Sunday, November 16, 2008

Why a Jesuist?

Who do people say the Son of Man is? - Beliefnet Forums:

"Paul is the reason I am not a Christian. God is the reason I am an atheist. Jesus is the reason I and many nominal Christians are Jesuists."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Paul is dead, but seriously… just this morning I was trying to come up with a term that would encapsulate my atheistic attitude toward Christianity (within which religion I was loosely raised) and permit my admiration for Jesus himself. I thought I might have coined the name "Jesuist" and Googled it…

Thanks for being out there on the blue roads.

Anonymous George.

PS - Something I frequently say to people is "Thank goodness that Jesus was NOT a christian."

J'Carlin said...

It took me a while on Google to find the term. Most of the cognates were taken.

I come from a similar background if you call UU "loosely Christian." Back before the merger "Unitarians believe in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of [people], the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of [humankind] onward and upward forever."

I liked the emphasis on Jesus, particularly since even then I was an atheist and God was worthless to me. But I studied all I could about Jesus, studied the synoptics in all versions I could get my hands on and found the Jefferson bible before Forrest Church made it popular.

A phrase you will find frequently in this blog is Paul hijacked Jesus into Christianity.

By the way if you have anything on Jesuism named or not, please link to it here. A work in progress for the more literate blog is an in depth study of Jesus as opposed to Christ on religion.

I find it an encouraging trend in Christianity that many are returning to Jesus in General and the Two Great Commandments in particular as the basis for their faith regardless of what their faith is supposed to teach.