If there is one thing I'm consistently irked by it's the Persecution Envy of modern Western Christians. They live in a world where they have more religious freedom than at just about any time in history and yet you wouldn't know that just by listening to them. Somehow this privileged group considers itself the most persecuted group in the world. They keep finding more and more ridiculous reasons to feel "persecuted". Schools teaching evolution is not persecution. Someone calling you a bigot because you said gays were abominations that will destroy civilization as we know it is not persecuting you. Neither is someone who doesn't agree with your view that everything will be perfect if only we got rid of democracy and got a Christian Theocracy instead.
How did we come to a point where criticism = persecution? That's an insult to everyone who has ever been ACTUALLY persecuted - for instance the countless Christians who were robbed, beaten, tortured and killed for their faith through the ages. Two thousand years ago persecuted Christians had to face lions, now they just have to face facts!
So I decided to create some LOLart (based on the "Unimpressed" meme) to illustrate just how ludicrous and pathetic the faux-persecution complex of the modern Christian is.
So maybe lay off the hyperbole and whining and be grateful for just how great you have it?
If you step into a church odds are really good that you would find something saying "God is Love" displayed prominently. However if you listen to Christians talk or read what they have to say in the media you probably won't see that displayed prominently at all. Instead the odds are really great that you would instead be hearing about how God hates things.
When I grew up, everyone seemed pretty convinced that God hated race mixing*. In fact even when I was in college, the fact that I was friends with a black girl led to me getting a lecture about how God hated mixed race people. These days though, God mostly seems to hate The Gays.
Now granted, most Christians won't go around with "God Hates Fags" signs like the Westboro Baptists Church but they still share the sentiment. Apparently "you will burn in hell forever for being gay" is considered friendlier than "God hates fags". The litmus test for being considered "Christian" these days seems to be agreeing that God hates gays. Gays get the blame for everything from earthquakes and terrorist attacks to the destruction of Western Civilization because God hates and punishes their sin more than any other. At best some Christians will try to make the distinction that God only hates homosexuality but not the homosexual person. However I could forgive gays for failing to see the distinction...
Now everyone listing the things God hates seem pretty confident that they are 100% correct. Whether it's desegregation, homosexuality or just sexuality in general, when someone claims God hates it they are pretty sure it's in the Bible. Now I may be a lowly seminary dropout but something about that seemed off to me. Probably because I've actually read the entire thing and didn't see any of that. I could be wrong of course so I went back to check and I found this comprehensive list of everything that God explicitly hates according to the Bible (I used the NIV but other translations may differ. Feel free to leave the verse in the comments if I missed one)
God hates:
The religious practices of pagans (Deut 12:31)
The erection of sacred stones (Deut 16:22)
All who do wrong (Psalm 5:5)
Those who love violence (Psalm 11:5)
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community (Prov 6:16-19)
The religious observances of hypocrites (Isa 1:14; Amo 5:21)
Robbery and wrongdoing (Isa 61:8)
Burning incense to and worshiping other gods (Jer 44:3-4)
Unspecified sinful deeds in Gilgal - most likely idolatry (Hos 9:15)
Plotting and swearing falsely (Zec 8:17)
The practices of the Nicolaitans (A heretical sect that mixed Christianity with pagan idolatry) (Rev 2:6)
And that is all of it. Every single instance in the Bible where God is explicitly mentioned as hating something or someone. Notably absent are things like teen sex, interracial canoodling and gays. Also weirdly absent are things like rape and child abuse. Mostly God just seems to hate people not worshiping Him. Well that and people who destroy the lives of others with lying and deception, which I am totally on board with hating. Especially interesting was God's hatred for those who love violence. I wonder when I can expect to see Christians start protesting boxing and MMA matches?
Now some may argue that while the Bible doesn't explicitly state that God hates the things they say He hates, He must nevertheless hate it because the Bible teaches that it is sinful and wrong and surely God hates sin! Fair enough but this leads to a bit of a weird double standard. By that ruling we should be telling everyone that God Hates Pork and also that God Hates Seafood Platters but since we love those things and consider them delicious those rules from the Holy Bible obviously don't count. Same thing with God hating mixed fibers. Surely God didn't actually mean that because those are super comfy! Similarly we rarely argue that God hates people who work on the Sabbath. Sure, that one is actually in the Ten Commandments but come on, our way of life would be soooooo inconvenienced if some people didn't work on Saturdays! Plus there would be no weekend sport! Surely God couldn't actually hate that!! But two dudes getting it on? Eeuuuwww!! That's icky so God totally must hate that!!
It's weird, it's almost as if God only hates the things we hate! But that would be crazy right?
*The recent shitstorm that erupted around this poster shows that not much has changed. Only instead of saying that God hates it people seem to be cutting out the middle man and going straight to "I'm not racist but I find this disgusting and wrong" - and those were the civil comments!
I stole this from Leaving Alex Jonestown. Go read her Christmas countdown series , it's scary and hilarious!
I don't think I could work for Fox News. It's not just because I'm not blonde a pretty enough either. Having to constantly act outraged at the most trivial bullshit imaginable would just take too much of a toll on my general wellbeing, I don't think I could handle that. If I had to spend my days acting like a new type of lightbulb is the worst thing in the history of anything I would have to fucking kill myself before the inevitable aneurysm puts me into a permanently vegetative state. I don't know which is worse either, having to constantly pretend that the most trivial nonsense is worse than Hitler or having to ignore the genuinely terrible things out there because you're paid to pretend it's the best thing since the discovery of cheese.
In a season where many in the media are even more nonsensically outraged than usual, Fox has once again managed to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack with its current outrage at The Muppet Movie:
That's right, the fact that the bad guy in the movie is a rich oil tycoon means that the Muppets are teaching class warfare to kids. Fox totally calls it like it is there, liberal Hollywood is totally demonizing the rich! It started way back when with classic movies like It's a wonderful life. Basically every Bond movie ever along with all Superman movies that featured Lex Luthor had evil rich villains. Of course there are also horror movies like Hostel where evil rich people pay to torture and kill young people and sci-fi movies like The Phantom Menace where the Trade Federation (a group of interplanetary job creators simply protesting a tax hike) are portrayed as the bad guys. Also, when the A-Team got hired it was usually because some rich guy was trying to muscle out a smaller competitor. In pretty much any period piece or Western I can think of the bad guy is almost always the rich landowner/tycoon trying to destroy the hard working poor. Actually, come to think of it most villains tend to be rich and powerful people oppressing the poor and disenfranchised. It makes sense though, having the protagonist be richer and more powerful than the antagonist just wouldn't be good storytelling, why would anyone root for someone like that after all? This is another reason I can't work for Fox, I don't think I can pretend that I think Ebenezer Scrooge should have been the hero while holding a straight face.
Of course while Fox I knows all about the infamous liberal bias of Hollywood, they may not realize that this evil liberal bias against the rich is everywhere. Not just in movies and the media but also in books! And not just in radical fringe works like The Communist Manifesto either, I'm talking about the world's favourite all time best seller - The Bible.
The Bible is just class warfare from cover to cover*. Well by Fox standards anyway. You have Jesus commanding a job creator to redistribute his wealth to the welfare cases. There is the socialist setup of the original church which is portrayed in a positive light. Jesus even told this one parable in which a rich man goes to hell because he was rich and a poor man goes to heaven because he was poor - not because of their creeds, dogma or belief systems, riches and poverty are the only things mentioned in the parable. Also that whole thing about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven didn't seem very pro-capitalism at all! It wasn't just Jesus being all hippie either. As The Slacktivist pointed out recently, the prophet Nathan once used a story about an evil rich man who took from a man who had very little to illustrate to King David just how evil his actions have been. In fact, demonizing the rich seems to be a running theme with the prophets. The Bible has lots to say about money but it rarely has a good word for those who have a lot of it. It has plenty of really bad things to say for those who make their money by exploiting others, those who don't pay their workers fair wages (promptly) and especially those who foreclose on widows (See Deut 24:15; Isa 58; Mark 12:40 for but a few examples)
Clearly the Bible is one long piece of anti-capitalist propaganda and I bet Fox would be outraged that it is taught to children. Of course they can't be outraged by it since they've clearly never read it.
*To be fair, Fox is also wall to wall class warfare but unlike the Bible, they side with wealthy.
I heard that line on Fringe some time back and while I have forgotten the episode, story and original context that the quote first appeared in, I have never forgotten the quote itself. To me it was just so beautifully profound I wanted to translate it into Latin and put it on my family crest. It's a great motto for any individual and certainly for any family. Even more so, it would be a great motto for a country to have wouldn't it?. OK sure, it's a little patriarchal but the sentiment is about more than sons and fathers. It's about honoring those who came before without living in their shadow. It's a reminder that each generation can reach higher by standing on the shoulders of the previous one. It shows no disrespect to your parents and grandparents - if they were bad, you can be better; if they were good, you can be great. Instead of stagnation, everyone can move onward and upward, even if it's just by the smallest increment at a time. "Be a better person than your ancestors". There, I washed off the patriarchy and now everyone can enjoy it! Happy?
Well turns out not everyone agrees with me that this is a good motto to live by. I'm specifically referring to the massive crapstorm that hit the airwaves when President Obama's Thanksgiving proclamation on Youtube failed to explicitly thank God. I'll let Jon Stewart run you through the story:
On a day commemorating their history, these Fox News pundits and their fellow umbrage junkies ended up being no better than their forefathers. Guess it's true what they say about those who do not learn from history! So lets look back.
Everyone knows that the Pilgrims left England and sailed for America (after a bit of a detour in Holland) to escape religious persecution. Worth noting though is the nature of this religious persecution. It's not that these people weren't allowed to be Christians in jolly olde England. On the contrary, Christianity was compulsory! What made these Christian Pilgrims feel so persecuted was the fact that they had to be Christians the way the official state church mandated - with harsh punishments for anyone who tried to be a different kind of Christian. Now interestingly enough it turned out that these Pilgrims weren't really opposed to the idea of religious persecution, they just didn't like being the ones getting picked on! After settling in the New World they established a system identical to the one that drove them from their homeland, only this time they were the ones deciding how Christianity should be practiced and punishing those who would not conform to their ideas.
Luckily for everyone, subsequent generations of Americans did turn out to be better men than their fathers. Over time Americans didn't just embrace religious freedom, they became the example for the rest of the world on what freedom should look like. Once the First Amendment arrived on the scene, it pretty much set the standard for everyone else to try to live up to. It's sad then that those talking heads on Fox didn't seem to get the memo. Instead they still seem to be stuck in the mindset of the Pilgrims, namely that everyone should not only be Christian but that they have to be Christian in a very certain way and anyone who fails to conform must be persecuted as much as possible. They use the word "freedom" a lot but I don't think they really understand what the word actually means! I'd like to believe that they represent the exception rather than the rule though.
Look, I get it. By its very nature the past will always exert a stronger influence on us than the future could ever hope to. I don't know about yours but my forefathers invented Apartheid! I have to live with that legacy and I have to try to do better. Maybe our forefathers did the best they could with how they understood the world but if we know better then we have to do better. What good parent would not want their offspring to reach greater heights than they did? If our forefathers are worth the reverence we afford them, would they not want us to exceed them too? I'm not saying that just because your ancestors were imperfect you have to be perfect in every way. But if every generation can just take one small step forward, who knows where we could end up going?
So today many of us in South Africa protested unsuccessfully against a proposed bill on the "protection of information" which many fear will become a tool for the government to silence media reports they dislike. The government swears they would never use it to censor the media though. Somehow I'm less than convinced. Lately it has become very clear to me that politicians as a species very much dislike the truth.
Now I'm sure you just had a very sarcastic thought after reading that last sentence of mine. I know how naive it must sound, expecting honesty from politicians! A politician telling lies is hardly breaking news after all, it's business as usual. In fact it is probably the earliest entry in the big book of lame cliches and I get that. I promise you I'm not as naive as I sound, I understand that politicians have never actually been honest. It's just that they seem to be getting worse lately. Much worse.
First there was Senator Jon Kyle who told a whopping lie about Planned Parenthood - nothing odd about that. The really crazy part came a few hours later when he was confronted with the truth and his office responded that his words were "not intended to be a factual statement". I'm pretty sure I'm not just looking at the past with rose coloured glasses here, this isn't par for the course! Pretty sure that traditionally when caught telling a big fat lie politicians at least bothered to come up with some lame excuse for it or at least doubled down and tried to defend their statement. To basically tell everyone else that they are actually the dumbasses for expecting a politician to tell the truth in the first place seems like a brand new twist on dishonesty! It's not just me right? Pretty sure this was the first time that a politician blamed the public for stupidly expecting his facts to be factual! Sadly, that was not the last time...
Just the other day I watched presidential hopeful Herman Cain start a discussion on the Occupy Wall Street movement by saying "I don't have facts to back this up". Since when is that a way to start a discussion? Am I the crazy one for thinking that is how you end discussion of a topic? "I don't have any facts to back this up" should be how you excuse yourself from discussing something you don't know anything about. It should not be offered as a license to share any crazy idea you just pulled out of your ass! Maybe I'm wrong but my parents raised me differently.
Speaking of parents, Michelle Bachmann is a proud parent. I've often heard her bring up the fact that she is a mother of 5 and foster mother of 23 to illustrate her conservative, pro-family credentials. Yet, lately she has started doing something I'd bet she never let her children do. First she went on national television to tell the world that the HPV vaccine causes girls to become mentally retarded. Now this claim is utter bullshit as any doctor would be able to tell you but Mrs Bachmann had a great source - some woman she doesn't know told her that. Now I'm not sure what kind of a parent Mrs Bachmann is but I know what my parents would have told me if I came to them with a wild story I heard from a complete stranger; They would have told me to stop passing on unfounded rumours and to check my facts before I start spreading lies that could potentially hurt people. I may be out of line but I'm reasonably sure that Mrs Bachmann would have told her children the same thing. So why is it OK for her to spread false rumours? It's not like it was a one time thing either, she recently told how "Obamacare" prevents doctors from helping the sick because they have to check with the IRS before they can treat someone. It's not true at all but she shared it anyway because an anonymous 7 foot tall doctor told her that story. Surely she knows better? She must know she's spreading rumours and telling lies, right? She can't not know, people keep telling her these aren't true and she keeps doing it anyway!
What's going on? Is this normal now? I didn't even have to go looking for these stories, these are just the ones that made the headlines so who knows what else is out there! Like I said, I'm not really this naive, I know politicians are dishonest but this goes way beyond simply telling lies. This is a new level of brazenly disregarding the truth. It's like they don't even have the decency to act honest anymore! They're not even pretending to tell the truth anymore, they are just openly lying and getting upset at people for not being OK with that. It's gotten so bad that I can't even enjoy the irony of seeing the same people who rail against the dangers of moral relativism be openly dishonest when it suits their campaigns.
Am I the crazy one? Am I wrong? Surely it wasn't always like this? When did politicians openly declare war on the truth?
Something extraordinary happened recently: My cousin recently proposed to his girlfriend of three years. Doesn't sound very extraordinary does it? But it is. Or at least, it's supposed to be. See in this country gays have full marriage equality and if you have been listening to Christian Conservatives you would know that once same sex marriage becomes legal it will inevitably be followed by the destruction of the institution of marriage! The Family will cease to exist! People will marry horses and cows! Slippery slopes will drag us all down to anarchy! Civilization will cease!
Except none of that ever happened. Civilization is still going (despite the best efforts of Greece), my cousin is getting married in a year and it turns out they have to wait that long for a venue because apparently a lot of other couples also plan on getting married it seems. It's been years now since the legislation passed and despite all expectations heterosexuals are still getting married and starting families - which seems rather extraordinary considering the fact that gay marriage was supposed to destroy both marriage and the family! Imagine that. In yet another shocking turn of events, people are still not marrying their pets/toasters, pedophilia is not legal and "the gay agenda" somehow failed to turn us all gay. So much for those slippery slopes...
The thing about all these demonstrably false claims about "the gays" is that, like a lot of the anti-gay movement's activities, they sound a little... well... gay! Think about it:
Firstly there is the preoccupation with gay sex. I'm a hetero male. Do you care to guess how much time I spend imagining gay sex acts? None. I spend absolutely no part of my day picturing what gays get up to behind closed doors. "None" is also the amount of homosexual pornography I look at. Now I can't possibly speak for all straight people but I'll wager that for pretty much all of them the answer to the above questions would be somewhere between "very little" and "none at all". You know who does spend a fair amount of time thinking about gay sex though? Gay people, sure. But also anti-gay activists. How weird is that? The people who act the most outraged by the very idea of gay sex spend hours of their day thinking about and talking about the details of gay sex. They even check out a lot of gay porn - and not just any old porn, the hardcore S&M stuff - and then show it to other people who also claim to be very much against homosexuality. They do this on a regular basis too. Yeah, that's totally not gay...
Secondly there is their need to make the lives of gay people as miserable as possible. To the anti-gay brigade, the concept of "live and let live" is more abominable than socialism and secular humanism combined. They don't believe in liberal hippie nonsense like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Instead they go out of their way to oppose anti-bullying and hate crime legislation that would protect gay kids from being tormented to the point of suicide. Yes, here you have "good" Christian folk being PRO-bully. Their rationale seems to be that kids won't "choose the homosexual lifestyle" if they can make it unattractive enough. The fact that countless kids still somehow "choose" a sexual orientation that will guarantee lifelong harassment, mistreatment not to mention verbal and physical abuse never makes them consider that perhaps choice has nothing to do with it. Now I'm not saying that these pro-bully, anti-gay folks are themselves homosexuals who feel that since they are forced to live miserable, closeted lives by their beliefs then no other gay person should be allowed to be happy and openly gay because that would be slander. All I'm saying is that it sure looks a lot like it. The logical inference of their position is that being gay is so attractive that if it was a hassle free option then everyone would want to be gay! Which makes very little sense because typically the only people wanting to be gay are people who actually are gay. Just sayin'...
Thirdly there is the statement that same sex marriage will "destroy marriage". I've never heard a particularly good argument as to why allowing more people to get married will somehow lead to less marriage though. Like my cousin (and the millions of people like him and his girlfriend) demonstrate, the fact that same sex couples are getting married does not in any way diminish the desire for marriage among opposite sex couples. Really the only scenario I can imagine where legalizing same sex marriage would end a hetero marriage is if say you're a gay person who entered into a straight marriage (due to religious or societal pressure) during a time when gay marriage was illegal but then when it became legal you decided to stop living a lie, get a divorce and finally marry your true love. Again I'm not saying that when anti-gay activists are saying "same sex marriage will destroy marriage" they really mean "if it was legal it would probably be the end of my marriage". Sort of sounds like it though...
I remember that back when Pat Robertson made his immensely horrible comments on the Haitian earthquake Jon Stewart did this amazing response to it, pointing out all the great (and Biblical) responses Pat could have made instead. That was one of the clips that got me started watching The Daily Show because I thought it was just such a smart and well thought out response that showed Pat Robertson for the insensitive jerk he was. Apparently not everyone thought so though. In the comments on that clip I was stunned to see many comments along the line of "How dare you criticize God's anointed?", "Pat Robertson is a man of God, shut up about him!", "Pat is a prophet speaking the Words of God, you will be judged for opening your mouth against him!" etc. And I remember thinking "WTF is wrong with you people??" Do you really think this failed apocalyptic prophet, this ghoul who has never found a tragedy so heartbreaking that he couldn't turn it into an opportunity to take cheap shots at the groups he dislikes, this horrible, cruel, self righteous old man - you think he is God's anointed prophet?! How ugly would your God have to be for that to be true? How damaged would you have to be to actually buy into such a claim?
Long story short, I try to avoid Pat Robertson because he's really bad for my blood pressure. But now he's gone and said something else that I simply can't ignore:
So if your wife has Alzheimer's disease, consider her dead, consider your commitment to your marriage vows done and go find yourself someone else. Just be nice about it and at least dump your spouse at a care facility first - just dumping them on the street just wouldn't be Christian after all!
Lest you think I'm upset just for the sake of dogma or ideology, I'm not. I am all too familiar with the horror that is Alzheimers. My grandmother, the only one I ever knew and who I loved dearly, had Alzheimers and it was hell. It's not like most bad diseases where someone gets it, gets worse, dies and then everyone gets to mourn and move on. No with this hellish disease you get to watch for years how someone you love turns into someone who doesn't even know who you are. I've never lived through anything worse. So I get how hard it is, I understand fully just how badly one wants to escape from it. But I would never agree that it would be OK to forget about them and move on as if they are already dead.
See, her illness was hard for me - it was hard for everyone in the family - but no one suffered due to it like my grandfather. I just had breakfast with him last week, he turned 93 and the man is still as sharp as a tack. I can't even begin to imagine how it must have felt for him to watch his wife of about 50 years slowly deteriorate day after day until there was nothing left of the woman he married. I can't even conceive of that kind of pain. Here's the thing, he never bailed on her. He stayed with her, taking care of her all day and every day until the day she died. Just by doing that, my grandfather taught me more about what it means to be a real man and far more about what the term "sanctity of marriage" means than every lecture, book, sermon and talk I've heard on the subject my whole life.
A real man, doesn't take the easy way out. A real man stands by his loved ones until the very end no matter what. Marriage vows mean something. Phrases like "in sickness and health" and "for better or for worse" are not just idle words, if you speak them you better mean them. The vow you make is the vow you live by.
I don't think anyone ever called my grandpa an "anointed man of God" but I have to say, I think he is a million times the man Pat Robertson is. If I can live to be half the man my grandfather is I would not have wasted my life.
Yesterday, blogging friend Gumby did a post on the issue that's been causing a huge uproar in the Skeptical Community - the horribly named "Elevatorgate". I think Gumby did a very good job discussing the situation so I don't really have anything of substance to add here. I agree with his assessment and I don't think it's worthwhile reiterating the entire thing on my blog. Seems to me that everything worth saying has already been said regarding "elevatorgate" (who thought up this name?!) and I have nothing original to add. OK, well maybe one thing. Can we, as a society, please stop adding "gate" to words to describe a scandal? Pretty please? The Watergate scandal was called that because it happened at the Watergate Hotel. It had nothing to do with either water or gates. Adding "gate" to a word to denote scandal is just stupid and it makes no effing sense! Now that I have that off my chest...
I think the fact that the issue of sexism and how women are treated in the Skeptical Community stirred up such a nest of hornets is worth looking into. It made me think of that really dumb antiquestion* believers often ask of skeptics - "if you're so skeptical, why aren't you skeptical of skepticism?" Obviously it's an incredibly stupid question - or is it? In the way the people who say it usually mean it of course yes, it's incredibly stupid. But I don't think it's entirely stupid to suggest that perhaps skeptics should perhaps be a little more skeptical about their own skepticism. Hear me out.
I am not saying there is a problem with skepticism. Healthy skepticism is good (also, healthy). The scientific method, logic and evidence based reasoning - while not perfect - are by far the best tools we have to separate fact from fallacy. No, skepticism is not the problem here, skeptics are. Skeptics are human beings. Human beings are terribly unreliable at observing and correctly interpreting reality. The human brain seems to be wired for belief and our minds are riddled with cognitive biases making us easy to fool. A human being can easily believe stupid things for bad reasons and thanks to our built in proclivity for confirmation bias we find it incredibly difficult to part with cherished beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Despite our best intentions its always easier to believe a true sounding falsehood than a difficult truth. That is why we need science, why we only started to really make progress when we started using the scientific method. The truth is often counter-intuitive, facts are not always self evident. Skepticism does not come naturally to us, reason and logic are alien to our minds. We have to learn these things and constantly practice them to become proficient at it and even then there will be no guarantees that we will get it right every time. That is why good science requires peer review - anyone can be mistaken so the more minds, the more tests, the more evidence the better. Skepticism is not a state of existence one can attain which will magically transform every corner of ones being into a bastion of reason. Instead it requires a daily commitment to reason and evidence and a willingness to seek the truth wherever it may lead you. None of that comes naturally to human beings.
And yet, it becomes tempting after a while to tell yourself that it does - to you at least. That skepticism is something you can attain and that once you have, your every thought and attitude will be a reasonable one. Its only human after all. So little wonder that so many feathers get ruffled when someone tries to address sexism and/or racism in the Skeptical Community. Once the idea that your every thought and reasoning is logical and sound has taken hold then any suggestion that you may be just as wrong as those sheepish non-skeptics about something seems terribly insulting!
I think this is a very good thing. I don't know that any of us have the self awareness necessary to know every dark corner of our minds and the bad thought patterns that may be hiding out there. I know this all too well, being new to skepticism myself. For most of my life I was massively credulous so learning to be skeptical and applying sound reason is sometimes a bit of an uphill battle for me. Situations like this, I have found, tend to bring everything up to the surface - which is where it needs to be if it's to be properly dealt with. So bring it on, the arguments for and against, the anger, the reasoning, the overreactions, bring it all. Here is a chance for everyone to learn something about themselves and about others, a chance to become better skeptics and better human beings.
So yes, if you are a skeptic you should be skeptical about your skepticism. For skepticism is something you can have but not hold. The day you stop pursuing it is the day it slips from your grasp. You can seek it, you can find it but you cannot possess it because for better or worse, you are human.
*A question is something you ask in order to learn something, an antiquestion is something you pretend to ask in order to reinforce your own ignorance. Other examples include "If you're so into tolerance why won't you tolerate my intolerance" and of course, that creotard classic "Were you there?! Huh? Huh? Were you? Were you there?"
"Wanneer ... jy ophou om my te label; En ek ophou worry oor wat jy dink; Sal almal dan kan happy wees en ophou om te kla?"
— Karen Zoid
"For being different, it’s easy. But to be unique, it’s a complicated thing."
— Lady Gaga
I just had the most wonderful birthday weekend. I hung out with friends, ate a giant steak, drank lots of beer, went clubbing, danced to loud & terrible music and came home late reeking of a night out on the town. In other words, I had a blast! I feel years younger than I am and none of that would have been possible had I not finally turned my back on nonconformity.
Yes, as a teen I was one of those. You know, the black wearing, alternative music listening, pop music scoffing guys who never seem happy. I would like to go "what was I thinking?" but the truth is, I know exactly what I was thinking. I believe that we all want to belong, we all want to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Hate it all you want, human beings are just hardwired for it. But what if you don't fit in the way you would like to? What if the popular fashion looks terrible on you and your hair just cannot look like that of anyone in a magazine? What if you find popular culture and music shallow and meaningless and completely detached from the way you feel? When you have difficulty fitting into the group everyone else seems to be fitting into just fine, of course the counterculture alternative is going to be attractive. I get why I was attracted to the nonconformist lifestyle to begin with. I was never that great at fitting in and at the time it seemed like the only group that would have me.
The thing is, there are some real problems with being a nonconformist as well. (If you'd prefer a list based discussion - with cartoons! - that's going to be far more enlightening than my ramblings here check out this article on Cracked) Nonconformity may seem like the freedom loving choice but in many ways it is as rigid as popular fashion/culture, if not more so. As with any group you are presented with a list of "in" things and "out" things, things that you are supposed to like and things you are supposed to hate if you want to belong. Worst of all, you don't even get to decide on what is "in" or not, the rest of the sheeple/popular kids/conformists decide that for you - when they zig, you have to zag, if they like it, you can't. Them's the rules! It took me a while to gather up the courage to say it but that's just stupid!
This is who I am: I really do like many thing's in the "alternative" world. I never had to pretend to like bands like Nirvana or artists like Tori Amos, I loved them in High School and to this day I'm a big fan. Thing is, I'm also a big fan of ABBA and I don't think the one precludes the other. I enjoy both Leonard Cohen and the Vengaboys - for very different reasons - and I don't see why I should hide half of my musical tastes in shame. I do enjoy deep thoughtful movies at times but other times I really enjoy mindlessly entertaining movies and I don't think there is anything wrong with that either. I listen to some bands I bet you've never heard of but I don't listen to them because you've never heard of them, I listen to them because I like their music. If they become world famous next week I'm not going to brand them sellouts and stop enjoying them, how does that even make sense? I like a lot of popular things too but I don't like everything that is popular either. Why should I? Liking things because they are popular or liking them because they are not popular are equally senseless to me. The only good reason I can see for liking something is how much it appeals to me. Am I wrong? I am not alternative and I am not pop. I am a very surreal, misshapen mix of all of that and more and these days I find far more joy in being myself than in trying to fit in.
I guess it's one of the few happy side effects of growing older but I find myself really not caring as much as I used to about how other people see me. I certainly wasn't always like that. For the longest time I cared all too deeply about whether the things I enjoy (or at least the things I admit to enjoying) would make people think I was intelligent enough or deep enough or interesting enough to be worthy of consideration and interest. I would pretend to be into things that, in reality, I barely tolerated. Likewise I had to hide things (like my deep love for silly romantic comedies) like it was a dirty secret. Not anymore though.
From Steam Me Up, Kid - the most joyfully insane blog I've ever seen! If you haven't checked it out yet you really should!
It didn't happen all at once and I can't really pinpoint an event that got the ball rolling. Perhaps it was a consequence of just being surrounded by a better class of friend who accepted me for who I am, not who I had to pretend to be. Perhaps growing older made peer pressure less relevant. Either way, I'm grateful it happened because I've never felt more free. If your opinion of me is diminished because I'm a fan of Lady Gaga then that is your problem, not mine. I'd much rather have the warm feeling I get everytime I watch Love Actually than the imaginary approval of people that don't even know me. Best of all, as I realized on the Tipsy Turtle's dance floor this weekend, not caring what you think of me leads to a surprising amount of fun and acceptance!
What do you care about? What matters to you? The AIDS pandemic? Deforestation? Human trafficking? Endangered species? The exploitation of the poor? Overfishing? Violent dictatorial regimes? Global warming? Racism? Women's rights? Victims of natural disasters? Victims of man made disasters? Political & corporate opposition to the prevention of man made disasters? Do you care about some of that or all of that? Do you care about some more than others or do you care equally for them all?
All of these issues are constantly in your face, demanding your attention, demanding that you care. If you consider yourself any kind of decent human being, it's like you're supposed to care or else you are implicitly admitting to being some kind of heartless monster! I have a question though, is it even possible to care about everything worth caring about? Maybe it's just me (I hope it's not but it's a distinct possibility) but I just don't have to capacity to care that much about that many things.
But is it just me though? Does anyone have the physical and mental capacity to meaningfully care about everything that needs to be cared about? Sure, I can be concerned about all those things and more. I can even be opposed to all those nasty things in principle. But can I care? I don't mean in the hipster douchebag sense where you are totally "into" every bad thing du jour for about 5 minutes. What does that accomplish besides giving you a smug sense of moral superiority and annoying the living shit out of everyone around you? How is that even caring?! If someone I care about is in trouble I show I care by trying to help, trying to make whatever is wrong better in whatever way I am able. To me, that is what caring should look like, otherwise why bother? Simply shaking your head with a sympathetic look may give you the warm fuzzies inside but it certainly won't do anything meaningful for those in need of care.
So I ask again, if really caring about an issue requires that you bleed for it, sacrifice your time and energy and resources and comfort in an effort to address the issue, how many things can you care about? Everything? Surely not! Most things? Unlikely. A handful of issues? Possible but even that would be pushing it. Seems to me that if you want to care in a way that is at all meaningful you really need to pick your issues with care.
Am I wrong or does having to care about everything prevent any meaningful action? I feel like I'm just so bombarded with good great, meaningful causes that I'm supposed to care about that I become overwhelmed by the sheer mass of it. Overdosing on empathy feels a lot like paralysis to me. Is there even a difference between overcare and zero care? For all the good it does, it may as well be the same thing!
I don't mean to sound preachy. Truth is, I suck at caring. I tell myself it's because I'm currently rather low down on Maslow's pyramid but it's far more likely that I'm just not that caring a person. I prefer to spend my time with escapism and humour rather than with the cruel realities of life in this world. Caring about a cause takes a lot of effort for me. But that is how it's supposed to be, isn't it?
"Why do bad things happen to good people?" is a question we hear all the time. Somehow you never seem to hear the inverse, "why do bad things happen to bad people?" Why is that? Sure we seem to get upset at the success and prosperity of the wicked but we rarely feel sorry for their misfortune. But the thing is, bad things happen to good and bad people (as do good things), it's just that we don't consider bad things all that bad when they happen to people we consider evil. When that happens we prefer to think of it as justice.
It seems that the idea that we cause our misfortune by our own actions* is as deeply ingrained into our psyche as the idea that we can somehow control the universe by saying and doing the right things. I recently wrote a post explaining why I reject the latter and by that reasoning I should also reject the former. And I do. But believe me, it's not easy. Especially when you read a story like this:
"ALAMEDA -- Harold Camping, the Doomsday radio preacher who sparked international media attention by predicting the end of the world last month, has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke at his Alameda home Thursday night.
The 89-year-old radio evangelist and president of the Oakland nonprofit Family Radio was taken by ambulance from his house Thursday night, a neighbor said, but his well-known, gravelly voice that led many believers to donate millions of dollars to his cause may never be the same.
"He had a stroke, it was on his right side," said the neighbor," Source
I freely admit that I would love to agree with the many internet commentators who call this stroke a just punishment for a false prophet. Thing is when I gave up trying to control the world and accepted that I live in a random and often chaotic universe I also gave up on the idea of karmic justice. The world is rarely fair and not everyone gets what they deserve. It sucks but then again, from time to time I have been grateful not to receive my comeuppance so there's that. I like the local term for karma/the hand of fate, namely the "blinde sambok" (blind sjambok). Granted for most people that describes someone getting their just desserts but I like the image of a blindly wielded whip it conjures. Anyone can get hit, at some point everyone does and some people get hit more than they should be and others not as many times as they probably deserve. Doesn't sound very comforting, I know, but it's actually a load off your mind once you realize you are not responsible for every piece of misfortune that comes your way.
Besides, real justice would be for Harold Camping to live long enough to see the world not end in October!
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*Just for the sake of clarity, I'm talking about causing our misfortune in the sense of Karma. Not talking about doing event A which directly leads to logical outcome B, I mean the way we tend to mystically connect outcome C with utterly unrelated action S. For instance I don't mean it in the sense that you caused your nose to be broken because you flirted with a Rugby player's girlfriend. I mean it in the sense that you think you "caused" the cold you got on your birthday by not calling your mom on Mother's Day.
Are there still any Christians out there? I'd like to think there are but honestly, they are increasingly hard to find. No, I'm not saying that because the Atheist-Communist-Muslim-Socialists are busy destroying Christianity and persecuting the righteous. Look, you can find millions, no billions of people who belong to churches and read Christian scripture and refer to themselves as Christians. I'm not talking about those though, I'm talking about people who actually live up to the criteria implied by the name Christian. If you call yourself Christian, the implication is that you follow Christ. Just to be clear, by "follow" I mean spending your days living according to the teachings and example of Jesus the Christ. That's what the word means, there is really not a lot of wiggle room.
Thing is, the weirdest piece of news just popped up in my daily news feed. It turns out that in Orlando, some people were thrown in jail for feeding the homeless. "No effing way!", you exclaim, "surely there is more to the story?" Well yes of course there is more to the story. They weren't just thrown in jail for feeding the homeless, they were arrested for feeding the homeless in a public park. The city fought a long, hard and expensive legal battle to make it so and they weren't going to let some dirty hippies thumb their noses at them by feeding some dirty homeless people! You know what? I actually get it. I know that nothing ruins a nice picnic in a pretty park more than a smelly hobo who stands around acting weird and looking like someone who hasn't eaten in days while you are just trying to enjoy your adorably tiny picnic morsels. So I can understand why the city fathers decided to ban feeding the wild homeless in their public parks. No God fearing taxpaying citizen wants the unwashed poor hanging out where their dogs poop, now do they?
Now I'm guessing most of the good people of Orlando Florida who support this law would also self identify as Christians. (The USA is a Christian Nation is it not? Pretty sure I read that online...) Heck, many of them would even call themselves "fundamentalist" or "Bible believing" Christians. The only problem is that a law like this is completely and utterly against the teachings of Jesus, i.e. Un-Christian. Therefore no one who claims to follow Jesus can also support such an antichrist law and still call themselves Christians. Jesus didn't leave that loophole. Bummer. (Unless you're a bum!)
It's the weirdest thing really, so many people who claim to know and follow the Christian Bible don't actually know its content. Somehow many people live with the delusion that the Bible is mostly concerned with regulating sexual activity plus some stuff on getting into Heaven and spotting the Antichrist thrown in to round it out. Of course in actuality, The Antichrist is not mentioned in the Bible (ditto the Rapture) and the Bible mostly deals with the here and now, not the sweet hereafter. Even better, when it comes to the "here and now" stuff, the sex verses are barely a drop in the ocean compared to the money verses. By far the biggest part of the Bible talks about money and stuff and more specifically, how to treat those who don't have any. Now I know that many a modern apologist manage to somehow wrangle the scriptures to make it look as if the Bible was written by Ayn Rand and is profoundly anti-welfare but to do that they need to pretend that the majority of the Bible doesn't actually exist. Sorry, but as a former theology student, that doesn't fly. One of the core principles of Biblical interpretation is that the majority/unambiguous verses are used to understand the minority/unclear verses, not the other way around. According to the major part of the Bible then it is very clear that God does not care about your picnic pleasures, He wants you to take care of the homeless. Like in, all the damn time!
This just again shows why (contrary to the idea many have) there can be no such thing as a Christian nation. You can live as a Christ follower, you can run your household (or commune) in accordance with His teachings, perhaps even have a small community that truly follows Christ in all they do. However it would be suicide to run a Christian country. Jesus had a habit of saying and doing things that made the rich and powerful deeply uncomfortable - it's one of my favourite things about Him actually - so the idea of getting the rich and powerful to abide by His teachings is so unpractical it's downright funny. Here is an atheist who understands Christianity better than a lot of Christians making the point better than I can:
I think that if you try to run an entire country according to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ you are going to have a nation full of deeply unhappy people. There would be no military, very little (if any) capitalism, a government budget spent largely on welfare and a justice system that doesn't resemble a justice system to name but a few issues. Face it, Jesus wouldn't make a good president. But don't take my word for it, go see for yourself what an actual Christian nation would look like. You don't even have to read the entire scary big Bible, just the four Gospels. Remember if you call it a Christian Nation then it has to be based on what Jesus taught. No cribbing from Moses or David! Afterwards you can tell me if that sounds like a nation you can live in or if you would prefer a secular government. It's OK, I can wait.
I don't think it's strange that Rob Bell faces so much hate. For the most part what is happening to him right now happens to every public figure that dares to have an opinion. No matter what you say, someone in this great wide world is going to nitpick, disagree and/or call you names for saying it. Sometimes this criticism will be richly deserved, other times completely unfair and the only constant in all this will be that you can't please all the people all of the time. Not ever.
Here is what I do find strange about all the cries of "heretic" and "false teacher" directed at Rob Bell though. Somehow these same people only find these words objectionable when Rob speaks them - from the mouth of another they are perfectly acceptable. Why is it that something can be a profound truth when someone else says it but at the same time be a profound heresy when Rob Bell says it?
It's the hipster look isn't it? "Cool" pastors are always up to something!
I have two examples of this phenomenon. The concerns a claim he made in the NOOMA video "Dust". Behold the scathing Australian criticism:
Clearly Bruce* here has a real bug up his ass about the idea that people having any self confidence at all. That is the only explanation I can offer for such an extreme reaction to such a minor point. Apparently if you dare have self confidence and entertain the idea that God could somehow like you, you are giving yourself over to humanism, which is almost worse than choosing to be gay! I have a few short notes on his criticisms. Firstly, the Scripture is wide open to interpretation here. He's right, it doesn't explicitly say Peter didn't have enough faith in himself but its not as if Jesus was specific in His reprimand; He didn't say "Why did you not have more faith in ME?" Secondly, his analysis of the original Greek is an outright lie. The original word by no means translate as "Faith in Christ". For such a Greek word to have existed Christians would have had to invent it! Check for yourself, the word Oligopistos means exactly what it was translated as: "little/scant faith". Thirdly, commentaries are exactly that, they are opinion pieces written about the Bible. What makes these interpretations more valid than the one offered by Rob? Commentaries are not sacred, authoritative interpretation handed down to us from the Lord God Almighty! They may be informed opinions but still just opinions. Lastly it is his claim that no scholar ever expressed a similar opinion to that of Rob Bell that brings me back to my original point.
Guess who said it long before Rob Bell did? Scholar, historian and conservative Christian darling Ray Vander Laan. His "That the World May Know" ministry strives to teach the Bible in it's original Jewish context and he has a DVD series where he takes tour groups to the archeological sites in the Middle East to to just that. I own almost all the DVD's and would recommend them highly. On DVD number six named "In the dust of the rabbi", (in section two) you will find him making the exact same claim Rob Bell makes. In fact it should be pretty obvious when you watch it that Ray Vander Laan served as the source material for Rob Bell and not vice versa**.Now Ray is nowhere near as famous as Rob but he is not some fringe element either. His video series is fully endorsed and distributed by none other than Focus on the Family. You don't really get more fundamentalist than Dr James Dobson and I heard him give his personal hearty endorsement to the very video in question on his radio show once. Interesting then that when a Christian scholar says it, it's a thought provoking discussion on what it really means to be a disciple but when Rob Bell says the exact same thing he is a heretic promoting humanism?
My second example is of course the source of all the current hoopla, the latest book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Now I can't say too much about the claims the book makes because I haven't read it yet. I'm definitely going to, I've already ordered a copy but for now I simply cannot comment on statements I haven't actually heard being made. I don't really expect him to actually come out as an universalist (everyone goes to heaven) or an annihilationist (you don't burn in hell, you are destroyed forever) or anything like that. Despite all the controversy, I've found Rob to usually be pretty orthodox in his beliefs so I'm interested to see where he is going with this. But let's say the great fears of his critics are true and that he claims that God isn't going to torture untold billions for ever and ever while only saving the teeny minority who happened to have been at the right place and right time in order to believe the right thing. Is that really anything new? Is this a claim that has been made by other popular Christian authors perhaps? You bet!
Guess who said it long before Rob Bell did? Only one of the most popular Christan authors and lay theologians of all time, CS Lewis.
Yeah that's right, the Narnia guy!
As Jeff Cook noted in a recent blog comparing the two men, "There’s not one controversial idea in Love Wins that is not clearly voiced as a real possibility by the most popular evangelical writer of the last century, CS Lewis". Now that blog post offers a good comparison between the works of CS Lewis and Love Wins so I'm not going to do a rewrite all of that and instead just offer one more example. In the last book of the Narnia series, there is a scene (one of my favorites of the entire series really) that gives a facinating look into Lewis' views on the afterlife. Here Emeth, a follower of Tash (a demonic entity that was the god of a different country in Narnia) meets Aslan (the allegory for Jesus) in the afterlife:
"But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."
Yet while that piece seems to clearly suggest that CS Lewis thought that followers of other religions will ultimately be redeemed in Heaven I've never heard anyone make a peep about it. Certainly the average evangelical doesn't habitually reach for their fainting couch when CS Lewis gets mentioned. If anything he is considered a wise teacher of profound truths. Why is Rob Bell then such a heretic for having an allegedly similar opinion?
I wouldn't have much issue with the criticism Rob receives if it was at least given consistently. However it is increasingly starting to look as if the problem is more with the person giving the opinion than with the contents of the opinion itself. Increasingly the relationship between Rob Bell and his critics are starting to resemble the relationship between Obama and the Republicans...
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*They're all called Bruce right? Surely Monty Python wouldn't lie to me?
**The dvd series used to be on the Mars Hill recommended resource list (which doesn't seem to exist anymore). If a comment he made on "Everything is Spiritual" is anything to go by, Rob actually attended at least one of these tours too.
Ye gods how I despise the modern breed of faux martyred Christian! The last time I blogged about Persecution Envy among modern Western Christians I was still able to be mostly amused if rather exasperated by the phenomenon. But between then and now I find that I have been worn down by countless instances of Christians striking a persecuted pose over the most inane bullshit, causing me to lose my sense of humour about this phenomenon entirely.
Enter the latest great martyr of the Christian faith: Sally Kern. You know she's a martyr because she did something few other martyrs in the history of Christianity has ever done, she wrote a book to tell the world all about her sufferings as a martyr for Christ. So what happened, you ask? Did she face a lynch mob because she preached the Gospel in badlands of Afghanistan? Was she arrested for running an underground house church in North Korea? Was her life endangered for distributing Bibles in Somalia? No, not so much. What happened was that she gave the following speech:
In it she likens gay people to cancer, she accuses them of undermining the United States and claims that acceptance of homosexuals will destroy civilization itself. In fact she goes so far as to call them a bigger threat than terrorism and describes homosexuals as if they all belong to some Illuminati type secret sect that is hell bent on infiltrating and controlling every aspect of society. Basically she spouts every bigoted idea that only people who have never met a real gay person can buy into. What she didn't realise was that someone recorded this speech and published it on Youtube, which in turn caused a huge backlash by both gay people and straight people who weren't completely batshit insane. This is now what goes for martyrdom these days apparently. You can read all about it in her upcoming book, "The stoning of Sally Kern". (Spoiler alert! It's a "media stoning", whatever the hell that's supposed to be. Turns out people calling her on her ignorant bullshit counts as persecution, who knew? I bet St Stephen would have loved to trade the actual stoning he received for a "media stoning"!)
Times sure have changed! Once upon a time Christian martyrs had to face lions - these days they apparently just have to face facts...
I so wish that Representative Kern was the exception but unfortunately she's the rule. There exists in Christianity today a generation of umbrage junkies, people who despite the fact that they possess every privilege and advantage a free society can offer still feel the need to feel constantly offended and persecuted. Of course, since they face no actual persecution they have to continually force themselves to be outraged about the most inane, trivial crap. And so we end up with a group of people who manage to feel martyred by the very existence of opinions contrary to the ones they hold. Therefore the very act of disagreeing with them becomes an act of persecution and so being called wrong and ignorant somehow becomes equivalent to stoning. It's not enough for them to enjoy freedom of expression and belief. No, they cannot feel happy unless they are the only ones who are allowed these freedoms.
How can anyone live like this? Isn't it absolutely exhausting to have to constantly work up outrage over the most meaningless things? Isn't that the most joyless way of going through life? Doesn't it destroy your very soul to constantly manufacture feelings of persecution when in truth you live a life of unmatched privilege? How can you sleep at night knowing you compared being disagreed with to the actual pain, suffering and death of millions of believers through the ages?
If you have watched any Christian television at some point in your life you may be familiar with this building:
This is the world famous "Crystal Cathedral" in Orange County, California. The prominent architect Philip Johnson designed the main sanctuary building, which was constructed using over 10,000 rectangular panes of glass and its sanctuary seats 2,736 persons. I think it would be fair to say that you would be hard pressed to find another church like it. It may not have as much gold and famous art but it somehow manages to outshine the most opulent Cathedrals of the Catholic Church.
Somehow it manages to look even bigger from the inside
Now my parents were kind of big fans (some members of my family still are) so I've had to sit through quite a few episodes of "The Hour of Power" which usually turned out to be far more bland than the name suggested. Now the founding pastor of this megalithic mega church is this guy:
Rev. Robert H. Schuller
Just to make it interesting I should point out that the good Reverend here wrote the following book (among many others):
Chew on that fact for a moment. Now try to comprehend the following. The Chrystal Cathedral is in debt. Lots of debt. How much debt? Well it depends on who you ask but Wiki & others tend to put it at over $40 million. That's a 4 followed by seven zeros. In US dollars, not Zimbabwean dollars. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it would be a lot of debt for a small country, never mind a single church! Now let's say you are the Reverend Schuller. What do you tell your congregation? Do you say "I'm sorry, we've clearly made some terrible mistakes and we will work hard to get out of this mess?" Turns out that no, instead you go before your congregation and say:
"I need more help from you," Schuller said, according to the Orange County Register. "If you are a tither, become a double-tither. If you are not a tither, become a tither. This ministry has earned your trust. This ministry has earned your help."
Yep, he wants you to give a lot more money to him because "This ministry has earned your trust". Dude! Like WTF?! You say the words but I don't think you understand the sentence you are using. Ending up in tens of millions of dollars worth of debt is the opposite of earning someones trust. When someone is in so much debt that Oprah herself could not bail them out then who in their right mind would trust them with any of their money? Yet this guy wants people to give double and triple the amounts they usually would. During one of the worst recessions in recent history. Thousands are unemployed, houses are being foreclosed on faster than the banks can fill in the paperwork but apparently the trustworthy place to put the little money you have left is in a giant Xmas tree ornament/church. What??!
In my previous blog I illustrated that claiming having lustful thoughts are exactly the same as being an adulterer is not only stupid, it destroys the entire Christian faith. Now you may have read that and thought to yourself, "Well hold on, that may be a well reasoned argument* but that doesn't change what it says right there in the Bible." You would be correct of course, it certainly does look like Jesus was agreeing with Christine O'Donnell when you read the passage in question. But is that really all there is to it?
The answer is that no, there is actually a lot more to it. Many Evangelical Christians prefer to use the Steven Colbert approach to Bible reading. It's a lot easier to just believe what your gut tells you ought to be true and forgo all the hard work of exegesis, understanding context and looking at the bigger picture. The problem is that this doesn't always lead you to truth. You are far more likely to end up with "truthiness". Just because it feels true that doesn't mean it is true no matter how convinced you may be that the feeling in your gut is actually the Holy Spirit. See the Bible wasn't written for any of us. Every Biblical author wrote at a specific point in time and space and addressed the work to a primary audience with a specific background, language and culture. If you aren't willing to understand Scripture the way the original recipients understood it then you may be better off not studying it at all.
In this specific passage in Matthew we don't have an English speaking Caucasian pastor addressing a western mega church. Instead we have a First Century Jewish Rabbi addressing a group of Jews seeking religious instruction. Rabbis were not only people who taught you what God commanded (the Torah laws) but also tried to show people how living according to God's commandments was supposed to look practically (called halakhah, "the path that one walks"). So then we find Jesus in Matthew 5 using a rabbinic practice called "putting a fence around the Torah" (Mishnah, Pirke Avot 1:1). See, the rabbis reasoned that since small missteps can (not inevitably though often enough) lead to the actual breaking of Torah law, the best solution was to give rulings that prevented people from even coming close to breaking the actual Law. For instance, one such ruling taught people not to handle tools on the Sabbath lest the temptation to work became too strong. (I have never struggled with that particular temptation myself but you can see the principle at work here. ) In short the idea was that if you never took the first step towards the slippery slope, the chances of you actually slipping were nullified.
Lest ye doubt me, here are some examples of the same practice by other rabbis, bearing a rather striking resemblance to Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount:
"He who violates, 'Love your neighbour as yourself', will ultimately violate, 'You shall not hate your brother in your heart', and 'You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge', until in the end he will come to shedding blood" (From a Rabbinical commentary dating around 200 to 300 AD)
The train of thought is pretty clear here. While only murdering your neighbour is actually against the law, the rabbinic restrictions are there to keep you from ever going down the path that could possibly lead to murder in the first place. Best to stay as far away as possible from small sins lest they lead to big ones.
They also - just like Jesus - seemed to come out very harshly against relatively mild transgressions like gossiping and humiliating someone in public. "To which is gossip more similar, robbery or murder?" "Murder, because robbers can always give back what they have stolen but gossips can never repair the damage they've done" "... one should rather fling himself into a fiery furnace than humiliate someone in public." (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59a.)
[Interested in learning more about the Jesus as a Rabbi? My source here is "Sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus" by Spangler and Tverberg. Its an accessable and easy read that does a great job at exploring the Jewishness of Jesus]
Actually I just realised that I'm wasting energy even explaining this. Firstly, no one actually leveled any such criticisms at me. Then again, there are probably not a lot of Biblical literalists who would regularly read a heretic's blog. Secondly - and this is the big one - no one actually believes that claim, not for a second. Oh they would say they do, but they don't. If you asked Christine O'Donnell or Ray Comfort (or anyone who regularly speaks to Christian teens) if they believed that lustful thoughts were the same as adultery in the eyes of God they would reply without hesitation that yes they do believe that because that is what the Bible teaches. But they lie. They may not realise that they are lying but actions speak louder than words and no one lives as if they actually believe that. Think about it, let's say you are totally committed to Biblical Literalism and you find out your pastor/spouse had a sexual relationship outside marriage last week Tuesday. You would be upset right? You would be asking for a resignation/divorce immediately. Now what if you found out that last week Tuesday your pastor/spouse saw an attractive person and had a quick sexual thought about them, what would your reaction be then? The same? Somehow I doubt it.
*In my head you are very well mannered and courteous, whoever you are.
I spent most of my life as a fundamentalist and discovered Reason much later than I would have liked. I'm still dealing with the trauma and this blog is my therapy. So this is me: non-conformist, heretic, fan of delicious flavour and a man without a home. I’m a cynical optimist and a really angry zen master. I am just a man trying to make sense of it all. This is my life in juxtaposition.
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