I think this might be one of my favorite videos/speeches on this topic to date. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, but of course his message has just been transformed into the most misused nonsense ever; Pat Condell is right on the money with this one. I believe I posted this in the shoutbox a few weeks ago, but I'm not sure why I didn't immortalize it with the post it deserves, so now I'm posting it.
The video is really awesome through and through, but if you don't want to watch the whole thing, at least check out this awesome quote.
There's a common misconception among Christians that the purpose of their religion is to spread the message of Jesus. In fact, the purpose of Christianity is to suppress the message of Jesus and to swindle you out of the kingdom of heaven.
Christianity is grounded in the notion that there's something fundamentally wrong with being born a human being. Original sin. It's probably the most poisonous and self-destructive idea in human history, so naturally it has been enthusiastically embraced by clergy.
Whereas Jesus seeks to empower you, clergy seek to weaken you, to make you feel small and helpless. They don't want you to consider the lilies of the field or to seek the kingdom of heaven within because that's too much like the message of Jesus. They'd rather you focused instead on the ludicrous celestial psycho drama of God and Satan and angels and demons and hellfire, and to burden yourself with baseless guilt and morbid fear of eternal damnation.
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You may recall, [Jesus] told the pharisees point blank where they could find the kingdom of heaven. Don't look here or there, he said, look within.
But they didn't want to hear that any more than the modern pharisees want to hear it, because they knew very well what he meant, that the kingdom of heaven is a STATE OF AWARENESS in the here and now that doesn't require the stewardship of professional clergy, and that if we took his advice to seek it within, not only would we find it, we'd find the strength and the wisdom to put them and their whole bloodsucking fear mongering criminal racket permanently out of business.
