Happy Good Friday, Straight From the Email Inbox

Two very different Easter takes arrived in Clockwork's inbox today, Good Friday, from Tim Leedom and Bobby Bible.

Newport Beach filmmaker and author Leedom has written extensively about the true origins of religions and religious mythologies. He writes:

THE JESUS PUZZLE
At least two times a year, Jesus is in the headlines–of course at Christmas and now again at Easter. Labeled a man, myth, metaphor, messiah, and manifestation–take your pick, he has commanded the attention and confusion in the personage of Jesus the Christ. To the Jews he is a fraud, to the Moslems a holy person, to the Christian fundamentalists God revealed in a perfect book of history and indisputable wisdom and laws, to atheists a man made destructive myth, to the un-categorized world … a puzzle of promise, hope and out of this world mystery.
 
Each one of these groups is non-monolothic in their belief. There are close to 2,000 different CHRIST churches, cults, sects, N disciplines who say they are THE WORD. They have fought and are still fighting in the name of the PRINCE OF PEACE.  The cartoon the Wizard of Id summarized it best in its classic dictionary definition of a 'Cult': THE CHURCH DOWN THE STREET FROM YOURS. But they all hold tight to Jesus but miss his highest teaching while talking darkly of others.

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Atheists can become agnostics overnight, and vice-versa, while
railing against the crimes of molesters, religious wars, the greed of
money-hungry televangelists, and ask straight-faced, “How could there
have be a Jesus and have this all happen?” They boast, “IF I RULED THE
WORLD IT WOULD BE BETTER THAN THIS!” They, too, look for the perfect
world or formula while not embracing a self evident truth that they
trip over instead of standing on.
 
Each group can state their cases impressively. Organizations,
lobbies, institutions on all sides make a life out of the pro or con.
The believer in the messiah story hates the humanists as heretics, as
sinners and pagans. The scientists and academia view the believers as
stupid, ill informed, hypocrites and worse while they themselves are
looking for peace, love and reason.
 
It is past time that the doubters look beyond the glaring
inconsistencies of the Bible, the borrowed stories, the crimes of the
church including King James, popes, televangelists and the questionable
beginnings of Christianity simply as ammunition against their
adversaries, the believers. They must also pay recognition to the
unlimited possibilities of a created world that is timeless and
infinite. Also they must acknowledge that manifestations and higher
wisdom did happen through the diverse times of Isis, Krishna, Buddha,
Lao Tzu and Jesus.

On the other side, the die-hard Believers must set down the excess
baggage of things that don't make sense such as the age of the earth,
the impossible and indefensible stories. They must recognize if they
condemn these same stories in other predated religions as myths and
metaphors, they must do the same when they claim them for their own.
They must recognize they can't have it both ways with either the
stories or the higher teachings. Wisdom and manifested Truth is Truth
no matter who said it. Likewise, fiction is fiction no matter whose
holy book it ends up in.
 
As in the popular song, “ONE TIN SOLDIER,” when forces fought for
truth and killed to find truth, they found under the blood-soaked
battlefield that covered the secret message buried in a chest, “PEACE
ON EARTH N GOOD WILL TO ALL MEN.” As with Jesus, call him a myth, a
metaphor, a messiah, a manifestation or man the simple command of “LOVE
THY NEIGHBOR AS I HAVE LOVED THEE” makes all the debate, added baggage,
N doubts irrelevant. It is the message not the messenger. This
transcends the preacher, the doubter, the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Jesus …
if people became this it would be the fulfillment of idealistic dreams
and religious prayers.

Mr. Bible, whose email address
gives a last name of Biblestein (funny, he doesn't look it), mass
emails very colorful messages filled with different fonts, type sizes
and grammatical anomalies. Clockwork prefers to think of it as going
freestyle–and really Old School.

Matt Coker

OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.