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The tale of Jesus and Judas
One Islamic version of the resurrection reminds me of one of my favourite books – A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
Spoiler alert: In the book, the hero looks very similar to a man sentenced to the guillotine and takes his place at the end.
The Islamic version of the resurrection I’m referring to, is that God turned Judas to look and sound like Jesus. They then crucified Judas who protested he’s not Jesus.
“God gave Jesus’ appearance to the one who revealed his location to those persecuting him. He was replaced as Jesus and the executioners thought the victim was Jesus, causing everyone to believe that Jesus was crucified.”
— WikipediaAnd for their saying, “We have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the Messenger of God.” In fact, they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them as if they did. Indeed, those who differ about him are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it, except the following of assumptions. Certainly, they did not kill him. Rather, God raised him up to Himself. God is Mighty and Wise.
— Quran 4:157–4:158Also the Nag Hammadi library doesn’t say it was Judas, just someone called Simon.
“I was not afflicted at all. Those there punished me, yet I did not die in solid reality but in what appears, in order that I not be put to shame by them. For my death which they think happened, (happened) to them in their error and blindness. They nailed their man up to their death. Another, their father, was the one who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They were hitting me with the reed; another was the one who lifted up the cross on his shoulder, who was Simon. Another was the one on whom they put the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the riches of the archons and the offspring of their error and their conceit, and I was laughing at their ignorance.”
— Nag Hammadi libraryBut for the sake of this I’ll assume it was Judas who ended up on the cross.
How I like to think of it is that Judas knew how important that Jesus was and happened to look and sound similar to him, so allowed himself to be crucified in the place of Jesus.
Perhaps Judas did betray Jesus and wanted to make up for it.
If Judas did the switch in the same way as the character from A Tale of Two Cities, then Judas goes into the jail to see Jesus with a friend, then they drug Jesus, swap clothes and then the friend takes Jesus out unconscious, dressed as Judas. Were Jesus to wake up 3 days later in a cave that would help the story nicely.
I don’t know. But it’s would very neatly explain how something like the tale of the resurrection could come about. Such an extreme event, would be rare, but is possible.
The New Testament maintains that Judas hanged himself, or was killed by a chariot – so they agree that Judas ended up dead.
In my story Judas is a hero, the most wronged man in all of Christian history.
Judas died so that Jesus might live.
Update
This gets a bit juicier. There is ‘doubting’ Thomas. It turns out that Thomas looked uncannily like Jesus, even so that Thomas is apparently based on ‘Twin’. I think I read somewhere else that there was also a James that looked very similar to Jesus. In the land of farce and make believe, this doesn’t make it any more true, but it makes it more plausible. There’s now four candidates who could have been up on the cross instead of Jesus – Simon, Judas, James and Thomas.
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Dance, God
“I would believe only in a God who could dance.”
— F. Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, 1883Note: Found under Quote investigator check for “Those Who Dance Are Considered Insane by Those Who Can’t Hear the Music”
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Doctors of Education
Doctor comes from Latin verb docēre and means ‘to teach’. In Dutch a teacher is called a ‘docent’.
Doctors of education should be paid as much as doctors of medicine.
Doctors of child medicine are just as important if not more important than doctors for adults.
I want to bring more science into education, doctors of education need to be scientific observers.
No doctor is a disciplinarian.
Doctors observe and give advice.
Teachers should be scientific observers as Montessori said.
They are studying the children to see what brings out the best in each child.
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Cake is the answer to life the universe and everything
Science and religion are glorified cooking.
Speaking to a friend of mine, who is following the teachings of a Lama, he described to me how one one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism is repeatability.
In many of the Buddhist teachings such as searching for the ego that they say isn’t there, the point is not to believe, the point is to go searching for the ego and see if you can find it. You don’t need to believe what they tell you, you need to repeat the steps they tell you and verify it for yourself.
Science is about repeatability. Science is about finding ways to repeat what we see and understand it through repeating it. We see the moon moving through the sky – can we repeat the same movements? How precisely can we repeat them? In how many ways can we repeat them and what are the steps to repeat these movements.
These steps are algorithms. Algorithms are often likened to recipes, they are a set of steps to create a result.
One of the biggest scandals of recent psychology and social science is the repeatability of the studies. When people try the same steps 20 years later they don’t get the same result.
This is similar to how you tell a good recipe from a bad recipe. If you follow a good recipe exactly for the first time it will come out looking very close to the picture and tasting good.
This is one of the strengths of a cook book from say Jamie Oliver who has a team of chefs repeating his recipes, verifying them and finding what goes wrong.
So much of cooking is about the physics of heat and the biology and chemistry of proteins, fats and acids.
I think the universe is one big cooking pot. Heat and press everything to a tiny point until it explodes then wait a few billion years to see what happens.
The other end of the scale of believability that my friend told me about was the process of how a Buddhist high priest selects the next. It is a fantastic and wonderful process but impossible to repeat by others. So all I can do is trust his word. I can’t verify if for myself. In the same way my friend is repeating what he has read or been told, he can’t verify it either. Even the people who witnessed the event can’t verify it because they’ll only see part of it.
The Chinese have abused this and found their own Buddhist leader. The problem is that their story is as verifiable as selections for Tibetan Buddhist leaders – that is not verifiable at all.
Christianity has many aspects that are unverifiable and unrepeatable. But it still has a recipe at its core. The 10 commandments. The ones you can’t verify the benefit of you don’t have to follow. These can be repeated and verified. There are other phrases such as ‘turn the other cheek’, Gandhi repeated these as part of the independence of India. Those words are powerful, you don’t need to believe in the resurrection to recognise the power of those words.
So bake me a cake as fast as you can and I’ll show you something that’s worth believing in.
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Solved problem?
Responsibility + Joy can pretty much guarantee you a life worth living.
But is that it? Solved problem?
Responsibility comes from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s search for meaning” (one of the final chapters titled ‘Meaning of Life’).
Joy comes from “The Book of Joy” from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
Between the three authors we have Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism covered.
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A human equation
If you educate the senses of any child with an equal waiting of science, art & music you will produce fine and decent human beings.
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Scientific observers, shepherds and messiahs
There’s a thread running through these all.
- A messiah is a shepherd
- A programming language shepherds you in a direction
- People become very religious about programming languages
- Shepherds observe their sheep, they observe them objectively
- Teachers observe their pupils
- Maria Montessori spoke that teachers should be scientific observers
There’s something here, some connection.
Teachers aren’t messiahs though. Or maybe they are… They are definitely shepherds. I guess they are priests.
Teachers give sermons. Martin Luther King gave meditations.
My daughter loves her teacher, plus she still loves her teacher from playschool/kindergarten.
Is there religion in schools? As in the school themselves, not just Christian or not.
A messiah is a saviour or liberator of a group of people.
Was Rudolf Steiner a messiah? He created his own term – anthroposophy (human wisdom). He creates mini temples with his Steiner architecture.
Anthroposophical proponents aim to extend the clarity of the scientific method to phenomena of human soul-life and spiritual experiences.
— Wikipedia – AnthroposophyWas Maria Montessori a messiah? Its interesting because then she’s the closest that comes to a female messiah.
Is a messiah a scientific observer? Are priests scientific observers?
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Compassion in the gutter
… compassion, which means “suffering with”
Book of Joy p452We’re suffering with each other, but we’re not suffering alone.
We’re all in the gutter. It’s good if some of us are looking at the stars, but it’s better to realise we’re all in the gutter together.
You, me, Putin, Trump, Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, sitting in a gutter wallowing in shit.
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Dad and Fred…
My dad was a great man, but he was an alcoholic and his drinking was what I consider to be the main cause for my family to fall apart.
Separately from this I recently had the privilege to go to the funeral of Fred. Maybe it sounds odd that I call it a privilege, but to me it was. I didn’t know Fred very well, he was the boyfriend of my partner’s mum. When I did meet Fred he was always fun to be around.
We got invited to his funeral and whilst everyone there was very sad, the tales of Fred’s life were of joy. His solution to almost all problems was to suggest that they go drink a beer (his favourite was Duvel). He was struck down with Parkinson’s in his later life, but he still carried his joy. At his funeral there was a beautiful video of him, crippled with Parkinson’s dancing around and laughing with his daughter.
There’s not much that connects Fred and dad, but they both loved music and stereos. I believe they both managed to electrocute themselves whilst tinkering with their amplifiers. I’m currently doing my best to learn about amplifiers and speakers (and not electrocute myself) with the help of a friend of mine.
Dad also loved a laugh, my favourite memories from childhood are massive scale water fights that lasted for hours and ended with us all soaked and water running down the stairs.
He also managed to convince my mum that the initials RMC which stand for Ready Mixed Concrete were named after him (Roger Mark Channing). Apparently my mum started boasting about this to her friends and was very embarrassed when she learned the truth.
What I’ve learned is that alcohol along with all drugs is a health problem and that joy along with just the right amount of beer is the answer to all problems.
In honour of both these great men, I give you the philosophy of Homer:
To Alcohol! The Cause Of, And Solution To, All Of Life’s Problems -
Man hugs
I love man hugs. I never hugged my dad and he never hugged me, the most intimate it ever got was a handshake. I never hugged an uncle or any male family member. I’m pretty sure I might have never hugged an Englishman, or at maximum it is a handful of guys. Somehow its just not done. Or at least not done around me, maybe I’m just less ‘huggy’.
About the only place hugging happens between Englishmen is on the football and rugby terraces, which for me personally is one of the underlying reasons why I see football as so important.
My French room-mate opened my eyes about dad hugs. He had lots of photos with his arm around his dad. I was slightly jealous, but mostly just curious. Why was it so normal for him but not done around my family?
I learnt about how normal it is to hug men from my male European friends, French, Greek, Serbian, Polish, Belgian and Dutch mostly. Its one of the real sad things of Brexit is how much England can learn from mainland Europe, any barrier to that is a step backwards.
I complain about many things in Belgium, but the man huggers here are some of the greatest. You can be having a shit day and they come up to you and give you a massive hug whether you like it or not. It’s awesome, albeit still slightly awkward for me. Things are always better after a hug.
Putin probably just needs a big hug.
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Ian's Philosophy 