"Find Jesus"

A recent suggestion sparked this thread. (I'm in no way upset by the advice, by the way.)

Whenever a particularly religious person suggests their faith to another, many times the advice is "Find Jesus", or "Become saved by Jesus".

I'm probably opening up a can of worms here, but I gotta ask: Why Jesus?

Jesus is fine, but nearly every Christian faith maintains that it was God who created the heavens and earth, and that it was God who sent forth Jesus.

So why is the importance placed upon Jesus? Why not God, who is assumed to be the highest power imaginable? If you want to split hairs, most Christian churches believe that Jesus and God are, essentially, one and the same. So praying to Jesus is, vis-a-vis, praying to God.

It seems to me that this is placing Jesus before God, which seems backward, a "cart before the horse" deal.


I'm not looking for umpteen quotes from Scriptures as an answer to this. Nor am I willing to tolerate self-righteousness for long. All I want is a layman's explanation as to why many churches have seemingly replaced the concept of God, as a source of salvation, with Jesus.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Cat9

And Crash, Minion was correct.

You find Jesus and not God directly because we are sinners and therefore not good enough to go to God directly. When you are "saved" means you have accepted Jesus' sacrifice, which you make you pure enough to go to God.

No, I find this pretense to be both deceptive and absurd.

As far as I've been able to figure out, if Jesus existed, then he existed only to provide tangible context for God's already existing benevolence. It was only so that we'd believe what was already true.

It is said in the Bible (and no, I can't cite the book, paragraph and line, but it's there.) that all men (and women) were created equal in the eyes of the Lord. Hence, a sinner is just as beloved as someone who is sin-free; God sees no distinction between the two and the idea that anyone is unworthy is preposterous. Created in God and of God, right? To deny us is for God to deny himself.

Further, it also states that all sin is forgiven, even before reconciliation is ever sought. By this definition, all sin is absolved in the moment because God loves everyone equally. It is only ourselves who must come to terms with the harm we've cast upon others. It's then that we approach God for the forgiveness that was already and always ours.

Anyone can approach God. That's what prayer is. Heck, that's what going for a walk and appreciating the outdoors is. You can pray to Jesus if you wish, but there's never been any backlash dealt to anyone who chose to circumvent Christ and seek God directly. Having to use Jesus, or a priest, or anything as a conduit to reach God is unnecessary. Prayer isn't louder or more effective if done in a church or while clutching a rosary.

Jesus was likely a fine individual, but I suspect that most of his message has been malappropriated toward controlling the masses instead of enlightening them. This is perhaps a significant reason as to why I find the suggestion of "Find Jesus" to be a bit of misdirection.

Regarding Mary, I was raised Catholic. I know for certain that she is revered not as a deity but as a very significant Saint. Catholicism encourages prayer to Saints, as they're considered pure and just, and are to be trusted. I never bought into the idea that each Saint had autonomous dominion over a particular aspect of life, however. Rafael is the patron saint of artists, but in a pinch, Saint Agnes or Saint Christopher would be just as reliable.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Archangelsk

Some stuff.

Yeah, that unstable dichotomy between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God is a lot of the reason I don't accept the Bible as a qualitative authority.

During the period that I attended church, I could never get into the whole "Yay Jesus!" swing. He's just a guy, a guy who never once demanded to be worshipped. All he ever did was thank his Creator for every miracle he performed. Even Jesus deferred to God.

Jesus was a man with a message. His message was received perhaps best, but is no more significant than those of other messengers throughout history. Compare the word of Jesus to the words of Mohandas Gandhi, Voltaire, Walt Whitman, Galileo, Mother Teresa, Stephen Hawking or John Lennon. I like to think that God selects messengers more often than we realize. Studying these folks' histories is far more informative than reading the Bible may ever be.

That's as best as I can figure, because it makes a lot more sense than worshipping a man who never wanted praise in the first place.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Nahika

Let's face facts Christianity gives us so much freedom most people tend to hate on it yet they love freedom.

I ask, truly what sort of freedom is "Do this or go to Hell."? No person in his sane mind would desire an eternal torment, so the default choice becomes obedience. That's not freedom, it's extortion. Get your perspective straight.

An adulterer exercises more freedom than a man who clutches his rosary all day, for he is not bound by dogmatic law.

Quote:

Face it that if he never came that we'd be a supremely oppressed society, women would be supremely oppressed almost slave like, women benefited a lot from the coming of Christ.

Yes, thank God we've eradicated all oppression from this world! If you'd crawl out from beneath the shelter of your religion, you'd see that women are horribly mistreated still. In third-world countries, they're subjected to the worst ritualistic mutilations imaginable. In the Middle East, women are second-class citizens deemed unworthy of opinion. In North America, women are still misogynized and objectified as part and parcel of our obsession with beauty and pop culture.

I'm glad Jesus fixed all that.

Quote:

If people don't find Jesus or want him at least you can root for him because we are taught compassion and patience and compared to Muhammad and his followers they are going to oppress the world.

Hey, they only learned from the Christians who pioneered the art of bloodthirst in the name of righteousness.

Glass houses, you know.

Quote:

They are going to give people the ultimatum one day it's either follow or die.

So, it's basically the same rhetoric the Christians have been spewing for centuries?

Quote:

All our inner cores wants to be forgiven.. we want peace and love we don't want to kill we're considerate and compassionate that's all our lord represents.
Everything he says is what our inner cores want to hear even if you're not even a religious person it just clicks.

No, it's quite obvious that we do not want peace and love. We understand these to be desirable ideals but we, as a collective, do not choose them. They don't serve our purposes. Eventually, several centuries from now, perhaps we'll understand these things enough to make higher choices. For the time, all this war, disease, poverty and hate is serving a very valuable function: we're experiencing it firsthand. You have no idea how crucial this truly is for a society's growth. Without the darkness, light has no context.

They don't teach you that in church though.

Quote:

It's saddening that Jesus is so great but his church suffers because we as his followers just aren't humble and considerate to our brothers and sisters that we tend to scare off the new. Or the Catastrophes of our lives make him negate him. It's sad that the disobedience or negation of one man can bring down so many.

If the church is suffering due to arrogance and mistrust, it is these things of which the church itself is guilty, and not its people to each other. The Christian church, so bound in its archaic ways, has failed to adapt to the modernization of this world. Where once many phenomena could only be explained as acts of God, now they've been explained by science. Instead of celebrating this, instead of thanking God for science, empyrical thought is denounced. How ridiculous! By distancing itself from our increased awareness of basic, scientific truths, it's Christianity that seems remote and out-of-touch with this realm.

Quote:

I pray for this world.

And there is the fundamental error. Me, I give thanks for this world.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?