Meditation for December 22nd
Why Jesus?
Another War on Christmas post.
As we approach Christmas, we focus more on the story of Jesus Christ’s birth in a manger in Bethlehem in one gospel, but in Nazareth in three other gospels. Christians are very convinced that Jesus came to guide us to salvation by dying for our sins.
God created man, and ever since Adam and Eve, God has been confused by humans. Maybe it started with eating the peaches in the Garden of Eden and gaining the knowledge of right and wrong, when God became bewildered by human decision-making. While we can and do make decisions based on doing the right thing, we will also lie, cheat, steal, and kill each other to get what we want.
At first, God was angry with man’s zany decision-making. He began to test them, and if they failed, God would punish them. He killed, maimed, and cursed whole family lines in response to the fearful lives of humans. He even played a game with Satan to see if Job would stop worshipping him if he had a bad enough time. God did win that bet, but other biblical figures have wrought the wrath of God for doing less than most Christian worshippers today.
Then God realized that it just wasn’t going to get better, so he flooded the earth to start over. Minutes after the water recedes, God is already upset with Noah and his family. He could have started over completely. He does have the power to do that, supposedly, but instead, he invests in one family, and he invests wrong. We are all related to this family now, which is weird since it starts with incest.
Then came a long period of God being depressed. He created this world and made man, but he just can’t understand how man keeps fucking everything up. Again, they have the capacity to make these significant ethical decisions. Still, they turn around, sometimes on the same day, and lie, cheat, steal, and kill each other to get what they want, and what really pisses the Sky Daddy off the most is that they keep looking to different Gods.
See the problem: God is omnipotent. He is literally perfect. Man is flawed, and God made them that way because he only wanted these animals to look like him. The flaws, combined with the permanent and generational genetic effects of the forbidden fruit, have made humans a different, baffling animal that vexes God.
God came up with a brilliant plan. He would come to earth and be born as a normal human. Or he will have an angel impregnate a woman with his seed, and his son will walk the earth. Or some combination of divine and human entity will be born and hang out with humans. He wasn’t the first god to walk among mortals, and not the last one either.
Now he walked the earth acting as a know-it-all blowhard, trying to correct all the mistakes the religious were committing in his name. From the quotes, he had a hard time saying anything straight up, other than maybe the Sermon on the Mount, where he is saying to take care of each other and stop hoarding wealth, but other than that, it’s all parables and riddles. Whole governments are making military decisions based on the foggy meaning of some of these parables.
Did God feel loneliness? Did he think the anguishing uncertainty that he is realizing his true potential? Did he have imposter syndrome? Did he have a hard time grasping what reality is? Did God, as a human, do anything that he regretted and would sometimes not sleep because he kept reliving that mistake? Did he truly understand what it was like to be human? Or did the divine overtake the human part of Him, and so he still was baffled by our decision-making and our morals.
If the scripture is to be believed, Jesus lived pretty clean. He only pointed out other people’s mistakes and preached love and tolerance. He saw that man was misunderstanding what a relationship between mortals and God should look like. Some thought he was talking about a utopia of post-Roman Judea, but others thought he was delivering a divine message to the Jewish people.
So the mortals killed him. They didn’t just murder him; they executed him by nailing him to a cross after torture with a crown of thorns and making him drag the heavy wooden cross up the hill.
Did God learn what he needed? Well, he has left us alone since then. The universe keeps getting bigger and bigger, and our existence keeps getting more and more threatened, but not by God, but by our own hand, and it’s led by His most ardent followers, so it seems like God just let go. Maybe he looked in on a Coda meeting and realized that he was being way too codependent with us, and it was time to detach with love. God doesn’t listen to our prayers anymore. He tried, but he’s still confused by our antics.
He is just going to let men kill themselves off naturally, and he will come back and start over. Even the belief in His son is making us more self-destructive, so he won’t have to wait long.
Prayer
Santa,
I don’t need a new Lexus,
I actually want something much more meaningful.
Why the fuck?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
And if Father isn’t happy with us,
Why keep us going?
Was there/is there a plan?
Not what’s said by your believers,
Because I don’t believe them
Since they lie, cheat, steal, and murder more than most.
That’s all I want to know.
Amen
Craft
Hand Baby Jesus in the Manger Craft
- Colored cardstock or construction paper
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Glue stick
The first step is to sketch your baby Jesus and two outlines of each hand. When you have a sketch, you will know which colors of construction paper to cut for the hair, the clothes, and the hand-shape templates for the straw.
Glue all of it together.
You now have a baby Jesus to worship, adding meaning to your life.
Goal
It is very plausible that nothing we think about Christianity is true, and even if there was a divine visit by God, maybe the message was misinterpreted. We have left the interpretation up to humans, and humans are very, very fallible.