/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Jesus's kingdom is in heaven, unlike modern day revolutionaries he never promised heaven on earth, but after death

>Back in Jesus's time when politics and religion were firmly merged together and people couldn't even conceptualize politics without god
Back in that time of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East was polytheistic where most of the worship was done in private and sectarian cults. The Gods influenced the life of mortals, but they struggled amongst themselves, had human qualities, and no destined plan for humanity other than that humans should become Gods on their own. People wooed to their favor for harvest, good trade, military victories or good sex. It did not influence political decision at all - Jesus was as such a revolutionary figure, for an all-encompassing religion of revelation, national liberation and social revolution.

>>2925487
humans should NOT become Gods themselves*

That's why in all the stories the Gods punish ruthlessly everyone who aspires apotheosis, unless that person comes from divine blood.

Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who participated in riots against Roman occupation. A close friend of his betrayed him to the Romans. And his execution was done in the most humilliating way there was at that time. This was so known and so traumatising for his followers, that they worked really hard in trying to convince other jews that Jesus, while not being a prophet but the son of God, checked the prophecy of messiah. But the prophecy at that time was of a powerful military leader. So early christians couldn't ignore the humilliating death of Jesus but had to recontextualise it. Funny that 600 years later, muslims inspired by periphery weird christian ideas said that Jesus didn't really died in the cross.

people couldn't conceptualize anything without god in those days. there was no psychology, there was no neurology, people didn't even know what the brain was, they believed that routine everyday thoughts and feelings and decision-making happened in the heart, and that the brain was just filler material to keep the skull from caving in. if a person walked out into the wilderness to contemplate on life in solitude and he experienced some kind of personal revelation, there could be no logical explanation as to where it came from other than god. there were no concepts like "introspection" or "subconscious" and people did not know where the inner self ended and the outer world began (and still don't really), people attributed things like resentment and hatred and immoral urges to the devil coming into their heart to tempt them and destroy them, and they attributed things like inspiration and hope and self-discovery to god coming into their heart to help them and show them the way. all of this was wrong of course and we can easily see that now but back then it was all perfectly rational, it was people doing the best they could with what little they had, it was their equivalent to what we call science today.

we know essentially nothing about jesus or who he was or whether or not he even existed, all we have are ancient copies of copies of copies of stories passed down and passed down which are secondhand witness testimony and interpretations of this man and what he did and what he was about by people who claimed to have known him and they are all quite different and often contradictory in their accounts. jesus was not alexander and he didn't build an empire and conquer civilizations leave behind a legacy of corroboratable evidence all over the world, he was just a commoner. i would hesitate to even describe him as a political figure at all, because the only political affairs he was really involved with were the internal affairs of the common jews living in ancient rome and even within that sphere he was not a pharisee or person of status, he was a complete nobody and outsider living among the peasant class. to the jews, the empire was all they knew and it encompassed the entire world and it had been around for as long as anyone could remember, since the kingdom of israel fell thousands of years ago the jews had lived as nomads in a world ruled by great pagan empires and rome was the biggest and most unstoppable one yet. freedom and independence and revolution were unthinkable, no human force could resist the empire, it was in god's hands and all anyone could do was wait and endure and survive and hope that god would someday intervene and set them free. the pharisees who oversaw the jewish districts of the roman empire were essentially just middle managers, they had very little real authority, their job was to keep their people in order and render undo caesar and carry out the will of the empire.

so jesus's movement wasn't really a political movement so much as it was a spiritual movement - the jews did not have the power to change anything about the world, the only thing they could change was themselves, expand their minds, change the way they think. jesus criticized the pharisees and called them out for what they were, as hypocrites and sellouts who compromised their values and broke their covenant with god in exchange for a small amount of wealth and privilege bestowed upon them by wicked pagan idolators, jesus preached a message of forgiveness and compassion and generosity and solidarity to a marginalized underclass who were being slowly and insidiously crushed and torn apart by the latest and most diabolical iteration of the empire yet, an empire that was not satisfied with merely dominating them physically and controlling their material conditions by pillaging and enslaving and deporting them like the previous empires did, this empire sought to dominate their minds as well, to slowly and insidiously corrupt them and turn them against one another and make them forget their beliefs and their values and who they were, to utterly annihilate them and turn them into nothing. the romans were studious observers of history and the legacy of alexander and they knew about the babylonians and what happened when they sacked the kingdom of israel and how the jews managed to preserve their culture and their beliefs while others like them became assimilated and erased from existence and they had no intention of making the same mistake. but how do you erase ideas? the jews had a remarkably high literacy rate compared to any other culture in the world at that time, estimated to be about 5-10% which doesn't sound like much but in a time when most civilizations actively prevented and even forbade literacy among anyone but the ruling class, it was phenomenal and made the jews extraordinarily resilient to cultural extinction. even if you murder all the priests and scribes and burn all their temples and burn every book or scroll with hebrew writing on it, the jews have enough literate people among their common population to rewrite all of it from memory more or less exactly how it was. so if you can't destroy it from without, then what you must do is corrupt it from within.

the compromised pharisees and their capitulation and corruption was like a weaponized virus that influenced the entire jewish community and made them lose faith in their own people and values and even their god, and it was all very carefully and deliberately orchestrated. the empire always works from the top down and the way it dominates the minds of men and breaks their spirits is by desecrating and corrupting the people and things that they revere most - if they cannot even trust their religious leaders and scribes who are the caretakers of the word of god itself, then who can they trust? when jesus said to turn the other cheek, he wasn't merely talking about resisting the urge to retaliate against an attacker, what he was really saying was, "don't let them make you like them." he was saying that we live in a world that is largely beyond our control and we cannot do anything about the empire or the politics or the plagues or the famines or all these other problems that are far bigger than any of us and ultimately in god's hands and it is not our place to question the will of god, but the one thing we can control is ourselves and how we think and what we hold onto inside which no one can take away from us if we don't let them make us like them. we have to do the opposite of what the empire does and start from the bottom and work up, start with how we think and how we interpret reality and honest we are with ourselves and how we conduct ourselves in our everyday lives, we have to humbly and courageously endure our suffering and not let it compel us to abandon our individual humanity and our faith in ourselves. we've already lost the war outside of ourselves a long time ago and we never had any hope of winning that war and we are slaves and we may always be slaves, whatever modicum of personal wealth or status we may have is provisional and counterfeit it is all just idols and false gods dangled over our heads by our pagan overlords and the frauds who serve them, all that there is now is the war inside of ourselves and this is our final stand, if we lose ourselves then we are gone. that is what jesus was about, that's what his movement was about.

>>2925484
>Back in Jesus's time when politics and religion were firmly merged together
you're smuggling this assumption in without evidence. atheists have always existed.

>and people couldn't even conceptualize politics without god
god? the abrahamic god yahweh? there were way more gods than that and most people were not monotheists.

>so I guess it must've made sense for a man to develop a political vision and think of it all as a revelation from heavens.
the gospels weren't written until 70 CE so we have no idea what the actual historical figure jesus is based off of, if he even existed, even thought.

>If you calm down and look at Jesus's message thinking of it as a political message then it can be summed up to a sort of proto utopian communism.

Not utopian, which implies making the material world a better place to live, something jesus (the version of him we get from the gospels) thought quite impossible, since according to him, the material world is fallen and a product of sin, and he thought people should suffer and beg for forgiveness and await the glory of heaven.

Nor communism, which implies overthrowing the ruling class through violent revolution, an act of disobedience against the natural order ordained by the God presented to us in the bible.

The closest we have to revolution against the ruling class from late antiquity is the servile wars, especially the two led by Eunus and Spartacus.

As far as the new testament goes, the closest thing to "communism" comes from Acts 4:32-35:

<32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

This is basic voluntary sharing of a community of religious equals. More of a mutual aid network than anything.

> He advocated for better treatment for slaves (which is really a lukewarm reformist stance),

Jesus says no such thing. That comes from Ephesians, which is from Paul, and is not quoting anything Jesus said…

Ephesians 6:5-9:

<5 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. 6 Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. 7 Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people, 8 because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free. 9 And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

Also this is less about reform towards treating slaves better and more about putting the fear of God into both the slave and the master. The reform towards serfdom away from slavery took hundreds of years and was more of a slow economic transition than something deliberately done on account of Christianity, and the early church itself owned slaves. There is a good video from Kings and Generals on Youtube about the slow transition from slavery to serfdom in Europe.

>an abandonment of money and instead life in communities where people share their shit and help each other.


>He also invented the threat of hell to force people to do as he said and his rhetoric and methods had a ton of weaknesses.

Jesus did not invent the threat of hell, even a layman's perusal of this subject matter is enough to put this idea to rest so I hope you won't mind me quoting shittypedia:

<As early as 1500 BCE, the Egyptians asserted that the dead will be judged and, if found guilty, punished and tortured for their crimes.

<One of the oldest detailed descriptions of Hell, however, are probably found in the Kathāvatthu, one of the earliest Buddhist writings written around 250—100 BCE.

<Tartarus is the place where, according to Plato's Gorgias (c. 400 BC), souls are judged after death and where the wicked received divine punishment.

Many other cultures had already invented the idea of souls being sent to a place of punishment. This was not a new idea.

>His insistence of pacifism

He drove the money lenders from the temple by force. Was he a pacifist?

>only made his followers easy to hunt down and for the people in power to distort his ideas. In the end Jesus's thought was entirely recuperated by the Romans.

christianity spread eastward out of the roman empire and the prophet mohammed's parents were christians.

>They took Jesus out of christianity and interpreted everything he said in a way that allowed them to do what they were already doing: kill rape and pillage everyone, which eventually merged (and turned) into christianity itself.

the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class

>Most of christian history of destruction is just an influence of the roman co-opted version Jesus's political movement with very little of Jesus himself,

i don't want to get into the question of whether much can be said about what the historical jesus, if he even existed, would have thought, since the jewish rebels against the roman empire who lived around the time of jesus were actually quite violent and not against raping and pillaging if they needed to do it.

>which means Jesus is a catastrophically failed political leader whose life should be interpreted as a failed revolutionary movement,

where does he advocate for revolution? and how do you know since we apparently lost his real teachings?

>and as all revolutionary movements it should be studied to avoid the same mistakes.

what is there to learn when what is passed down to us is distortion?

>For example, he proved that martyrism and pacifism do not work at all,

the purpose of martyrdom and pacifism is not to defeat the ruling class, but to make the apathetic population realize that violence is necessary through the deaths of innocents. even Gandhi and MLK used nonviolence in this manner, to create a strategy of tension.

>that speaking in vague riddles will just make it easier for your enemies to just distort everything you said in a way that is convenient to themselves, and that communism must be materialist.

how do we know the real jesus even spoke in parables since what was passed down to us were gospels written after jerusalem was already destroyed by the romans?

>>2925485
>pic
ah fuck this rocks, thank you

>>2925484
>He also invented the threat of hell to force people to do as he said
This is a later addition to this religion. Jews at that time didnt believe in afterlife.