Spirituality, aesthetics and the profit motive. America from the time of Herman Melville and “The Confidence Man” does not appear to have altered significantly. Or has it?….
Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com):
Yesterday, a couple of ‘godders’ came to my door (uninvited i might add). I opened the door to a rather stunning older black woman – beautifully coiffed and rather stunning and imposing. She had a little fat puffy white boy in tow with her. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit. He also was nervous and somewhat sweaty, too. He st…ood behind her and she did all the talking.
“hello, we want to invite you to celebrate our lord’s death.”
I said , no, thank you’ (or something to that effect.) My partner (maire) shouted ‘happy Easter!” from behind me. Then i closed the door as she shoved this flyer into my hand.
Art Chantry:i think this is enough discussion about the reality of a living christ for now. i want to talk about bigfoot for a while. and then flying saucers, too. i'm suddenly now all 'fair and balanced' and the new agers and para-biolog...ists are hassling me for equal time. the rosicrutians are up after that. then i have a new guy who wants to have equal time for a start-up that's based on the possible existence of an all-seeing, all-knowing seal pup that lives on the bottom of the san andreas fault name of "bippy". he wants to call his new 'religion' "bippyism" and wants the equal time to grab a few lost souls and soak some money out of them. so no more jesus-speak for now. besides, you guys all make me wanna puke. not that there's anything wrong with that... Read More:http://www.artchantry.com/
Just look at this image.
To begin with, one of the weird things that places Christianity alone is the resurrection. the “x”tian faith is a celebration of death (and subsequent PHYSICAL rebirth.) That sort of defines Jesus as a zombie, doesn’t it? Only we’re expected to drink the blood and eat the flesh. Very strange stuff.
If we didn’t have Jesus
We wouldn’t have
No one at all
If we didn’t have Jesus
We wouldn’t have
No one at all
If we didn’t have Jesus
We wouldn’t have
No one at all
God gonna set
This world on fire
God gonna set
This world on fire
God gonna set
This world on fire
One of these days
One of these days
One of these days
All of the sinners
Gonna turn up missing
All of th
Gonna turn up missing… ( Randy Newman, If We Didn’t Have Jesus )
But, the thing that floors me is the image of Jesus on this crummy little brochure. Can you believe this thing? It looks like a cross between mr. Brady (on ‘the brady bunch’) and Charleton Heston (in ‘planet of the apes’). I mean, could those godders have been handing out a more confused and elaborately misleading image – along with their “celebrate the death of our ‘lord'” message? Geez. What has become of us?
---Jesus Hates Zombies featuring Lincoln Hates Werewolves in: Yea, Though I Walk... Vol. 1. Pretty sweet! The book is due to hit shelves in September! Here's the gorgeous cover by my good friend Danilo Beyruth...Read More:http://jesushateszombies.blogspot.com/
Everybody with even a small partially operating section of the brain intact would realize that anybody who was born and raised in the ancient middle east would not look anything remotely like this image. I mean. this whole picture is a complete and utter lie. Do you trust anybody who can lie to you like this? Oh, excuse me, we voted in George W. Bush – twice!
There are orders of Jesuit priests who study the history of Jesus – the REAL person that lived as Jesus Christ in the ancient middle east 2000 years ago. It’s often referred to as “the search for historical jesus.” It’s an extremely complicated and convoluted endeavor that is made all the more baffling as they get closer and closer to the actual timeframe of his life. So little historical reality is actually documented that it turns into one dead end after another. The bible seems to have been nothing but a slapdash amalgam of many religious books collected together like short stories and re-written and collected centuries after Jesus actually lived. So, very little of the book has any historical information that can actually be used to trace his existence that it’s a conundrum.
The bottom line is that the closer that these Jesuits get to finding the REAL Jesus Christ, the more he vanishes from history. He seems to be (at best) a legend or a myth. At worst, he was a piece of propaganda created to build a business model soon to be called a ‘church’. Taken from this perspective, this all too Aryan and middle-class image of Jesus on this crummy brochure actually is far more truthful in intent than anybody would guess.
How do those same Jesuits doing all the research deal with the contradiction? Well, the best response to that question (which gets asked all the time) is “faith and facts have little in common.”
So it goes.
…Gonna climb up
Jacob’s ladder
It’s not very far away
Gonna climb up Jacob’s
Ladder one of these days
I’m gonna walk
And talk with Jesus
I’m gonna walk
And talk with Jesus
I’m gonna walk
And talk with Jesus
One of these days
One of these days
One of these days
God gonna set
This world on fire
God gonna set
This world on fire
God gonna set
This world on fire
One of these days… ( Randy Newman )
ADDENDUM:
“Over the centuries, artists have considered Isaiah 52 (“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him”) and the fact that Jesus worked as a carpenter (without power tools) until his 30’s, and decided that Jesus was a pale, skinny, effeminate Prada model.
Historians agree that Jewish men in Jesus’ day had short hair – at some point, being a Nazarene got mixed up with being a Nazarite, and He has since been depicted with long hair or even a mullet. This has resulted in bumper stickers claiming that Jesus is a Democrat.
White Christians effortlessly counter claims of an olive-skinned Jesus with historical evidence of their own: Arthur Maxwell’s The Bible Story and the Hanna-Barbera video series “The Greatest Adventure Stories From the Bible” clearly show that not only was Jesus white, but so was every other person mentioned in the Bible.” Read More:http://www.stuffwhitechristianslike.com/2009/02/15-white-jesus.html
…Black clouds are (hung?) in (an Arabian?) sky
And Jesus stood there dignified
They stuck a thorn into his eye
And they began to crucify
Lord why did you let your son die?
Lord why did you let your son die?
Lord why did you let your son die?
Jesus died for you
Jesus died for you
Jesus died for you
They buried him in a poor man’s grave
But he still had Mankind to save
So he rose from that poor man’s grave
And he saved Mankind
He said
Forgive them, they know not what they do
He said
What fools these mortal be
And I say
Baby, I’ll lay down my life for you
Just the way that Jesus died for me
Bring him back.
Bring him back.
Bring him back.
Please bring him back
Bring him back in the summertime
Got to have Jesus in the summertime
In the summertime
In the summertime
In the summertime
In the summertime …(Randy Newman, Jesus in the Summertime)
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