The Forgotten Jesus

The Forgotten Jesus

A project that Thomas Jefferson, age 27 at the time, begun was painstakingly removing any passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In doing so, he combined all the pages he tore out into a slimmer, much different New Testament. He left behind all the pages he didn't believe in. Jefferson said "We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words of only Jesus." He removed all the "misconceptions" he believed Jesus' followers had. Jefferson felt he understood what Jesus "really" taught and lived, and he described his surgery as separating the "diamonds from the dunghill." "OK, call it sacrilegious; but look at it and listen to Jefferson's rationale before you summarily dismiss it". Jefferson's religious faith and politics were consistent in at least one assertion, they both called for giving up the temptation to exert power over others. Of his faith, Jefferson wrote: "No man can conform his faith to the dictates of another. The life and essence of religion consists in the internal persuasion or belief of the mind." He feared that the alternative was a "revival of the brutal, bloody wars of religion that America was founded to escape. Jefferson saw "church" as was the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity." This was because he was firmly against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. He called vast parts of the Bible "religious manure."

"The Catholic Church's hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youth and children." But, "they obsess about others' sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance." They never faced their responsibilities; they only worried about other people and what they were doing "wrong" in the church's eyes. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson's or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion. Christianity itself is in crisis. Many people are now embracing other self-help ways, like Atheism and "spirituality."

St. Francis believed a different aspect and looked at three random passages in the Bible and decided that he was going to live by them, following the path of Jesus. He chose three random passages and they were what he lived by. St. Francis and the other saints who followed him were known for the way they lived and followed the bible and not the political battles they faced and won. St. Francis "renounced his inheritance, becoming homeless and earning