Maggie's Farm

I'd like to recomment a book.

"Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love Of This World For Crucifixtion And Empire" by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker

The ladies maintain there was a change in the iconography and thought around 1000 AD, around the time of the Great Charles of France. Christianity gave up trying to find Paradise in this world, and looked for it elsewhere. The cross became prominent, whereas earlier, Eden, the Four Rivers of Paradise, Christ as the Good Shepard were at the fore. This giving up of Paradise in this world led to militancy, murder, force.

It's a good book, though some of the social prescriptions in the last part might not be so well thought out.

I maintain Jesus was not an economist, therefore he couldn’t have been a socialist. And in his day, the means of production were a simple plow and stoop labor, not the mass production factory, and there were no great universities with departments creating new technology. Having withdrawn to the mountains, he returned, hero like, to share what he had found there, a pearl of great price. He threw out wildly impractical suggestions, called fools fools, condemned hypocrites and lawyers, gave the money bag to Judas to carry, and lived off the women. He told great stories with deep meaning, and humor too. It’s said he was the kind of man that could turn water into wine. He left his birth place, and his family, and his friends too, and finally left life itself. Having done zero to contribute to the material advance of his society, his every act was an effort to bring forth life and more life, and he often failed, and he changed the world, a little for the better, taken all in all.