To the Least of My Brethren

When I was a small child, I watched a religious documentary on television about the life of Jesus. I have forgotten most of it, but I remember the ending. The narrator quoted Jesus: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do so to me.” The narrator made no further comment. But the film footage that accompanied it showed drug addicts sitting in the gutters of a major city. This was in the mid-1960s, during the height of the hippie era.

I felt really challenged and uncomfortable by the ending of this documentary. If I believed Jesus, which I did, then it was my responsibility to love drug addicts sitting in the gutters. Jesus did not say that the drug addicts first had to reform, and then we could love them. To me—and I was as neat and conservative of a little kid as there could be—this sounded like giving the nod of approval to their sinful life styles. I did not like this.

I still don’t. Jesus’ words are still hard to swallow.

But the most interesting part is this. I’m pretty sure that I remember that the documentary was sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. I very much doubt that Southern Baptists would produce such a documentary today. The Southern Baptists have pretty much sold out to the conservative, Republican political line that drug addicts are evil and unworthy of any assistance, and that poor people are poor because they are lazy. Conservatives today despise poor people, especially those who are, in fact, responsible for their own poverty. But they did sponsor this documentary fifty years ago. In the last half century, the Southern Baptists and other conservative religious groups have left Christianity behind and become an arm of the Republican Party. It didn’t used to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

I hope conservative churches might emerge out of their Trump-worshiping phase and go back to this particular aspect of what they used to be like. I’m not holding my breath, however.

We Just Keep Believing the Lies

Here is a quote from Charles Seife’s book, Proofiness: “Whether it’s the savings and loan scandal or Enron or the subprime mortgage crisis, the end is always the same. The people who are willing to lie about risks make themselves very rich, and the taxpayers suffer the consequences. Even if one or two of the malefactors wind up in jail, there are always many others who made themselves much better off at others’ expense and never suffered any serious consequences.”

When will we stop getting tricked? When will we stop believing the evangelicals and conservatives, after their repeated lies? It goes back a long time. The Reagan administration lied about Russians testing nuclear weapons bigger than the existing treaty allowed by leaking it to New York Times, which published it, and many people still believe it, even though it has been shown to be a lie. The Bush II Administration did the same thing about supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. In both cases, according to Seife, it was the same people who whipped up the lies: Richard Perle in the government and Judith Miller at the Times.

No matter how many times the evangelicals and the Republicans get caught lying, they will keep doing it and most people will keep believing them.

Forty Years in the Wilderness

The Biblical books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy contain long lists of ritual laws that God supposedly communicated directly to Moses on the holy mountain while the Israelites were wandering for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula after escaping from slavery in Egypt.

Among these ritual laws, there are many that could not possibly apply to the nomadic Israelites. For example, they were supposed to put blood on their doorposts. Wandering, tent-dwelling nomads don’t have doorposts. They were also supposed to make ritual cakes out of wheat flour. Wandering nomads don’t raise wheat.

It is clear to most scholars of the Bible that these ritual commandments were projected backward from the period after Israel had become a settled country, when they had doorposts and wheat fields. Most likely, these rituals had become well established by the period of Greek occupation, just before Roman occupation. The priests then projected their rituals backward to the nomadic period of their history. By claiming that God Himself had thundered the commandments from the mountain, the priests could claim absolute authority (of God and of Moses) in matters of ritual and doctrine.

But fundamentalists believe that God actually commanded the Israelites to do all of these things, for example to use wheat flour (which they did not have) for making ritual tortillas during the lifetime of Moses. As far as I recall, the commandments in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy do not say, “Someday, you will be able to keep these commandments.” The commandments were given, period, some of them on pain of death.

The fundamentalists have set themselves up for this problem. Instead of reading the Old Testament books as ritual, they insist that they are history. The ridiculous situation of a poor wandering Israelite finding himself condemned to death for not having wheat flour is the result not of the ancient writings themselves, but of fundamentalist assumptions about them.

Evangelical Christianity: It’s Mostly about Political Power

Never mind the arguments for or against the existence of God, or the historicity of the Resurrection. None of that really matters. Evangelical Christianity, by and large, is simply an arm of the Republican Party.

A recent poll indicated that 44 percent of American evangelicals thought that Donald Trump had a high moral character. The only way this is possible is that those evangelicals believe that Christianity consists not just of obeying the Republican party, no matter what, but obeying the most extremely vicious wing of that party. These evangelical Christians have no freaking idea what Christianity even is, and its doctrines make absolutely no difference to them in their personal lives. For them, Christianity is a total fucking lie. For them, Christianity consists of an automatic weapon, aimed at you.

Of course, there’s the other 56 percent. But they get shouted down by the 44 percent. They really have no influence on the Evangelical scene.

From this I conclude that we can dismiss evangelical Christianity as a total waste of time, as evil, and as a threat to the future of the world. There are many evangelical Christians who are not like this, of course; I know some, and so do you. Some of them are truly fine people. But as a movement, as a set of churches which you might consider joining, I would say, stay away from evangelical Christianity as far as possible. They are disgusting.

All readers of this blog undoubtedly knew this. But you might not have had a number to associate with it. The number is 44.

Stay away from evangelical churches. Tell your friends and acquaintances to stay away from them. Those churches have nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus.

The Walk of Faith

One day recently, during my winter break, I went hiking on Turkey Mountain. As you may have read in previous essays, it is not a mountain and it has no turkeys. But it does have a lot of natural history: it is a palimpsest of geological time, ecological time, and human effects. And often when I go walking on the trails, I receive many insights that my perception of the natural world stimulates within my mind. Or, if you prefer, insights from God. I cannot know which of these two sources of insight is true.

But on this day, I had very little such experience. I did get a couple of ideas, which I duly noted in my notepad (on my cell phone). But the hike was mostly just annoying. Oh, it was a couple of hours of good exercise, which is never a bad thing. But it was mostly a time of being annoyed at the constant stream of loud airplanes overhead—not commercial planes, but pilots who get their enjoyment by flying over other people’s houses and creating noise—and other hikers who let their dogs run loose, and smelling the sewer plant. The most annoying part was when I got a phone call from the credit union telling me that they had made a mistake and I had to drive back in to their office to sign some more papers. I finished my hike well exercised, and appreciative of the beauty of winter branches, and even of buds swelling in anticipation of spring, but not spiritually renewed.

But it was a walk of faith. Sometimes when I have taken this hike, I have received numerous important insights into what I needed to write. This is faith: I believe that, whenever I hike on these trails, I might receive important insights. It doesn’t always happen, but I am always ready for it to happen. Actually, this insight was one that I received when on the otherwise annoying hike, so I guess it was worth it.