Listen to what many Christian Conservatives in America say about Jesus and the way they depict him in art and music, and you have the image of a sweet, lily white, European, milk-toast sissy, an image that bears little resemblance to the dark-skinned, Jewish, revolutionary, "man's man" that Jesus actually was.  Although he was extremely kind to the common man and woman, Jesus was extremely demanding of those who had an abundance or either riches or power, whether political or religious.  He forgave and/or played down the sins of publicans, tax-collectors, prostitutes and an adulteress.  He told his followers to value a poor widow's penny more than substantial contributions from the rich.  And he told those who wanted to follow his leadership that what they should not do is imitate priests and levites, but instead follow the example of a heretical Samaritan.  Where has this idea of Christ as an impeccably polite and diplomatic gentleman come from?  Certainly not from Jesus, who instead said of himself :

{ Matthew 10: 34-37 } 

        "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household.  Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."

        Although the words of Jesus speak of inter-family conflicts, is there a single example of such conflict in the gospels?  No.   What we see there instead are dozens of examples of very similar conflicts between Jesus and the leading members of his religious "family", or community.   If "actions speak louder than words," then Jesus showed us that the sword he came to bring was the sword of battle with people like the arrogant, pompous, money-grubbing leaders of his day, who were so similar to the "Religious Right" of our day.
        Far from being a mild-mannered, diplomatic, "goody-two-shoes",  Jesus was such an extraordinary "pain in the ass" to the religious community of his day, that they did everything they could to shut him up,  including conspiring to have him nailed to a cross,  the equivalent of putting him in today's electric chair.    To follow Christ and not experience the animosity and the rejection that Jesus promised his followers would experience, is to follow Jesus from too great a distance!  Just try exposing the hypocrisy and the misrepresentations of the Bible of today's equivalent of the fraudulent leaders of his day, and you will see why Jesus predicted:

{ John 16:1-3 } 

        "I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling.  They will put you out of the synagogues.  Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.  And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me."

        When pious religious leaders demanded that Jesus follow the Bible's teaching and impose the death sentence on the woman "caught in the very act of adultery," instead of condemning the adulteress, Jesus condemned her conservative prosecutors!

{ John 8: 2–11 }  

        Early in the morning he came again to the temple.  All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them.  The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.  Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women.  Now what do you say?"
        They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him.

        Some people found fault with Larry Flynt's recent effort to expose the Republican party leadership for its astounding hypocrisy.  Rather than condemn their own friends ( Republican Congressmen Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, Hellen Chenoweth, and J.C. Watts, to mention just a few), whose closets are bulging with a whole brothel full of worse adulterers than Democratic President Clinton ever dreamed of being, they insist on condemning the messenger.  How interesting that the mainstream media, after racing to publish everything salacious about the Democratic president that they could lay their hands on – including the whole of Kenneth Starr's pornographic report – has made no effort to expose the immorality and hypocrisy of the leaders of the Republican leadership!  Could it be that, just as Jesus published the sins of the hypocrites of his day by writing them in the dirt at his feet, God has had a hand in publicizing the sins of today's hypocrites in a "dirty magazine"?  (Actually, this report was no more pornographic than many of the women's magazines in our supermarkets.)

        Although people in our day tend to view Jesus teaching on divorce as rather "conservative", the fact is that in hismale-dominated patriarchal time his teaching was very liberal and feminist,

{ Luke 18 : 9-14 } 

{ Luke 6: 37–8} 

        "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.  Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you.  A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back."

Can you imagine "Religious Right" types treating "prodigal son" types the way the father did in Jesus' parable? { Luke 15:11-32 :}

        Although this passage is commonly called "the parable of the prodigal son", that's only a title added by editors to verses that had no title in the original. Since the point of this story, however, is to describe the divine father, I think a much better title would be one that highlights the father's behavior rather the son's. And since its the father's liberality that is emphasized, what better title could there be than "the parable of the liberal father"? (And note that it's not the wayward son who is portrayed badly in this story of Jesus', it's the resentful conservative son!

{ Matthew 21: 28-32 } 

"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

        When Jesus spoke those words from the cross, was he praying for the religious leaders who had been working for months, if not years, for just such an outcome?  Or was he simply praying for the misinformed "little people" following the orders of higher ups?  When it came to those with whom he had done battle for most of his public life,  Jesus was anything but forgiving.
        "Evangelicals" spend a lot of time and effort worrying about "Satan".  But, if Jesus was concerned about an invisible evil angel from another world, he had a strange way of showing it, because he hardly ever mentioned the devil.  Instead,  judging from the four Gospels, which are dedicated to his life and preaching,  there was nobody that even came close to bothering Jesus as much as the religious establishment of his day: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the priests, the "Scribes" or "experts in the law" (i.e. the Bible).  Click on the Bible below and you will find some 80 sermons, reprimands to or warnings about those whom Jesus considered most threatening to him and to his mission, i.e. not Satan ( whom he mentioned only a few times),  but those who claimed to represent GOD and the Bible.  in other words, the "Religious Right" of his day.  This barrage of sermons against these supposed "men of God" is what moved them to have Jesus permanently silenced, after they managed to persuade enough people to believe that Jesus was the imposter and they were God's true representatives.
        Anyone who claims to believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and does not want to know what Jesus had to say about the "Religious Right" of his day, deserves to be misled by the "Religious Right" of our day  .

Conservative Christian leaders are very unlike Christ:
Open the Bible 
to see for yourself.

        To see just how sinister the so-called "Christian Coalition" really is look at it through the eyes of someone who saw it from inside "the inner sanctum", read the outstanding expose of this monstrous fraud : The Hijacking of the Christian Church, published on the Religious Freedom Coalition of the SouthEast web site.

{ James 1:27 – 2:9 }

        "The Christian who is pure and without fault, from God the Father's point of view, is the one who takes care of orphans and widows in their distress, and who remains true to the Lord – not soiled and dirtied by his contacts with the world.  Dear brothers, how can you claim that you belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory,  if you show favoritism to rich people and look down on poor people?  If a man comes into your church dressed in expensive clothes and with valuable gold rings on his fingers, and at the same moment another man comes in who is poor and dressed in thread-bare clothes, and you make a lot of fuss over the rich man and give him the best seat in the house and say to the poor man,  "You can stand over there if you like or else sit on the floor"  –  well,  judging a man by his wealth shows that you are guided by wrong motives.
      Listen to me, dear brothers: God has chosen poor people to be rich in faith, and the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs,  for that is the gift God has promised to all those who love him.  And yet, of the two strangers, you have despised the poor man.  Don't you realize that it is usually the rich men who pick on you and drag you into court?  And all too often they are the ones who laugh at Jesus Christ, whose noble name you bear.  Yes indeed, it is good when you truly obey our Lord's command, "You must love and help your neighbors just as much as you love and take care of yourself."  But you are breaking this law of our Lord's when you favor the rich and fawn over them; it is sin."

{ James 2:12-21 & 26} 

        "You will be judged on whether or not you are doing what Christ wants you to.  So watch what you do and what you think; for there will be no mercy to those who have shown no mercy.   But if you have been merciful, then God's mercy toward you will win out over his judgment against you.  Dear brothers, what's the use of saying that you have faith and are Christians if you aren't proving it by helping others?  Will that kind of faith save anyone?
      If you have a friend who is in need of food and clothing, and you say to him,  "Well, good-bye and God bless you; stay warm and eat hearty," and then don't give him clothes or food, what good does that do?  So you see, it isn't enough just to have faith.  You must also do good to prove that you have it.
      Faith that doesn't show itself by good works is no faith at all  –  it is dead and useless.  But someone may well argue, "You say the way to God is by faith alone, plus nothing;  well, I say that good works are important too, for without works you can't prove whether you have faith or not; but anyone can see that I have faith by the way I act."  Are there still some among you who hold that "only believing" is enough?  Believing in one God?  Well, remember that the demons believe this too – so strongly that they tremble in terror!  Fool!  When will you ever learn that "believing" is useless without doing what God wants you to?  Faith that does not result in good deeds is not real faith.  Just as the body is dead when there is no spirit in it, so faith is dead if it is not the kind that results in good deeds."

{ James 5:1-7 }

        "Look here, you rich men, now is the time to cry and groan with anguished grief because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you.  Your wealth is even now rotting away, and your fine clothes are becoming mere moth-eaten rags.  The value of your gold and silver is dropping fast, yet it will stand as evidence against you and eat your flesh like fire.  That is what you have stored up for yourselves to receive on that coming day of judgment.  For listen!  Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay.   Their cries have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.  You have spent your years here on earth having fun, satisfying your every whim, and now your fat hearts are ready for the slaughter.  You have condemned and killed good men who had no power to defend themselves against you."

{ 1 John 3:17-29 } 

        "If someone who is supposed to be a Christian has money enough to live well, and sees a brother in need and won't help him – how can God's love be within him?  Little children, let us stop just saying we love people; let us really love them, and show it by our actions.  Then we will know for sure, by our actions, that we are on God's side, and our consciences will be clear, even when we stand before the Lord.
        But if we have bad consciences and feel that we have done wrong, the Lord will surely feel it even more, for he knows everything we do.  But, dearly loved friends, if our consciences are clear, we can come to the Lord with perfect assurance and trust, and get whatever we ask for because we are obeying him and doing the things that please him.  And this is what God says we must do: Believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another.  Those who do what God says – they are living with God and he with them.  We know this is true because the Holy Spirit he has given us tells us so."

{ 1 John 4:1 }         "Dearly loved friends, don't always believe everything you hear just because someone says it is a message from God: test it first to see if it really is.  For there are many false teachers around."     [... as is evident in those who claim that today's Republican Party represents the teaching of Christ! ]

        Don't be fooled by the many times Christian Conservatives mention the name of "Jesus" or "Christ".  Pay close attention and you will find that they largely ignore what Christ taught – which was largely about the necessity of devoting ones life to doing good deeds for the benefit of those in need of them and to thereby please God and achieve eternal life. –  Instead they repeat endlessly what Paul of Tarsus taught ( i.e. that Jesus supposedly intended to save us by faith alone ) – which makes just about everything Jesus or anybody else says about works superfluous or even objectionable. –  This is the heart of the problem with "Christian Conservatism", and so we dedicate an extensive web page to the extremely important issue of Paul's teaching about faith vs. Christ's teaching about works. But there is a lot more of Paul's teaching that they promote in lieu of the teaching and example of Jesus, as we show in their own words at PaulvsAll.html.

        "Christian Republicans" insist that "charity" is a private matter, best left to churches, and that it is wrong for any government to tax the rich in order to help the poor.  According to them, "market forces" and the "profit-motive" – not morality, or religion – should govern in the public square.  That's straight out of the gospel according to the G.O.P.,  and the very opposite of what the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures teaches!  Here is what the Bible and Jesus teach about GOD vs. Mammon (Greed) and here is why so few Christian priests or preachers teach what Jesus taught about the lust for money.

        "Christian Conservatives" often insist that they are in possession of "the absolute truth" and they despise Liberals for promoting what they call "moral relativism". 
        According to John 10:16, Jesus said, "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold (i.e. who don't think and worship as we do).  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd."
        And in Luke's Gospel, (as well as in Mark's) we are told that when his followers said to him in Ch. 9, v. 49,  "Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us."  Jesus replied "Do not stop him; for whoever is not against you is for you."
        (Yes, I know that according to Matthew 9, 30, Jesus said the very opposite, "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters."  So much for the "absolute truth"!  See the scores of internal contradictions in the Bible which Liberals who actually read the bible attentively have found in it at LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/inerrancy.)

        "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
The English author Jonathan Swift

      "If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be – a Christian."
The American author Mark Twain, (in his "Notebook", prepared for publication by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Row, 1935, p. 328.)
      "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
– Mohandas Gandhi
      "Hasn't America seen enough of the exclusionary, prejudicial, vote-suppressing, racial profiling, inner city-ignoring, confederate flag-waving, Bob Jones University-loving attitudes of the radical right? "
S. Congressman Patrick Kennedy

        Had Hitler not persuaded the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran churches to "mind their own (ecclesiastical) business, and to stay out of "secular" matters,  the mass murder of 10 million Jews, Jehovah witnesses, handicapped people, Liberals and homosexuals could never have succeeded.  See " the role played by Catholic Church's leadership in the Jewish Holocaust"

Why the Bible makes demands on "government" .

{ Isaiah 32: 1, & 5-8 KJV : }

        "Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment. . . .   5 The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful. For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail. The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.  8 But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand. " "

        The triumph of Conservatism in America these days is perhaps most visible in the way we are throwing more of our "sinners" in prison than any other country in the world, civilized or not.  And nowhere is the treatment of those in prison nearly as cruel and un-Christian as it is in the "Bible Belt" states.  Instead of visiting those in prison, as Jesus taught, Republicans seem intent on making sure that as many families as possible are torn apart, with as many children as possible deprived of fathers and mothers who are behind bars, often far from their families.
        That is why we devote an entire web pages to Prison Abuse in America's "Bible Belt".

        "One of my all time favorite Fox News moments was on the Hannity & Colmes show.  The hosts were talking about the book which Alan Colmes had written ("Red, White and Liberal") in which there is a chapter entitled, "Jesus was a liberal".  This night, the Conservative preacher, Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, was the guest.  Turning to the preacher, Hannity, with a sneer & smirk, told Graham about the chapter in Colmes' book.  Expecting Graham to sneer along with him, Hannity asked what Graham thought about that....  Graham replied (to Hannity's horror) that he'd have to agree with Colmes." – D103486 –

        I once saw a gun lover's site pull the following words of Jesus out of their context to support his position: " the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one."
The context of that passage, however, shows how dishonest that use of the verse is: Luke 22: 36-38 He said to them, "But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.  For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, 'And he was counted among the lawless'; and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled."  They said, "Lord, look, here are two swords." He replied, "It is enough."
        In Jesus' day of course there were no guns, but can anyone doubt that if he were alive today, Jesus would be warning us about guns & bombs rather than "swords", as in

{ Matthew 26, 52 : } 

        " Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword ."

{ Isaiah 2 : 3-4 } 

        "For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.  He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Was Jesus Christ responsible for
the "New Covenant" prophesied by Jeremiah?
{Chapter 31:31-34 NIV}  

        "The time is coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt [i.e., the covenant of the Law, the Ten Commandments], because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the Lord.
        "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."

        "It is the Christians, O Emperor, . . . who beyond all the nations of the earth have found the truth: for they know God as Creator and Maker of all things, and they worship no other god beside Him; for they have His commandments graven on their hearts, and these they keep in expectation of the world to come.  Whatsoever they would should not be done unto them, they do not to another. . .  If they see a stranger they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him, as over a brother, for they call not one another brethren after the flesh, but after the spirit.  They are ready for Christ's sake to give up their own lives; for His commandments they securely keep, living holy and righteous lives, according as the Lord their God hath commanded them, giving thanks to Him at all hours, over all their food and drink, and the rest of their good things."

        "In his book Edith the Good, Spencer Marsh's implicit thesis was that Edith Bunker's every reflexive reaction to any situation was what the writers thought Jesus' reaction would be. Marsh had it right; that is the way Edith was conceived. . . Everything tells me that the world would be an exquisite place to live if we were all able to respond to life as Jesus did."  Norman Lear (a sceptical but spiritual Jew.)
[ from an article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-lear/mamaloshen-a-church-for-p_b_480896.html after it was originally posted on the Washington Post's On Faith page].
I consider myself deeply religious. I was born a Jew and I love my people and our culture. I could not be prouder of what, in our long history, we have brought to the world.