So, Nigel Farage has justified his views that HIV immigrants should be denied treatment as a 'sensible, Christian thing to do'.
Meanwhile, in Conservative land, David Cameron is 'standing up' for the Christian faith.
It is Easter Sunday. For many of you, it means little beyond chocolate eggs, a long weekend and a chance to catch up with friends and family. Good! As with Christmas, it is something we can all enjoy, regardless of faith. However, from a Christian point of view, it's something a little deeper. Everyone knows Jesus was crucified, and then rose again.
Here's a very rare R.E lesson from me, on Easter:
Jesus was a man. Oh he was the son of God, and supposed to be perfect, but he was also in a human body, and subject to the same cultural prejudice and conditioning as everyone else in his society. And his society was a right-wing patriarchy, where the Roman Empire was in charge, despite having little in common with normal people, and the church monopolised ethical behaviour, often hypocritically. Sound familiar?
So, Jesus was a man, but he was not like others, while also being the same as everyone else. He worked. He went to the church. He welcomed women amongst his followers, as friends. He was totally unafraid of the sick. 'Leprosy' at the time was considered similar to HIV in the 80s - you had to go and live outside civilisation if you had it. And the church decided if you had leprosy, so often you might just have particularly vicious eczema or acne. He accepted the poor, the sick, and the shunned as better and more deserving than those with money or power.
Jesus was killed, on trumped up charges because he was giving the church such a hard time and causing a lot of trouble. According to the Bible, this was a perfect sacrifice, because he had done nothing wrong. The importance of sacrifice in the most ancient religions has been lost, but you gave up something you really needed (usually food, clothing and wealth, in the form of animals) in exchange for forgiveness. Deuteronomy is full of the different sacrifices that had to be given either to thank God, or in exchange for forgiveness.
The world needed Jesus. The world killed Jesus. The world was forgiven.
Jesus rose again, proving the world was forgiven, that God was real, that God was his father.
So, on Easter Sunday, the Christians are happy because we were saved by one man's selflessness. I know, it's full of theological plotholes, but that's the message.
Now, the Christian message has been so warped and demented over time, that it's sometimes quite difficult to understand that Jesus was an example of total radical thinking and cultural overhaul. The Christian message has been co-opted by those in power to win them more power over the years, losing the inclusive, social justice imperatives that were quite simply revolutionary in the first few centuries CE. The powerful stories in Christianity have been adapted to suit different cultural beliefs (Easter probably didn't actually happen in Spring, but a lot of fertility rites did, so it superseded them, See also: Christmas and the birth of the new year) and the laws of the old testament have been used to develop law systems across the world.
In other words, the rigid, right-wing, superior exclusivity that is now viewed representative of Christianity is A TOTAL BASTARDISATION.
Nothing shows this more than the British right wing political parties (and similar across the world) using Christianity to justify their shattering policies of giving more to the privileged and taking from those in need.
Christianity is about love, acceptance, fairness, equality. It's about helping those most in need. It's about sharing. If Jesus were alive today, he would be screaming from the rooftops about how hideously unfair welfare reforms, taxation loopholes and criminalising poverty is. That's what he did in his own time, according to the Bible. That's why the powers that were killed him.
He wouldn't be sitting in judgement on people with HIV. He wouldn't be taking from the disabled, and workless. He wouldn't be exploiting workers. He wouldn't be encouraging the government to take from the poor to increase the rich.
If you consider yourself a Christian, and you support UKIP (and to a lesser extent, the Conservatives) you really need to reconsider your faith, or your politics.
Faith and politics should be kept as far apart as possible, because nothing shows up the rampant hypocrisy of government like pretending to have God on their side.
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