account other than the four orthodox gospels of the new scriptural canon, one cannot with any certainty assert what may have been an original teaching of this individual (if such individual ever existed), and what is a subsequent interpolation, Pauline or otherwise. One can only refer to the four gospel scrpitural canon for what is only a vague idea of what the teaching of this individual may have been. Given contradictions between these accounts, they are themselves of dubious value. Finally, individuals such as Origen and Eusebius winnowed the existing accounts or gospels to these four gospels, and edited and "corrected" them--this we know because they recorded as much in their own writings.
Therefore, if one suggests, as others have done here, that the nasty old god of the old testament and his laws no longer apply because of the "new covenant," one is restricted to that scriptural canon to know what the will of the putative god would be. Therefore, one is left with no objection to homosexuality, because there is no mention of it in that particular scriptural canon.
), they are arguing also against the millions of protestant christians whose protest was precisely that the catholics had adopted pagan, largely mithraic, practices. 
