Never say die : Mail & Guardian Online

'n Baie interessante perspektief op Jesus se opstanding deur Cedric Mayson - van die ANC se kommissie vir religieuse sake - wat in sy persoonlike hoedanigheid skryf.

We are children of Darwin, the Big Bang and the global village and we need a new vision: we cannot survive on 19th century religion. The idea of a Christian God in the sky, and heaven “up there” is dead to those who know about a round Earth in space, and inter-faith. It is time for a new religious dispensation based on the Jesus story to free us from inherited concepts that lead us astray.

In fact, a new resurrection of human insight is happening. Jesus simply cannot be confined to the inherited ideas of colonial churches, and is too crucial a human being to represent a bone of contention between Jews or Muslims or atheists. The language of George W Bush or Blair or Israeli extremists or Osama Bin Laden is the language of crucifying soldiers.

If Jesus, the Prophet and Karl Marx sat down together today they would talk about Earth not heaven, and of the way to justice, peace and full humanity for all, and they would surely reach agreement that worshipping Mammon the God of Globalised Greed makes most people poor; Jesus proclaimed that the vital force of God on Earth lay in the heart of a cooperative human community, within which a uniting, holistic experience of vision, values and skills takes place. That was the way to peace and prosperity, justice and love. We are in the middle of a major reconstruction of faith, a new reformation, a unity in diversity, a secular spirituality, which demands the rediscovery of such a Jesus.