Welcome to Gaia! ::

I know, I'm late, but I lolled at that. I lolled hard enough that the computer class that's in the lab all looked over at me.

Ummm.... Catholic priests, fringe/cult Born agains, and this weird guy with a shaved head and a tattoo looking Ever so slightly like a Hammer that lives in Boston...

Yes, I know a little something about how most of the stereotypes got started:

-The Big Nose stereotype, if I am correct, is the result of a genetic disease the symptoms of which included a big nose. It plagued much of one line of Jews (Sephardic?) and let's just say the gentiles around were pretty impressionable.

-(The horn mtyth is below.)

-The rich stereotype was started during the first holocaust of the late 14th century in England and the Mediterranean area. The Jews were blamed for the Black Plague and thought to be devils. This is also where the horn myth comes in, though it may have already existed. The Jews were either killed or forced to become moneylenders. (The Christians would not lend money at interest because they believed it to be a sin called usury. Yet, the job was important for the economy so they made the surviving Jews do it.) The Jews had to charge exorbitant interest sometimes, though, just to put bread on the table in the environment they were in. They didn't like it, but they didn'yt want to starve to they charged a lot of interest when need be. This is why some people think Jews are greedy and rich, even today.

-The myth about Jews killing Christ was created at the beginning of Christianity as a way for the early Christians to secure followers and stop them from celbrating Jewish holidays at synagogues and the like.

I heart big noses! Depending on what angle you're looking at my nose from it's relatively small so when my friends in high school would complain about their noses I'd always tell them how attractive I find them. People should embrace giant noses and stop making such a big deal out of it. They're cute!

The "Jews killed Jesus" thing also kinda stems from the fact that Judas was a Jew, or at least that's what I hear. I always have to explain to Christians that they're missing the point rather terribly. If we hadn't "killed" Jesus, who would have died for their sins? Simple as that.

I dunno...I'm quite fond of Jesus myself. Not quite sure if I could kill the guy as brutally as the Romans supposedly did.

The old: "He was only in a coma" thing?

It couldn't have been a coma considering people can't survive comas without proper medical care.

Personally I don't even think Jesus is real historically. I'm iffy on whether or not anything contained in the pages of the bible are real, but that doesn't make it less potent in my opinion. The goal of a spiritual text is to educate the person reading it and help them understand more about their beliefs, so why does it have to be real? People are just obsessed with fairy tales.

But people do wake up from a state of near-death.



Apparently, there are roman records saying a man named Jesus was crucified around 35 C.E. (AD). I've never seen em, though. We'll have to take the Pope's word on it.

@Neuf: Please do share!