Why Should I Respect Jesus When Christians Don’t?
White Christians don’t respect Jesus
This article was originally published on Medium.
I had a professor in college who called everyone by their last names only like a drill Sargent. My maiden last name is European, but it’s spelled strangely and hard to pronounce for an English speaker.
Most people caught on eventually when I explained to them how to pronounce it, but one of my professors refused to. I corrected him the first times, but eventually gave up and let him continue to pronounce it wrong. He didn’t care enough to correct himself.
He was an open misogynist and even lectured me in front of the class because of it. He was really upset with me because I told him once that I was going to college because I wanted to become a Pastor. He was against women becoming pastors even though he admitted that I knew the Bible better than any student he’d ever had.
He didn’t respect me. He wouldn’t even pronounce my name right. Yes, I knew who he was talking about when he said my last name wrong, but he never hesitated to correct me on things while refusing to be corrected on even how to pronounce my own name.
This happens to a lot of people, although usually they are racial minorities. People are racist and want to make a point that someone doesn’t belong if they aren’t white, so they refuse to go outside of their culture to even attempt to say something foreign to their tongue.
They want the world around them to change and conform, for everyone to be exactly like them.
They don’t want to grow as people or discover things. They prefer to think of themselves as superior and reject everyone different instead.
A lot of these people are conservatives and most of those conservatives are Christians.
And do you know who they are racist to more than anyone? Jesus, their own fucking God.
I call him Jesus here because this mistake is so common that no one will know who I am talking about if I don’t. But his real name was Yehoshua or Yeshua for short and I’m going to refer to him as his real name for the rest of this post.
Christians will insist that they understand that Yeshua wasn’t a white man. They say they understand that he was middle eastern and spoke Aramaic. But do they, if they refuse to call him any name other than the white name they gave him?
Mind you, they get furious at me regularly when I write things. They want me to never question their god, to be “respectful” of him, which in actuality means they want me to be so fearful of their god that I never speak negatively about Christians or the Bible.
But they’re so racist that every time I bring up the fact that it’s disrespectful to call anyone by the wrong name, let alone their own god. They always say, “Nah. He gets it. He understands my white mispronunciation of his name and he accepts it.”
Listen, I don’t believe God is real and they’re lucky he isn’t because they’re being racist against their own god. It’s mean to purposefully butcher someone’s name over and over again because you don’t like how it is pronounced.
He chose that name if he’s a god.
Yes, I also knew my professor was talking to me when he mispronounced my name but him doing so made him a giant asshole.
And it completely proves that when Christians claim that the Bible has been preserved and has never been changed as millennia has passed, that they are lying. They like to claim that everyone perfectly and painstakingly copied but never changed any words.
They pretend there was no one with ambitions or prejudices that might want to slightly alter a word to change its meaning as it has been translated for their own agenda. They say they’ve kept everything exact out of respect for their own god.
And just magically they fully changed Yeshua’s whole fucking name and can’t even preserve that much and I’m supposed to believe they kept everything else perfect?
Fuck, no. Wrong.
The fact that they know the name Yeshua, find it easy to pronounce and yet still won’t use it, shows that I respect their god and the purity of their Bible more than they do. And I don’t even believe in any of it.
For some reason years ago I'd gotten it into my head that Jesus Christ meant "the anointed messiah" and so was meant to be more of a title than his name, so thank you for teaching me something. I do think many of Yeshua's words had been put into his mouth by others well after the fact, whether or not the gospels describe one person or an amalgamation of several people or if he was just made up.
The prophecy about Jerusalem being in a state where no stone would be on top of another stone seems a good candidate for someone after 70 CE to have decided "Yeshua definitely would have foreseen this," and so corrected the story. And the parable about the farm workers hired later in the day getting paid as much as the workers who had been at the farm all day doesn't seem to fit the style of many of his other parables, but addresses issues Paul was dealing with in *his* ministry. Not to mention that Paul called himself an apostle and said his law came straight from Yeshua, though he seems to know nothing of the Yeshua in the gospels. So Yeshua (were he to have existed) was barely cold before people started thinking they could improve on him.
I think you made a valid and very interesting point. But I believe the change is to separate him from his human physicality rather than a mere white supremacy thing. More to separate him from us instead of one of us becoming enlightened and showing the way to everyone as children of the Divine. Then we seek him outside instead of seeking the Divine inside.