jcsbimp01

One person's post mentioned having to clarify, conversationally, "Classic Jesus or Republican Jesus?" My philosophical and analytical mind started running with that, and I don't believe such a clarification goes far enough... and I also think that to "go far enough" would shake some very basic foundations in at least my life, possibly many others. But then, if a foundation is shaky, it might bear investigating why. So if you're curious, follow along with me here.
 

I firmly believe I had no control over where and when I was born. I tend to think that is true of everyone. And "everyone" is spread over millennia of history and even many years before that, not to mention many continents and cultures. But where and when a person is born has great bearing on not just what he learns about the world, but also how he learns to think about it. Our culture influences our perspectives on everything. (With this and many other statements I'm making here, I invite anyone who sees it as a clear untruth to point it out and give your reasons.)
 

"The civilized world" so named by those successful enough to have published their opinions and had those opinions taught widely, shaped language development and cultural development and how information is seen and shared among its members. The most widespread messages, and the most-used methods for spreading those messages, were the most popular ones.
 

Stick with me. This is the important bit.
 

What you or I learned, or can learn today, as truth depends on where you and I were born, where we live now, and what messages are available to us for figuring out how to filter and process an immense amount of published, traditional, verbal, and non-verbal information, some of it designed for the purpose of letting us know who we are, where we are in the grand scheme of existence, and what we might need to be ready to do with our lives - our purpose.
 

What about religion? Certainly it concerns itself with the most important of these concepts of identity and purpose. But - aha! - the religion we get the opportunity to learn also depends on where we were born, what has been popular in the area where we were born, and the family values into which we had the circumstance to be born. And I think we could have been born anywhere, or at any time.

Religion itself, in fact, can deal with even these observations. I know the religion in which I grew up, Southern Baptist Christianity, definitely dealt with it. Divine will and intention, an overarching plan for every single life form, a heavenly caring and compassion for each organism and the circumstances it will encounter ... all of these teach some of us, and teach us strongly, that our birth and our religion and the culture that instills our values is anything besides random and circumstantial. It is deliberate, it is known, and, in some sense, it is as it should be.
 

We then are left to extrapolate, if we are so inclined (and it appears that I am, for weal or for woe, so inclined), whether that is identically true for the many other beings on this planet, throughout time and space, whatever the culture and values and religion into which they might have been born.
 

The messages I or you grew up learning were most important are influenced by laws of large numbers - probability laws - in this, unless that Divine will and intention I mentioned is so powerful and so deliberately active as to set such laws aside when it comes to the matter of which message gets to which organism and how it affects that organism's life.
 

Religion, science, history - all kinds of knowledge ranging from objective to speculative ... and even to manipulative presentations of information (hang in there!) ... gets to you and me at least partially based on how likely it is to get to you and me, and this has to do, at least somewhat, with the sheer number of organisms or their message-spreading mechanisms that are putting that knowledge out.

We get the truths - the information and the presentations of such - that we are most numerically likely to get, based on where and when it is our fortune to exist.
 

American Christians get the Jesus information that gets to us, just like anybody gets the information about anything (again, that hugely powerful Divine will and intention aside - can/should you push something like that aside for argument's sake? think of the billions of others in other eras and cultures before you answer that). And powerful forces have shaped that information - that culture-shaping, society-forming, brother-and-sisterhood-bonding information - all down through the centuries that a religion formed in Jesus Christ's name has existed.
 

This is why, when talking about American values and Christian values, I've often dared to use the words "manipulative" and "exploitation." Because you see, in this country, who spreads the messages the farthest is who makes them the most popular, and who becomes the most powerful is who controls the most powerful messages - and, through them, the cultures and values and practices ... and, yes, religious beliefs ... of the most people.
 

And that gets right back down to you and me. The messages and values that found us were influenced by what was likely to find us. They may or may not resemble what we think they are supposed to be beyond that.
 

This is why scientists and historians and libraries and books are as important in considering Divine stuff, even our holiest of principles, as priests and preachers and the 700 Club... and even the President.