Extracted from Jim Palmer‘s Facebook Post here.
You can’t pin Christianity on Jesus. It’s not his fault. To conflate Christianity with Jesus is to ignore the tragic gap between his life and what was later built in his name.
Jesus was not a Christian. He did not found a religion. He did not set out to create a system of belief, institutional authority, or worship directed at himself. What exists as Christianity is a construction that came later, shaped by interpretation, power, fear, and control.
If Jesus had any say in what followed, most of it would not stand. Here are ten things Christianity pedals that Jesus would adamantly refute:
1. Religion took a way of living and turned it into an afterlife waiting room. Jesus talked about how to live now. Religion turned it into a heaven people hope to reach later.
2. Religion built a system around his name instead of a movement around his message. It made it possible to avoid changing anything as long as the songs keep playing.
3. Religion turned his death into a cosmic fix for a problem he spent his life dismantling. Jesus didn’t come to solve separation from God. He exposed it as a false idea.
4. Religion let Paul the Apostle write the script and called it the story. Theology took over. The life of Jesus itself got pushed to the margins.
5. Religion made him so divine that no one could actually follow him. “Be like Jesus” collapses when he’s cast as something no human could ever be.
6. Religion took something universally relevant and turned it into an exclusive path. That’s not conviction. That’s control masquerading as truth.
7. Religion tells people they’re broken, guilty, and under threat, then sells them the cure. That story runs on fear and control, not on the truth that Jesus actually taught.
8. Religion keeps people waiting for Jesus to come back and fix everything. Meanwhile, the world burns and passivity gets labeled as faith.
9. Religion treats his name like a magic word. Say it enough times and something happens. That’s not transformation. It’s superstition.
10. Religion tied him to institutions, politics, and power. Jesus stood with the vulnerable. Religion turned him into a brand that props up the very systems he would’ve dismantled.
The issue isn’t that Christianity exists. The issue is we’ve made it untouchable while it keeps bending Jesus into something he never was. We defend it like it’s sacred, even when it’s clearly off track. At that point, calling it faith doesn’t make it honest. It just makes it easier to keep pretending.
Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy http://tinyurl.com/ke25zdu
2nd Post from his Facebook page
Christianity didn’t just misread Jesus. It overcorrected and turned him into something unrecognizable. A human being was taken and layered with enough supernatural claims to remove him from the range of actual human life. Virgin birth, sinless perfection, God in the flesh, cosmic savior, resurrected and ascending. At that point, you’ve turned him into someone no human being could ever be.
And then comes the instruction: be like Jesus. Be like him how, exactly? By being God? The demand collapses the moment you take it seriously.
Jesus doesn’t position himself as categorically different from everyone else. When that interpretation is pushed onto him, he pushes back. Jesus does not make the kind of exclusive claims that Christendom asserts and depends on. He did not claim to be THE son of God, but A son of God.
In fact, when Jesus is called out because his claim is misunderstood as a statement of exclusivity, he says, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods.'” Jesus challenged people with the idea of godhood – sharing in or expressing what is considered divine.
Further, in John 17, Jesus makes it clear that the oneness he spoke of having with God is a oneness we ALL share in equally. This oneness he describes is not something he protects or monopolizes. It is something he extends. Shared, not reserved. Equal, not hierarchical. That move alone destabilizes any system built on separation.
That’s the problem. If what he points to is inherent, the structure of distance collapses. No mediator. No gatekeepers. No logic to worshiping what you’re told you can’t embody. So the system flips it. It elevates Jesus just enough to keep everyone else below him. It turns him into God and, in doing so, makes him useless as an example.
What Jesus is pointing toward is not his own uniqueness, but a different way of understanding reality altogether. Not divided, not tiered, not structured around access and exclusion. Human life itself as an expression of something deeper, already participating in what it seeks. He realizes it and lives from it, then points to it without enclosing it. This isn’t confined to Christianity. It shows up across traditions, in philosophy, and even in scientific descriptions of interconnected systems. It isn’t hidden. It’s repeatedly reframed.
You don’t have to accept any of that. You can reject the idea of underlying unity entirely. That’s not the point. The point is the contradiction. A system built on separation takes a figure who undermines that separation, turns him into the embodiment of it, and then organizes itself around worship at a distance. That isn’t a minor distortion. It is a structural inversion. And in the process, the very thing that was being pointed to gets buried under the system built in its name.
Jim Palmer, Inner Anarchy – http://tinyurl.com/ke25zdu
