Today at the Editor’s glance: A few words about Christ. “It is difficult to see him objectively, not only because the evidence is derived from those who worshiped him, but even more because our own moral heritage and ideals are so closely bound up with him and formed on his example that we feel injured in finding any flaw in his character,” Will Durant writes. “His religious sensitivity was so keen that he condemned severely those who would not share his vision; he could forgive any fault but unbelief. There are in the Gospels some bitter passages quite out of key with what else we are told about Christ. He seems to have taken over without scrutiny the harshest contemporary notions of an everlasting hell where unbelievers and unrepentant sinners would suffer from inextinguishable fire and insatiable worms. He tells without protest how the poor man in heaven was not permitted to let a single drop of water fall upon the tongue of the rich man in hell. He counsels nobly, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ but he cursed the men and cities that would not receive his gospel, and the fig tree that bore no fruit. He may have been a bit harsh to his mother. He had the puritan zeal of the Hebrew prophet rather than the broad calm of the Greek sage. His convictions consumed him; righteous indignation now and then blurred his profound humanity; his faults were the price he paid for that passionate faith which enabled him to move the world. For the rest he was the most lovable of men. We have no portrait of him, nor do the evangelists describe him; but he must have had some physical comeliness, as well as spiritual magnetism, to attract so many women as well as men.” Or, as Anthony Burgess described him, ” “Christ, whatever else he was, was a popular hero: an exotic cat lick done in by the Roman proddy dogs.” Bruce Barton, author of the unfortunate The Man Nobody Knows, which alleged Christ as the “founder of modern business,” called Christ the world’s greatest salesman, reminding us that nothing is ever so crass as the American salesman. In a 1772 letter, Voltaire observed that “Jesus Christ never thought of speaking in favor of softening the blows of slavery, and yet how many of his compatriots were enslaved at the time!” Since we’re onto heathens, there’s also Bertrand Russell’s observation. He admired Christ. But had some reservations. “There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.” And now this:
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Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“It was uncertain if he had even lived. But an idea had been born back then, which had continued to triumph down to the present, and that idea was the dignity of every individual soul, and the equality of all–in a word, individualistic democracy…”
–Thomas Mann, “The Magic Mountain” (1924).
