1. Yup, Easter used to be a pagan festival celebrating the fecundity of spring or something like that.
2. The traditional New Testament Jesus would not be welcomed into the Republican Party nor most Christian churches today. Give away your possessions to the poor? Forgive your enemies? Judge not? Love one another? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you? It’s all still too radical and difficult for most modern Christians to follow and you can imagine the boos and catcalls if Jesus should dare run for president.
3. This is about the size of it, and why modern Judeo-Christians are so at odds with Jesus’ message of love and peace. The Gospel is supposed to be the ‘Good News’ of a new covenant with God, obviating and replacing the Old Testament, but most Christians ignore that.
4. One of the wackier argunents presented by the Christopublicans as to why we have found fossils millions of years old when they claim the universe was created no more than ten-thousand years ago: ‘God planted those fossils as a test of faith.’
5. This is more like the ‘Capitalist Savior’ Jesus the Christian Right believes in.
6. While children starve, the priests dress in finery and live in luxury. Whose side would Jesus be on? As Catholic Archbishop Helder Camara once said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”
7. As Mark Twain wrote, “Go to to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.”
H/T to Michael Dare, Dareland.com.