By Darius Mirshahi
I loathe extravagant places of worship and the leaders who run them. Mega-churches, temples, and mosques are built with the most expensive materials while thousands of people die of hunger, exposure, and curable diseases. Greedy capitalists posing as ‘men of God’ prey on the desperate and sell them false hope, taking from the poor to enrich themselves.
To make matters worse, most places of worship reinforce unhealthy social relations such as hierarchy, sexism, queerphobia, submission to authority, and generally create followers who feel ‘unworthy’ and helpless. They are also to blame for a large amount of the culture of fear we live in.
It occurs to me that Jesus (the guy in the Bible that supposedly lived 2000 years ago) would probably share my disdain for organized religion, as well as my disdain for capitalism, individualism, racism, exploitation, and all the other things our society is built on. It is my humble opinion that if Jesus was around today he’d most likely be engaged in class war.
Jesus was always talking about how the rich were evil and that it was the poor and oppressed people who would inherit the kingdom of ‘God’. He made many enemies in high places because of his class analysis, and ended up becoming one of the most famous political prisoners ever before he was publicly executed.
Just as he ran into the temple and flipped the tables of the money lenders back in the day, Jesus would be running around smashing ATM’s today. Jesus would kick the televangelists out of their mega-churches and set up squats and social housing for the homeless. Jesus would be helping co-ordinate a ‘Food Not Bombs’ by magically turning nothing into something that hundreds could feast on. Remember that whole fish and bread trick?
Jesus wouldn’t vote for conservatives, much to their dismay. Jesus wouldn’t vote for liberals either. Jesus wouldn’t vote at all. Jesus never asked a politician for anything, if he saw a prob¬lem he took action himself. Jesus didn’t lobby politicians for more health care; he went out and healed the sick himself. Today he’d probably open some free clinics in poor neighbourhoods and break the pharmaceutical corporations’ patent laws to provide cheap/free medicine to everyone who needed it.
Jesus, if he ever did exist, was a pretty awesome person. He was such a threat to the state, organized religion, and capitalism that the rich and powerful organized a smear campaign to justify his arrest and execution.
Today, everything he stood for has been co-opted. Now his followers are among the most lost in the world, allowing a rich, powerful, and hierarchical institution known as the church dictate their beliefs instead of directly following the example Jesus set.
With hundreds of millions of Christians around the world you’d think we would have already won this class war. You’d think we would have already eradicated capitalism and the state and instituted an egalitarian society based on mutual aid, gift giving, and freedom. It’s time for Christians to leave the church and act a little like the man they admire so much. Jesus was an enemy of the state and capitalism. What about you?
