The Marginal Christian's Handbook.

Reflections on Contemporary Christianity by a progressive Christian.

A progressive Christian versus the Church of Christ without Christ.

This blog is one "sub-weblog" of our main blog, The Flatland Almanack.    Please do visit us there!  I  will try to post a note on this topic every week or so, but The Flatland Almanack is my daily blog.  This one is for longer pieces.

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Richard Dawkins: "The universe is queerer than we can possibly image..."

...but there's nowt so queer as folk.    My favorite "village atheist" on the limits of human perception...an argument which some people might well assert against some of his own theories. At any rate, it's well worth watching; Dawkins is always worth the time. We could all benefit from spending more time thinking about thinking, consciousness, and perception. 

Here's the blurb from the site. 

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for "thinking the improbable" by looking at how our human frame of reference -- the things we can perceive with our five senses, and understand with our eight-pound brain -- limits our understanding of the universe. Think of it: We can't see atoms, we can't see infrared light, we can't hear ultrasonic frequencies, but we know without a doubt that they exist. What else is out there that we can't yet perceive -- what dimensions of space, what aspects of time, what forms of life?

Is he not listening to what he is saying or am I missing something?  Anyway, the talk is well worth hearing and can be found here at TED.   I'll have to listen to it again, after which I'll probably need to update this.

Blogcombing: "What Have the Faithful Done?"

At her excellent (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) blog, Writing in Faith: Thoughts, Sandy Carlson has posted a beautiful, thought-provoking and very balanced note on how churches as institutions have shown that they can indeed be agents of God's grace (a point on which I've sometimes felt doubt).

I believe that institutional churches of every hue and variety can be agents of God's grace--but only if we first accept that they are very human, very flawed attempts at reaching toward a divine mystery so much greater than ourselves. Teachers come in every shape and size. Sometimes they come in hellish nightmares. So be it. The gift of these lessons is no less a blessing.  (Sandy Carlson)

She then lists 13 "acts of faith--some beautiful, some hellish--as presented by Religion and Ethics."  Read more...

Gallup Poll: Over 80% of Americans Identify as Christian

A Gallup poll about religious beliefs in America doesn't reveal any earth-shaking information.  Still, I thought it was worth a comment. 

About 82% of Americans in 2007 told Gallup interviewers that they identified with a Christian religion. That includes 51% who said they were Protestant, 5% who were "other Christian," 23% Roman Catholic, and 3% who named another Christian faith, including 2% Mormon.

Because 11% said they had no religious identity at all, and another 2% didn't answer, these results suggest that well more than 9 out of 10 Americans who identify with a religion are Christian in one way or the other.  (Gallup)

But only about 62% of those polled identified themselves as belonging to a particular religion go to church.

To summarize, more than 8 in 10 Americans identify with a religion and 8 out of 10 say that religion is at least fairly important in their daily lives; more than 8 out of 10 say they attend church at least "seldom"; and again more than 8 out of 10 identify with a Christian religion  (Gallup).

Interestingly, only 14% of those polled said religion is "increasing" its influence. (Gallup). Of course, how one answers such a question would depend on one's assumption about its current or prevailing influence.   

Torture: An Issue for People of Faith

[Cross-posted at Versus & Buck Naked Politics]  At Slacktivist, Fred Clark wrote a searing response to Mona Charen's distressing recent column on torture.  Thanks, Slacktivist, for doing this---so other blogs don't have to.

And since it's Christmas, I also found via Slacktivist this site:  The National Religious Campaign Against Torture. For some reason, the group limits membership to organizations (i.e., to churches), but you can sign a statement and get other information on opposing as immoral the government's use of torture.  Speak Truth to Power, people!  Read NRCAT's statement below and then please go there and sign it.  After all, it's Christmas.

The Passing Show: the Uses of Prayer, the British Spongebob, Sideshow, and the Church of Christ without Christ

by Damozel | I've had a long day of praying and waiting, waiting and praying.  Being a certain sort of Christian, I assume that God knows what he is doing all the time and always knows what everyone wants in his or her heart;  I also believe that life is demonstrably not about trying to be happy all the time or to live forever, but something else, a different sort of opportunity.   I therefore believe that prayer is pointless on some issues:  things I don't like and feel I can't bear will happen.   But of course, a priest I know once pointed out, the answer to a prayer is not invariably, "Yes."

Prayer is for filling in the time when there's nothing else to do but that, I guess; and also because you might as well ask.  To quote a character in a Flannery O'Connor novel I read in my twenties, how can you get what you don't ask for?  You might as well ask.  Anyway, that sense of connection and communication can keep you from going insane when there is literally nothing else to be done.  At least you can ask for the kinds of things that can make a difference in the meaning of a situation:  courage, support from above or within, that sort of thing.   And you can register what sort of outcome you want.  Who knows, maybe it does make a difference sometimes?  And so far my prayers have been "answered."  Answered with a "yes," I mean.  Unless, of course, it's what was going to happen all along anyway.    

Ricky Gervais, the Archbishop of Canterbury & The Nativity Story

Get Sol Invictus (The Unvanquishable Sun) by Damozel | This conversation between Ricky Gervais and the Archbishop of Canterbury has rattled a few cages and why?  Because the archbishop acknowledged what I've known since Sunday school days:  the nativity story as we "know" it is a cobbled-together story with elements of myth or legend.  Who knew?   The Telegraph reported:

His comments came during an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live with Simon Mayo yesterday. Later on in the show, the Archbishop was challenged by fellow guest Ricky Gervais, the comedian, about the credibility of the Christmas story.

It's quite clear if you listen to the conversation/read the transcript that the archbishop (NB:  I don't like him)  affirmed his belief in Christ and the Bible.   His critics don't seem to be sufficiently taking in this part:

Gervais told Dr Williams he was concerned about "brainwashing" of children who are sent to faith schools at an early age, comparing teaching that God exists to belief in Father Christmas.

Dr Williams said faith schools expose children to the full range of human experience and values and he did not believe they indoctrinated people. (Archbishop says nativity 'a legend'; emphasis added)

Part of the problem is that the Archbishop is the most diffident cleric ever.  Maybe he was intimidated by Gervais.  No doubt he's as big a fan of The Office and The Extras as I am----how could he not be?  So he didn't fight back as aggressively as he might have and he got himself as thoroughly and awkwardly ensnared as Andy Millman or Maggie ever did in The Extras..  And this all seemed to be due to simple diffidence, not to any intent on the part of Gervais to trap or trick him.    

But he said nothing that I haven't heard every educated cleric I've ever known say.  Here's the video:

Still Here, Still Working Full-Time on the Political Blog

I really DO intend to begin blogging about my own life again.  But getting Buck Naked Politics up and running (and with a 200+ technorati ranking) and still working full-time has absorbed all my energy.  Please visit me there!

Elaine Pagels talks to Salon about the Gospel of Judas.

I was so excited to see this interview.

I love Elaine Pagels. I read her book on the gnostic gospels at least once a year to remind myself not to accept with qualification the received wisdom concerning Christ, the life of Christ, his mission, and his resurrection.  The people who interpreted the Bible got the good news from sources with political as well as religious agenda.  Putting aside the question of whether the Bible should be accepted as the Word of God, direct from the source, the word of its interpreters (including the early church fathers) certainly does not.  Why don't people realize this?  And why aren't people who call themselves Christians or christians as hungry as I am to know the details of Christ's life from every possible angle? 

I know the answer, mind you:  it's because conventional Christians know so little about history, or about the state of the world during Christ's time, about his circumstances, the dangerous and unstable political situation in Judea and Galilee, or anything else that they haven't received via often unqualified Biblical interpreters that they have only the haziest idea of the man who allegedly stilled the water, walked on it, survived or was revived after Crucifixion or came back from the dead, and who referred to himself as "the Son of Man." 

They don't know the significance of his calling himself this, the difference between his calling himself the Son of Man and between those who called him the king of the Jews, or why it makes a difference what he really meant.  They don't know the significance of Pilate's writing, "The king of the Jews" on the tablet placed over his head at Crucifixion or why the priests objected to this.  They don't know the political or religious significance of his ride into the city, his driving the moneychangers from the temple, or his mission to the poor and outcast.  They don't even know that Jesus is just Greek for "Yeshua" or "Joshua."   Furthermore, they don't want to know.

And the reason they don't is that they are afraid that understanding Christ might interfere with their precious "personal relationship"-----as if human beings, gods throughout history, and God himself weren't perpetually anxious and hungry to be understood.   They want to worship him but not to understand him and are afraid of what they might find out if they let in any information that wasn't included by the very politically driven Council of Nicaea 300 years after his life ended.

Can I Hear You say Hallelujah? Evangelicals Step Up.

The word "evangelical" gets thrown around a lot these days concerning various Christian groups.  Some of the groups mentioned are honest-to-Jesus Bible-thumping hellfire-spouting missionary types, but some of them are just exceptionally conservative Christianists who go to church every Sunday, sit up straight, sing in the choir, and refrain from dancing or drinking.  There's a difference, I think.  Coming from the Carolina Bible Belt---and being related to a number of Southern Baptists and Republicans----I'd say there is a difference between those and, say, the Pentacostalists. 

But I don't suppose it matters.  I'm not going to tabulate and classify them; I'm just going to pray that more of them get the prodigious mess in their heads (where the words of Jesus get all mixed up with what their Daddies told them about taxes, capitalism, and the flag) sorted out so they don't keep yanking the country further down the path to dysfunction and dishonor. 

There's some reason to believe that some of them are hearing the pleas (or that God is hearing the prayers) of some of their more centrist or even leftward-tilting brethren.   

According to The Raw Story, one large group, the National Association of Evangelicals,  (45,000 members) have "broken ranks with the Bush Administration on torture."

The National Association of Evangelicals, representing roughly 45,000 churches across the U.S. endorsed on Tuesday a declaration against torture put together by Evangelicals for Human Rights – an organization of 17 evangelical scholars – in a striking break from the Bush Administration's policy.

"Tragically, documented cases of torture and inhumane and cruel behaviour have occurred at various sites in the war on terror, and current law opens procedural loopholes for more to continue," the evangelicals' statement declares.

Sara Miles at Salon.com: When Christ-consciousness gets a hook in you, it hurts like hell.

I am always happy to find confirmation anywhere that other thinking women with brains, a leftward-tilting sensibility, and a devotion to progressive goals have struggled as I did and do with the chagrin of being Christian in an age when the label conveys to the people I respect  "intolerant, narrow-minded, embryo-hugging-at-the-expense-of-sentient-humanity, climate-change-denying, taxes-nonpaying, liberal-baiting, logic-denying middlebrow moron."   Bill Maher, for example, was all over the whole God issue as usual Friday night, in the very first Real Time of the season.  Every time he gets on the subject I feel less and less affection for Bill Maher (even though he is still my hero) and more and more irritation that I can't be there to rebut his many, many wrong assumptions (and no one else ever has to my satisfaction). 

I am slightly soothed to note that most of his guests admit---shyly, as a rule, and with a certain shame---to a belief in something besides hot tubs with twins and so on.  But not by much I'm not.  I'm an intelligent person and I can tell a hawk from handsaw regardless which way the wind blows, but the sometimes it's hard to hold shame at bay, even though Jesus---understandably---explained, as he had every right to do, that if his followers were ashamed of him, he would be ashamed of them.   

For one thing, as I would expect Jesus to understand,  I'm married to a Brit---i.e., an atheist who not only doesn't believe in God, but views any discussion of, or casual reference to, one's religious beliefs as a solecism of the worst sort----and I am surrounded by lovely, non-God-bothering liberals who are prone to announcing their nonbelief in a tone of really insufferable smugness, as if their lack of faith somehow set the final seal on their credentials as progressive thinkers with a sky wide tolerance for all faiths. 

So I was happy to see this article by Sara Miles in Salon, since both her experiences trying to be a Christian in secret and the reasons why she let it happen to her are painfully familiar to me.

First, just to get it out of the way, the traction-like pull of the original fisher of men (and women) once you let him get his hook in you: 

[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com] 

But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man....

[quote ends; link in original]

Lessons on Christian Life and True Charity: Annie Lamott and Oprah.

  I posted this note as an entry to my journal blog ("The Flatland Chronicles") and then realized that it is almost entirely about matters of faith and the meaning of the Christianity that Christ taught. I have written a lot here about charity and the meaning of charity, and plan to write (when I have time to do it justice) about Lamott's   Plan B:  Further Thoughts on Faith.

In the meantime, here this note gives some suggestions for further additions to a marginal christian's reading list as well as some further thoughts on christian charity and how you go about doing it.

To read all about it, JUMP NOW TO THE FLATLAND CHRONICLES.

Sloth and Other Deadly Sins.

JUMP BACK TO INTRODUCTION TO THIS NOTE (IN THE FLATLAND ALMANACK).    

SEVEN:  COUNT 'EM!  As previously noted, I come from a religious background that didn't focus overmuch on sin.  I first learned about the seven deadly sins in a novel I was reading.  I was only young at the time---11 or 12, say---so I was surprised to find that there was a list of sins that were considered "deadly."  I wasn't sure why that was supposed to be so.  Deadly how exactly?  I didn't know. 

Nowadays, of course, I could simply google "the seven deadly sins" and all my questions (more, or sometimes less, authoritatively) would be instantly answered.   Here's a whole website devoted to the seven deadly sins, for example.   The pull quote at the top of the page remarks rather jovially, "The Seven Deadly Sins are those transgressions which are fatal to spiritual progress.  You probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating.  Welcome to your source for information for history on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues."

DEADLY VIRTUES.  About the same time I first read about the seven deadly sins, I also learned about the seven deadly virtues, which is what they were called in the song.  My parents (and I at age 11 or so) were fans of any musical by Lerner and Loewe, and Camelot was a family favorite.  In that original Broadway version (Julie Andrews as Guinevere, Richard Burton as Arthur, Robert Goulet as Lancelot), adorable Roddy McDowell starred as Prince Mordred, Arthur's illegitimate son by his own half-sister (though this isn't mentioned in the play), and a bastard in more ways than one.   I fell in love with him based strictly on one tiny photograph inside the album cover.   (Even as a child, I knew that Lancelot was an insufferable prig, despite my mother's swoonings over Robert Goulet.)

In Camelot, Mordred's malice seems to come from out of nowhere;  they don't delve into his miserable childhood and Oedipus complex or the rest of it; for that, you have to read The Once and Future King (the book on which the play was based).    His one number is called "The Seven Deadly Virtues," and it goes like this (and this is from memory because I so adored that song as a child that it's permanently seared into my brain):

The seven deadly virtues, those ghastly little traps:
Oh no, my liege, they were not meant for me.
The seven deadly virtues were made for other chaps
Who love a life of failure and ennui.

Take Courage:  now there's a sport!
An invitation to the state of rigor mort!

And Purity:  a noble yen!
And very restful every now and then.

I find Humility means to be hurt.
It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt!

Honesty is fatal and should be taboo;
Diligence:  a fate  I would hate!
If Charity means giving, I give it to you;
and Fidelity is only for your mate...

Which is pretty much how I learned the names of the seven cardinal virtues.    I was intrigued by Mordred's version of adolescent rebellion---"Let others take the high road; I will take the low/I cannot wait to rush in where angels fear to go!"---but I didn't really understand at age 11 how to emulate him.   I wasn't even sure what some of the words (diligence, for example) meant.  Those were (comparatively) innocent times, the Seventies. Too innocent, for example, to permit a character in a musical to sing with malicious merriment about the Seven Deadly Sins.

"Franny and Zooey" as a Manual on Prayer.

I learned to pray from my parents.  They told me to bow my head and say certain words before eating and they taught me to say "Now I lay me down to sleep" before I went to bed.  I am trying to remember how I worked out who this "God" person was they were going on about or how I came to understood that I was meant to be talking to him (He was always "he" to the adults of my parents' generation). 

When I think about it, it seems to be something I've always known.  Though obviously, that can't be true.  At some point, the words would have just been words.

The blessing my father said at night went like this:  "Father, we thank thee for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty.  In the name of Christ the Lord, Amen."  Where I grew up, it was sort of the universal adult blessing of the food. 

In school, we learned to say this: 

God is great
God is good
Let us thank him for this FOOD.
Ah-MEN!

This lent itself easily to schoolyard variations, e.g., "God is good; God is great; Help me get the biggest plate."  When a friend of mine said it instead of the real blessing, a little girl---my cousin Julie, I'm guessing---got very worked up.  That's how I learned the word "sacrilegious."

How the Democrats could win back Christian voters.

From Salon:

[quote begins from Salon article by Michael Scherer, "How Would Jesus Vote?"]

Pastor Chris Stephens runs his church services like a rock show. Colored strobes dance across the stage, electric guitar solos punctuate the hymns, and his sermons are filled with exhortations like, "We need a God explosion." The roughly 2,000 worshipers who belong to Faith Promise Church know to expect a blunt-talking believer when they come to Sunday services, a man unafraid to take a stand for Jesus.

So it was no surprise two years ago when Stephens devoted a sermon before the presidential election to a discussion of God's hopes for the ballot box. "If you are a Democrat or a Republican before you are a Christ-ocrat, you are an idol worshiper," he told his congregation. As he explained it, God cared most about just a few core issues in 2004: ending abortion, opposing gay marriage, appointing conservative judges and ensuring the freedom to pray in the public square. Christian voters, he told his congregation, ignore these issues at their own peril. "If you reject Christ, if you have never been born again, you are not going to heaven," he said at the end of the sermon.

[quote ends from "How would Jesus vote?"]

The real issue with which this article is concerned is the apparently successful attempt of an allegedly "moderate"  gay marriage-opposing, right to life "Democrat" to peel off the evangelical base from a "right to choose" Republican. 

I don't think Democrats have to take that stand to win back Christian voters.  I don't mean the extreme or extremely stupid kind who are governed by emotion, but the thinking, caring ones.  Those people vote Republican out of various fears, some more worthy than others.  But the Christian who is not a Christocrat but a believer whose religion really matters to him or her could very easily, by making the correct argument, cause at least some of those people to rethink the notion that Jesus wants Christians to be Republicans.

Rather than argue about abortion or gay marriage, Democrats need to cite the substantial amount of text in the gospels that focus on private prayer, on making sacrifices (e.g., the widow and her mite) for the benefit of the community and especially the poor, and on his insistence that mere belief in what he propounded would NEVER be enough. 

The very ads used by the Republicans to discredit opponents could be turned against them in such a case.  In the Tennessee campaign with which the Salon article is specifically concerned, the GOP has used ads with definite racist implications intended to ring those fear-of-the-other alarm bells in white Republicans.  Would Jesus approve of that?  I think not, my friends.  I think not. 

The religious left needs a credible ministerial voice to remind people that Jesus was all about acts, not words or beliefs.   Regardless of ambiguous statements that he came to fulfill the law, he was clear that the law which he fulfilled imposed two basic duties:  to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind ("the first and greatest commandment"; and love your neighbor as yourself (the second commandment which is "like unto it.")   From these injunctions, he said, "flow all the law and the prophets." 

"That About Wraps it Up for God, Then."

SEE RELATED ENTRY AT THE FLATLAND ALMANACK.

In one of the five volumes of  Douglas Adams'  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, a prominent philosopher (I forget his name) writes books proving the nonexistence of God.  (My favorite title: Who is this God Person, Anyway?)  His arguments are so flawlessly reasoned that God ends up saying "Oh, dear" and "vanishing in a puff of logic."

But the reality is that the perceptions on which faith is based are not subject to reason or reasoned analysis.   I have to laugh out loud when scientists announce that they've got reality all figured out.  They need to read Edward Abbot's Flatland. 

Look, I like Richard Dawkins.  I enjoyed The Blind Watchmaker.  I believe that most of what he says is true.  For example, this:

[quote begins from Richard Dawkins, The Huffington Post, Why There is Almost Certainly No God]

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming....

My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.

[quote ends]

Yes, yes, and yes.  All true.  All just as terrifying to this Christian as to anyone in the scientific community and for exactly the reasons that Dawkins cites.

But he's wrong that one cannot reject the argument of creation by design and believe in a personal God.   I reject Genesis (and most of the Bible), so I'm hardly a typical Christian.  Furthermore, my notion of reality is less fixed than his.  I'd say this:  in the reality that Richard Dawkins perceives, there is almost no room for God (interesting that he left that little loophole).  In the reality that my husband Nick perceives, the same is true. 

But scientists are in their way as credulous as evangelicals are in theirs.  They trust profoundly in their instruments and in their perceptions.  They also believe in the existence of facts.

But my own training in another profession has convinced me that there is no such thing in the universe as a fact.  There are only the shifting perceptions of observers, some of whom are scientists.   I love science because every advance into understanding the universe and the stuff of which the universe is made shows that it is always altogether stranger than one can quite conceive.   Are you a human being composed of flesh and bone or are you a loosely organized mass of particles whirling at high speed in mostly empty space?  Isn't it amazing that the answer is both?  And isn't amazing that you can say "I" and tell that part of reality apart from the rest of it that isn't?

I certainly agree that religion should have no place in American politics.  The incursion of the so-called Christian Right is a development that the Founding Fathers would have deplored.  Separation of church and state ought to ensure that no religious agenda could achieve a sufficient foothold in the government to impose its will on the rest of us.   But the fact that there are people whose identity is so tied up in their beliefs about the nature of reality that they can't tell the difference doesn't prove a thing about religion in the abstract or God in the concrete. 

Out of the mouths of babes.

Get this:

JESUS CAMP.

It's the sheer frivolousness of this that gets me down----the light, unanalytical handling of sacred things and sacred text----and the complete disregard of the need to approach spiritual matters mindfully, with reverent care rather than happy clappy frivolity.

I am particularly amazed that these self-styled teachers don't take seriously what Christ seems repeatedly to have said about people who make a feature of their own righteousness---"They have their reward now."  Therefore, he said, no further rewards await them in the kingdom of heaven.  He speaks of silent prayer in private.  Do they think he didn't mean it or that somehow or another he changed his mind?

Yes, I know the arguments about why what he said about sanctimonious hypocrites and displays of piety doesn't apply to them.   But I don't believe it.   If one thing in the gospels is clear, it's that Jesus was not at all fond of the conspicuously self-righteous.   

No intelligent person can stomach piety and mawkish sentimentality in the spiritual realm; and Jesus was obviously an abnormally intelligent man.  If you read the words attributed to him in the gospels, it's that following his rethinking of the ancient laws is a difficult and challenging undertaking.

I hate to see indoctrination of the sort apparent in this film.  It's disturbing to see little children being taught that "speaking in tongues" means shouting out lugubrious nonsense that would embarrass a chimp. 

God knows---and doubtless shakes his head in wonderment at the spectacle---that well-meaning religious people everwhere believe that religious training means indoctrination.    It means drilling out-of-context quotes from random books of the Bible into heads too young to understand the context even if they were given it, and it means teaching them to "believe in" events that defy human understanding.

It's the way it's been approached by organized religion since early in the church's history:  begin force-feeding them the received wisdom when they're still too young to understand what's being done to them.

It's sad to see children being told how to have a religious experience, partiularly in circumstances in which they are subjected to groupthink and peer pressure.

It's sad because they'll never know the authentic experience from the enforced exercise in mass hysteria.    They're being told or shown how to feel and what they're being told isn't particularly consistent with the actual teachings of Christ in the Gospels.

God, Death, and Judgment: A heretic's view.

I was talking recently to a young friend who is going through a crisis of faith.  He can't continue to believe in God, he said, because he simply can't accept the notion of a supposedly just God whose actions are so arbitrary.  If it matters to God whether we believe or disbelieve, he said, why doesn't God show special favor to those who believe the right things?  Why don't their prayers matter more?

And how can a just God justify to humanity events such as the tsumani that killed so many in Indonesia a year and a half ago?   And why, if praying makes a difference to anything, isn't it more reliable?  When my young friend prayed that his mother's cancer would go away the first time, it had gone into remission; but when it returned, all his praying did her no good at all.   "It's pointless," he said. 

Furthermore, what about all the people---on both sides---being killed in Iraq?  How can a just and merciful God allow the good (whichever those are) to be killed along with the bad?

Listening to him made me very glad to be a heretic.   Conventional Christians have to engage in heroic twists and leaps of logic to explain to themselves and others why good people suffer along with the bad.  Because I came at Christianity (christianity) from a different angle, I never have this problem.

1.  God doesn't care whether you're happy.  First of all, I don't assume as most Christians I know seem to do that God wants his creatures to be "happy," whatever that means.   If I believed that this was the purpose of creation, I really would have to chop some logic. 

The idea that personal suffering is a sign of God's inattention certainly isn't supported by the Bible.   If you assume that when bad things happen to people it's a sign of God's anger, Jerry Falwell, you clearly haven't paid enough attention to what your Bible tells you about what happens to those whom he favors with his personal attention, starting with Christ and working backwards and forwards through history.   

I remember a dismal hymn we used to sing at the Episcopal Church that expressed the paradox that Christ was so fond of reiterating:  "The peace of God...is no peace, but strife cast in the sod/Yet brothers pray for but one thing/The glorious peace of God!"  I didn't get it as a teenager and I certainly wasn't interested in a God who promised "not peace but a sword."   

I had to come to Christianity the long way around, via  other religions.  Given its difficulty, I find it much easier to see life as the process by which the soul educates and disciplines itself than as a one-time-only temporary chance to convince God that you are sufficiently repentant/pure/faithful to deserve a place at some extended picnic with the other good and deserving.    If we assume that there is a God who takes some sort of interest in our welfare---and based on experience, I do----the only possible inference we can draw from what we observe about the reality of human life is that suffering, bereavement, and death are (from God's perspective) circumstances that somehow inure to our benefit, however much we may wish to forego them.

A note on two excellent essays by "Real Live Preacher."

                                                           

In my newest blog, I've created a category of blogs about blogs.  My first such entry was a rather lengthy note on two essays published at my favorite Christian site, "Real Live Preacher." 

In his essays (links are in the note), he discusses the problem and nature of evil.  In my blog, I reflect on his reflections and discuss my own perception of evil as the natural state of the human race as our biological inheritance. 

Jump to the note.

Christianity, Christ, and Mel Gibson

[published on August 4, 2006]

I was furious when I first heard about Mel Gibson's anti-Jewish diatribe; and I said so.  For one thing, everything he said made it crystal clear that the charge of some people that his Passion for Christ film was anti-semitic cannot be justified solely by reference to that most anti-semitic of the Biblical Gospels, the Gospel of John.

As I noted before, I did not see The Passion of Christ.  Because of a fascination with the shroud of Turin (a fascinating artifact, whatever it is and wherever it came from), I have read a great deal on the subject of Crucifixion and the realities of Roman tortures and execution, up to and including scourging by means of the flagram and the use of the spear for ensuring the death of Crucifixion victims.  Having read enough to understand that it was a messy, prolonged, humiliating, and cruel way to die, I had no stomach for seeing a film billed as a "realistic" depiction of Christ's execution. 

I therefore am in one sense not in a position to comment on whether it was or was not anti-Semitic.  On the other hand, I have read the Gospel of John closely---probably more closely than the others, due to its comparative strangeness and also for the abundance of profuse and often puzzling details.  A person who was basing a Biblical story on that Gospel and was sticking closely to that version of events would indeed find it pervasively anti-Semitic.

Before basing a film on this Gospel (or any of the others), such a one would have done well to study some contemporary religious sources in order to understand the historical context of that book.  At a certain point in history, the emerging Christian religion would have been wise to distance themselves from the Jewish population from which Christianity arose.  Furthermore, a person who took a little time to understand the historical context would realize that Jesus was executed as a subversive by the Romans.

The Jewish leaders turned him over to the Romans because his triumphal ride into the city doubtless made it clear to them that if they did not put a stop to him, the Romans would do so in any case.   Furthermore, they would doubtless not stop with Jesus only.   His claim to be King of the Jews----which the ride into the city asserted he intended to claim---was a deadly serious one, from the standpoint of the Romans and Herod.

There are always two sides to every story.  The gospels adopt a mocking tone when they refer to the Pharisees and their constant questioning of Jesus.  According to those accounts, the priests and scribes are constantly trying to trick Jesus into blasphemy. 

Jesus IS "the Christian Left."

According to this Washington Post article\, progressive Christians are starting to mobilize to push back against the religious right.  There are plenty of people as sick as I am at their hijacking of our religion to push political agenda that we're all very sure the Man Himself would never have endorsed. 

[quote from Washington Post article by Thomas Ferraro]

Some, like the Rev. Robin Meyers of the United Church of Christ in Oklahoma, marry gay couples and seek to reduce abortions while rejecting calls by the right to outlaw them.

"I join the ranks of those who are angry because I have watched as the faith I love has been taken over by fundamentalists who claim to speak for Jesus but whose actions are anything but Christian," declared Meyers, who has written a new book, "Why the Christian Right is Wrong.

According to scholars, the religious left has become its most active since the 1960s when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other clergy -- black and white -- were key figures in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

>[quote from Washington Times article by Thomas Ferror ends]

The bad news is that the religious left is, mirroring the Democratic party, exceedingly loosely knit, lacking the awesome skills of the Right in creating a narrow, monolithic point of view with which to address voters. 

Was Jesus Married to Mary Magdalene (or anyone)? Why this Heretic Prefers to Think Not.

[published on July 14, 2006]

1.  That visceral assent.

I read---nay, devoured---Holy Blood Holy Grail----years ago.  In other words, years before The Da Vinci Code essentially incorporated a sizable chunk of its main thesis in a thin--but colorful!---fictional shell.  I did NOT like The Da Vinci Code, which I felt presented the same arguments much less stylishly (or coherently), but I loved HBHG.   

One of the authors of HBHG recently published The Jesus Papers.  A few days back, I discussed a review of the book by Laura Miller, writing in Salon.com, criticized it for---among other things---its amazing leaps in logic.  And there are some amazing leaps.  I liked it, and I liked HBHG, but only to the extent that both served as food for thought (or for imagination).   I know the difference between history and an imaginative construct such as HBHG. I also know that when you start looking for connections, you'll see them everywhere, so I am not surprised that the authors were able to link, for example, Jesus to the Merovingian dynasty or the Merovingians to the Templars.  Human beings have changed since the dawn of time, but not THAT much. 

Anyway:  about this whole Jesus-as-husband-of-Mary-Magdalene deal.  First of all, I remember first having the theory called to my attention.  It was during one episode in a kick-ass show Chris Carter show called Millenium, in an episode called Amanuensis.  I highly, highly recommend it; I much prefer it to The Da Vinci Code.  I think I saw it (it was a rerun) in 1998.  At the time,  I felt chills go down my spine and my scalp prickling and something that a character in Ursula LeGuin refers to as 'the visceral 'yes.''   It seemed right.  It felt true.  Or I wanted it to be true.

2.  Other people who also want it to be true.

Apparently The Da Vinci Code  has brought about the emergence of huge numbers of people who reacted to this theory pretty much in the same way I did.  I was sitting at a Starbucks with my husband one afternoon shortly after publication of The Da Vinci Code, when a grey-haired classic old- lefty type  wearing skin-tight biking gear caught my eye.  His own were wild.  "Have you read this?" he asked me breathlessly. "Have you read it?  It's amazing!  It changes everything!"   He so wanted it to be true.  Why?

A Marginal Christian Looks at Corporal Punishment, Sexual Assault, Transvestitism, Divorce, & Crushed Testicles in the Old Testament.

  [published on July 13, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles", my previous blog]

A Marginal Christian Looks at  Corporal Punishment,  Sexual Assault, Transvestitism, Divorce, and Crushed Testicles in the Old Testament

Someone pointed out to me that my discussion of the Bible isn't exactly authoritative.  "You aren't a Biblical scholar," he pointed out.  "You really aren't qualified to say what it means."

No, that's right.  But I am engaging in a little exercise called "Imagine the world if we took the Bible literally just based on what it seems to be saying and didn't read selectively or with regard to its context"  That's pretty much what certain right wing Christians do.  I'm doing what they do:  going through and cherry-picking the particular parts of interest to me.

I will always think it surprising that the Church Fathers saw fit to keep the parts of the Old Testament that didn't directly relate to Jesus.  I know---or I think I know; let's say I've been told----that the early church split very early on between the Church led by Jesus's brother James and between the Church led by Paul (who never met Jesus, or at least not while Jesus was alive).  The Church of James still followed the law of Moses; Paul decided because, according to him, he had the direct authority of  Jesus to do so. 

Jesus frequently cited the law of Moses in his disputes with the pharisees and scribes and such, but it's always seemed clear to me----I am telling you my perception, not what know or even "know"-----that in his disputes, he was constantly reinterpreting that law.  Indeed, it seems obvious that he was; otherwise, why would they have been trying to nail him on charges of blasphemy.  I don't think in sober truth that there is much of it left if you read his remarks closely; he quotes scripture constantly, but he is spinning it toward completely different conclusions, or so it seems.  His statement that he came to fulfill the law I take as meaning something entirely different than the fundamentalists I know take it to mean.  I understand it to mean---this is just me, unaided by Biblical scholarship----"Now that I am here, you don't need it anymore" or (possibly) "Now that I am here, I will tell you its purpose; if you achieve the purpose, you need not follow it to the letter."

I say all this because----again-----I am continually astonished at the ease with which certain Christians I know (including certain churches I shall not specifically name) jump back and forth between old and new testaments without really seeming ever to read them together.