Jesus loves me! This I know / For the Bible tells me so

[Procrustes Stretched]

Simplistic. Gotta love it. What? Another new book on Christianity? I do like the review by Jon Meacham:
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”

Book Review - Christianity - The First Three Thousand Years - By Diarmaid MacCulloch - Review - NYTimes.com

Read carefully, the Gospels tell the story of the disciples’ working out what a resurrected Messiah might mean, and the conclusions they drew formed the core of the belief system that became Christianity.

Why the initial uncertainty? Because it is vastly more likely that Jesus’ contemporaries expected his imminent return to earth and the inauguration of the kingdom of God — a time, in first-century Jewish thought, that would be marked, among other things, by a final triumph of Israel over its foes and a general resurrection of the dead. How else to understand, for instance, Jesus’ words in Mark: “I tell you with certainty, some people standing here will not experience death until they see the kingdom of God arrive with power”? Or why else were the Gospels written decades after the Passion? Could it be because Jesus’ followers believed that they were the last generation and did not expect to need documents to pass on to ensuing generations? If Jesus were returning to rule in a new kind of reality, there would be no need for biographies, for he would be here, as he also said in Mark, “with great power and glory.” As the years passed, however, and the kingdom did not come — despite the prayers of the faithful — the early Christians realized they should record what they could in order to capture the stories and traditions in anticipation of a much longer wait. The Gospels that have survived, then, are apologetic documents, composed to inspire and to convince. John is explicit about this, saying he was writing “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and so that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Do discussions like the ones the book raises affect your beliefs and faith? Are you tied to dogma over reason and inquiry? Can you do what Meacham is doing while reviewing the book? Does the intellect play any role where a discusion of religion comes into play?

What does this say if anything, about religion, a belief in a God, about Christianity?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

It says you should find better use of your free time.

Nobody gets forever, Dante and you might actually do something constructive once in a great while.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

It says you should find better use of your free time.

Nobody gets forever, Dante and you might actually do something constructive once in a great while.

but I get paid to baby sit for the likes of you.