Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 1. When Pigs Fly

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection. But his fiction usually contains a lot of thought-provoking religion.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed here); The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

The first story, When Pigs Fly, is about an American woman (Wendy) who wandered away from her Muslim heritage (she was Wafa before). Then one day, God appeared in the sky. Only, unlike Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral, it was Al-lah, not the Christian God. God said he was going to kill reprobate former Muslims, but He was going to give Wafa an extra chance, since, He said, He just likes her. His only rule is to stay away from pork and pork products.

Wafa rejoins the mosque in which she grew up, in Oklahoma, and thinks she is obeying Al-lah. She has even dedicated her life to making the world better, by getting a college degree in biology. But in her biotechnology class she discovers that pig genes have been sliced into the DNA of almost all crop plants, and that she and all her fellow Muslims have been eating pork without realizing it. So, God killed all of them.

My science blog readers will be interested in the biotechnology by which pig genes are inserted into vegetables. But the question for my religious readers (this blog) is, would God ever do anything like this? Of course not, although a lot of religious people do not realize it. A relationship with God is different for each person, and is a whole life history, rather than a mindless following of one or a few rules. Christians, and Muslims, need to understand this.

CheapGrace, a New Phone App

I have just posted a new video about a new phone app, which allows you to sin all you want to and yet get forgiven a thousand times a second. Available only to Republicans.

There is no such thing as human nature, I think. We have instincts, some we consider good (such as love) and some we consider evil (such as hatred). As we live, we create our own human nature, by (one would hope) practicing the good ones and minimizing the bad ones. This is true for all humans individually, if mentally normal; all ethnicities; and at all times in history. It is the legacy of evolution, of altruism. The reality is much more complex than this, but there is no time to explore this topic now.

That is the evolutionary view. The fundamentalist Christian view, however, is that everyone is a sinner unless God specifically forgives them. But as soon as you commit another sin, you have to ask forgiveness over again. The good news is that there is no Biblical limit to number of times God will forgive you. Even fundamentalist Christians would say that you cannot ask forgiveness a hundred thousand times and expect God to keep forgiving you, but, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical basis for this assertion, however reasonable it seems.

Theoretically, then, you could just keep doing whatever you want, and every time you sin, say “Woopsie, forgive me,” and God will forgive you.

But you could sin a hundred times a day. What happens if you die right after unforgiven sin number 57? What you need to do is to keep muttering “Woopsie, forgive me” all the time. This would be mind-numbing, but it would work.

What follows next is fiction.

You would go crazy by praying “Woopsie, forgive me” a hundred times an hour. But you don’t have to! This is the age of the phone app. You can download a phone app, “CheapGrace,” that is named after a concept created, disparagingly, by the World War II era Christian martyr Dietrich Boenhoeffer. It will send text messages to God demanding forgiveness. The free version (available from Gotohell.com) texts God 10 times per second. The version that you pay for will do it a thousand times a second. You think that God cannot handle a thousand pleas for forgiveness from billions of people each second? Remember, this is an infinite God we are talking about. This app will run in the background, so you can just forget all about it, and your sins are taken care of.

There are a couple of caveats, however.

First, it is available only to Republicans. You must click on the box indicating “I am a Republican,” and another box saying, “I am not a robot.”

Second, it is not available while your phone is updating itself, but that is usually at night when you are asleep, and you cannot sin. Of course, if you have insomnia, or if it turns out you can sin while asleep, then you are taking a little bit of a risk.

Technology can be fundamentalism’s best friend, in some cases.

The Jesus Algorithm

Evangelical Christians claim to love Jesus. But to them, Jesus is not a person. He is an algorithm.

An algorithm is a formula or computer code that controls something that happens, for example, that determines what the computer does. It has a certain function, and is valued just for that function. The algorithm certainly cannot decide for itself what to do.

To evangelicals, Jesus has just one function. He forgives sins. You are a sinner, they say, and what you need to do is to press control alt J to activate the Jesus algorithm. If you say the right words, all of your sins are totally forgiven, but if you do not, you are damned. Jesus himself has no say in the matter, any more than a computer does. If you are a good person, who obeys the Golden Rule, and truly loves other people, that does not matter. Jesus is not permitted to forgive or save you. And if you use control alt J, Jesus must forgive you even if he sees into your heart and knows that you are going to just go and do the sinful act again. To evangelicals, Jesus has no intelligence or personality. You have leeway for judgment. Jesus does not.

This is why Donald Trump is the darling of evangelicals despite his numerous, large, and ongoing sins. He uses the algorithm, or maybe has an intern do it for him.

It gets worse. Evangelicals (particularly the televangelists) fantasize that they have exclusive access to the keyboard. A Democrat cannot slip in and press control alt J. If you are a Democrat, you are damned, and there is nothing you can do about it. Republicans, on the other hand, have unlimited access to the keyboard. In fact, most of them seem to have special Cheap Grace apps on their phones that repents of their sins every ten microseconds, so that before they even realized they have sinned, they have asked forgiveness, which God is obligated to give. (Cheap Grace is a term invented by theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to refer to this kind of thoughtless repentance that does not cost anything in your life. Back in the 1970s, when I was an evangelical, we all respected Bonhoeffer, whom the Nazis executed. I guess evangelicals don’t do that anymore.)

And God? He’s totally out of the picture. He has given all of his authority to Jesus, who is completely under the control of the evangelicals.

I greatly admire, and love, the Jesus who said “Behold the lilies of the field...even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these” and “Ask not what your country can do for you...” Oh, wait, that second one was John F. Kennedy. I think I would really enjoy knowing Jesus, if only the evangelicals did not keep him in a box like a veal calf and prevent him from having any personality.