The Christian Institute are very keen to let us know that John Cleese has fearlessly dived into the field of theology and prounounced,
Some of the fundamentalist Christians, seem to be performing or practising a kind of Christianity that I don't think would be recognised by Christ.
I don't think Christ said a lot about abortion or even about single sex marriage.
I don't know where all these Christian doctrines came from but that had nothing to do with what Christ ever said in the Bible.
Honestly, I thought for a moment he was practising stand up. But no, it turns out he's not. Of course, the reason that Cleese doesn't know where these Christian doctrines comes from is that he hasn't actually properly read the Bible (at least it would appear that way since the alternative – that he had read it but just ignored what he read – would make him look even worse).
What Cleese may have missed in that Bible is the words that Christ said (which one hopes He would recognise as His own),
Matthew 19:4-6 Jesus answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Friends, whenever anyone runs the nonsense argument that Cleese has here these are the words to give them. Jesus spoke very clearly about human sexuality.
Cleese should stick to this kind of religious commentary:
Jesus didn’t say anything about abortion? Possibly because it wasn’t a controversial moral issue among the Jews.
According to Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity, 1996, pp. 117-125, who quotes a number of ancient Jewish & Christian authors, including Josephus, the Didache & Justin Martyr) both the Jews of Jesus’ day and early Christians regarded both infanticide and abortion as murder. Both were common in the Greco-Roman world, so much so that Tacitus apparently regarded the Jewish teaching that it is “a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child” as another of the Jews’ “sinister and revolting” practices.
In The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Mr Beaver memorably says of Aslan: “‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” So often when I hear members of the intelligensia like John Cleese talk about Jesus, the mental picture I get is not of a wild, powerful and majestic lion like Aslan. Instead, I’m reminded of my sister’s dog Rufus – a tame, harmless and totally inoffensive lapdog, who’d never say or do anything that would offend or challenge them.
Hi David,
I don’t know if you caught the article in the Good Weekend magazine recently (2/7) on John Cleese called “A Python Bites Back”. Towards the end the article states:
“He wants to make a documentary about religion, he says: “About what it would be like if the churches hadn’t screwed it up. The essence of most religions is to get the ego under control. which is a terrible contradiction as churches just want to become bigger and more powerful”.