The character Jesus Christ was essentially a Middle Eastern Siddhartha Gautama who – to no fault of his own – had his message hijacked, and the labels ‘Son of God’ and ‘Redeemer’ pinned to him posthumously by the writers of the Gospels, so as to give their followers a martyr to worship and induce guilt with. Guilt is the defining difference between the philosophies of Buddhism and Christianity, and the single most powerful weapon Christians have always employed to control the masses with. Without the myth of Christ, Christians would have never had the means to gain control over massive amounts of people, and would have been stuck in the same meandering boat that the ever-patient Jews have been in for millennia.
Buddhists do not assert that certain natural behaviours are in any way immoral, or that you should be ashamed of having partaken in them – they’re indifferent to it; they simply advise their followers to refrain from any pleasure-oriented behaviours, because they believe that all pleasure inevitably leads to suffering. A supernatural, eternal afterlife is not even required in Buddhism; it’s simply a concept that was tacked on after the fact, that you can choose to incorporate if you really need it. This is why Buddhism is such a tame, fluid and progressive religion. Christians on the other hand, despite sharing virtually the same philosophy – and in so, promising the same eternal release after death – believe that you should not only refrain from certain natural behaviours, but that you should be ashamed of having ever enacted them in the first place; and that if you ever wish to get to heaven, and not burn eternally in hell, that you must repent, and give yourself over to your sacrificial ‘saviour’, who is also your immortal, all-powerful God, sent to Earth in the form of his son. How this can make sense to anyone in the year 2015 is beyond me.
Jesus Christ, if he existed at all, never intended to be looked upon as the saviour of anything, let alone a God incarnate. His message was eerily akin to that of the archetypical Buddha, and his crucifixion was nothing more than a familiar, run-of-the-mill Roman exercise on a man who preached a philosophy that didn’t conform to their Pagan beliefs, in a region of the empire where it happened pretty much everyday: Judaea. The Gospels are so full of contradictions and conflicting accounts of Christ’s life that none should be taken seriously; and if we’re going to look at them objectively at all, we need to consider that maybe – particularly in the case of Paul – they were scripted so as to be used as a new instrument of oppression and control, on a vulnerable people living under a system that was bound to crumble and fall eventually anyway.
Thoughts of Ra 