Chrixian is to Christian
as Christian is to Jew:
mutually orthogonal.
The Jews are credited with founding monotheism. They honor a creation god. They'd gotten the religion with its stories going pretty well by two and a half thousand years ago. The Jews built a grand temple in Jerusalem to house this god. The Temple of Jerusalem claimed to speak for God. It's still there, it still does.
Around two thousand years ago Judaism split (I bet not for the first, or last, time). The splinter sect said that God had sent his son, Jesus, as a Messiah, to the Temple, had cleansed the Temple of degenerate practices, got arrested, scourged, crucified for his trouble. In other words, the new group was saying that the old group had lost heaven's mandate, had betrayed its charter. These Christians built new temples called churches. One church in particular became ascendant in Western Europe: the Roman Catholic Church: it's the one with the Pope.
But of course that church too splintered. Luther wanted Christians to read the Bible for themselves. (The Church knew perfectly well what trouble that could lead to.) The Pope put out a contract on Luther. But the splinters flourished, and splintered, and flourished some more. Note: the Church claims to speak for God, says that salvation is due Christians, but only through the church. Meantime splinters say salvation is due Christians ... (But ignore core Christian concepts such as Original Sin and Atonement.) (or, try to monopolize them without understand them!)
Meantime, other critics come along. Ivan Illich says that the Whore of Babylon has taken control of the Bride of Christ. The Church is in the hands of ... professionals, experts, specialists, who drink wine, have housekeepers, drive Cadillacs ... and don't understand a thing about Christ.
pk joined Illich. Now I coin the term Chrixity.
The Jews claim God; but betray God.
The Christians reclaim God; but still betray God: in the same old ways. Jesus is still on the cross, after two thousand years of torture. (The Jews (using the Romans the way Henry II used his barons) only crucified Jesus for one day!)
I draft, post, redraft. Sometimes I see something in the first draft missing from the second draft. I'm tempted to keep both drafts. "Ms." was proposed to replace Miss and Mrs.; but it didn't: it added a third category: Miss, Mrs. or Ms.! Flaubert revised Mme. Bovary so many times he introduced new mistkaes while he erased old.
Anyone who doesn't like the chaos of my drafts, introduced infelicity compromising tightened prose, should damn well send me a budget to work with: instead of arresting me, censoring me, squashing me after crippling me (after banishing me).
First there's the Jews: monotheists. Orthogonal to the Jews, the Christians steal their shtick, say they speak for God, mis-transcribe and reedit something they call the Bible, claiming their work is God's own.
pk repeats the same shtick: the Church betrays God, Christians are people, and people torture the bearers of God's messages. I give this vision, this metaphor, a name: Chrixity.
But I don't want to splinter. I wish I could unite. But people would have to be able to understand what's said to them first. Understanding is prerequisite to listening: and versa visa.
I said the Jews are credited with inventing monotheism: we don't know enough of events to know what the truth is. Our records are recent, human: incomplete at best, mucked with at worst. The Jews wanted to steal the land of the people they called Canaanites; maybe they stole their one god from some other people too. I don't say they did; we don't know that they didn't. What I do know is that all of us babbling away, writing our noise down, loading it onto the electromagnetic spectrum, are kleptocrats: thieves.
Me too.
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