THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE

Jesus said to his disciples, “…you will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32), because he foresaw that for a long time Christians would believe in an idea that is false. Since this message appears not long after the episode of the adulterous woman,* and a bit later the Pharisees tell him, “…we were not born illegitimate” (Jn8:41), it is clear that he referred to who was his father.

The belief in the dogma of Jesus’ virgin birth has turned Christians into slaves, because they do not really have faith in this dogma, but in the authorities that defend this dogma, and their faith in authorities goes together with a lack of faith in themselves.

When we assume that authorities understand ideas that we don’t understand, how do we know whether they really understand these ideas or only pretend to do so? How do we then know whether they look after everybody’s well-being or only look after their own well-being?

People have followed authorities – I not only refer to religious authorities – like sheep follow a shepherd without realizing that the shepherd only protects his sheep against wild animals because he plans to eat them himself.

Jesus said, “The truth will set you free” because the fact that the gospel of Saint Matthew made the religious authorities come to erroneous conclusions, teaches us that instead of trusting authorities we must learn to understand the world we live in by ourselves.

Faith is positive when it refers to the future, because then helps to achieve objectives; but it is negative when it refers to the past – like Jesus’ virgin birth –, because then it encourages people to ignore all information that contradicts our ‘assumption’. Since wisdom comes from processing information right – seeing how new information affects all previously obtained information –, having faith in dogmas turns people into ignorants.

Both the dogmas of religion and the axioms of science are ideas that are supposed to be right but that have never been proved to be so. The difference is that whereas scientists realize that eventually a particular axiom may be proved to be false**, theologians consider that time can only demonstrate a dogma to be right.

Ignorance and arrogance often go together and are certainly at the origin and defense of the dogma of Jesus’ birth. When the gospel of Saint Matthew was discovered, the authorities of Christianity assumed it said that Jesus was born of a virgin, but they did not process all its information right. For instance, they did not look up what was special about the four women in Saint Matthew’s genealogy for Jesus, and also did not check the different prophecies that Saint Matthew refers to. If they had done so, they would have realized that whereas Saint Matthew refers to a prophecy regarding a virgin giving birth to a son, the original text in Isaiah refers to a young woman giving birth to a son. (Is7:14).***

(*Read the article ‘The adulterous woman’.)

(** The most important axiom says that two straight lines running parallel with each never cross each other. Wondering about how two straight parallel lines behave is the same as inquiring about the nature of the universe; since that is the space in which we project these lines. In case this axiom is false, we have to restate our ideas about the universe.)

(***The belief in the dogma of Jesus’ virgin birth made that when Christians found that Isaiah referred to a young woman, they assumed this prophet made a mistake.)