Tygarjas Twyrls Blog

I was going to write this after my next post, but my next post might come off as slightly abrasive to certain believers that are kind enough to read my words, and so I feel it necessary to lay this one down first. The purpose of this post is simple, I want to make as clear as I can my current opinion of that guy:

So, the obvious: I take him with a grain of salt. That being said . . .

The catholic church has long maintained that Jesus is both earthly and divine. He is both man and God. Whenever looking at a religion I tend to look toward the orthodoxy for the views that should be inherent to that religion. And given that that view was created about 1600 years ago to reconcile the fact that there was no orthodoxy at the time and different “Christians” had different views regarding Jesus, I look at this view as being the thing that the organized teaching of Christ had as its belief once it was in existence 400 years after the fact. Since that is the belief of his followers consistently since they decided to have an organized agreement about him, I begin by considering that belief against what I know of history past, and existence present.

My view of anything, and anyone, is as follows: If I haven’t met someone, they seem much less real to me than someone I have met. I am 99.9% certain of Ben Stein’s existence because I have met the man personally. Before that I was about 95% sure because I used to watch his game show frequently, and was a Ferris Bueller Fan. But before shaking his hand, there was only so certain I could be. Take Einstein for example, I’ve seen enough pictures and read enough exact quotes, and used enough of what his science created, that I can be pretty sure he existed. But I never met the guy, and even if I had, I know from experience that things aren’t always what they seem.

I don’t mean to come off as a doubting Thomas. The simple fact is that to me, if something is not experiential, it is not useful. If it isn’t in the realm of direct experience, it falls under the heading of entertainment. Ben Stein is something I have experienced. Einstein is something I have experienced, or at least the concepts attributed to him. God is something I perpetually experience. Comparatively speaking, Jesus is something not so experiential. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of what he supposedly looked like. Though of course in real life everyone knows he was black . . . Just kidding I don’t know that either, though he probably at least had a real good tan. I’ve read the stories written at least decades after he supposedly died that tell me what he supposedly did. And studying the history, no two accounts are the same.

So, to begin with, whether or not Ben Stein, or Einstein, or Jesus is real doesn’t really matter to me. But of those three, two of them I have a basis for experiencing, and the other one I really don’t. That being said, I have no reason either to believe or not believe that the guy existed to begin with. And that being said, since a lot of people seem to think he did exist, and since I have no reason to dispute something so many people want to believe, if he did exist, and again I have no reason to care one way or the other since he hasn’t done much for me lately, my views on an existent Jesus are as follows:

Given the reports passed down through the years by the groups of Christians who were successful in silencing the other groups of Christians, Jesus is supposedly both human and divine. I have no problem with that premise whatsoever. As a man he seemed to be someone really trying to teach people to treat each other as though there was an inherent divinity within each of them, and that they should respect that of each other. He must have taught according to his own realization that he was made in the image of the divine as was everybody else, since a) that is the Jewish teaching, which was what he taught, Judaism, and b) he is likely to have had a direct experience of that teaching given the character of what he is said to have taught. So, as is every human being, Jesus was of course both God and Man. If he existed, the only difference between him and apparently most of the people around him just then is that he was maybe more cognizant of his place in the greater whole than most of the others he taught to.

So, that’s it. Jesus is alright with me. It doesn’t particularly matter to me if he existed or not since the law is the law regardless of him. But if anyone can learn to treat others as though they are sharing bonds of divinity as Jesus strove to teach his students, thank goodness for the stories.

TTFN