Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Matthew

1
There are two points about the events unfolding here. The idea put forth is that the Lord brings into being a physical extension of Its holy spirit, in the form of a human. This god-person lives, grows, and feels as other humans do (A god we created in our image supposedly created us in Its image...and then created another god, in OUR image? If this all feels a bit incestuous and pedestrian and masturbatory, you're not alone.). My first point is that it seems a violation of the Lord's consistency, to ordain that a god-person appear only at one particular place and time in history. Are messiah stories just a shabby way to subvert the notion of omnipresence? How can god be "more" or "less" present? And it just seems unjust that certain people be given access to this god-person, while others are not. My second point is that having this god-person come as a man reinforces the fallacious notion of male superiority. To this day, sexist ideas are so embedded in most of humanity that the "naturalness" of a male messiah (or indeed of God ITSELF being male) is something that many people, of both sexes, never think to question. Of course, if the god-person had to come as one human, It had to be one sex or the other. But how telling is it that the Bible, a book penned by men, would have a male messiah? How obvious? How tawdry. Would Christianity have achieved the following it has, had Jesus come as a woman? Perhaps the Lord was merely being pragmatic, in creating Jesus in the gender that would be most readily respected, but again, it does not seem reasonable that the Lord could pander to a system of repression and subjugation.
12:1-8
These words, as with many of Jesus' words, contain nothing which, in and of themselves, proclaim unreasonableness. Bear in mind however, that these words directly contradict commands from the mouth of God, from the Old Testament. If Jesus and God are one, as Matthew attests, it is inconceivable that they could contradict one another.
21:19
Jesus' anger or irritation with the tree, even to make a point, seems unjust. And illogical, too, unless trees possess spirituality like that of humans. Which is fine with me, but not really in line with the Bible thus far.

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