Poor Old Jesus

A fantasy picture I am fascinated by.

A few years ago I recall having one of my sporadic twitter-ding-dongs with an ultra-conservative-gun-totin’-Trumpian-christian-fundamentalist-white-supremacist-Biden-and-electric-car-hatin’ dude.

What a long and depressing identity list but seriously, not one of them is inaccurate.

I try not engage in this kind of ding dong any more and that’s a great relief, I’ve left twitter and don]t miss it. I know this kind of discussion is sadly a pointless waste of time but I used to try and tell myself it would be a clarifying and healthy mental exercise. It would, “sharpen my arguments.”

It did nothing of the sort, it just dragged me down into the mire and hate seeped into my heart.

But this particular interaction has stayed with me because during this brief and thankfully not too unpleasant exchange of views (we politely agreed to disagree) I found this picture on a previous tweet in his long and vitriol filled timeline.

I don’t known the source of this picture. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

I do not possess the skills and weird inner world to make this picture up and I am slightly loath to mock it because it’s clearly been created with great care and thought. The almost childish simplicity of the message fascinated and slightly offended me in equal measure.

I will get to the offense part in a moment, but I encourage you to study the image for a moment or two.

The central figure of Jesus presumably holding a scroll on which is written the law of God is a classic image for anyone who grew up in a Christian culture.

What is confusing are the figures gathered around him and the setting in which he stands.

It’s clearly meant to be Washington DC and the slightly tragic fantasy depicting the impact he will surely have when HE returns and lays down HIS law is . . . .   well, what is it? Tragic? Deluded? Maybe just a bit sad. The leap from the world I live in, to the world where this is a perfectly sensible prediction of the future is too wide for me to traverse. It is SO weird I can’t understadn what would motivate anyone to create it.

Surely it’s an overblown way of saying ‘when my dad gets here, he’s really gonna show you!’

I’m assuming the laws written on the Holy scroll will, according to the incredibly simplistic imagery, be some kind of dictatorial, right wing reactionary instructions that will make all those damn liberals, journalists, homosexuals, scientists, pregnant women (?) and atheists (pictured bottom right) hold their heads in shame.

It will vindicate all the ex-presidents, soldiers and ‘God fearin’ ordinary folks (bottom left) and the years of suffering they’ve had to endure from those damn commie Muslim fascist Biden-ites.

The fact that Abraham Lincoln is depicted kneeling with his hands out as if to say ‘yes, it is He and lo, His word is law,’ is doubly confusing as this is the man who said "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."

But surely as an atheist I shouldn’t be offended by this image, I have no belief in some bronze age fairy tale, it’s all irrelevant to my day to day existance.

Well, allow me to explain.

I was brought up in a Christian society, taught by Christian teachers, I went to church quite often as a child although both my parents were discreet atheists. Neither of them had a change of view as they lay on their deathbeds, neither had a last-minute conversion, they both died bravely and without rancour.

I went to Sunday School when I was very young, I learned the stories about Jesus and the teachings he gave.

The notion that we shouldn’t judge others, that we should be tolerant, we shouldn’t respond to violence with violence, we should try and understand and sort out our own failings before pointing out the obvious failings in others.

That we should be kind, loving, tolerant and forgiving.

Basically, really good stuff, kind, humane ideas emanating from an era of ignorance, cruelty and brutality. I liked those stories as a child, I like them now.

So using this dark skinned, dark haired Jewish man from 2,024 years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean as a figurehead for white-male-right-wing-highly judgmental and authoritarian conservatism is slightly baffling, but sadly as we now know, entirely predictable.

I also don’t want to critique the absurdity of modern Christianity any more than the questionable beliefs held by the other two Abrahamic religions. I know there are equally absurd notions and claims made by them, but it is the awkward contradictions depicted in this fascinating picture that maybe separate this type of Christianity from the very dated and solid structures we know all to well with the other two flavours.

I have always found the fact that Jesus was a Jew very intruiging, particularly considering the millenia long fear and hatred of Jews by Christians. I’m so, so grateful not to have the burden of these beliefs, I don’t want to ban anything. I don’t want to oppress any religion, the effect religions have had on most of my life has been immeasurably tiny so it’s really not a problem.

And yet outside my little happy bubble of atheism, I can see that religion and the claims the bronze age dudes made in their scrolls are still having a brutal and negative influence to this day.

That really is a problem, and I’m not saying if millions of people shrugged off religion all suffering would cease, of course not, but I truly don’t think there would me more wars and brutality.