The Elder Brother
Yesterday, this facility published the text of Luke 15, also known as The Prodigal Son. The titular phrase does not appear in the King Jimmy text. The story is a parable, that is, a made up story to teach a lesson. Those who say every word of the Bible is true somehow miss this.
The Prodigal Son is a popular story. It is well known, and speaks of forgiveness. Some unkind people say that Jesus worshipers like to be forgiven, and do not like to forgive. There is plenty of evidence for this observation. Lets just say that lots of people don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. If you can get your pie in the sky hero to forgive you, then you can have a slightly cleaner conscience.
PG was at a memorial service once. The guest of honor was a leather wearing pagan. The minister, who had met the deceased one time, told the story of the Prodigal Son. It made PG feel better.
The forgotten character in this story is the older brother. He was faithful to his father, stayed at home and helped out, only to see his wayward brother welcomed back with joy. The father never killed a fatted calf for the elder brother. Maybe the elder brother deserved it more. Sometimes, life is not fair. Some say this is more than a parable. Maybe it is three units of bull.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. These men were Union soldiers during the War Between the States. After the guns stopped firing, it was a long time before the two sides forgave one another.
Chamblee54 
Two thousand years ago a bunch of guys followed this dude around, wandering all over the place for years, listening to the stories he made-up. The guy was weird. REALLY weird. There are guys like him today, have been all though history. We used to, for a while here in the US, lock them up in institutions, because interesting guys that wander from town to town tend to make people nervous. Now we “tolerate” them, and let them live in the streets, feed them some, a lot of them get addicted to drugs, some get various forms of “treatment” for their “problems”…
Back to that little group of wanderers two thousand years ago. That dude, he had some pretty amazing stories, and he seemed to – nix that – dude KNEW things that he shouldn’t have known, was able to DO things nobody could explain. He was inspiring to some people, mildly amusing to others, confusing to many, and eventually, he and his followers and the people they met in their journeys became a real pain in the ass to the political Powers That Be. So they killed him.
Back to his amazing stories. The stories he told really made people THINK and WONDER. They were DISTURBING. Preconceptions of stuff were forever shattered. The more people thought about his really clever stories over the years, especially after he was taken away so brutally, the more they really missed him. A lot of people really liked him. Some fell deeply in love with him. It really hurt that he was gone. It was more than just his awesome stories. He was a REALLY NICE guy to people, especially people who people weren’t always very nice to. The way he acted, it made a difference in people’s lives. Some of the people who loved him a whole lot were really haunted by him. They dreamed about him. Such is the love for the people we love the most passionately and deeply. We never really forget them. It’s called being human.
His followers tried to write-down some of the stuff they remembered he said, and preserve it, because, well, he was pretty freakin’ awesome, the things he did and said, and they wanted everybody to love him as much as they did.
The stuff that happened after all that, you already know all about it. Not really what dude had in mind. AT ALL. But, whatever. People are weird, and only need an excuse to justify shit. I don’t hold any of that mess against him. By all accounts he was fascinating. I still like his stories a lot. Thomas Jefferson dug them so much that he cut-out just the stories he told and put them together in his own version of what became the Christian Bible. The reduced version used to be handed out to new members of Congress.
It’s too bad that so many of his supposed followers today demand that you BELIEVE things about him, and are so passive-aggressively VIOLENT about it. They deny they’re being VIOLENT about it, but honestly, they protest TOO much. Myself, I don’t tolerate their passive-aggressive VIOLENCE. They can believe whatever they want. I’m over their VIOLENCE. It’s not nice. I try to be nice to people.
I think that everybody has some little key to a lock that hardly anyone can see.
And I won’t try to hurt them if they don’t try to kill me.