I was wondering again if anyone had read about fairly recently discovered texts which suggested that very early christianity was broader and more inclusive than appeared later.

   I tend to agree that later the christian church has been rather soft on sins that Jesus was rather hard on, like greed, and the church has been conversly quite strident on subjects about which Jesus apparently said very little at all, like sex. And so on, blah blah.

   I tend to think the teachings in the New Testament are pretty strikingly heroic and difficult to live by, and my experience with the religion seems always to easy it up a lot, water it down, interpret it into whatever suits what one can actually hope to live up to. You know the camel passing through the eye of a needle? well, turns out "camel" most likely meant a kind of twine, so, it's hard, but not THAT hard, if you're rich. And turn the other cheek? well, see, that was a kind of insult, back in the day, so it really means you have to put up with some teasing, sometimes, but you can pop open a can of christian whoop-ass when you need to. Maybe the softening of the meaning is a form of kindness to the weak, though, I don't know. The text is mind-boggling to me but I've usually found the religion a chore.

But if David Koresh, god or man, preached a coherent body of seminal moral thought comparable to the New Testament, I missed reading it. Probably the government covered it up. If he faced his persecutors in quite the same way, well, he didn't, I think. It's merely facile to compare things that aren't quite alike. Jesus being the son of god seems a little muddied by references to everyone else as the children of god, and I've always found the all-or-nothing argument a little unfounded in light of the story as we have it.

There are more precise condemnations one would make if they were taking the question seriously--that the crucifixion looked like suicide, or whatever. But I object to pretending to take the question seriously when one is obviously possessed of a particular sense of it.