Shack Attack

Author William Paul Young was in town last week to sign copies of his new book. Young is the man responsible for The Shack, the runaway bestseller about a man who spends a weekend in the woods with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Before Young hit it big, he cleaned toilets for a living, he told the local press. Always interesting, where writers get their inspiration.

In The Shack, God is a large black woman, Jesus is a laid-back white dude with a hooked nose (“I am Jewish,” he explains), the third member of the Bog Three is an Asian woman. The equal-opportunity casting offended many church people, but the real crime perpetrated by the novel is against good prose, dialogue, and plot.

The cover of my paperback copy of The Shack says that there are three million copies in print, but even in this the Land of the Fatuous, it’s hard to imagine that so many readers bought into the concept. God as Aunt Jemima? (“Sho ‘nuff,” she actually says at one point, and then a couple of pages later, “Them greens can give you the trots.”) When The Shack’s protagonist first meets this version of the Almighty, a little bird flies in the window of the kitchen where she is whipping up some vittles and begins to eat out of her hand. The hero and the Holy Trinity spend the weekend eating, laughing, bantering and explaining themselves, and he, the mortal among them, is simply amazed at how down-to-earth his hosts are.     

It all could be a Disney movie, except for the part about the slain daughter and the demented serial killer.

A bio-blurb on my The Shack reveals that Wm. Paul Young “suffered great loss as a child and young adult.” If The Shack was meant to be autobiographical, the title has one too many letters.

A letter in today’s local paper urges the teaching of creationism right along with the teaching of evolution. “We should present both views and let our children make their own decision,” the writer says.

Oh, by all means. Education should be a smorgasbord, from which kids can pick out their favorite dishes. The story about God creating everything in six days is bound to be a popular one, and it can prepare children for reading books like The Shack when they grow up.    

Don't asp

         Proud to be a Tennessean, Reason #692: A front-page story in the Sunday edition of our Great Metropolitan Newspaper is about snake-handling churches. The piece is not just a snippet but is a full five-page splash, with pictures of cretins fondling deadly serpents while yawping or praying and sometimes swooning from the sheer ecstasy of it. The reporter, with admirable journalistic integrity, refrains from editorializing in his in-depth coverage of the phenomenon.

   Readers are treated to the testimony of yokels as to the spiritually invigorating effects of playing with poisonous snakes, as well as the inspiration and justification for it. (Mark 16:17: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents…”) Though the cultists are violating state laws prohibiting snake handling and possessing poisonous snakes, they say it’s worth the risk of punishment to experience the power of the Lord coursing through them.

   The article quotes Wiley Cash, author of a “best-selling” book about a snake-handling church, who says that people want to believe they’ve been singled out by God, and “What better proof than to pick up a timber rattler and not have it bite or to survive a bite?” Can’t think of nary a one, but the good folks at the church in LaFollette can: drinking strychnine. (The passage in Mark continues: “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”) The reporter did not get to witness this at the service he attended, as “All the poison was drunk at a previous service and they’ve not had time to get more.”

   He also noted that “Most serpent handlers think drinking poison is optional.”

   Women are discouraged from handling snakes, and they’re also not allowed to preach in Pentecostal Holiness churches. They must wear skirts or dresses, and are not allowed to wear earrings or cut their hair. Snake handlers themselves can’t drink (under the theory that alcohol might make them crazy?), curse or have sex outside of marriage. (They can have plenty inside marriage, though: the preacher profiled, age 21, has four kids.)

   The article reports that a pastor in West Virginia, the only state where snake handling is legal (thank God for small favors: at least we don’t live in West Virginia), died about a week ago from a rattlesnake bite. He was following in the hallowed footsteps of his father, who died at the hands (or jaws) of a rattler in 1983. The pastor of the church in LaFollette prayed that his congregation wouldn’t lose the faith.

   “The only thing I know to do,” he said, “is to encourage the people of God to keep on, keep doing the signs of God.”

   Maybe so; after all, life is always a hit-or-miss proposition.         

Atheist or Agnostic?

   No word sets atheists to foaming at the mouth more than agnostic—not evangelical, not born-again, not even Baptist. To the avowed atheist, the mere agnostic is a lily-livered, weak-kneed and spineless specimen of infuriating indecision.

   Besides a fundamental misunderstanding of what an agnostic is, and a possible ignorance of the fact that almost all their cherished and oft-quoted icons considered themselves agnostics and not atheists, self-proclaimed atheists may be confused on another point: Their attitude toward the non-nonbeliever.

   First, the misunderstanding:

   While an atheist rejects all religions, and denies the existence of God (and so flaunts the same certitude as the devoutly religious), the agnostic admits that he does not know.

   There might not be a God: Science alone can explain the universe, for example, all except for how something can arise out of nothing, and if we need an explanation for that, why bring in God?—why not say that if something always had to exist, it might as well be the universe as God?

   There might not be a God, which might explain the random nature of life and death, the prevalence of misery and suffering, the apparent predominance of evil.

   Yet again, there might be a God, which might account for our intimations of something greater than ourselves, for our apperception of mystery and beauty in the universe, for our love and fellow-feeling, for our sense of individual and collective purpose and destiny.

   There may be a God we can apprehend and explain, but none of the world’s religions have yet apprehended and explained Him to the atheist’s satisfaction. The agnostic doubts all the explanations, but admits that he can’t be certain they’re all fallacious. It may be highly unlikely that a God of love will one day roast me like a peanut forever and ever for dancing on Sunday, but the agnostic, while doubting it, admits that it is not impossible.

   Atheism is a belief; agnosticism is based on knowledge (or, rather, the lack of it). 

   Now, for the attitude:

   Many an atheist is put out by the agnostic’s “gutlessness,” and his scorn implies that he himself is genuinely gutsy. Why is the agnostic gutless?-For not avowing something he’s not sure of? And why should the atheist see himself as courageous?—just for avowing something that most people don’t agree with, even if it’s unprovable?

   The atheist proclaims that there is no God, standing up to ridicule and censure from those people whose judgments he doesn’t value in the first place. The agnostic says he doesn’t know, incurring no one’s wrath but everyone’s pity.

   The atheist basks in the novelty and daring of his opinion, while the agnostic cowers in the corner with his uncertainty.

   The atheist forms his conclusions based on the puerile or pathetic beliefs of the religious; the agnostic concedes the value and sometimes the power of belief. 

   The atheist insists that his certainties are more certain than the believer’s; the agnostic suggests that there are no certainties.

   The atheist scoffs, openly or to himself, at the religious impulse, seeing it as weak-minded or deluded. The agnostic is confounded by the fact that so many people—including people far more intelligent than he—are religious. 

Christ-inanity explained

   Christianity would be OK if it weren’t for the Christians.

   A “Christian” woman of my acquaintance, for example – let’s call her Grace – tells me often that she’s praying for me: She knows that I drink, and that I never keep the Sabbath. When I point out to her that Jesus himself preferred the company of wine bibbers and whores and Sabbath breakers to that of respectable people, she frowns.

   That’s because the real personage of Jesus is an inconvenience to her.

   Jesus was impatient with those who stood on formality – those who designated a day as particularly holy, for instance, or who wanted to forbid certain activities and mandate others.  All the rules and regulations, he said – all the fever to formalize and legislate plain love and respect for one another – obscured the simple truth of what he taught.

   And what he taught was as stark and uncompromising as could be. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Give up everything and follow me” are injunctions lovely and splendid as theory, but impossibly daunting in practice. Even Jesus had trouble with them from time to time, what with everyone pulling him in a different direction, doubting him, fearing him and finally forsaking him. He was sometimes out of sorts with even those closest to him, his disciples (“Ye of little faith”).

   After Jesus was gone, of course, he became a cult figure, and the imbecilities began to pile up, embellishing and encrusting his austere and beautiful creed and sometimes, down through the years, rendering it almost totally unrecognizable. Jesus would weep anew to know that such thundering absurdities as the virgin birth or the doctrine of eternal damnation or the wiping away of sins by Atonement have been, and are being, inculcated in his name.

   The Christians beginning with Saint Paul set out to fashion a Jesus who would be popular and palatable to their recruitment base – a Jesus whose warning, “I come not with peace, but with a sword,” would be modified or ignored, and whose assertion that we must be like children would come to justify the utmost credulity and the most infantile beliefs, instead of a rallying cry for what Jesus meant: That we must cast off worldly desires and become like a child again, full of wonder. 

   I call this perversion of Jesus’s teachings and the subversion of his spirit and character: Christ-inanity.            

Simply nonsense

   There is no end to the number of books analyzing what Jesus meant or represented, and to plow through them all would require the time and leisure that the Christian eternity promises. One recent one, called Simply Jesus, asserts that Jesus was God’s agent and spokesperson here on Earth, which indicates that the Almighty had bigger fish to fry elsewhere.

   The Tennessean’s excellent religion columnist, Ray Waddle, wrote a review of Simply Jesus in last Saturday’s paper. Waddle calls the book’s author, N. T. (wonder if they call him New Testament?) Wright, “a leading British interpreter of Christian faith, a successor to C. S. Lewis.” And to judge from some of the excerpts Waddle includes, I see the resemblance: Wright seems to, as Lewis did, specialize in the tenuous argument presented as unassailable fact.

   “Jesus has all sorts of projects up his sleeve,” Wright declares. (Jesus, I presume, wears long sleeves to hide the nail marks.) First and foremost he’ll be getting around to, at long last, implementing the tenets he laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. “The meek will be taking over the earth, so gently that the powerful won’t notice it until it’s too late,” Wright says. But once the meek are in charge, how will anything get done? There’ll have to be someone un-meek enough to make a decision, won’t there? And if power inevitably corrupts, won’t the meek become the bold, engendering a new crop of meeks ready to supplant them in power – and on and on in a Marxian cycle?

   “The peacemakers will be putting the arms manufacturers out of business,” Wright writes. “Those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice will be analyzing government policy and legal rulings and speaking up on behalf of those at the bottom of the pile.” The passage is uncannily Lewisian: Fatuous speculation put forth as gospel.

   But Lewis, at least, was always lucid. When Wright says, “Heaven is God’s space, God’s dimension of present reality, it’s hard to either criticize or commend the statement, because it’s – simply meaningless.

  

Pray for us

     A Nashville woman has come up with an iPhone app for the prayerfully challenged, Nashville’s City Paper reported last week. 
     Laura Landress’s Prayermaker is available at the Apple store – somehow appropriate to us Luddites, as it was a apple, you’ll recall, that led to our common downfall.

     Prayermaker enables users of different faiths (so far, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, New Thought, and Protestant) to create personalized prayers to offer up to their deity of choice.

     “It fills a need to help people find the words to pray when they need those words,” Landress said in a brief Q-and-A with the paper. “The idea came from a desire to help people have a prayer life that is easier to have on a regular basis.” If this is as eloquent as she gets, let’s pray that she’s not the one writing the prayers.

     If we’d come up with the idea, here’s the interview we’d conduct with ourselves.

Why would anyone buy your Prayer Home Companion? Isn’t the idea of prayer is that it’s supposed to be heartfelt?

Why does anyone buy a greeting card? They’ve got a feeling in their heart, but they may have a problem putting it into words.

So you’ve got a prayer for every occasion?

We’ve got all the major ones covered. Prayers for success, prayers for health and well being, prayers for world peace or an end to poverty…

Then where does the personal part come in?

Well, within our framework of main categories, users can choose from hundreds of subcategories to custom design a prayer for their specific needs.

It sounds like a cookie-cutter approach to prayer.

Not at all. We provide our users with a whole multitude of ways to express their individuality.

Give us an example.

How about I show you one? Here’s our Home screen. Let’s create a prayer for our Uncle Joe, who’s got cancer. We touch the “Sickness” button here, then, from the pull-down menu we choose “Diseases,” then either “Fatal Diseases” or “Possibly Fatal Diseases,” then “Cancer.” If we wanted to specify the type of cancer, that’s an option.

   Now we’re prompted to choose the prayee: “Self,” or “Other.” We select “Other,” and now we see our choices are “Relative,” “Friend,” or “Other.”

Can we look at the “Other” menu?

Ok. We’ll touch “Other,” and we see a long list of choices, like “Celebrities,” “Complete Strangers I Read About and Was Moved By,” and “General.”

“General?”

That’s where we would go to request a cure for cancer.

I see. Back to Uncle Joe.

All right. We’ll back out of this screen and choose “Relative.” Now we select “Uncle,” and it brings up a series of questions designed to create a profile of our Uncle Joe. Here’s where we encourage users to get creative. After they’ve filled in the basic info on Uncle Joe, they’ll see prompts like “Choose three of the following adjectives to describe your uncle,” and a long list of adjectives, plus the option to provide their own.

   They can either answer these prompts or elect to skip them. So their prayer can be as simple or elaborate as they want to make it. In any event, with so many choices available, every prayer will be unique. The idea being to make sure that your prayer makes it through to God.

Makes it through?  

Just think of how many prayers your God – whoever He might be – has to listen to every day. The more professionally crafted the prayer, the more likely it is to catch His ear, wouldn’t you say?

Maybe so. We’re done now?

Just about. We touch “Create Prayer,” and wait a few seconds…and our custom-made prayer pops up for our review. Now we can Edit, Send, Save, or Cancel the prayer. If we select Send, the prayer is sent and we’re offered the option of sending this prayer again or another one at a specified date and time, of which our phone will remind us.

Where does the prayer get sent?    

Facebook.

Facebook?

Where else? Everybody’s on Facebook.

Mother of myths

“The mother cult is something that will set future generations roaring with laughter.” – Gustave Flaubert.

   Those generations haven’t arrived yet, obviously, and the cult of the mother, which holds its signal celebration on this day, still flourishes.

   Mother-worship is as old as mankind itself. The Earth Mother was probably civilized man’s first deity – the goddess of crops. The Virgin Mary was a much later version. The most famous mother in Western history has her hordes of ardent devotees even down to this day.

   What would Jesus have made of the idea of people venerating His mother? For that matter, what would He have thought of Jesus-worship? The New Testament provides no clear-cut evidence that He regarded Himself as divine. As for his mom’s awareness of it, consider the episode in Matthew in which she urges her son to go with her to John the Baptist and be baptized, in order to wash away His sins.

   Indeed, it appears, at least to this skeptic from his reading of the Gospels, that Jesus had no inkling of His divine duty until He met John the Baptist and was inspired to start preaching himself. Even then, he delayed matters for 40 days and nights, pondering on it. If He’d been convinced of his supposed mission, would he have waited?

   As for the Virgin Birth, did Jesus ever hear of it? It’s never mentioned in Mark (the oldest Gospel) or John, and the details of it differ in Matthew and Luke. Again, the notion of virgin birth was an age-old one and very common in Jesus’s part of the world in those days, particularly in Egypt.

   Just sayin’. Happy Mother’s Day. 

Atheist or Agnostic?

No word sets atheists to foaming at the mouth more than agnostic—not evangelical, not born-again, not even Baptist. To the avowed atheist, the mere agnostic is a lily-livered, weak-kneed and spineless specimen of infuriating indecision.

Besides a fundamental misunderstanding of what an agnostic is, and a possible ignorance of the fact that almost all their cherished and oft-quoted icons considered themselves agnostics and not atheists, self-proclaimed atheists may be confused on another point: Their attitude toward the non-nonbeliever.

First, the misunderstanding:

While an atheist rejects all religions, and denies the existence of God (and so flaunts the same certitude as the devoutly religious), the agnostic admits that he does not know.

There might not be a God: Science alone can explain the universe, for example, all except for how something can arise out of nothing, and if we need an explanation for that, why bring in God?—why not say that if something always had to exist, it might as well be the universe as God?

There might not be a God, which might explain the random nature of life and death, the prevalence of misery and suffering, the apparent predominance of evil.

Yet again, there might be a God, which might account for our intimations of something greater than ourselves, for our apperception of mystery and beauty in the universe, for our love and fellow-feeling, for our sense of individual and collective purpose and destiny.

There may be a God we can apprehend and explain, but none of the world’s religions have yet apprehended and explained Him to the atheist’s satisfaction. The agnostic doubts all the explanations, but admits that he can’t be certain they’re all fallacious. It may be highly unlikely that a God of love will one day roast me like a peanut forever and ever for dancing on Sunday, but the agnostic, while doubting it, admits that it is not impossible.

Atheism is a belief; agnosticism is based on knowledge (or, rather, the lack of it). 

Now, for the attitude:

Many an atheist is put out by the agnostic’s “gutlessness,” and his scorn implies that he himself is genuinely gutsy. Why is the agnostic gutless?-For not avowing something he’s not sure of? And why should the atheist see himself as courageous?—just for avowing something that most people don’t agree with, even if it’s unprovable?

The atheist proclaims that there is no God, standing up to ridicule and censure from those people whose judgments he doesn’t value in the first place. The agnostic says he doesn’t know, incurring no one’s wrath but everyone’s pity.

The atheist basks in the novelty and daring of his opinion, while the agnostic cowers in the corner with his uncertainty.

The atheist forms his conclusions based on the puerile or pathetic beliefs of the religious; the agnostic concedes the value and sometimes the power of belief. 

The atheist insists that his certainties are more certain than the believer’s; the agnostic suggests that there are no certainties.

The atheist scoffs, openly or to himself, at the religious impulse, seeing it as weak-minded or deluded. The agnostic is confounded by the fact that so many people—including people far more intelligent than he—are religious.

A lot of learning is a dangerous thing

   A poll done on Facebook resulted in more than half the respondents averring that creationism should be taught in public schools. This startles me only because I thought the percentage of the scientifically illiterate among us would be much higher.

   Allied to the average man’s misunderstanding of evolution is his fear of it, often heightened and even encouraged by his religion. Every one of the world’s religions is, at best, an intermediary between its adherents and the truth. And every religion worth its salt must conform to the intelligence and understanding of its audience. Religion must not let the naked truth go abroad, but must clothe it in myth and allegory. Even Jesus, who espoused no religion, chose to speak in parables in order to make the truth palatable.

   When religion presents the truth, even in a diluted or adulterated form, it renders a service to mankind, but more often it does damage by employing a lie to convey a truth. For example, Jesus was preaching evolution when he said that the kingdom of God is within us and we must strive to realize it by becoming God-like. The lie of Christ-inanity is that we were made in God’s image, as the apple of his eye, but that each of us is born in sin and all we can do is pull ourselves up out of the slime.     

God: That is the question

A review of The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. 

   Sigmund Freud never met C. S. Lewis, but the author of this book imagines a debate between the two on the subject of God (and some corollary topics). He also teaches a course at Harvard contrasting the two men’s “worldviews.”

   Nicholi calls Freud “the atheist’s touchstone,” and refers to Lewis as “perhaps the twentieth century’s most popular proponent of faith based on reason.” Lewis himself was an atheist for the first half of his adulthood, and Freud, indeed, was one of his touchstones. When he became a Christian he often challenged the ideas of Freud’s that he had earlier embraced. Or as Nicholi puts it in his prologue: “In subsequent writings, he (Lewis) provides cogent responses to Freud’s arguments…”—thus indicating early on where his own sympathies lie.

     Freud called religion “the universal obsessional neurosis,” and was a lifelong atheist, although as the author suggests he may have wavered in his disbelief from time to time. (In a letter to a friend he wrote, “Science of all things seems to demand the existence of God…”) Freud thought that one’s early, ambivalent attitude toward one’s parents formed the basis for one’s “deep-seated wish for God.”

   Freud’s atheistic underpinnings came largely from his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher who, in his The Essence of Christianity, asserted that religion is just a projection of human need. “Divine wisdom is human wisdom…the secret of theology is anthropology…the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind,” Feuerbach wrote.

   Lewis, like Freud, grew into an atheist as a teenager. His mother died horribly at home when he was 7, and Lewis recalled that his earliest “religious experience” was praying in vain for her life. He was sent to a miserable boarding school where, he said, he read his Bible, “lived in hope,” and “attempted to obey my conscience.” When the school closed he was sent to another, whose matron took him under her wing and shared her growing unbelief with him. Under her influence, and that of his reading in the classics, his faith began to collapse. Another teacher, William Kirkpatrick, helped drive the final nail in the coffin, although the corpse would be resurrected years later.

   (To be continued…)      

Easter Parade of Fools

Regarding our habit
Of venerating a rabbit
That brings us all eggs--
Just who's pulling our legs?

Easter's always a grand day, with chocolate abounding and wine overflowing (in our household, at least), an occasion to ponder one of life's profound mysteries:

How can we be so gullible?

It's a time to reread the Book of Luke, the lovely story (most beautiful in the King James Version) that takes us from the birth of Jesus in a stable, attended by shepherds of the field, to his calamitous end and beyond, when the slain Christ apparently busts out of his tomb and, after checking in with a few former friends, takes off for parts unknown.

The most charming (or off-putting, depending on your point of view) aspects of the whole story are it fairy-tale elements. The son of God comes to earth and sets up shop as a carpenter, disappears for a dozen years or so and then returns to embark on a brief career as an itinerant preacher. Though penniless, he attracts an entourage, and travels from town to town, relying on the kindness of strangers for room and board while entertaining the masses with speeches and parables and the preforming of miracles. He walks on water and raises the dead and converts water into wine. He naturally attracts the notice of the authorities, who begin to ask questions and end up hounding him to death. His death, however, is a triumph, and far from the end of things. He has promised to return and set things right.

It is Luke's Jesus that has come down to us, for the most part--the gentle, soft-spoken, sociable soul who loves children and is beloved by women, who bestows his miracles liberally, and who is always kind and considerate, even unto death. And it is Luke's point of view that has become a bedrock of the faith, in particular his conviction that Jesus was the long-awaited messiah who would come back to earth, after a three-day vacation, and establish his kingdom. The fact that we're still waiting hasn't dampened the expectation.