The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Jesus

In the past, great religious leaders did a lot of walking. More recently, they have preferred limousines and jets paid for by rich donors who think God wants them to do this. Mahatma Gandhi did a lot of walking. In 1944, a back country preacher named Guy Howard published his biography, Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks.

Jesus of Nazareth walked everywhere during his short ministry on Earth. He gave the impression of wandering aimlessly—at least, he did not explain his itinerary to his disciples. He wandered in the desert, and took his disciples north into Galilee, the country-bumpkin part of Israel where he was born. He briefly rode on a donkey, when he triumphally entered Jerusalem on his last Passover.

Can you imagine how different Jesus’ impact would have been on his listeners, and on history, if he had ridden around on a horse and preached down at the people, with his sword sticking out?

He certainly gave the impression of poor planning in his walks. He did not arrange for his disciples to have enough food for them to eat, and wouldn’t you know it, he was leading them right through Samaria. Samaria was the place with the remnants of the northern kingdom who worshipped in a way Jerusalem Jews considered unholy. Righteous Jews did not want to even be in Samaria, much less get caught there without food. The disciples went off to find food, leaving Jesus alone at a well.

We see now that Jesus had planned it this way all along. A woman came to the well to draw water. She noticed Jesus did not have a bucket and wondered if he would like a drink. He offered her living water, which confused her. He surprised her by telling her about her past: she had had a succession of lovers. It couldn’t get much worse for a righteous Jew—having a personal conversation with a Samaritan woman of loose morals. The disciples were not pleased. Long afterwards, Christians realized that Jesus was teaching them, and the Samaritans, something important about how God does not look down on certain cultures of people.

Jesus summarized his whole way of life as not just walking, but walking on narrow, difficult paths. It is on such paths that you learn about the world and about yourself. Can I, in fact, complete this path, and more, can I learn from it and enjoy it? “Enter in at the narrow gate,” he said. “For the way is narrow and the path difficult that leads to life, but the way to hell is smooth and wide.” I preached a sermon on this topic to a bunch of Boy Scouts about 1969, when I was a scout myself. We were camping and hiking in the lower Sierra Nevada mountains.

As a botanist who walks nearly every day, I can tell you that the easy roads are mostly bordered by weeds; to find the beautiful wildflowers, you need to hike the narrow trails.

Christmas and Yule

Many of you may have been asked by your kids, why is Christmas on December 25? My granddaughter dutifully said, that’s when Jesus was born. Of course, that is not true. Nobody has any idea when Jesus was born. In the middle of winter, the shepherds would not have been watching their flocks by night outdoors; the flocks would have been in barns or mangers or something. I read one article that figured out when John the Baptist was born, based on the priestly schedule of his father (“the course of Abijah”), and then added six months to it (Jesus was a half year younger than John), and came up with sometime in September.

But the church realized celebrating Jesus’ birthday was a good idea. Not knowing when it was, the early church chose an existing pagan holiday and transformed it into Christmas. The holiday was, of course, Yule, on December 25. Midwinter? Not quite. It is four days after the first day of winter.

The pagans wanted to celebrate the day when the sun appeared to be returning. It reached its lowest point in the sky (at midday) on December 21. But how could ancient people know this? They didn’t have accurate time measurement. They lined up stones that indicated the winter solstice. But it was a few days after the solstice before they could be sure the sun was, in fact, “coming back,” by eyeballing the stones.

This was too much to explain to my granddaughter, but I tried. Christmas is not when Jesus was born, but when we celebrate it. Never mind, for now, whether it actually happened. We have a spiritual desire to believe that there is some force of good (God) behind the operation of the world.

In Egyptian mythology, Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25. In the Mithras cult, you were saved by eating the body and drinking the blood of Mithras in a meal. In Zoroastrianism, blood sacrifice was followed by a resurrection three days later. It should be obvious that many Christian beliefs came from pagan sources.

But this does not change the basic idea. They, like us, wanted to believe that there was some ultimate significance. Just think about the words to some of our favorite Christmas carols. They are about the general idea, rather than doctrinal assertions. Consider, for example, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” and “For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.” Scrooge was not converted to a doctrine, but to love. I am only the millionth blogger to write about the true meaning of Christmas; maybe somebody will read it.

Instant Gratification, Consumer Debt, and Jesus

Americans owe $1.2 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Once you are sunk into credit card debt, it is very difficult to get out of it, as almost everyone knows. The more you owe, the higher the interest rate you get charged, which makes it even harder to pay off your debt.

Credit card debt results mostly from instant gratification. Americans want to buy whatever they want right away, and use their credit lines to do so. I carried credit card debt most of my life. I lived frugally. In my case, it was not instant gratification that I was after, so just living frugally, as I tried to do, is not a guarantee of freedom from credit card debt. I finally paid it off, which saved me a lot of money in interest payments.

American banks want to make it easy for you to get a line of credit. They send out pre-approved credit offers to just about everyone. My daughter received one when she was eight years old. We filled out the application just to see what would happen. It was rejected, of course, but why was it pre-approved in the first place? One advertisement showed the family dog getting a pre-approved credit offer, and then said, who but a dog would put up with 18 percent interest? Banks cast a wide net, irrespective of age or even species.

Then I moved to France and found a very different situation. I wanted to live debt-free, and found that I was practically required to live debt-free. My bank debit card is tied only to my checking account. If I were to overspend my checking account, the payment would not necessarily be refused, but I would get a call from my personal banker (Thomas) telling me to get my rear in gear and live within my means. For such reasons, credit card debt is practically unknown in France. A writer for Slate online [https://slate.com/business/2025/01/credit-card-spending-france-debit-payments-budgeting-finances.html] had a similar experience.

Instant gratification is nearly the opposite of the kind of life Jesus taught. I don’t think I need to explain this. America is considered a Christian country, France a secular country, but it is in France that people live closer to the manner of which Jesus would approve, in this way as in many others.

Am I the Enemy?

The ultimate measure of success for big corporations, and little ones, and individuals, and governments, is profit. An enemy is anyone who reduces profits. And it doesn’t matter how the enemy reduces those profits. I certainly reduce the profits of corporations, and you probably do also. That makes us enemies of the corporations.

This has obvious religious implications. If you are less worldly, this makes you an enemy of the world, just like Jesus was.

One way to reduce a corporation’s profits are for governments to force them to pay for their externalities—that is, the consequences of the harm they have been inflicting on people and the Earth. To force fossil fuel corporations to pay a carbon tax (so far, a failure); to force tobacco corporations to pay for the health effects of smoking (a partial success); to force pharmaceutical corporations to pay for the suffering that directly results from aggressive marketing of addictive drugs (a mixed record of success and failure).

But another way is for ordinary consumers to choose to buy less from corporations, choosing inexpensive and healthy alternatives. Those of us who choose this path are eating into the profitability of large corporations as surely as if they had lost a lawsuit or paid penalties.

On a recent weekend, my family and I visited the Black Forest National Park in Germany, right over the river from Alsace, where we now live. We walked around in the snow and let the kids throw snowballs. We had to drive there, in a family sized vehicle, but we only use the vehicle when there is an unavoidable reason for it. Most of the time we walk or take public transportation, which helps us avoid the parking nightmare that Strasbourg, like any city, is. Then we went home, and enjoyed the free entertainment of one another’s company and educational YouTube videos (such as mine or those of Jamy Gourmaud).

What we did not do was to go on a cruise or buy a lot of hiking equipment. The end of the day was also a perfect opportunity for us to go to a restaurant and have a family meal, but we did not do this; we went home and had leftovers which, I might add, were pretty good. We did not go out to a movie. In just these ways, we deprived corporations of about a couple of thousand euros of income. That money is not part of their income as surely as if it had been forbidden by government policy. We also had less debt, which meant that we deprived financial corporations of debt interest.

Corporations do not want us to consume less or to encourage others to do so. They do not want us to drive less, or buy smaller cars, but to buy big electric trucks. They do not want us to buy fewer of the items that have to be transported all over the continent. They do not want us to simply not smoke; they want us to vape, a market the tobacco corporations largely control. They do not want us to be healthy, but to be permanently in a state of requiring expensive medical intervention. They do not want us to reduce credit card debt, just avoid defaults.

I have a medical condition which requires prescriptions that are, for me as a French resident, free, but which in America required me to pay a thousand dollar deductible each year, and most of that money went directly to the recently-assassinated CEO of United HealthCare. I do not endorse assassination, of course. But for a million people in my situation, these charges were a billion dollar benefit to UHC. Even though my medication is now free, I do everything I can to avoid getting sicker and needing yet more medical intervention.

Any of my readers (which is not a large number) who are influenced by my enjoyment of low-impact pleasures will have a similar negative impact on corporate profits. This makes us, collectively, major enemies of the corporations. We may not be as obvious as the Marxist activists, but we are as significant.

And, I need hardly add, we are happy. To have my grandson try to throw a snowball at me, and miss, is as enjoyable as any cruise. And there is no chance whatever that I will contract the rotavirus for which cruises are famous from the snowball.

From the Very Beginning

From the very beginning, Christianity has been a religion of bloodthirsty violence. 

Jesus was neither bloodthirsty nor violent. Some of his disciples wanted to be. Peter had a sword ready, but Jesus told him to put it away. Jesus said, “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” What he meant was, don’t do it. Many modern conservative Christians would say, “Yee-haw! Let’s go die by the sword!”

Lots of evangelicals think they are willing to die for their faith, but what they actually mean is they are willing to kill for it.

For the first couple of centuries after Jesus’ death, there was little or nothing in writing about Jesus. The men who wrote the first gospels had, at best, second-hand access to information about him. Their writings reflected their beliefs and feelings more than those of Jesus.

Consider, for example, the gospel account of the trial of Jesus. According to this, the Jewish rabble in the streets called for Jesus to be crucified. And they said, Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.

There is no other historical corroboration (e.g., from Josephus) that any of them actually said this. This could have been nascent antisemitism that was already germinating within the church. It didn’t take too long before Christians were using this as an excuse for persecuting Jews.

But suppose that the rabble actually said this. This does not obligate God to do what they said. The idea that the rabble said Let his blood be upon us and on our children, and that this obligated God to allow the persecution of Jews throughout all subsequent history. This sounds as if God said, Oh, well, I guess this means I’d better let the Jews get persecuted, whether I want to or not. Poor little God, he had to let a rabble dictate the entire future of the world.

And the major proponents of this view are modern evangelical Christians. That is, modern fundamentalists actually give a street rabble power superior to God. I actually heard this on a radio broadcast from Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, but they cannot be the only ones. It is blasphemy to elevate human ideas over God. Fundamentalists are blasphemers. This started very early in the history of the church.

One of the latest books of the New Testament is the book of Revelation. It is the bloodiest, most gruesome book you could ever read. Fundamentalist Christians believe it is an exact prediction of what will happen in the End Times. They love this stuff. They cannot wait to watch God torture millions of people as they writhe in agony. Fundamentalists drool at the thought of the afflictions to come. And they have been doing so for a long time, at least since about 100 CE when Revelation was written. This image is from a 1917 Adventist book.

 

Some theologians say that Revelation was not meant as an exact prediction of the future. It is obvious, they point out, that the hallucinations of Revelation were just recycled from those of Ezekiel. It was meant, perhaps in secret code, as an encouragement for Christians to stand firm in the face of Roman persecution. But you call this shit encouragement? Encouragement, my ass. It stirs up hatred, not love and perseverance. How could Christians be encouraged by reading about rivers of blood and billows of pestilence? What kinds of twisted minds did people have.

This was exactly the same period of history as when the early church fathers were preaching that sex was fundamentally evil; it was necessary, but should only take place within marriage, and even then you have to make sure it was just for procreation, and to not enjoy it. Gentle sex within marriage was merely tolerable; meanwhile, literature that glorified blood and death was holy.

There is a moment of beauty in Revelation. Right at the end there is a heavenly city of peace. But even this city is utterly artificial. The beautiful river is actually a canal, and there is one tree. One tree, that’s all that remains of the natural world. If this is Heaven, count me out. I’d rather hang around and chat with Jesus.

Why Fundamentalists Must Believe the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Hoax

I have posted a video that describes the ideas below.

Thousands, if not a million or more, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax that has been started by Democrats to make Donald Trump look bad. Part of this is because white evangelicals have, as the title of a recent book indicates, chosen to “worship at the altar of Donald Trump.” In some cases, fundamentalist belief that there is no coronavirus pandemic has led them to acts of aggression, as certain recent viral videos have shown.

But there is another reason that fundamentalists MUST reject the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is caused by a virus. And that is because the Bible says so. I first pointed this out in a blog entry in 2012.

Actually, the Bible does not say that there is no such thing as viruses, or that they never cause disease. But I present below the evidence that the New Testament describes one-third of all diseases as being demonic in origin.

Here is a complete list of Jesus’ healings, in which I indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe garbled transmission is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

Creationists make a really big deal about evolution. Decades ago, they wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolution. When that didn’t work, they tried to mandate equal time for creation and evolution. When that didn’t work, they wanted to mandate the inclusion of a mention of creationism. Clearly, over the decades, evolutionary science has been their target. More recently, they have begun attacking the science of global warming with nearly as much fervor as they once attacked evolution.

But they didn’t have any trouble with medical science. Their children learned about how viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, and parasitic worms cause contagious diseases, and how mutations can cause other diseases—in medical school, in college, in high school, even before high school. In none of these places, except perhaps their own schools and colleges, was demonology mentioned. I have never heard of fundamentalists trying to get legislation passed to mandate the inclusion of demonology in the medical science curriculum. They chose to allow a figurative interpretation of, or perhaps just to ignore, those Bible passages that attribute disease to spiritual causes. Fundamentalists occasionally attempt exorcisms, but they never insist that the rest of us agree with them.

How can the creationists do this? They think that God has given them the right to decide which parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively. “Day” is literal in Genesis 1 and figurative in Genesis 2; “the Earth” was figurative in Peleg’s day but literal in Noah’s day; and natural law accounts for the wind and the rain and diseases but not the origin of species.

I wondered, in 2012, what God would do without fundamentalists to tell us which parts of the Bible to believe and which ones not to believe. But now I know. They have embraced a literal Bible interpretation to such an extent that they reject medical science, except when they get sick. There are more stories than any of us can list of fundamentalist preachers rejecting the coronavirus pandemic, only to themselves die of covid.