Inconvenient Bible Passages, Part One

While cleaning out my accumulated papers, I ran across a list of Bible verses that I taught in a Natural Resources Conservation class at a Christian college in 1990. Since that time, conservative Christians have largely turned against environmental issues, and recently have abandoned them because of their adoration for Donald Trump. But these verses remain as a challenge to them. I merely list them here. They almost sound like the kinds of environmentalist screeds the conservative Christians so openly hate, but they come directly from the Bible.

“For six years you may sow your land and gather its crops, but during the seventh year you must leave it alone and let it lie fallow.”

“…because there is no fidelity, no kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land…therefore the land mourns, and everything that dwells therein languishes, even the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea are also swept away.”

“When the poor and the needy seek water in vain, and their tongues are parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them…I will open rivers on the bare heights and wells in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool…I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the larch as well, that men may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

“The land must not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is Mine, since you are only resident aliens and serfs under me.”

I will let you think about these for a while, then post some more.

Christian Hatred

Conservative Christians are inspired by hatred, as many of us have discovered. This does not mean that all Christians are so inspired, of course, but the existence of Christians who truly love their fellowmen does not disprove the overall truth of my statement. I am not saying Jesus would have done anything I describe below.

A few years ago, I posted a video of scientist Glen Kuban explaining, calmly and with evidence, that the fossilized footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas are dinosaur prints, not human prints as claimed by fringe religious groups. One YouTube comment posted to the video said, “There are dino human prints the uploader is a liar and a moron.” They simply and viscerally hate Glen and myself (I was the uploader). But this happens so often, so regularly, that we almost do not notice. I had forgotten all about it.

Glen is so calm and nice. I would, myself, have been snarky. The creationist woman said to him, “That footprint has to be human! My foot fit exactly into it!” My response would have been, “Then it must be your print. These prints are 110 million years old. I wouldn’t have put you at a day over 70 million.” I think Glen is glad that he, not I, engaged the woman in conversation.

It gets worse. Conservative Christians are at the forefront of claiming that everyone should have unlimited access to firearms. Jesus said, “Put your sword away, Peter; those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” Many modern Christians would say, “Yeah! Bring it on! You just try to kill me with your sword, and I will shoot you with my assault weapon.” The final argument for many modern Christians, in defending their doctrinal beliefs, is “our beliefs are true, and we have a thousand assault weapons to prove it.”

I was a biology professor at a university in Oklahoma where most of the students were Christians. But a few of them (mostly, as it turned out, mine) were Freethinkers. They formed a club and had meetings. They posted signs announcing the time and place of their meetings. The signs got torn down so that, like the secret Christian meetings of the Roman Empire, information spread by word of mouth.

If you have your own examples of Christian violence that you have experienced, feel free to post a comment.

By Their Fruits

Jesus famously said that “by their fruits you shall know them.” He made it clear that what he meant was that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and that is how you tell them apart. You cannot be good by just saying good and doctrinally correct things; you have to actually do them. Nothing in religion could seem more fundamental than this.

But right-wing American Christians do not believe this. They reject what Jesus said. The most obvious place to see this is in politics.

Right-wing fundamentalist Christians are almost all Republicans. Many Republican politicians do evil things. The most prominent example is Donald Trump, who has had repeated, well-documented scandals, both sexual and financial, in addition to encouraging a revolt against the United States government. He has publicly called on Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” to NATO countries.

But it is not just Trump. Many Republican politicians have had scandals, such as Mark Sanford, who disappeared from the state of which he was governor, claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail but actually in Argentina visiting his mistress; and George Santos, who was ousted from Congress after multiple financial scandals and misrepresentations.

Nor is it just Republican politicians. Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University, which his father founded, was spectacularly scandalous in arranging not for an actual affair but for arranging to watch someone else have sex with his (Falwell’s) wife. He resigned after a ten million dollar severance was offered to him. Ted Haggard, a megachurch pastor, had scandals related to sexual acts and to misrepresenting his book as a best-seller when actually his church had bought most of the copies. Both Falwell’s and Haggard’s churches proclaimed openly that the Republican Party, and specifically Donald Trump, were God’s choices for moral leadership in America.

And it just keeps going on. As I write, Liberty University has been fined $14 million for its failure to report, and sometimes to even acknowledge, incidents of sexual violence toward female students and staff. To Liberty University, as to the Southern Baptist church, a woman’s proper place is to let men do what they want with them and keep silence. And Steve Garvey, former baseball star with a history of sexual and financial scandal, was the Republican winner in the Super Tuesday election in 2024, running for a California U.S. Senate seat.

Of course, Democrats have scandals also. Some of us are old enough to remember the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewensky affair. I’ll let you look for other examples. But it appears to me that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a moral high ground over the other party.

And there is one outstanding example of truly good Democrats: Barack and Michelle Obama. For eight years, Republicans searched desperately for any scandal with the Obamas, and they didn’t find a single one. I read Michelle’s autobiography, Becoming, and I was astonished that such good people could actually rise to positions of leadership in our society.

Most evangelical Christians believe everything Trump says, approves of everything He has ever done, and appear to adore Him with religious fervor. They refuse to even consider that He might be wrong. To them, He is no mere human being. Sarah Posner wrote a book about it in 2020 (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump; Random House) and the white evangelical devotion to Trump has only gotten stronger each year since then.

If Christians obeyed Jesus’ command to evaluate people on the basis of what they do, rather than what they say, the result would be clear. Neither Democrats nor Republicans consistently have the moral high ground. One should judge candidates individually, not on the basis of their devotion to Donald Trump, and Trump must be subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

In some cases, the blasphemy is open. One Georgia billboard had a photo of Trump and a quote from the Bible: “and the government shall be upon his shoulders,” an Old Testament reference always attributed to Jesus. I would show you, but the image cannot be copied. You can, however, find it at the Ministry Watch wehsite. I also saw a billboard in Missouri, as I drove on I44, in 2023, which said that Trump, like Jesus, was being crucified; the poster showed a cross on a hill. The billboard was on a side road which I could not find. Christian responses to these billboards ranged from support to disturbance, but few if any evangelical Christians declared it to be blasphemy.

But most evangelical Christians totally reject Jesus’ authority in this matter. They worship Donald Trump.

Everywhere You Look: Fundamentalist Megachurch Lack of Ethics

There are so many examples of evangelical Christian megachurches and blatant lapses of ethics that one hardly knows where to begin. I’m not beginning; I have no plan to do an investigative series, but to simply post one story among many. This story illustrates perfectly how evangelical Christianity is using psychological manipulation to get money from people. I can only wonder if it has anything else to offer. If they so easily lie about their business dealings, maybe they are lying about Jesus also.

This story is about Mark Driscoll, a televangelist pastor at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church. For many years and in many ways he demonstrated not only a total lack of ethics but psychological manipulation to get rich and famous. You can read the details here.

Driscoll wrote a book about how to have a wonderful marriage. Then his church paid a quarter million dollars to buy 11,000 copies of this book, thus boosting it to the New York Times best seller list. This gave Driscoll the kind of publishing fame that the rest of us can only dream of having. Then he used this fame to negotiate a multi-book deal with Tyndale House, a Christianoid publisher. (I just invented this term. Christianoid means using Christian words and images to appear Christian for purposes of fame, fortune, or manipulation.) When news broke of what Driscoll had done, Tyndale House defended him. Clearly, at least this Christianoid publisher has no interest in professional ethics or honesty. I cannot help but wonder if the way to have a wonderful marriage is to pay your spouse a quarter of a million dollars.

Of course, Driscoll got a lot of radio publicity too. As a result of Driscoll’s lack of ethics, one assistant radio producer got fed up with it and resigned. She cited an “evangelical celebrity machine.” Maybe that is what the evangelical gospel is all about: people following religious celebrities for no better reasons than they follow entertainment celebrities. Maybe evangelical Christianity is merely a form of entertainment.

There have also been several charges of plagiarism against Driscoll. Not just a sentence here or there, but large passages of his writings are stolen, maybe a word changed here or there, from authors who could only dream of Driscoll’s level of fame. Despite this, many evangelical leaders continued to defend him. The cumulative effect of Driscoll’s ethical lapses eventually caused Mars Hill Church to close. The last sermon was delivered by another famous evangelical preacher, Rick Warren, who told everyone that God had done wonderful things through Driscoll. This makes me wonder if Rick Warren sees no problem with unethical evangelicalism.

 

Christianity Used to be an Intellectual Challenge

I have recently been looking through my scribbled notes from Bible studies back in the 1970s. Pages and pages of them, now barely decipherable. They were based on a close reading and analysis of many scriptural passages (avoiding, of course, the strange ones such as the fifth chapter of Numbers). We thought about, and discussed, everything, and analyzed our own lives in great detail. We had Friday night Bible studies and weekend conferences and retreats. These Bible studies were sponsored by Turnpike Road Church of Christ near Santa Barbara, a church that still exists. The youth ministers put a lot of thinking into the study sessions. Even though I now consider many of their assertions to have been incorrect, I remain amazed at the careful thought they put into it.

Those days are gone at most evangelical churches in America. Today, for many if not most white evangelical Christians, Christianity is very simple: Just worship Donald Trump. Even after Trump lost the election, evangelical support is still strong for Him. If you are a Republican—and very few centrist Republicans questions a single word from Trump—then everything is fine. You don’t have to worry about your materialism or your sexual morals, since God has given Trump and presumably His worshipers a blanket forgiveness for everything. You do not need to develop anything remotely resembling what we used to call a Christian character or an attitude of holiness. No longer do you have to wonder what sort of response you should have to immigrants; just kick them all out. No longer do you have to think about how a Christian should be a steward of God’s creation; the environment is nothing more than a source of raw materials for rich people to exploit. No longer do you have to consider that someone who disagrees with you might be partly correct; just assume that they are totally evil and treat them that way.

Perhaps the difference between then and now is best illustrated by what evangelical Christians are supposed to pay attention to. Back then, we read and discussed C. S. Lewis. Now, many evangelical Christians subsist on a fare of pure Fox News.

 

Global Warming Denialism: What Fundamentalists Are Forcing God to Say

Fundamentalist Christians insist that, since God controls the seasons and the weather, there is nothing that we can do to alter it. This is the basis for their insistence that, no matter how much carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere, global warming will not occur unless God wants it to. That is, if God has decided that global warming will occur, then it will occur even if we totally cease all carbon emissions; and if God has decided it will not occur, then we can pour all the carbon we want to into the air and nothing bad will happen.

The fundamentalists base this belief upon Genesis 8:22, in which God tells Noah right after the big Flood, “While the Earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” This verse does not say that global warming will not occur, so long as the seasons continue. There are no scientists who say that global warming will cause seasonal and geographical differences to cease to exist. But to fundamentalists, this verse means that God is in charge of climate and seasons, and that whatever happens on Earth is whatever God has already planned. We cannot reduce global warming by driving smaller cars, nor can a rich televangelist make global warming worse by flying around in a private jet.

This would be a laughably trivial matter except that it is the principle upon which the Republicans who are largely ruling America believe. The most famous global warming denier, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, has said that, because “God’s still up there,” the “arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

But the Bible also suggests in several places that God is also in charge of your lifespan. God has already decided how many days you are going to live, and there is nothing you can do about it. The verse that says this most clearly is Psalm 139:16, in which the psalmist records words he attributes to God: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.” Fundamentalists usually use this verse to prove that an “unformed substance” (an embryo) is fully human (“my” unformed substance). Almost in passing, they acknowledge that this means our days are numbered.

Elsewhere, Jesus says that the hairs of our head are numbered. I remember listening to evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on the radio telling us all that his hair was falling out, and that if he counted them, he could calculate the exact date on which he would become bald. He seems to have been unaware that, in most cases, when a hair falls out of a follicle, a new one grows back.

Perhaps “numbered” just means “limited”? The hairs of our head, and the days of our lives, are finite, and we should be mindful that we will not live forever, and we had better get our lives in shape before it is too late. This is a good interpretation, but is not a fundamentalist one. The psalm says, regarding “the days that were formed for me,” every one of them. Each day of our future was written individually in God’s advance plan. In another psalm, the psalmist said that our lifespan was limited to 70 years (or, he concedes, maybe 80). I knew someone who literally believed he would drop dead on his 70^th birthday. But most fundamentalists would say that only God knows how many days we will live, and each one of us has a different number of days. This assertion is scientifically untestable (how could you ever prove that someone died on a day different than the one written on God’s secret list) but seems to be a straightforward literal interpretation of Psalm 139:16.

If fundamentalists then took this verse one step further, they would have to conclude that your number of days is predetermined, no matter what you do. Don’t bother with eating healthy food; go ahead and drink and smoke; don’t worry about hiking or walking, just go ahead and sit on the couch and listen to televangelists and Fox News all day, because it won’t make any difference. Eating vegetables will not make you live any more, and eating fat and sugar will not make you live any fewer, days. Fundamentalists generally do NOT take this interpretation. Instead they say that God made your body and you should take care of it, at least a little bit.

If God is in charge of the climate, and He is also in charge of your lifespan, why do fundamentalists tell us there is no point in working toward planetary health, but that it is important to work toward personal health? I think there is only one possible reason: they are using Genesis 8:22 as an excuse to ignore, or even be hostile toward, the science of climate change. Their fundamental beliefs therefore appear to be, “God is in charge of everything except when He isn’t,” and, “God’s truth is whatever the Republican Party says that it is.”

God is the tool of the fundamentalists. You would think that one advantage of being God is that you are in charge. But, poor little God; He has to do whatever the fundamentalists tell Him to do.

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.