The Jesus MeetUp Is Jesus a Christian? Week #21
Here are the 12 main Christian tenets of faith:
1 God created all that is seen and unseen.
2 Jesus is the Son of God and is One with the only true God.
3 Jesus suffered and was crucified.
4 Jesus died and was buried.
5 Jesus rose again. [the Resurrection]
6 Jesus ascended into Heaven.
7 Jesus will return.
8 Faith without works is dead.
9 Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
10 Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins.
11 God created Hell to send unbelievers for eternal fire and torment.
12 The Bible is the infallible Word of God.
Christian tenets 1 through 7 are things Jesus would agree with, as we know from what our
Urantia Book tells us He said, did, or believed.
Christian tenets 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 are BIG NO-NOs! ----> Jesus never agreed with these!
Read on.
This is where things get really interesting.
Tenet 8 comes mainly from what Jesus’ brother James erroneously said, “Faith without works is dead.” James 2:14. Paul went on to somewhat agree with this statement. However, when we look closely at what Jesus said to the brigand hanging on the cross next to Him we can see clearly that the brigand had no opportunity to do any “works” since he was nailed to a cross and almost dead! Let us read what happened and what Jesus said to this man who had faith alone.
187:4.1 One of the brigands railed at Jesus, saying, "If you are the Son of God, why do you not save yourself and us?" But when he had reproached Jesus, the other thief, who had many times heard the Master teach, said: "Do you have no fear even of God? Do you not see that we are suffering justly for our deeds, but that this man suffers unjustly? Better that we should seek forgiveness for our sins and salvation for our souls." When Jesus heard the thief say this, he turned his face toward him and smiled approvingly. When the malefactor saw the face of Jesus turned toward him, he mustered up his courage, fanned the flickering flame of his faith, and said, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And then Jesus said, "Verily, verily, I say to you today, you shall sometime be with me in Paradise."
So, Tenet 8 is a falsehood.
Faith alone is required to get the approving smile and confirmation of your secured spiritual state from Jesus. Will you desire to “do your Father’s will” if you love Him? CERTAINLY! YES! But God does not threaten you with losing your eternal salvation if you do not DO certain works!
On to Tenet 9.
Tenet 9 teaches that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and that His mother Mary was a virgin. We know this is not true as our Urantia Book tells us that Mary and Joseph had quite normal marital relations. Jesus knew He was born in the normal way in our world and that His parents were loving of one another and made love as any married parents will do. He approved of this as He knew this is His Father’s way on all material worlds.
128:0.1 As JESUS of Nazareth entered upon the early years of his adult life, he had lived, and continued to live, a normal and average human life on earth. Jesus came into this world just as other children come; he had nothing to do with selecting his parents. He did choose this particular world as the planet whereon to carry out his seventh and final bestowal, his incarnation in the likeness of mortal flesh, but otherwise he entered the world in a natural manner, growing up as a child of the realm and wrestling with the vicissitudes of his environment just as do other mortals on this and on similar worlds.
Tenet 10 begins to get into some very disturbing psychological abuses.
In terms of misrepresenting Jesus’ Paradise Father’s good name and character, Paul is indeed the great corrupter of Jesus true teachings.
Jesus never mentioned God’s need for blood to be shed in order for forgiveness to be applied to any one of His loved children. Paul erroneously attached the archaic practice of blood sacrifice to his personally invented new religion called ‘Christianity’.
Ephesians 1:7 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.” ~ Paul.
However, Jesus NEVER said or taught this! Think how the atonement doctrine makes our Paradise Father appear to be ruthless, bloodthirsty and viscious in demanding the death of His own Son on a Roman cross. Christians make bold to rail against abortion and yet they shout from the rooftops that a Father demanded the blood of his own son to be shed so that someone’s mistakes could be “paid for”. Is this not what abortion does? It calls for the bloody death of a child to be executed so that an-other's mistake can be assuaged. Do you think this hypocritical?
Jesus said of His Father…
132:4.2 Always the burden of Jesus’ message was: the fact of the heavenly Father's love and the truth of his mercy, coupled with the good news that man is a faith-son of this same God of love.
Paul’s failures are serious and grievous as they have caused our Paradise Father’s children to have great fear of Him and self-hatred for themselves as being “bad” with original sin and innate evil etc...
121:6.5 Paul failed...and that was the doctrine of the atonement;...Paul's theory of original sin, the doctrines of hereditary guilt and innate evil and redemption therefrom, was partially Mithraic [pagan] in origin, having little in common with ...Jesus' teachings. Some phases of Paul's teachings regarding original sin and the atonement were ORIGINAL WITH HIMSELF.
Tenet 11 WOW! Let us find the falsehood!
11 God created Hell to send unbelievers for eternal fire and torment.
86:4.8 Almost every group had a different idea regarding the destiny of the ghost soul. The Greeks believed that weak men must have weak souls; so they invented Hades [Hell] as a fit place for the reception of such anemic souls; these unrobust specimens were also supposed to have shorter shadows.
So, Hell is an invented/made up story to convince people to be strong and have good souls. We now know that we do not need any fear tactics from supposed religious teachers/leaders to scare us into making good free will choices that thus grow our own souls. Because Hell is not real in the first place we have no need of : 1. Thinking that any erring human will be consigned to the fiery torture of Hades.
2. Thinking that WE are fortunate due to the fact that WE have chosen God, are better and more righteous than others so that we can be grateful to God that he will not send us to eternal torment. [Note: Jesus said that there are no chosen people. Our Paradise Father loves all of His children equally.]
3. Appreciating Jesus for taking my place since supposedly I deserve to go to Hell and experience God’s painful, burning anger and rage at me for my sins. I do not need to be thankful that Jesus willingly chose to be my substitute in Hell because THERE IS NO HELL!
These are all silly ideas and concepts.
You and I also know, from reading our true Urantia Book, that the Book of Revelation is a vision John had on the Isle of Patmos that has now become so distorted and damaged that no human could possibly know what it really says.
139:4.14 When in temporary exile on Patmos, John wrote the Book of Revelation, which you now have in greatly abridged and distorted form. This Book of Revelation contains the surviving fragments of a great revelation, large portions of which were lost, other portions of which were removed, subsequent to John’s writing. It is preserved in only fragmentary and adulterated form.
So, when our fellows try to prove the existence of Hell using the Book of Revelation we know that those passages do not say what they think it says. No one can know what this verse quoted next relates to. It is NOT referring to our loving Paradise Father!
Revelation 14:9-10 A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb.” ~ John. This is an assault on our Father.
On to tenet 12!
The Christian tenet of faith that states that the Bible is the infallible “word of God” cannot possibly be true. This is for a number of reasons. 1. Jesus challenged His group with an explanation of the changing of the Yahweh concept down through the ages as seen in scriptures. He proved that scriptures have absolutely been touched by the hand of man whenever someone deemed it necessary for their own personal reasons. This is too lengthy to fit within these two pages but you can read it for yourselves in Paper 142:3.1-23. 2. We clearly see in Genesis that in no short amount of time—just 16 verses after announcing the birth of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4—Cain has murdered his younger brother and is consequently thrown out of this land by God. In theory, this would have dropped the world’s population from four down to three. The narrative continues in Genesis 4 with Cain settling in the land of Nod and having children with his wife. Obviously, there were other humans living in our world at this time. So, the Bible itself proves that it is NOT infallible and was written by someone other than “God”. If these two instances prove that the Bible is errant then what else has been changed in order to fit the desires of humans down throughout history?
Jesus does not consider Himself to be a Christian!
The GOOD NEWS is that these disturbing and rather frightening concepts regarding God are not true and therefore we can embrace the true, beautiful and good character/nature of our Paradise Father. We can learn from everything that Jesus has really said as dictated in our beloved Urantia Book/Part 4 regarding our soul growth, potential for spiritual growth, good futures that lay before us and delight in the fact that we are fully LOVED, completely CARED FOR and we have our indwelling Thought Adjusters/fragments of our Paradise Father along with Jesus’ Spirit of Truth both working for our good in every way possible.
Jesus has asked for us to preach the kingdom of God that dwells within everyone.
He has called us to love our fellows while we have the courage to challenge these false doctrines that hurt people psychologically. Christianity was invented by Paul, influenced by the poor additions to Jesus’ teachings by His own group who clearly did not understand much of what He said to them. And then, we have today those religious leaders/teachers who continue to prop up fear-mongering knowing full well that their own financial coffers will continue to be enlarged if the profit-motive system of Christianity is held up.
Jesus indicates from His teachings that He desires to see more leaders/teachers who will stand up and proclaim to the world what He has told us without any manipulations for profit in any way. The world needs to see more people like this who will spread the good news of the kingdom of God that dwells within knowing that when they do this they will discover that they are supported by the seraphim, assisted by our midwayers, celebrated by Jesus and seen with joy by their indwelling Paradise Father.
196:2.1 Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus. In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ. The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road. The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul's religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. The only notable exceptions to this statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only once referred to the personal religious life of his Master. The New Testament is a superb Christian document, but it is only meagerly Jesusonian.
Note: Have you ever heard a Christian say “I’m a God-fearing person”? It’s a shame that the teaching of such a false doctrine has instilled false Fear of what we know to be a Truly Loving, Forgiving God. Let us help spread the word of the Real Paradise Father’s character!
What are we waiting for?
To faithfully proclaiming the true teachings of
Jesus and our beloved Paradise Father ~ Marin and David
Questions to discuss:
1 Has the atonement doctrine caused you to think God might be angry with you? If so, how?
2 Has Paul’s doctrine of Hell caused you to fear your death and life thereafter? If so, how?
3 What do you feel now that you know Jesus never said these things?
Next we study Week #22 Jesus Is Here Now: Proof
