Quotes from Robert S. McElvaine

This heretical perversion of the message of Jesus that most often passes for Christianity today has been aptly termed churchianity. People go to church, profess a belief in Jesus totally devoid of a belief in his teachings, and then self-righteously proclaim themselves to be "Christians.

The essence of having faith in what Jesus had faith in and being a Jesus Follower is to engage in a very simple but extraordinarily difficult practice that is best captured in a single word: empathy.

Doing what comes naturally was (and is) no longer the appropriate response in many circumstances that arose in what had become an unnatural environment. It became the major social role of religion to bridge the gap between a human nature developed for one environment and the altered environment in which that nature now had to operate. People had to be persuaded to act unnaturally, as Jesus and other religious prophets would preach.

Much as the Nazis created an "Aryan Jesus" because the real Semitic Jesus was not to their liking, the Lite Christians have created an American Jesus or a Muscular Jesus or a Consumerist Jesus because they don't like the real nonviolent/turn-the-other-cheek/love-your-enemy/meek-shall-inherit-the-earth/easier-for-a-camel-to-go-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-than-for-a-rich-man-to-enter-heaven/drive-the-moneychangers-from-the-temple Jesus. They simply re-create Jesus in their own image.

Eve's Fall symbolizes women's invention of agriculture, which came to be seen as the Original Sin that caused the loss of Paradise. The revolutionary changes in the human environment to which agriculture led required the introduction of the unnatural values Jesus (and other religious prophets) taught to "save" humanity from the disconnect between human nature and the environment that resulted from what is represented by Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge.