Tag Archives: Moneychangers

Moneychangers in the temple

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It’s official, the New Life Church Killer Matthew Murray died by a self-inflicted wound. Perhaps this will take the heat off volunteer church security guard and disgraced-cop Jeanne Assam who may have fired on Murray from a concealed position and kept firing on him as she advanced according to her police training. What does this latest distinction mean? This is what it suggests to me:
 
Troubled-teen Matthew Murray, according to his own website postings, may be America’s first suicide bomber, using smoke and assault rifle to penetrate and injure a temple of American militant fundamentalism.

This is American sectarian violence, perpetrated by a former adherent rebelling against the oppressive reach of American smiley-face religio-capitalism, church of prosperity Fundamentalism. The same corporate spiritualism that drives our war machine, the rotten heart of Pax Americana, the misplaced sense that American vacant-headed fundamentalist values must police the world, and dominate, or at least prosper from the bulk of its resources. Murray believed this kind of Christianity was at the core of the world’s problems, and church leaders like New Life founder Ted Haggard as much as brag about it.

Matthew Murray was the product of too-far-isolated fundie parents, who terrorized their children with fire and brimstone nightmares. His ostracism justifies public education, where home-schooling entrusted to zealots yields intelligent but incompatible offspring.

Was Jesus really all that into nonviolence?

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Once again, I attended a ‘peace’ meeting dominated by liberal Christians extolling the virtues of nonviolence. The meeting started off with a film about how supposedly Gandhi and MLK, using only methods of nonviolence, had supposedly accomplished great miracles for people. Pretty sad stuff when one considers the situation of Indians and American Blacks today.

But this adulation of these two men by liberal Christians is really a stand in for their adulation of Jesus Christ, supposed human son of God, and their ideal model of what a human being should be. So it pays to take a brief look to see if Jesus in the Bible really was a model of nonviolence. We certainly know that neither Moses, nor the Christian God himself was, and that’s according to the Bible itself. But what about Jesus?

Jesus lived in a time of Roman imperialism. The fate of the Jews in his time was roughly equivalent to the fate of Iraqis and Afghans in our times. It was equivalent to that fate of Palestinian Arabs today under Jewish occupation and domination. The Jews back then, just like the Iraqis, Afghans, and Palestinians today, lived under the thumb of collaborators in their national and religious community who cooperated with the foreign emperor that ran their affairs. And like then, today’s imperial subjects direct much of their anger towards their own collaborators, and not so much always directly to the soldiers and officials of the Empire itself.

Jesus advocated a policy of no direct rebellion against the Roman Emperor who was viewed as much too strong to directly confront. But the collaborators were a different matter altogether. There, Jesus entered their temple with his followers and whip in hand, overturned their tables of money and goods, and chased them out of their places of commerce. Hardly nonviolent acts.

Since temples back then operated much as combination banks, pawnshops, pay day lenders, and currency exchanges all under one giant WalMart sized roof, when Jesus entered the ‘Temple’, in reality he entered the bank, too. His wrath was severe against the moneychangers (bankers) and collaborators, whom he accused of thievery against the common folk. If you or I were to enter a bank today and do as Jesus did, we would hardly be considered pacifists, now would we, Dear Liberal Christian? So why do you think of Jesus as being particularly into ‘nonviolent resistance’?

And what was Jesus’s punishment for his act of rather non pacifist rebellion? He was given the death penalty by a Roman official, who seemed to find the affair amongst the Jewish camp to be rather amusing. I rather think that any liberal Christian today trying to pull off such a stunt, would find themselves at least with life in prison, too. It’s much easier to push off a false image of how Jesus actually acted, and to copy that instead.

I tell this story in historical and Biblical perspective, simply because I am so fed up with American middle class, New Age liberal Christian pacifist idiocy, and their repetitive chants about the primacy of ‘nonviolence’ always recited like a totally broken record. Far from being nonviolent, Jesus actually was quite assaultive. And that is as the story goes from the Bible.

So let us now pray for liberal Christians to stop constantly reciting to us their turn-the-cheek fables. Amen. And now lets get going, Jesus-like, whips in hand, and turn over the banks and tables of today’s ‘moneylenders’ in the ‘temples’, and chase them out of their bank and church, The Pentagon. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus!