My grandpa was a preacher. Now he's an atheist. I wish I could sit him down and ask him how you make that journey. Did he ever really believe? Or was he just using the church as a pacifier? I can never remember which denomination he was a part of. Church of God, or Church of Christ or something like that. Probably the most simultaneously uncreative and conceited name for a church ever.
I was never a particularly good Christian, I don't think. I mean, I "got" theology and I prayed occasionally, but all that stuff about being part of the community of believers and praying without ceasing and keeping your mind focused on whatever is pure, whatever is holy, etc. eluded me.
I often remember a conversation I had with one of our pastors. I had been expressing suicidal thoughts to my mom for years at this point, but it took quite a while to convince her that, no, it wasn't all a ploy for attention. (She also straight-up refused to believe that I was engaging in self-harm, because I had the misfortune to pick a method that didn't leave visible marks. Good job me!) So naturally, instead of seeking help from a psychiatric professional, she sicked the preacher on me.
He was a nice enough guy, but he wasn't equipped to deal with that kind of shit. At our first session he asked me what I thought his job, as a preacher, was.
I said: "to bring people closer to God."
It seemed like the obvious answer, but he was surprised that I got it. Apparently, there have been entire books speculating on the subject and all coming up with this "correct" answer that I had just pulled out of my ass.
So my point is, I get Christianity in theory. Unfortunately, at a certain point I began to understand it too well and none of it makes any god damn sense. It's easier to lay blame on people who "misinterpret" the Bible and do weird things, like murdering their neighbors or burning down Planned Parenthoods. But really, the whole thing is kind of a mess.
The Council of Nicaea is problematic. The Bible we know today was heavily edited and censored by a bunch of guys who lived hundreds of years after it was written? Of course you can use that same old "scripture is divinely inspired" argument. But that's the equivalent of responding to every theological problem with "JESUS IS MAGIC!" Even if you believe that God Himself was whispering into the ears of every single person who contributed to the collection of writings that became the Bible, was he also playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with the Council of Nicaea to make sure they kept all the good stuff and threw out all the books He didn't like? "Let's see...yeah, keep that one, that's fine...that one's good....that one's kinda wordy but we'll go with it....ew, wait, a GIRL wrote a gospel? Who let her do that? Chuck it in the bin!"
I guess it's not that ridiculous, if you believe in that sort of thing. But remember, this is a religion that's actively pursuing converts all over the world. And this is their sales pitch? A mistranslated and misunderstood collection of old writings that was arbitrarily pulled apart by a bunch of dead old white men in the 300s B.C.?
Here are some fun facts about the Bible that you may not know. I didn't, until I started reading books about the Bible that weren't written by somebody like Tim LaHaye.
FUN FACTS ABOUT THE BIBLE THAT THEY DON'T TEACH FUNDAMENTALIST KIDS
1. Mary Magdalene was probably not a prostitute, or even an adulteress. (Side note: in my five seconds of "research," I ran across this, which is allegedly a sculpture of Mary Magdalene by Donatello. It does not look like how I pictured Mary Magdalene. It looks like if the old cancer-ridden man from Poltergeist 2 tried to dress up as that garbage monster from that X-Files episode where they went undercover in a planned community. Donatello did some pretty good art otherwise, so I'm not sure where this abomination came from. Although, it's worth noting that this is allegedly a sculpture of David. Who was, in case you're still catching up, a man. Just to review: in Donatello's world, this is a woman, and this is a man. Anything you want to tell us, buddy?)
2. That whole mess with Sodom and Gomorrah? Probably had nothing to do with male-on-male sex. This is a classic case of scriptural misinterpretation: one that springs from confusion about how the world has changed in thousands of years, along with poor understandings of ancient languages. And yet we still have the word "sodomy." So, thanks for that, weirdly mistranslated Bible!
3. Onan wasn't punished for masturbating. He was punished for disobeying a direct order from God to get his wife pregnant - Onan wasn't jerkin' it, he was pulling out during sex to "spill his seed on the ground." Despite the fact that even modern translations of the Bible make this very clear, we still have the word "Onanism." Thanks again! (P.S. I do understand that the term originates from Biblical scholars inferring that, because Onan wasn't allowed to spill his seed on the ground, no man should spill his seed on the ground. [Or in a toilet, or in a tissue, or whatever.] That's just unforgivably stupid. It's like saying that because Samson couldn't cut his hair, no man should cut his hair.) (P.P.S. Onan's pretty hot!)
4. Song of Songs has nothing to do with anything else in the Bible. It's just a book of erotic poetry. They don't even really attempt to hide this; how it's managed to stay in the Bible all these years is a mystery to me. There is nothing explicitly religious in the book at all. Instead, we get lines like:
"As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste." (emphasis mine)
The only way this could be any more blatant is if it was a banana tree. There's also something in there about how her "navel" is a "goblet" that never lacks "mulled wine." Or maybe it's not "navel." Maybe it's another body part that tastes like wine. Who knows!
5. I wanted to come up with five, but I got bored. There's a decent case to be made that the Apostle Paul was a self-loathing homosexual, but despite the evidence that claim reeks of sensationalism. He could have just been a really weird, tormented guy. I never liked Paul much. His writings disturbed me, which was annoying because he basically wrote 90% of the New Testament. I think I started to become an atheist when one of my well-meaning Christian friends took me to task for disliking Paul's woman-hating stance. The fact that I ever, as a young girl, struggled to understand why I would never be allowed to teach or lead a church or lead a family because of something Paul wrote thousands of years ago breaks my fucking heart. Because I know I wasn't the only one. There were many before me and there will be many after me, and many of them will never even learn to see, let alone shrug off, the heavy yoke of patriarchy that is the New Testament.
I promise I'll get back to The God Delusion. But first I want to quote Bishop John Shelby Spong, in his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism.
To traffic in guilt as the church has done, to take the beauty and life-giving quality of sexual love and distort it with layer after layer of sexual guilt is simply no longer defensible, if it ever was.I love that.
Anyway. I've been reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and it's pretty good. As my sidebar quote from Kevin Smith states so eloquently, I've gotten smarter since I was raised Christian. But I still have a lot to learn. The basic scientific principles of evolution and natural selection were glossed right over in my education. I once took a class called "Creation Sensation vs. Evolution Pollution." Surprisingly, this was not a fair and balanced presentation of the facts. As Dawkins points out in his book, Creationists equate natural selection - a well-documented scientific process - with "random chance." It's not even close to the same thing, but nobody ever confronts them on this huge, basic error.
There's a saying about how, if you keep an open mind, people will throw all sorts of garbage in there. That's not necessarily untrue. It certainly happens. But if you keep a closed mind, you're just leaving all the old garbage in there to fester and nothing good ever as a chance of getting in.
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