Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 6. The Lord Will Provide

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.

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; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth (all reviewed earlier); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog); The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith (reviewed here); The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This story is actually two stories of faith gone wrong. In the first, a crazy religious man gives all his family’s money to a holy-roller preacher. But the man’s wife comes to the preacher to ask for the money back because her sick son will not survive without it. Even though to the preacher the highest form of religious experience is speaking in tongues, he realizes that mercy is more important than religious signs. In the appendix of the book, Rice explains that this story is true: the crazy man was his grandfather, and the sick child his father.

In the second story, a small fundamentalist congregation consists of just two people: an old man and his wife. The Bible forbids women to have any role in church other than to sing songs selected by the men, that is, the husband. The wife finally gets enough of it and leaves the church. In the appendix of the book, Rice says that this, also, is a true story.

These stories get inside the crazy mindset of fundamentalists. The old man would not attend any church that did not have what he considered a completely Biblical doctrine, and, after his wife left, was willing to drive fifty miles to the next nearest congregation of The True Church. His wife, meanwhile, just went around the corner to another church which was, as far as she could tell, just as good.

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.

John Muir's Campbellite Father

John Muir’s father, on his farm in Wisconsin, was a Campbellite. And so, about 150 years later, was I. What does this mean?

Following the teachings of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, participants in the “Restoration Movement” wanted to “restore” Christianity to its pure Biblical basis. There were to be no doctrines or creeds that were not specifically in the Bible; the Bible alone was to be their basis of faith. You will find modern churches that identify with this tradition, usually called Churches of Christ. The Disciples of Christ denomination began from this tradition but has branched out to no longer be fundamentalists. And among the Churches of Christ, you have to look carefully for the true, utterly pure Campbellites. I was a member of a Church of Christ sect that insisted that you should use a single cup for communion, and the churches that used multiple cups (a separate cup for each communicant) were “erring brethren.” You couldn’t tell from the church signs which church was which; the signs did not say “We use only one cup/multiple cups in communion.” While this seems like a trivial controversy, it was deeply important to us, and we spent a lot of time, sermon after sermon, denouncing the erring brethren. How many hours of my life I wasted on this!

Of course, Campbellites reject the label. They, as I did, claim that they are followers of Jesus, not the Campbells.

But us Campbellites clung to many doctrines that were NOT in the Bible at all. One example: we claimed that no instrumental music could be used during church services. Such a command is not found anywhere in the Bible. The Bible does not even say, “You cannot do anything during a church service that is not specifically authorized by Scripture.” We just made that crap up.

Another, and I believe more important, example of non-Scriptural assertions of Campbellites is, or was, what John Muir’s father tried to indoctrinate his son John to believe. He believed that the entire world, including the natural world, the forests and its trees and birds and soils, was fallen and evil, and we should not celebrate it. He actively tried to get his son John to NOT love the natural world. Fortunately, he failed, and we had John Muir to lead us into an era of conservation awareness. Search the Bible all you want, but you will never find any reference to the natural world to be the realm of Satan, or that loving the natural world is a sin. Just read Psalm 104 and try to tell me that the love of nature is a sin. Just try it. Since I do not expect any Campbellites to read this essay, I expect no response to this challenge. Campbellites live in a little isolated world in which they, and they alone, are faithful to God, and perhaps more recently to worship Donald Trump instead of God.

I have a particularly vivid and painful memory in regard to this specific belief. The Bible tells about how the old heavens and the old earth will be destroyed, and a new heaven and a new earth will be created. As a lover of nature, I was overjoyed to hear this. The forests and flowered hillsides I loved so much would not be destroyed forever but be recreated without the taint of human sin that currently fouls them. When I was asked to give a sermon, our “evangelist” was sitting in the front row paging through his Bible. I did not know at the time that he was planning to lambast me about this horrible belief—the idea that anything in the world, even the forests and wildflowers, could possibly be good.

The next week he delivered a sermon that was directed specifically at me. He said that “certain teachers” (translation: me) actually said that God would create a new earth. Then he went through a really contorted and wicked line of reasoning. He said, the old earth was the Old Testament, since before Jesus our earth (or dwelling) was the Old Covenant. The new earth, therefore, had to be Jesus’ new covenant. Anyone who believed that it would be a literal new earth, with trees and stuff, was utterly wrong and bound for hell. Gee, thanks, Bob Sanders.

You can imagine the effect that this had on me, as a high school student. To be utterly shamed as not only an infidel but a heretic in front of the congregation which I loved very much! I was utterly depressed by it. Some people would interpret what he did as verbal child abuse. I believe this form of verbal child abuse continues today in fundamentalist churches. Of course, it turns out he was wrong about this, and about almost everything else.

Thank God, if there is one, that I am no longer a Campbellite, and that I revere the work and memory of John Muir.

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.

 

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.

Want to Know Where the Bible Came From? Don't Ask a Fundamentalist

 

I recently read Whose Bible Is It? by the prominent scholar Jaroslav Pelikan. It was an interesting overview of facts that are found in many other books, such as those by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman’s books are somewhat combative, which is understandable, since he emerged from a fundamentalist background. Pelikan came from, and remains in, a scholarly environment, and he is telling the fascinating story of where the Bible came from without feeling the need to fight the anti-information crowd.

Pelikan tells of the gradual accumulation, over centuries, of the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the books that didn’t make it into either one. The Bible is not a book; it is a collection (Bible comes from the Greek word for library). Different versions of the Bible included different books, and even as late as Martin Luther there was disagreement about which books really belonged in the Bible.

One point that Pelikan made that I had not previously thought about was this. The world of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was one totally unfamiliar to modern people. When the scriptures say that Jesus is a shepherd, modern people have no idea what a shepherd actually does. Also, people thought that diseases were caused by demons, not germs or genes; the Bible contains not a single example of a medical healing. Also, the Old Testament world was one of continual and continuous war. When the prophets longed for turning swords into plowshares, they were not just thinking about spiritual warfare within one’s spirit but relief from suffering right now. And in the New Testament, when they expected the Second Coming, they expected it right away, not in the undefined future; so much so that Paul said that we shouldn’t even bother getting married. When so many of the expectations of the Israelites and Christians failed to materialize, they had to scramble around to find an excuse for it.

Another point was that some major Christian doctrines have a very shaky Biblical basis. In one place, our modern Old Testament says, of the redeemer, “They have pierced his hands and feet.” But it could just as easily be read as, “They have mauled his hands and feet like lions.” The first one sounds like a prediction of the crucifixion, the second does not. The difference is one slight line in the text—these are Masoretic vowel points, not even letters—a yod vs. a waw, which look very similar on paper. Something important was lost in translation.

Another thing that was lost in translation was the character of Jesus. When Jesus told the religious authorities that God can make children (ben/banim) of Abraham out of these stones (eben), it was evident that He loved puns. You just can’t get this in English. Most of us realize this, although there are some churches that believe that it was the 1611 King James Bible that was inspired by God, rather than the original writings.

The Bible is not a book—or, rather, a library—to be quickly read or superficially interpreted. Fundamentalists seldom have the patience to examine closely what they consider to be the scriptures.

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.