How Kind Was Jesus?

The Jesus Christ of the gospels is a patently artificial construct. This Prince of Peace also preaches discord and strife:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." – Matthew 10.34.

Having told his fans to love their enemies, alarmingly, Jesus also tells them to turn families into enemies!

"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household." – Matthew 10.35,36.

" If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." – Luke 14.26.

How far does Jesus go with this malevolent (and plainly ridiculous) dictum? Matthew provides the answer:

"And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death." – Matthew 10.21.

Having alienated his followers from their families with this murderous nonsense Jesus advises his adoring groupies on how to deal with their own body parts that lead them into sin – amputation! They are to mutilate themselves by cutting off hands and plucking out eyes. He says it's better to be "maimed" than to suffer the "everlasting fire" of hell.

"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched ... And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell ... And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." – Mark 9.43,47.

According to the malefic sage, merely looking at a woman "with lust" was a sin. 3rd century Origen was one young and impressionable Christian fanatic who took the words of his Lord a tad literally and castrated himself. He was neither the first nor the last Jesus-follower to glory in self-abasement and abuse. In the hair-shirted centuries that lay ahead tens of thousands of the brethren would mortify their own flesh in accordance with the pathetic dictates of the godman.

In times of acute social hardship and plague, despairing believers, taking upon themselves guilt for general misfortune and personal tragedy, submitted voluntarily to half-naked frenzies of public lamentations and floggings. Indeed, punishing the body for the good of the soul remains a main tenet of the Christian psychosis.

Jesus Christ is the chief honcho of a physically dangerous, family-threatening, mind-warping cult! Still want to live next door to the superstar?

Pagans Knew Better Porphyry (232-305) was the nemesis of the Christians. They 'refuted' him for generations and then settled for burning his books. "A famous saying of the Teacher is this one: 'Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have no life in yourselves.' This saying is not only beastly and absurd; it is more absurd than absurdity itself and more beastly than any beast: that a man should savor human flesh or drink the blood ... and that by so doing this he should obtain eternal life! Tell us: in recommending this sort of practice, do you not reduce human existence to savagery of a most unimaginable sort?" – Porphyry Against the Christians (Hoffmann, p49).