Identity for Me But Not for Thee

I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics.  Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.

This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.

But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare. 

So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore.  And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.

What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore.  It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.

This is wonderfully incoherent. I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality.  Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.

First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'.  Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard.  Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels.  Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.

Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter.  Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today.  As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air.  It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy.  But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.  That should be clear, if not obvious, from reading Paul's letters: they show him trying to impose his framework on his churches, and there's no reason to believe he succeeded.

McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate."  Of course.  We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups.  But "dogmatically"?  I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it.  The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.

Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul (along with other biblical writers) would have condemned "homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a discrete or separate thing.  In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).  

Apologists almost always do this, I've found (I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality.  Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own eye.

McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.

There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er.  McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it.  He seems to believe in progress.  The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore.  But who's "us" here?  The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance."  What will replace them?  Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values?  I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others.  All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints.  And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.

Aw, Hell No

I don't usually like engaging with videos on subjects that demand careful attention; I'd rather work from text, which can be quoted and analyzed more easily.  But I've been watching the work of a popular YouTube guy, a biblical scholar named Dan McClellan who's also active on TikTok.  I first encountered him in the Twitter feed of Candida Moss, whose book The Myth of Persecution (Harper, 2013) I liked a lot. I found him offputting then, and still do, but he knows his stuff and is good on matters of fact.  But matters of fact about the Bible tend to bleed into questions of doctrine, as in this short video. 

 

McClellan isn't as different as he might be from the Christian TikTokers he takes on.  As you can see in this case, he draws in traffic with a catchy line, "There is no biblical concept of hell."  At least he doesn't begin by gushing "This video will BLOW YOUR MIND!"  He quickly explains that there are several biblical concepts of post-mortem punishment, and I can go along with his reconstruction of the development of ideas about the afterlife in Judaism and Christianity.  I believe I've seen another video where he goes into differing terms such as "Hades" and "Gehenna," which some English translation render as "Hell."

So that much is good.  I don't think the translation of specific words is that important: if you're being burned by the fire that is not quenched, gnawed by the worm that is not sated, it's not going to matter whether you're in Hell or Hades or Gehenna.  As McClellan says, the New Testament has several conceptions of post-mortem punishment, as it has several conceptions of what you must to do be saved, and what is required of you after you've been saved.  If you take such things seriously, that can't be reassuring.  It's why so many Christians are anxious and unsure that they won't be condemned after all.  Quibbles about terminology are like fussing about whether Jesus' name was really or some variant of Yehoshua: do the purists on that issue, who generally don't know any more Aramaic and don't fixate on the Aramaic forms of other Biblical names, think that the Savior won't hear their prayers if they don't address him by the exact correct name, or pray in flawless Aramaic or koine Greek?  Maybe he won't, I don't know.  

I think it's more important that Jesus in the gospels is consistently punitive, though of course he forgives sins when he's in the mood.  (Aren't human tyrants always marketed with touching stories of their occasional generosity and kindness? You don't want to see them when they're mad, though.)  God isn't consistent either, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy (Exodus 33:19, quoted in Romans 9:15).  As McClellan points out, Paul doesn't talk about post-mortem torture - that's Jesus' shtick.  But the default setting of the New Testament is that you are in danger of God's wrath, and you can only escape it through Christ.  As I've argued before, this is a widespread human assumption, older than Christianity and found beyond the borders of Christendom. As with any belief about the afterlife, there's no evidence for it, but it's what many people take for granted anyway.  It isn't something that wicked priests invented to control the masses; the masses believe it on their own, and may even have invented it.

Many Christians and what you might call Christian-adjacent types don't like the idea that a loving god would condemn them or people they like to eternal torture, though they're willing to throw Truly Bad People under the bus.  Maybe they're right, but they have to work hard to forget that Jesus didn't see it their way.  The time, for some reason, was very short, and the gospel must be proclaimed far and wide, but he came to save a few; most would not find the way to safety.  The promise of salvation depends on, and is meaningless without, the threat of punishment. Whether you'd end up in Hades or Hell is, it seems to me, a distraction from the main message of danger and safety.

Of course many of his fans react as if McClellan had come up with this information on his own, the way people react to Bart Ehrman or Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky. That goes with the territory.  When I read the comments under his videos I often wonder how many of them really understand what he's telling them. Many of the reactions are of the typical Internet line that he DESTROYED the Bible Thumpers.  SCHOOLED them.  And so on. It doesn't matter whether they understand, as long as they're on the Right Side.  

As someone who's read a lot of biblical scholarship over the past forty-five years, I don't see it that way.  McClellan likes to invoke "the data" and intone that the scholarly consensus "absolutely" disproves the apologists' claims, and in many cases he's right; but scholars aren't always as unanimous as he implies, and the scholarly consensus has changed in the time I've been following the field.  I agree with much of what McClellan says, but I'm wary of being too absolute about it.  The data about Jesus are too sparse, vague, and contradictory to say much with certainty about him.  Many different reconstructions have been constructed from the data, and despite archaeology and some manuscript finds, very little new data have  been found in the past century.  Compare William Shakespeare, who lived much more recently than Jesus, in a period and place that is much better documented.  But we know surprisingly little about him, almost no new documents have turned up in the past century, and his biographers use speculation, often very free, to fill in the yawning gaps. (See David Ellis, The Truth About William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies, Edinburgh 2013.)  The great English scholar and churchman Dennis Nineham quoted his teacher R. H. Lightfoot "lamenting that New Testament scholars 'are "so hot for certainties"; if only they would sometimes say, 'we simply do not know'".  But scholarship abhors a vacuum.  So do believers and unbelievers.

I suspect McClellan wanted to convey that no one knows what Jesus taught about the afterlife, to forestall any claims about it, and I think some of his fans decided that they could fill in the gap with their own wishful thinking.  It's possible that the clashing concepts in the gospels go back to Jesus himself. When the time is short and the gospel must be proclaimed with the help of the Holy Spirit, consistency is not a priority.  Jesus was not a systematic theologian but a back-country revivalist, exorcist, and end-times preacher, not a serious scholar of Torah.  If he had teachers or other influences, we don't know who they were; scholars can only infer them.  As McClellan indicates, the gospels show the influence of religious speculation and writing of Jesus' time and place; he may not have bothered to think hard about them when the Spirit drove him into the wilderness (Mark 1:12) after his baptism. Or he might have.  It's fun to speculate, and I do it myself, but speculation isn't evidence, let alone certainty.

Let Jesus Sort Them Out

 

I was horrified by this image, which a Christian friend shared on Facebook.  It came with a post declaring that it "touched me in a powerful way, as it shows the precious girls running through water, to get to JESUS."  Not to quibble, but it looks to me like the girls are running on water, and why not? They're dead, and no longer bound by the limitations of the flesh. The flash floods that killed them rose far above their heads.  I'm sure this person wouldn't want to deny the supernatural elements that the picture takes for granted.

"People around the world need to see the joy on the girls faces and the warm, excited embrace of Christ."  Eeeuuw.  Just eeeuuw.  Christians never stop to think what they're revealing about their psyches when they write stuff like this.

I clicked on the original poster's profile, and something symptomatic was going on.  He was distraught over the lost girls, praying in tears.  Didn't he have faith that an excited Jesus would take them to his, erm, bosom?  That they weren't dead, but sleeping?  Someone commented that seven girls had been rescued, praise God!  Doesn't that mean that those precious girls didn't get to go straight to the Pearly Gates and be with Jesus forever?  Do they want them to be separated from their Heavenly Father?  

C. S. Lewis wrote somewhere that deep in our hearts, we all believe that we are immortal. But if that were so, why would we see death as a bad thing, instead of a portal to a higher existence?  By Lewis's reasoning, it would seem that deep in our hearts, we don't believe we're immortal.  In an excellent book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon, 2019), the philosopher Martin Hägglund showed that in traditional orthodox Christianity, mourning the beloved dead shows a dangerous, even sinful lack of faith.  He quoted St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and C. S. Lewis berating themselves for feeling sorrow when someone dear to them went to be with God.  In general Christians have a great deal of difficulty reconciling their lively faith with their humanity.  As Sappho wrote, we know that death is an evil, or the gods would be mortal. (Lest someone try to claim that the Christian God became mortal through the incarnation, let me point out that he was only mostly dead, and rose again. He knew that mortality was an evil - but then according to Christian mythology, death is a curse he laid on us.)  

In the case of the Kerr County flash floods, which killed far more people than just the children at Camp Mystic, we're looking at what used to be called an act of God.  I've noticed that many Christians are squeamish nowadays about that kind of language, but it belongs to them and they shouldn't be allowed to distance themselves from it.  Not all Christians feel that way, of course, but they're still inconsistent about it.  By the time they get around to praying for the victims of this or that disaster, the damage is already done; it wouldn't occur to them to ask God not to make the disaster happen in the first place.  But after all, Jesus needs more angels to help him make rainbows.  God made the floods, and the Lamb reaps the harvest.

Once again I'm struck by how exactly the 18th-century philosopher David Hume described the ordinary believer's conception of God and his providence:

He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it. 

The Facebook friend who shared the image is the same person who lost her car keys and didn't find them until she'd spent a couple hundred dollars replacing them.  Meanwhile her friends prayed that they would turn up.  They also exhibited the understanding of their god that Hume described.

The poster on Facebook identified the artist behind the image as Afton Burkard, which I mention because artists should get due credit for their work, no matter how creepy it is.  But on the original post someone added a community note that the image is AI-generated, which seems more likely. 

The Slums of Jerusalem?

I just read Arundhati Roy's new book, The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste (Haymarket Books, 2017), about the debate on caste in India between Mohandas Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar, an important Untouchable activist educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, who wrote the Indian Constitution. 

There's a lot of history and politics to assimilate from Roy's account, and I don't feel I can comment on most of it because I don't know enough about Indian history and culture.  But this paragraph brought me up short:

Perhaps because the Western Christian world was apprehensive about the spreading influence of the Russian Revolution, and was traumatized by the horror of the First World War, Europeans and Americans vied to honour the living avatar of Christ.  It didn't seem to matter that unlike Gandhi, who was from a well-to-do family (his father was the prime minister of the princely state of Porbandar), Jesus was a carpenter from the slums of Jerusalem who stood up against the Roman Empire instead of trying to make friends with it.  And he was sponsored by big business. [location 1243 of the Kindle version]

That last sentence is a swipe at the support Gandhi received from Indian industrialists, especially G. D. Birla, who "paid him a generous monthly retainer to cover the costs of running his ashrams and for his Congress party work [location 1183]."  For now I'm concerned with Roy's characterization of Jesus, which is at best debatable.

Jesus was certainly not "from the slums of Jerusalem," but from the boondocks of Nazareth in Galilee, a week's journey away from Jerusalem.  I wonder where Roy got this; I can't recall ever having seen Jesus assigned to Jerusalem before.  Roy grew up in a Christian community in Kerala and attended something called the Corpus Christi School for part of her schooling, so she must have been exposed to Christian lore.

As for Jesus' social status, it's impossible to say anything sure about it.  The famous Nativity stories set in Bethlehem are absent from Mark, which was probably the first gospel to be written, and from John, which may have been the last of the four canonical gospels.  In Mark, Jesus is known in his hometown of Nazareth as "the carpenter, the son of Mary" (Mark 6:3); his father is unnamed, but he has several brothers and sisters.  Tektōn, the Greek word translated as "carpenter," refers to a woodworker as opposed to a metalworker or stonemason.  Jesus' neighbors' dismissive reaction to him in that verse indicates that he wasn't anyone very special, certainly not a Torah scholar or scribe, let alone a priest.  But he probably wasn't a slum-dweller either.

The gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy claiming Jesus' adoptive father Joseph as a descendant of King David, but there must have been quite a few of David's descendants around, so I don't know how exalted a status that gave Jesus.  The gospel of Luke has a similar (but different) genealogy for Joseph, and also depicts Jesus' mother Mary as a relative of the wife of a priest in the Jerusalem Temple.  We'll never know whether these stories were meant to boost Jesus' social status; one would think that being the incarnate Son of God would be distinguished enough.  I  don't think they have any historical basis at all, but that's something that will never be settled.  But if they do, Jesus' family compared well to Gandhi's in their class status.

Jesus' stance with regard to the Roman Empire is equally uncertain.  What is certain -- as certain as historical facts can be -- is that he was crucified, which means that he ran afoul of the Roman authorities who controlled Palestine in those days.  According to all four gospels, Jesus' cross bore the legend "King of the Jews," so it is likely he was executed as a political offender.  But from the gospels it's impossible to tell what his offense was.  This, like Matthew and Luke's genealogies, is understandable as an attempt by literate early Christians to make Jesus less scandalous and more respectable.

We also have Jesus' famous saying, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."  Asked whether Jews ought to pay taxes to the Roman Empire, Jesus asked his challengers to show him a coin, which bore Caesar's likeness, and delivered that clever, evasive reply.  That it was evasive is shown by the many different interpretations it has inspired.  It wasn't enough to prevent his capture and execution by the Romans, but then according to Christian doctrine it wasn't supposed to. 

All four gospels show Jesus being just as cagey when he was brought before the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate.  It's unlikely, of course, that Jesus' followers had any accurate information about what happened between his arrest and his crucifixion.  These stories were probably invented to show how Christians should behave when they were hauled before Jewish or Roman authorities.  But they don't show Jesus 'standing against' Rome.  Remember that Jesus was, according to the gospels, an end-times preacher, not a political activist.

As for "sponsored by big business," the gospels also agree that Jesus had some well-off followers who supported him financially, such as Joseph of Arimathea and  "Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others who provided for Him from their substance" (Luke 8:3).  Luke also has the story of Zacchaeus, a "chief tax-collector" who was so impressed by Jesus' cold reading of his background that he became a follower and supporter.  This story too may be an invention meant to instruct converts, but we know from Paul's letters that there were some well-to-do Christians in the early churches whose donations helped support the apostles and "the poor."  Like many religious leaders, Jesus' relation to the wealthy and to the state appears to have ambivalent.

This is a sore point with me, that I've written about before: educated, intelligent people who make remarkably misinformed claims about religion.  Jesus' politics are, as I've tried to indicate, open to considerable debate, but placed next to "the slums of Jesusalem," I don't find Roy's comparison of Jesus and Gandhi compelling; it seems to me that they may have been more alike than different.  Since I'm not a fan of either man, this isn't a problem for me.  Nor does it have a big impact on Roy's account of the enduring harm of the caste system.  It's just another of those curious lapses about religion that afflict many politically progressive writers.

In His Steps

Just a brief thought that popped into my head recently.  Compare this:

"We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated," [Donald Trump] said.

With this:

At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants..."

This is, I think, a fair comparison, because Jesus was at odds with the educated, respectable elements of his society: the priests, the scribes (which means literate men), Torah scholars.  His first followers were also "unlettered."  The apostle Paul, whom most liberal Christians hate while drawing on his doctrines, was unusual among early Christians in this respect. This pattern continued for a long time in early Christendom.  Yet the same liberals who tout Jesus as if he were one of them nowadays are utterly contemptuous of the kind of people Jesus appealed to.

It shouldn't be necessary to point it out, but unfortunately it probably is: to say this is not to endorse Trump.  If anything, the similarity counts against Jesus.  And the reactions of many educated liberals to Trump's victory have certainly shown the limitations of being well educated.

In His Steps

I'm still working on a post about liberal reactions to Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and decided that this part of it could stand by itself.

One complaint I saw frequently from gay and straight liberals alike was that Jesus taught an "inclusive" message, and these "so-called Christians" are teaching one that excludes.  As with so many popular statements about Jesus, this baffled me.

I suppose it depends partly on what you mean by "inclusive."  The people who used the word mainly seemed to be thinking that it meant "pro-gay," but I don't know of any reason to suppose that Jesus was pro-gay.  (The "Would Jesus Discriminate?" memes have been circulating again lately, but they don't persuade me.)  The other meaning they seem to have in mind is that Jesus didn't exclude anybody, though I suspect they rarely say so outright because it's so obviously false.

It would be reasonable to suppose that Jesus wanted to have a lot of followers, but since he wasn't all that successful, the gospels and the New Testament try to make a virtue out of his failure, with a lot of sour grapes. Jesus taught, for example, that the gate to salvation is narrow, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:14; compare Luke 7:24) -- so you see, the unpopularity of early Christianity wasn't a bug, it was a feature!  More generally, Jesus made it clear that not everyone was going to get into the kingdom of God, though he was unhelpfully vague and contradictory on the qualifications and criteria.  Most Christians would, I believe, counter that those who go to Hell deserve it, because they rejected God and Jesus.  That may be so, but it hardly constitutes an "inclusive" message.  And since (according to Christian orthodoxy) everybody deserves damnation, and nobody deserves salvation, it's hardly a defense of Jesus' all-embracing, welcoming love that a few people (who don't deserve it) are saved from Hellfire anyway.

Jesus was an avowedly divisive figure.  He came, he said, not to bring peace but (according to Matthew 10:34) a sword or (according to Luke 12:51) division: to set "a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's enemies will be members of his household" (Matthew 10:35-6; compare Luke 12:53).  This wasn't just talk, since according to the New Testament Jesus was controversial during his lifetime, and the early Christians, following his example, got up in unbelievers' faces, though they also fought among themselves.  Paul's letters are testimony to the acrimonious squabbles that divided the early churches, and Paul didn't hesitate to fight with Jesus' original disciples ... but Paul is the Ur-villain in many liberal Christians' understanding of Christian origins, so this will hardly surprise them.  The point is that Paul was merely following in his Master's footsteps.

That Jesus was divisive, often confrontational, and non-inclusive doesn't necessarily make him a bad person.  These traits are not why I reject Christianity myself.  I could point to any number of people who've influenced me who are divisive, confrontational, and non-inclusive; so, probably, could those who claim that Jesus' was a message of inclusion.  They're just wrong about Jesus, inventing a kissyface huggybear Jesus who fits their fantasies of what Jesus should have been, and ignoring the evidence we have of what he was like.  The gospels aren't reliable historical sources, but they are the raw material from which people quarry their images of Jesus.  There are all kinds of bad things one can say about Christian bigots, but failing to be as inclusive as Jesus isn't one of them.

Toward a Recognition of Evidence

A slight digression here.  I just reread At Eighty-two (Norton, 1996), the final volume of May Sarton's journals, and as usual it was a fascinating view into old age and ill health.  It also pointed me to a few writers I might explore, such as the poet Deborah Pease, and reminded me of Sarton's friend, the academic and novelist Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who championed Sarton's work when few academics were willing to consider it.  The cold shoulder she got from academic critics was something that bothered Sarton a great deal, a theme she harped on throughout the journals, including this one, and I admit I was surprised to be reminded that Florence Howe didn't include Sarton in her anthology of women's poetry No More Masks, not even the expanded 1993 edition.

Anyway, now that I've finished re-reading all of Sarton's journals it might be time to return to Carolyn Heilbrun's feminist critical writings.  Her book Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, first published in 1973, is probably still her best-known work.  I've read it two or three times, most recently last year, and it's one of those frustrating books that I remember positively but can't recall any of what it says.  The only notes I took from my last reading have little to do with androgyny, but they may explain why the book hasn't stayed with me better.

In the face of the evidence of Jewish life at the time of Jesus, or, indeed, at any time, more blatantly still in the face of the evidence of the Gospels, the Church was determined to deny sexuality its place in the religious world, to idealize celibacy, which the Jews and probably Jesus considered sinful, and to enshrine virginity, which the tradition had heretofore never seen as anything but a perversion.  Not only may Jesus not have been a virgin, but there is little beyond the patristic tradition to suggest that he was not born from an ordinary sex act.  The pagan tradition in which the father is a god (one need only recall Zeus’s many sexual affairs with mortal ladies) and the Jewish tradition which saw God as, in one sense, the father of all children were no doubt distorted for the uses of a Church which feared sexuality almost as much as it feared the feminine principle, perhaps for many of the same reasons [17-18].

On the whole, the factual errors in this passage are hard to excuse, though it reflects common views of Jesus and Christianity at the time, and down to the present.  I think that historical scholarship on Judaism since the 1970s has enriched our knowledge and understanding of rabbinical attitudes toward sexuality in Jesus' day, and I don't hold Heilbrun responsible for not taking into account work that hadn't been done yet.  But most of what she gets wrong was avoidable.  It boggles my mind when she says that the Church idealized celibacy and virginity "in the face of the evidence of the Gospels" and blames the doctrine of Jesus' birth to a virgin mainly on "the patristic tradition."  In fact the virgin birth is reported in two canonical gospels, one of which (Matthew) has traditionally been touted as the most "Jewish" of the four.  Jesus' harshly repressive teachings on sex in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew again) are hardly obscure, and then there is his commendation of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven.  (That link will show you numerous translations of the verse, which are evidence of how uncomfortable it makes many modern Christians.)

There's a tendency, due I think to influence from 20th-century village-atheist polemic, to talk as though the gospels were written much later than most scholars today think they were, as if they were written in the second or third centuries rather than the first.  But the same downgrading of marriage and the body is found in Paul's letters, which were certainly written before the gospels, within twenty-five years of Jesus' death, though Paul was not merely Jewish but a Pharisee.  Paul is ambiguous on the point, but it's generally accepted that he was celibate, and he argued in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage was a second-best relation, a concession to human weakness for those unable to control their lusts and give their full devotion to the Lord.  These passages were not discovered in a clay jar after 1973; they'd been there all along, and were not obscure.

Heilbrun goes on to cite William E. Phipps's Was Jesus Married? (Harper & Row, 1970), a popular controversial book at the time she was writing Toward a Recognition of Androgyny.  I've only read Phipps's later book The Sexuality of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1973), and it has been a while, but as I recall his main argument was to point to the universality of marriage in Judaism, which is a slight oversimplification anyway. Whether Jesus himself was married, let alone a lifelong virgin, we'll never know, but it can't be settled by appeal to mainstream Judaism of his time, because Jesus was not a mainstream Jew of his time, even on the evidence of the gospels, which show him at odds and in mortal combat with the mainstream Judaism(s) of his time.  This wasn't (or wasn't solely) a fabrication in the service of patristic propaganda; the hostility between the early Jesus cult and their fellow Jews was intense, and no less so if it was over issues that seem trivial to 20th century Americans.  Again, the apostle Paul, who on his own account had been a mainstream Jew, a Pharisee no less, was also hostile to marriage and sexuality before the gospels were even written; and even though we have some of Paul's own words about himself (unlike Jesus), it's not certain whether he was or had been married himself.

I don't know of any evidence that Jesus "probably considered [celibacy] sinful," and I've just pointed to evidence to the contrary.  As for the claim that "the tradition had heretofore never seen [virginity] as ... a perversion," that's absurd: virginity was mandatory for women before marriage in Judaism, as in other traditions.  It's also absurd to claim that the idealization of celibacy and virginity denied "sexuality its place in the religious world"; marriage and sexuality always had their place in Christianity, even if it was a second-best place.  If women and men were not to remain virgin or unmarried throughout their lives, that hardly indicates a respect for their freedom or well-being.  Compulsory marriage was as much a distortion of human potential as compulsory celibacy, but then individual freedom was not a Christian, Jewish, or pagan ideal.

I wish that Heilbrun were still alive; I'd like to ask her how she could have overlooked the evidence that celibacy had a place in Christianity from its earliest days.  If she cites the gospels, I presume she'd read them at some point.  Was no one who read the book in manuscript, or helped prepare it for publication, knowledgeable enough about the Bible to notice this strange mis-characterization of New Testament teachings?  It now seems to me that much of Toward a Recognition of Androgyny involved generalizations about culture and literature that I can't accept, even if I like Heilbrun's rejection of sexual polarization.

Seeing What the Church Will Do Unbullied, There's No Occasion To

I'm not sure what to make of Conor Friedersdorf's latest venture into the turmoil over same-sex marriage.  The title and opening are especially problematic: "Will Christians Ever Bless Gay Marriage?", with the subhead "Some writers think that even as society changes, orthodox believers will stick to traditional beliefs."

Insofar as the title and subhead seem to equate "Christians" and "orthodox believers," they depend on a faulty assumption, albeit one often used by reactionary believers when convenient: "Christianity" means only those who fit a narrow and unrepresentative range of what I'll call the spectrum of Christianities, except when it doesn't.  (So, for example, fundamentalists will point to the fact that the vast majority of Americans identify themselves as Christians in order to advance their theocratic agenda, even though they don't consider the vast majority of Americans to be real Christians and will denounce them as apostates, etc.  Reactionary writers like Rod Dreher have drifted toward the label "traditional" Christians instead, but as Dreher himself admitted in one of his better pieces, it's surprisingly difficult to define what a "traditional" Christian believes.  In practice, at least for people like Dreher, it mainly seems to boil down to opposition to same-sex marriage.  But Dreher also is willing to recognize that "traditional" Christians as he imagines them are a dwindling minority among American Christians, though he exaggerates slightly so as to indulge the traditional paranoid delight in persecution -- or rather, the fantasy of persecution -- that so many Christians cherish.

Friedersdorf himself, to judge from this article, doesn't subscribe to this confusion.  He recognizes the range of beliefs and values held by Christians, and does a good job answering a writer, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who argues against the "false premise" that Christianity does change its values and will abandon its opposition to same-sex marriage.  I will concede that some Christians never will accept it, just as some Christians cling to theologically based anti-Semitism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.  Hell, there are some Christians who still want the Catholic Mass to be celebrated in Latin only.  There's no reason why all believers, or all churches, should agree on any issue.  And it might bear reiterating that the legal recognition of civil marriage between same-sex couples in no way obliges a denomination to recognize them, any more than it must sanctify heterosexual civil marriages involving spouses of different denominations, or a divorced spouse in denominations that don't recognize divorce, or any number of other pairings.  Catholic churches are not, as far as I know, being burned down or priests lynched or jailed for refusing to marry such couples in church.

I'll add something to Friedersdorf's discussion, though.  He quotes the writer he's rebutting, who's much given to straw men and false antitheses:

"Christianity's view of sexuality isn't some encrusted holdover from a socially conditioned patriarchal era on its way out, but is instead deeply connected to its understanding of who God is and what human beings exist for."

It's interesting to me that Gobry qualifies his claim somewhat by referring to Christianity's "understanding of who God is and what human beings exist for."   That concedes the debate right off the bat.  I'd expect a traditionalist Christian to insist that he is enumerating God's understanding.  From there I need only point out that "some encrusted holdover from a socially conditioned patriarchal era" and "its understanding of what who God is and what human beings are exist for" are not mutually exclusive -- indeed, that it's quite thinkable that a traditional Christian understanding could also be an encrusted holdover from a patriarchal era, etc.  I think the burden of argument lies on Gobry to show why it isn't, and he doesn't do so.

Gobry also whines that the proponents of same-sex marriage believe that "if you just bully Christianity enough, it will find a way to change its view of homosexuality ..."  Like many traditionalists, he assumes that advocates of same-sex marriage are not Christians (see the confusion I addressed above), though as Friedersdorf points out, the pressure to change Christian understandings of homosexuality (and of sex generally) has mostly come from within the churches, from Christians rather than unbelievers.  If it were up to me as an atheist, I would resist putting any external pressure on religious believers in this regard at all, if only because external pressure only gets believers' backs up.  But again, I think it will be mostly Christian or other religious GLBs who'll be having tantrums when their churches refuse to bless their marriages, and will want to throw out the First Amendment in the interests of their God-given right to have a church wedding.

I have my disagreements with Friedersdorf on many aspects of this controversy, but he did a good job this time in answering Gobry, and he quotes some useful arguments from comments under a Rod Dreher post that cited Gobry.  Even so, I object to his conclusion: "It's hard to imagine that Jesus wouldn't prefer that to the previous arrangement."  I think that anyone who reads Jesus' many antisexual teachings in the gospels should find it easy to imagine that Jesus would not accept same-sex marriage or openly gay followers.  Friedersdorf talks a lot in this piece about "love" as a reason for accepting same-sex marriage, but any conception of Christian love that appeals to Jesus as a model must account for such dominical teachings as "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire."  As an atheist I don't have to reconcile Love and Hellfire, but Christians do.

Real Jesuses Don't Sparkle

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter linked to an amusing article on Rick Warren, the right-wing antigay Christian minister whom Obama invited to give the invocation at his first inauguration.  Warren offended a lot of Asian-American Christians by posting

a photo of a Red Guard, the young Communist cadres that policed their communities during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. The poster showed a smiling, rosy-cheeked young woman in the drab gray uniform the Red Guard typically wore.

His post (since taken down) said "The typical attitude of Saddleback Staff as they start work each day."

Many Asian-American evangelicals "were not amused," and after first berating them on his Facebook page ("It's a joke people! If you take this seriously, you really shouldn't be following me!"), Warren issued a patently insincere, pro forma apology -- you know the drill:

"If you were hurt, upset, offended or distressed by my insensitivity I am truly sorry," he wrote. "May God richly bless you."

I commented that if Warren wants to be funny, he should have a poster showing Jesus carrying his cross to Calvary (maybe a screengrab from Mel Gibson's torture-porn movie) with the same kind of caption -- "One of our volunteers after a typical day." I wonder how well that would go over with his constituency.

But maybe it would go over well: Christians are supposed to take up their cross and follow Jesus. Besides, Warren's style of Christianity is the kind that comes up with slogans like "Jesus loves you so much it hurts" or "This Blood's for you."  My friend, who's a serious Christian, admitted that I'd made him laugh.

Then today I decided to see what Rod Dreher has been up to at The American Conservative, and lo, he had just posted "Jesus Means Business," based on another Christian blogger's post about popular contemporary images of Jesus. who called the painting of Jesus in robes shaking hands with an American businessman in a suit "the most awkward Jesus painting I've ever seen."  Dreher was embarrassed by it too, though I can't see how it's more disturbing than many other more respectable images of his Lord.

Some commenters at both sites lamented the depiction of Jesus as a "white" northern European, a complaint which has become a cliche by now.  I'm not sure we really know what first-century Galilean Jews looked like; it's a mistake to assume that they look like modern Palestinians.  Since no one has any idea what the historical Jesus looked like, it's not surprising that people projected their own assumptions about him into the images they created.  So the earliest known image of Jesus, from Syria around 235, shows Jesus as a beardless Roman youth.  This was a convention in the catacombs too.  But there are pictures almost as old that give Jesus a beard.  There evidently wasn't a standard image then, and there was considerable opposition in the church leadership to any images of Jesus at all.  Worrying about how Jesus should be depicted begins to resemble the "Real Vampires Don't Sparkle" hissyfits that some have indulged since the success of the Twilight series.

Are these images any more wrong than, say, Black Jesus?  For example, do hipster-wannabe youth ministers write snarky blog posts about depictions of Jesus as a sub-Saharan African?  I'm not particularly interested in the popular question of whether there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth, but the Jesus of Christianity is a largely imaginary character, barely defined even by the gospel accounts, even among "traditionalist" Christians.  It's not the Jesus of first-century Galilee whom Christians worship, it's the risen and exalted Christ, who sits in the heavens at his Father's right hand, but (behold) is with his faithful followers always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).  So, how do people think he should be depicted?

Someone like Rod Dreher, or even the presumably somewhat less "traditionalist" Zach of The American Jesus, can hardly object to contemporary Christians believing that Jesus Lives and is with those who believe in him, no matter where they are, no matter what they're doing.  They're embarrassed by the painting that shows the conventional (white, long-haired, bearded, robed) Jesus sitting in the Garden of Eden with a naked, nipple-less Adam and Eve, and sure, it takes a heart of stone not to giggle at that one.  But as one of Zach's commenters patiently explained, the picture is based on the orthodox, Biblical teaching that Jesus, the Word of God, always existed, and participated in the Creation (John 1:1-4).  Maybe it is seeing that sublime theological doctrine naively literalized that embarrasses them; but how are these pictures any worse than, say, conventional depictions of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, which literalize another tangled metaphor from the gospel of John?  Jesus may or may not have been a carpenter (the Greek word usually translated that way, I gather, is not so specific), but he doesn't seem ever to have been a shepherd.  I suppose it's one thing to see Jesus anachronized as a Renaissance European, and another to see that same Jesus in a twenty-first century corporate office or hospital room, let alone preparing for a ménage à trois in Eden.

Maybe their embarrassment arises also from the shock of seeing themselves as others might see them: the difference between a more sophisticated (so he likes to think) Christian and the more naive believers who are willing to shell out $1500 for a painting of Jesus in the executive suite is a difference of degree rather than of kind.  It's easy to laugh at these pictures, but what if you begin to suspect that some of your settled beliefs are just as laughable to someone else?  One remedy, I suppose, would be a thoroughgoing iconoclasm, refusing to tolerate any images of God or Jesus at all, but it's a bit late for that.  Another might be to fall back on the New Testament teaching that of course the worldly will laugh at Christians' simple, humble, scandalous beliefs; the believer should brush their laughter aside, knowing that their repayment awaits them in Hell.  But that would imply that Dreher and Zach and others who laugh at these pictures are worldly too, siding with the heathen, and their own salvation might be in doubt.

I wonder how literally the people who like (and buy) these pictures really take them.  Probably they do believe literally that Jesus is with them, some of the time anyway, even if they can't feel his presence.  And how else are you going to show that belief visually, if not by taking the conventional image of Jesus and plopping him down in the present, robes and beard and long hair and all?  Once again, it seems to me, it's the antiliteralists, the people who'd insist on a non-literal approach to the Bible, who are taking these pictures more literally than they were intended.

Reading Entirely for Pleasure Now

I stumbled on a little book at the library called So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore: An Unexpected Journey by Wayne Jacobsen and Dave Coleman (Windblown Media, 2006).  Its premise is that the protagonist meets a man who "just might be one of Jesus' original disciples -- still living in the twenty-first century ... That's Jake's dilemma as he meets a man who talks of Jesus as if he had known him, and whose way of living challenges everything Jake had previously known."  Lots of alarm signals there, but it's a small book and I decided to see what the authors made of their idea.

The cold I've had this week has put a damper on my ability to read stuff that actively annoys me, however, so for now I'm going to put the book aside.  It's due at the library tomorrow, so maybe I'll try it again later.  Here's where I got to on my first try.

Jake has a twelve-year-old daughter with asthma, and though he's a Christian he clearly hasn't been getting the strength and support from his God that Christian marketing promises.  He remembers his first encounter with the man who just might be one of Jesus' original disciples.  The stranger informs a squabbling crowd in the street:

"He was nothing special to look at.  He could walk down the street today and not one of you would even notice him.  In fact he had the kind of face you would shy away from, certain he wouldn't fit in with your crowd.

That seems a bit self-contradictory: someone whose face you'd shy away from is not someone who is "nothing special to look at."

"But he was as gentle a man as one would ever know.  He could silence detractors without ever raising his voice.  He never bullied his way; never drew attention to himself nor did he ever pretend to like what vexed his soul.  He was real, to the very core...

"And with all that love, he was completely honest.  Yet even when his actions or words exposed people's darkest motives, they didn't feel shamed.  They felt safe, really safe with him.  His words carried not even a hint of judgment, simply an entreaty to come to God... [18]."

And so on.

Well, maybe.  We don't, in fact, know anything about the historical Jesus: nothing about his appearance, how old he was when he died, we can't be sure about what he said or taught or did.  Our surest historical information is that he was crucified sometime between 26 and 36 CE, because Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect or procurator of Judea during those years, and there's general agreement that Jesus was executed under Pilate's administration.  That could conceivably be wrong too, but there's no evidence against it at present.

But if the stranger's description is accurate, it is utterly at odds with the gospels' depiction of Jesus, and I don't think that Jacobsen and Coleman want to discredit the canonical gospels.  They want to discredit some present-day people's idea of what Jesus was like, and gather them to the fold of some form of orthodox Christianity.

Any reading of a text will be subjective, but I can't see how anyone reading the gospels would come away with the impression of Jesus as a consistently gentle person, one who never judged, one who never raised his voice, one who never bullied, one who didn't draw attention to himself.  Hello!  Wandering around Galilee and drawing crowds in the thousands, doing faith healing and exorcisms and nature miracles drew attention to him, and unless he was barely sentient he knew what he was doing.  The cleansing of the Temple was hardly the act of a person who didn't care if he was noticed or not -- all the more so if, as some interpreters complain, it was a purely symbolic gesture that achieved nothing except to hasten his arrest and death.  According to the gospels Jesus drew attention to himself because that was his mission: to proclaim the good news, to arouse enmity, and to die on the cross.

Throughout the gospels Jesus is judgmental, dividing the sheep from the goats, the elect from the denied, the saved from the damned.  I'm not sure how you can read a saying like "You snakes!  You brood of vipers!  How will you escape condemnation to hell?" (Matthew 23:33) and not get a strong feeling of judgment.  As for bullying, when Simon Peter denied that Jesus as messiah would have to die, Jesus reportedly responded, "Get behind me, Satan!  You think as men think, not as God thinks!" (Mark 8:33).  Again, I suppose that someone sufficiently determined could read that -- a master reproving his disciple, with all the authority issues it implies -- as not-bullying, but I can't.  Decide for yourself.

Of course this is more or less what I expected, and one reason I think I should try to read the entire book is to try to figure out what the authors think they're doing: do they have any notion at all of how they've departed from the same scriptures they presumably regard as the true record of Jesus and his teaching?  I have no objection to people just making stuff up, but I do marvel at the doublethink it takes to make it up without noticing you're diverging drastically from your source material, and indeed insisting that you're only submitting to its truth.

Imagine that someone wrote a little book about someone who he thought might have known Frodo Baggins, and this someone told how people misunderstand Frodo: they think he's a tiny, bookish little guy, but in fact he was a mighty warrior, seven feet tall and three ax handles across the shoulders, who spent his nights carousing and wenching in the taverns before he went on his quest of the Ring.  When you're writing fiction you can do pretty much what you want, but would anyone agree that this was the "real" Frodo?  It seems to me that Jacobsen and Coleman, far from challenging modern Christians' ideas of Jesus, constructed the Jesus they'd like to believe in themselves.  And not just they, but many other Christians as well.

I Don't Want a Pickle

Democrats have been indulging in a lot of chest-thumping since the election, so I've been seeing more stuff like this on Facebook lately.

You know, the self-congratulatory "I'm a liberal so I'm like Jesus and JFK!" stuff.  These people have a rather odd notion of what a liberal is.  Even leaving aside the fact that we have no idea what Jesus looked like, and that there's reason to doubt he had long hair, bleeding-heart, peace-loving, anti-establishment hippie freaks were not liberals.  Liberals didn't like hippies, didn't like peace freaks, and the disdain was returned.  Liberals are not anti-establishment, they're part of the establishment.

As for Jesus, while he may have been peace-loving and anti-establishment (though it's hard to be more establishment than the Son of God), he was also a faith healer and exorcist who preached that The End Is Near, taught his followers to leave their families and normal lives to trek around Galilee and Judea with him, and picked fights with the reasonable, respectable religious leaders of his day.  The Sadducees were roughly comparable to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chaplain of Harvard University; the Pharisees were liberals compared to them, if a bit hard-core -- think modern Congregationalists or Presbyterians.  But if you want to put Jesus into a contemporary box, he was a radical, not a liberal.  Within a few years of his death, his followers were speaking in tongues, like modern Pentecostals.  That's not connected to Jesus in the gospels (except for a stray verse or two of doubtful authenticity), so we don't know where it came from.

Liberals don't like radicals.  Radicals don't usually like liberals.  They mock them for their readiness to sell out their fine principles as soon as the going gets rocky. It's a fair bet that if today's liberals had to deal with someone like the historical Jesus, they wouldn't actually call for his execution, but they'd find reasons not to work very hard to save his life either.  As with Martin Luther King Jr., only after he was safely dead would liberals start squabbling with conservatives over who got to claim him for their side.

You Make Me Feel Mighty Real

Notice: The following material contains language, ideas, and jokes that may be offensive to some readers. If you are easily offended, This Is So Gay recommends that you exercise your choice to not read.

NARRATOR: Jesus is carrying His cross along the road to Calvary, where He will suffer a prolonged and excruciating death. This fate could have been avoided if He had a Sassy Gay Friend.

[Theme music plays over Sassy Gay Friend throwing his headscarf over his shoulder.]

[Sassy Gay Friend jumps out from behind a Roman soldier and confronts Jesus.]

SGF: What are You doing? What, what, what are You doing?

JESUS [I picture Jonah Hill in the role]: Judas betrayed Me, Peter denied Me, and Mary Magdalene eloped with the disciple I love!

SGF: I told You, even the Son of God can spread Himself too thin...

JESUS: My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

SGF: So, You got dumped by Your boy toys. It happens! But what is this mortification of the flesh here? The crown of thorns, the stripes of the lash on Your back, this tacky cross! Don't be such a drama queen!

JESUS: The Son of God can be a drama queen if He feels like it.

SGF: I don't think so! The Son of God is a role model for millions of kids. Think of the endorsements You'll lose.

JESUS: I don't care! I want to die! Then they'll wish they hadn't treated Me like this! And I'll be laughing!

SGF: Oh, I'm so sure, like You're going to rise on the third day and watch them feel guilty. Now I want You to stop this nonsense, come down off Your cross, and show me the Jesus I know, Who told the scribes and the Pharisees where to get off. Enough of this whining -- I want to see the Judge of the quick and the dead, Who will separate the sheep from the goats!

JESUS: But what about My beloved disciple?

SGF: Honey, there are plenty of fish in the sea -- 153 to be exact. Look at that humpy number over there. Hand him the cross.

JESUS: Well ... I guess you're right. [He passes the cross to a guy with a linebacker's build, who's wearing a jersey that says CYRENE 00.]

SFG: C'mon, You stupid bitch, let's get out of here and I will make You a fisher of men.

JESUS: Does this loincloth make Me look fat?

SFG [smugly, to the camera]: She's a stupid bitch.

The first Sassy Gay Friend video was funny, the second one (about Juliet) still funny but a bit weaker, and the newest one (about Desdemona) didn't do much for me at all. I got this idea shortly before the third turned up on Youtube; one advantage of writing over video is that one can conjure up all sorts of effects (Jonah Hill as Jesus, the crowds along the road to Calvary) without actually having to stage them. I hope this offering fits the spirit of Good Friday.

Don't Worry, Be Happy (or Sleepy, or Dopey, or Doc ...)

While I was surfing the Web last weekend I stumbled on a blog post about the "atheist bus" ad campaign that I've written about before. This post was by a Christian writer who found the campaign's slogan strangely attractive:

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy with your life.

His answer was predictable, at least to me.

Then it slowly dawned on me. This ad is a cry for freedom; a cry against the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god. For once, I find myself fighting alongside the atheists. A god who paralyzes with fear, overburdens with guilt, and replaces the joy of life with sorrow and regret is no God at all. This god is an idol that demands tribute and can never be feed enough. The atheists are avidly fighting against a god who takes life rather than gives it.

In this instance, perhaps the cry of Ariane, Dawkins, and others is not far from the cry of Jesus, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them… you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” (Lk 11:46, 52).

Sometimes I wonder… Would Jesus ride the atheist bus?

I joked in my first post on the Atheist Bus Campaign that an 'atheist bus' must be a bus that doesn't believe in gods, but this guy wrote as though he thinks that were true, or that riding a bus means agreeing with all the advertising it carries. That's presumably why a Christian bus driver refused to drive a bus with the atheist ad on its side; or maybe that driver knew that many riders would think so, and blame him -- not the bus company -- for the ad. ("Presumably," another blogger shrewdly speculated, "he was previously perfectly happy to drive about in buses advertising capitalist multinationals, bearing exploitative images of women and encouraging us to go out and spend money on goodness knows what rubbish – but there you are, that’s Scummerland for you.") And presumably, I as an atheist should refuse to ride a 'Christian bus' displaying a Christian ad. People are scary.

But I think that our blogger knows better, and is just constructing a sermon theme, a superficially startling opener that in the end turns safely home to the faith you know and love. What I don't get is how he can claim Jesus as an opponent of what he calls "the tyranny and oppression caused by a diabolical god." The Jesus of the gospels is a preacher of hellfire and damnation. Shortly after the passage the blogger quotes, Jesus tells "the crowd," "I tell you my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!" (Luke 12:4-5, NRSV). Be afraid, be very afraid! This heartwarming passage, which is followed immediately by more of the same, can be read as referring either to Yahweh or the devil, or to Jesus himself, whom the gospels depict as having "authority to cast into hell." It doesn't much matter, though, for the ultimate source of that authority must be the same: Yahweh, the god of Israel. Jesus' promises of reward usually alternate with threats of eternal punishment.

Jesus' message in the New Testament would be meaningless if there weren't a Hell, created by Yahweh for the devil and his angels, awaiting those who fall short of whatever standard Jesus demanded of people. Being "saved" is only a concern if you're in danger, and Jesus is clear and explicit about what the danger is. The cosmology of the New Testament is incoherent -- it's impossible to know exactly what one must to do avoid Hell and be admitted to the Kingdom, since different requirements are declared at different points. The function of this incoherence -- not necessarily its intent -- is to foster that paralyzing fear and anxiety that our blogger objects to. First you have to create the danger, then you can sell the remedy for the danger.

On one of my first trips to Korea, my friends took me to a famous and very old Buddhist shrine at Seokguram Grotto. I wrote in my journal:

HK told me, as we continued downward, about the meaning of the white paper lanterns that were hanging above our heads; they were in memory of the dead. They're part of the rituals intended to help the dead make their way to paradise more quickly. HK said she'd been surprised to find no such elements in Christianity when she was in the US. I explained to her about masses for the dead in Roman Catholicism, and prayer to saints for intercession, which are intended to shorten people's stay in Purgatory. I also told her the rabbinic story of Rabbi Aqiba saving a spirit from Hell, and mentioned Wittgenstein's remark from the Tractatus that any afterlife would be as mysterious as this life.

It's odd to me that people invent hell, and then invent ways to get other people out of it. Which comes first, the punitive impulse, the construction of a system of posthumous spiritual "justice", or the construction of loopholes in the system in the name of mercy? It's commonplace, a cliche really, for unbelievers whether atheist or just members of competing cults, to blame these systems on the greed of priests and other religious professionals. There's probably some truth in that notion, but it also seems to me that laymen like the process, the system, the game, the complications.

There's certainly a human impulse toward elaboration, and one toward creating obstacles so as to have something to get around. The iconoclasts who smash one such game will see it replaced with another by their followers, if they don't invent the replacement themselves. Jesus was no exception, for what it's worth. He was in some kind of competition with the Jerusalem temple cult. Rather than deny outright the need for expensive atonement, he (or his disciples) established the cut-rate alternative of baptism -- but inflation inevitably set in. If Jesus himself instituted baptism, he was in on the process himself, and by the time Paul became a Christian, Jesus' followers certainly had such a system in place. If we knew that people really needed this sort of help after their death, it would be perfectly reasonable and rational for their friends and relatives to give it. But we don't know any such thing, and that is the problem.

So, like a true fundamentalist, our blogger puts the blame on Jewish "lawyers" in the gospels, and on modern churches that interpret the gospels differently than he does, trying to divert attention from the fact that it was Jesus, as far as anyone knows, who preached the "diabolical god" he objects to. Since he can't believe in the Jesus of the gospels (and who can, really?), he constructs a Jesus he can believe in. Would Jesus join the Atheist Bus Campaign's protest against such beliefs? I see no reason to think so.

In his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Harper & Brothers), Walter Kaufmann wrote a dialogue between Satan and a Christian, which concluded (chapter 59):

Christian: You always harp on hell.

Satan: There is no place like home. And you might as well get used to the idea: haven't you been told that I enjoy the company of those who cannot answer me any better than you?

Christian: But I don't understand at all. Only hysterics think of going to hell themselves.

Satan: I know: good Christians consider hell a place for others. But don't you realize that if you are right about everything, you, and those like you, are undoubtedly headed for hell? Don't you see how immeasurably you stand to gain if Christianity is untenable? It is I that bring you glad tidings. Believe me and you are saved. That God exists, that is a ritual phrase, charged with emotion and a thousand connotations: some sheer superstition, some myths, some true, some false, and most of them vague. But here is the truth that shall make you free: I do not exist.

Christian: If Satan does not exist, I must have dreamed. So I can go on believing what I have always believed. But what exactly do I believe? That is the question.

(image link)

More Popular Than Jesus Now

Oh, dear -- my fellow atheists are such an embarrassment to me sometimes. At The BEAST, there's this interview with "world-renowned philosopher genius" Daniel Dennett:

BEAST: Recently, Harris Interactive asked 2,600 Americans: “Who do you admire enough to call a hero?” Obama beat out Jesus for number one—

DENNETT: Oh, that's good.

B: That's change we can believe in?

D: I think so, yeah. I think that, actually, Jesus makes a fine hero. I've always thought that Gandhi was about right there. He says, I like your Jesus, it's your Christians that I have trouble with. In fact, we had some discussion of forming a group called Atheists for Jesus. Although, I think it's still problematic. Yeah, I think this is a good sign.

I can think of any number of people I'd put ahead of Obama, though I'm not sure I admire anyone enough to call them a hero. But Jesus? Remember, Dennett is one of the militant New Atheists, an evangelist for neo-Darwinianism and secularism. It takes a heap of reinterpretation to get Jesus into bed with Dennett's philosophy, and since he offers no explanation I can only speculate. Does he, like many liberals, think of Jesus as a bold critic of organized religion and overlook Jesus' own feverish apocalypticism, wonder-working, and authoritarianism, as the gospels depict him? Of course, we know almost nothing for sure about the historical Jesus, and that makes it easier for people to invent a Jesus congenial to them.

In much the same way, despite the vastly better documentation available about him, many Obama fans invent a Barack who believes what they believe, wants what they want, and will do what they imagine they'd do in his place. And mercy me, so does Daniel Dennett:

B: President Obama seems to be a smart guy. Do you think he truly believes in God or do you think he's pandering, and which is more frightening?

D: I suspect that he's like a great many people. He believes in belief in God. And that he believes that the belief in God can accomplish a lot of good, especially if it brings people together. And it's political, I think, in some ways and sidesteps problems. You know, we all want to pick our problems, and I think he's very wisely decided that there are other people that can—can and should—do the job of critiquing religious excess. He's got, actually, more pressing and important things to do. I think he's right.

Personally, against both Gandhi and Dennett, I have known numerous Christians I like better than the Jesus of the gospels (or rather the Jesuses, since the gospels differ, sometimes subtly and sometimes broadly, in the way they depict him). But all this reminds me of the exchange on God between Yossarian and Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (bold type added):

“ … When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious he never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk.”

Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife had turned ashen in disbelief and was ogling him with alarm. “You’d better not talk that way about Him, honey,” she warned him reprovingly in a low and hostile voice. “He might punish you.”

“Isn’t He punishing me enough?” Yossarian snorted resentfully. “You know, we mustn’t let Him get away scot free for all the sorrow He’s caused us. Someday I’m going to make Him pay. I know when. On the Judgment Day. Yes, that’s the day I’ll be close enough to reach out and grab that little yokel by His neck and--”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. “Stop it!”

Yossarian ducked behind his arm for protection while she slammed away at him in feminine fury for a few seconds, and then he caught her determinedly by the wrists and forced her gently back down on the bed. “What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”

Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. “Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,” he proposed obligingly. “You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to. Is it a deal?”

I guess I'll have to extend the same tolerance to Daniel Dennett, both on Jesus and Obama.

(Image of Obama with unicorn and roses by Lukas Ketner.)