If you could….

[Fenris]

It certainly was in my teenage years. It was quite common to see some event with a speaker, inviting people to "come forward and accept Christ" and then provided precisely zero followup. Out of all the people who went forward I often wondered how many found, as I did, that the euphoria had gone by the following morning and with a total lack of any form of followup there were a bunch of people left wondering what to do next.

This is what Rabbi Leo Baeck calls "romantic Christianity": The euphoria of being "saved", singing hymns, smelling incense, or what have you. It's completely inward looking and as a result is capable of beholding terrible injustice without being the least bit upset. This contrasts with what he calls "ethical Christianity", where the devout try to follow a Christ-like life.

[tango]

It certainly was in my teenage years. It was quite common to see some event with a speaker, inviting people to "come forward and accept Christ" and then provided precisely zero followup. Out of all the people who went forward I often wondered how many found, as I did, that the euphoria had gone by the following morning and with a total lack of any form of followup there were a bunch of people left wondering what to do next.

This is what Rabbi Leo Baeck calls "romantic Christianity": The euphoria of being "saved", singing hymns, smelling incense, or what have you. It's completely inward looking and as a result is capable of beholding terrible injustice without being the least bit upset. This contrasts with what he calls "ethical Christianity", where the devout try to follow a Christ-like life.

"Romantic Christianity" - interesting name for it.

It's certainly a variation of something I came across in a number of other places - music designed to shift emotions, with the resulting emotions presented as if they were some kind of divine move. That then may or may not be paired with the wondering where God went, once the totally normal sense of euphoria faded away.

There's certainly a lot of me-focused stuff in the more toxic Christianity-like cults out there. It's surprising how many contemporary "worship" songs focus more on me than the one I'm allegedly praising. But there's less limelight on offer to those who quietly get on with living a Christ-like life, especially if they give God the glory for the things they are doing.

[49ersALLS.F.]

I don’t see Jesus as a misfit at all. His hometown had been invaded before his birth, and this wasn’t the first time that had happened. In my readings of the literature, it was only the second Jerusalem had fallen to outsiders, but there are also cartographic proofs from engineering that Jerusalem was built on the site of two other cities, which had other names, and which Caleb and Joshua’s band had both escaped from and returned to.

Jesus Christ looks perfectly normal to me, but then I always see him more as a census passer than as “God, per se”. Judicially, the really important thing to do to enter Jerusalem for the first time before it was even built was to pass the census, really. People get all hung up on language arts, ancient pronunciation, and military status when they look at the census in numbers and forget that if you couldn’t pronounce the shibboleth correctly, you were eliminated from the already established tribes, which had formed around Mount Sinai a few books and a chapter before.

Jesus just looks like a regular Israeli to me, I realize he had to get in line for the Italian head count and pay foreign taxes on his carpenters business, but he’s a regular synagogue church attendee and totally fits in with the Hebrew character as illustrated over time in the histories, even if the unfortunate fact of his country being occupied by outsiders makes it seem on the face of it that he’s a misfit, rebel, or outsider.