I’m not a believer in the divinity of a purported Hebrew Palestinian who allegedly lived several millennia ago and is worshipped by billions of people today under names he probably never heard, Jesus for Christians and Isa al-Masih for Muslims.  His name, if he indeed lived would have been Yešu, the Aramaic variant of the foregoing Greek and Arabic versions.  But while I am not a believer in his divinity and have no way to determine whether he in fact ever existed, I am a profound believer in the fundamental messages that echo in his name: to love one another and treat others as we would have them treat us and to protect the weakest and most humble among us.  According to the “gospel” of someone named Matthew, a man who never knew Yešu but claimed to know a great deal about him, Yešu’s teachings might be summarized in eight blessings known as the “beatitudes”, i.e., blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled; blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy; blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God; blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God; blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; and, blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Unfortunately, today, and, to be honest, relatively shortly after they were purportedly uttered, those teachings seem, at least to me, to have been completely distorted, principally by the followers of a certain Pharisee from Tarsus by the name of Saul, a strange man who subsequently went by a Roman name to which he claimed entitlement, Paulus.  History knows him as Paul at least in English (Pablo in Spanish, Paulo in Portuguese and Italian, etc.) and ironically, from my perspective, he has been recognized as a saint (although never formally beatified or canonized).  Jews, in diverse versions of their Toledot Yeshu claim that he was always one of theirs and that he infiltrated and distorted the embryonic organization of those who initially followed Yešu in order to save Judaism by severing the followers of Yešu into a new religion, one whose members Paul referred to as Χριστιανοί (Christianoí, in English, today Christians).  To me, he was, is and always will be, a psychotic fraud.

Based on what many people I care for and respect who consider themselves Christian have indicated to me, the beatitudes have little relevance with respect to what they perceive as a promise of salvation and eternal bliss (as opposed to a threat of damnation and eternal torture).  To many, perhaps most of them, the beatitudes are an irrelevance.  All that is required is a belief that Yešu is your personal savior and that “salvation” is a gift from the “holy spirit”, an aspect of Yešu and of his purported father, YHWH; a gift that can never be earned regardless of how good a person is.  However, that is not a universally held belief among Christians, or among Muslims (a religion that stems from Christianity in a manner similar to the way Christianity stems from Judaism).  There is a major dispute among those who consider themselves Christian as to whether or not “belief alone” is enough to attain “salvation” or whether it must be accompanied by “actions” that would be pleasing to Yešu and his father and to (I can’t quite qualify the nature of the relationship) the Holy Spirit.  A third variant believes that salvation is a predestined decision by YHWH/Yešu/Holy Spirit who arbitrarily (one assumes, by consensus) pre-select men and women for salvation before they are born (the “elect”).  There are tens of thousands of variants of Christianity organized into separate sects, many of which believe that only the members of their sect can attain salvation (plus 144,000 Jews), all others, including other Christians, being destined for “the Pit”, and that salvation will become possible only after Yešu returns to earth to establish a millennial kingdom which can only occur after a battle popularly referred to as Armageddon[1], a worldwide holocaust originating near the ancient Canaanite city of Jerusalem.

Yešu, had he lived and had he been a divine avatar, might have agreed with any of the foregoing hypotheses but if he was merely a man, albeit one with a profound sense of empathy and tolerance and hope and faith in human nature would, if he somehow returned to our world and studied our history, he would in all probability be appalled to see what has been done and what is being done in his name, although perhaps in Paul’s name would be more accurate, given that Christianity is a Pauline invention.

Many Christians, especially fundamentalist Christians in the United States, are thrilled with the conflict currently broiling in the Middle East as the Zionist State of Israel attacks all of its neighbors, engaging in horrific acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing which such Christians see as the prelude to Armageddon and they see the current president of the United States, Donald John Trump and his political movement within the Republican Party (Make America Great Again; “MAGA”) as the divinely inspired catalyst for such event.  That perception is rock solid notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s hedonism and alleged pedophilia, with his followers noting that most acts people believe to be anathema and mortal, even cardinal sins[2] are fine (as long as they don’t involve blasphemy) if undertaken by Jews (or on their behalf) against the Goyim (non-Jews) despite the fact that Christians (like them) are irredeemably Goyim.  Logic does not seem to be an impediment to such beliefs, rather, illogic is a strong suit in their support, illogic being an essential element of “faith” (see infra).

It is difficult for me to understand how any sane person, especially a well-educated sane person would accept the foregoing, especially one who is among the Goyim, but many people I love and respect somehow do. In order to try and understand the phenomenon, I’ve done quite a bit of historical, philosophical and religious research, something which started when I was very young, although, at that time, not being prescient, my interest in the quest for truth and for a potential divinity was not in response to the situation today.  Concurrently with such research I have, during the past decade, tried to understand the demise of concepts like empathy and tolerance which I have always associated with the teachings of Yešu.  Indeed, they seem to be at the core of his philosophy but alien to the version of Yešu’s philosophy espoused on his behalf by Paul and, unfortunately, alien to the movement Paul founded purportedly in the name of Yešu.  The movement to which so many of my friends belong.

The history of the myriad Pauline religions seems to involve irreconcilable existential internecine conflict, conflict frequently requiring the slaughter of those with differing perspectives in the name of incoherent trivia such as the nature of Yešu, i.e., whether or not he was human, divine or both, and if both, how those natures interacted and which had priority; what the appropriate hierarchical structure of Pauline institutions should be; and, which written accounts of Yešu and diverse humans raised to a semi-divine status as saints, were more or were less accurate.  And of course, whether belief “trumps” (pun intended) empathy, tolerance and good works.  Many of my friends, way too many, believe that murder, indeed mass murder; indeed genocide and rape and mayhem in the name of the quest for Armageddon and Israeli supremacy, are virtuous, while concurrently believing that economic doctrines that emphasize equality and equity such as promoted by Yešu (e.g., socialism) over property rights are anathema.  And their beliefs are somehow centered in their devout Christianity.  How weird is that?  They explain their posture by citing scripture, chapter and verse, although not quoting Yešu, rather, quoting Paul and his colleagues or, at times, the Hebrew Tanakh

We humans have an amazing capacity to rationalize and to accept the inexplicable as valid based on a concept we refer to as “faith”.  “Faith” can purportedly move mountains and not only requires no factual support, but even suggesting that facts might be useful in analyzing beliefs held by faith alone is considered anathema and sinful (e.g., the Trinitarian belief that monotheism is not impacted by the coexistent existence of three independent divine personalities in a single godhead; or, questioning the concept of “free will” where its exercise in a non-approved manner results in eternal damnation; or, the nature of divine love that sentences its subjects to, once again, eternal damnation; or, where a perfect creator’s imperfect creation permits the murder and rape and torture of the innocent).  Thus “faith” permits some of my friends to believe in the “sanctity of evil” and in the evil inherent in empathy and tolerance and, of course, the evil inherent in egalitarian concepts such socialism and communism as well as in the supreme importance of peace.[3]

To be honest, after having studied and taught comparative religions and related philosophies for over well over half a century, although I believe that I actually love the concept of Yešu as a philosopher, one akin to Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya Clan (whose followers refer to as the Buddha), and perhaps even Laozi (formerly Lao Tzu, he of “the Way”) and Zoroaster, the ethical dualist, etc., I find the entirety of the ahistorical Abrahamic cosmogony/cosmology to be not only impossible to credit (absent complete reliance on “faith”), but internally self-destructive and incoherent and, as an example to follow, truly anathema.  It is the Abrahamic trilogy of faiths that more than anything else has led us to where we find ourselves: a world where greed, as embodied in the Calvinist concept of the Protestant Ethic, is good and the supremacy of one group of people over others, as in racism and xenophobia is divinely ordained, but that empathy, tolerance and equity are evil; where wars are a positive and peace merely a sign of weakness and lack of ambition.  And where the refusal to win at all costs is the surest pathway to perdition.

While based on the context truth may exist independently, in the absence of divinity, it seems that in order to create standards such as good and evil, morality and ethics, we humans invent superior supernatural parental figures but, since we are absolutely imperfect, we do a poor job in the god-creation department and even where we create decent divine examples, we ignore the directives that we ourselves evolutionally attribute to them through our ability to rationalize.  That is certainly the case with the Abrahamic religions and may be the case generally.  It probably is.  Which is why empathy and tolerance, etc., never really had a chance, other than as ideals most of us consign to “utopias” while we live in “dystopias”.  Today, April 18, 2026, I see no way out of the above described dilemmas, at least for humanity.  I hope that I’m wrong and that recent events in the Middle East and their echoes in the United States have merely brought on a sort of depression.  But if I’m not wrong, perhaps if humanity passes away, the planet might be saved, even if it has to start all over again with a new dominant life form.  But if it isn’t saved (due to our “bequests”), perhaps our solar system will not notice our virulent demise.  And if our solar system does not notice it, certainly our galaxy shouldn’t either.  We can only hope that life has not, does not and will not infect other aspects of the multiverse the way we have in our tiny corner of creation.

So, so much for empathy and tolerance and survival.

What a depressing retrospective!
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

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[1] Really a place, or, based on its Hebrew etymology, har məgīddō (הר מגידו), “a mountain” or “a range of hills”.

[2] “Sin” is a strange concept, without a consistent logical connection, and is branched, at least by Christians, into a hierarchy which, from lesser towards anathema, starts with venial sins, then mortal sins, then cardinal sins and culminates in blasphemy.  It’s only common link is that sin displeases the divine entity and most displeasing of all appears to be anything that challenges that entity’s claim to supremacy.

[3] On the other hand, in the absence of a defining divinity, good and evil, morals, ethics, etc., may only be human concepts unaligned with nature and “relativists” among us argue that values are really non-existent so, in that case, … Never mind.