GUESTS OF DAY 22 - May 19th


First, let me apologize for not having a photo that includes my guests. But the equipment was playing up and after I thought I had fixed it, it just kept taking pictures without actually saving them.

Two guests came over tonight, Gabriele and Steffen, two more of my colleagues. "I'm from Thuringia, people there don't believe in God." Gabriele remarked. And said that this was true for most people from there that have a certain age. Mostly the younger generations. But she also told be that the protestant kids all had to go "christian studies" after school. I'm not sure whether they "don't believe in God" despite or because of that.

Steffen spent some years in a christian school, but he also told us that the school was rather aregular school. However, his knowledge of various biblical motives and themes from the bible was quite convincing.

Gabriele brought up the question how it was possible for something like Christianity to develop in general. Even if Jesus lived, he must have been an extremely charismatic person to attract so many followers, and educated followers at that (it wasn't so common for people to know how to read or write at the times, so 80 gospels was quite a large number).

My theory is this: I think that Jesus gathered a rather large following among the educated because he offered an abstract philosophy that was based on religion and faith (maybe in contrast to the greek philosophers but this is extremely thin ice I'm skaiting on).

That alone wouldn't have sufficed to create such a huge and well oiled machine as the church is today. I assume at some point some people realised how powerful a means Jesus' theories are in terms of manipulating people. Manipulation is not necessarily or excelusively a bad thing.

I believe that if Jesus' theories hadn't been advanced in some form and if these theories couldn't have been used for manipulation, religion would not be what it is today.

Coming back to my guests, I'd like to add that it was a very pleasant evening. They were a bit jumpy when it came to selecting their favourite Jesus motives and in the end settled for two I hadn't expected. Gabriele picked a "tile" from Malta and Steffen chose the classic motive of the suffering Jesus before the crucifixion - "Considering the horror he's going through, he looks rather relaxed."