Will save your soul for food

A story in the NY Times deals with another hard-hit group of victims of the recession: preachers. The number of available pastoring jobs has not kept pace with the numbers of individuals answering the “call” to set themselves up as custodians of souls.

Preaching has always struck me as a fairly cushy gig, consisting largely of comforting the afflicted with platitudes and parsing the word of God on Sunday – which may be why there’s such a glut of job seekers in this segment of the market. (The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports that there are more than 600,000 ministers in the U. S. but just 338,000 churches.)

My advice to these particular unemployed, short of counseling them to remember Jesus’s precept about tomorrow taking care of itself, would be to do what so many others do when they can’t find anyone to hire them: go into business for yourself.

Start on any street corner. “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I.” (Jesus again.) Voila! You’re a church, and therefore tax-exempt. Pass the plate. If you take in anything, you’ve made money your very first day in business, and it all went into your pocket. How many entrepreneurs can say that?

Build on that rock, no matter how inconsequential. The key to success, as in any other business, is to give people what they want. Entertainment, in this case, with a little hellfire and damnation thrown in.  Work up some good stories, develop a sound delivery, and you’ll be on your way. If you’re good enough, you’ll be able to get people to let you sleep and eat in their homes.

Maybe you think I’m being facetious. But why should you expect someone to hire you if you can’t do the job on your own?

Russelling with religion

   Bertrand Russell, the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, was born on May 18, 1872. He is best known for his works on logic, knowledge, and mathematics; his A History of Western Philosophy is an elegant and entertaining overview of the thoughts and thinkers of the Western world from pre-Socratic times down to his day. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

   In 1927 Russell gave a speech in London called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” He defined a Christian as one who a) believes in God and immortality, and b) believes, at the very least, that Jesus Christ was “if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men.”

   Addressing the first condition, Russell laid out some of the arguments for the existence of God. In short order he demolished:

·        The First-cause Argument. “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause,” Russell said. “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.”

·         The Argument from Design. (Everything in the world has been created so that we can live in it and appreciate it, and if it weren’t made just so, we could not live in it.) “It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world…should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years,” Russell said.

·        The Moral Argument. (There would be no right or wrong unless God existed.) Russell pointed out that if God created both right and wrong, then there was no difference in quality or truth between the two, and therefore it became meaningless to say that God is good.

   Turning to the second condition, concerning the character of Christ, Russell first admitted that Jesus said some wonderful things, among them “Turn the other cheek,” “Judge not lest ye be judged,” and “Sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” But he noted that he was consistently less than wise, as he firmly believed that his second coming would happen within the lifetimes of those he was addressing. And because he believed in hell, and angrily condemned those who did not heed his warnings about eternal punishment, Russell judged Jesus to be far less than a paragon of virtue. In fact he placed Socrates and Buddha above him.

   “The Christian religion, as organized in its churches,” Russell concluded, “has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world…

   “When you hear people in church debasing themselves…it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings…"

And finally:

   
            “A good world needs knowledge, kindliness and courage; it does not need…a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.”    

Doubt as an operating system

   An article in the New York Times some months ago noted that 12 percent of Americans define themselves as “Nones”—those adhering to no religion—and many of these “Nones,” to make a lame pun on the term, are throwing off the habit of organized worship but not necessarily their belief in God.

   The author, Eric Weiner, says that we need an entrepreneur, in the mold of Steve Jobs, to invent “not a new religion, but a new way of being religious.” This new “operating system,” as Weiner calls it, would, among other benefits, celebrate doubt and elevate humor to an exalted component of worship. No less a champion of the faith than G. K. Chesterton, Weiner points out, said that “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

   Jesus himself was a doubter and a wag of the first order—well, waggish at least in relation to the comedic standards of the day. His parables about the plank in your own eye and the camel going through the eye of a needle were intended as knee-slappers, but to his constant chagrin his audiences were a somber lot—they needed to be roused from the dead, like Lazarus.

   We see the same over-seriousness as to religion today, Weiner says, perhaps due in part to its association with politics, a decidedly earnest business. Many people, he suggests, would hold on to their religion if the politics weren’t part of the package.

   As to doubt, Jesus was a steadfast practitioner—in particular, he fretted over his followers’ lack of faith and staying power—which enabled him to clearly identify the chief doubters in his midst. And then, of course, near the bitter end, he doubted his own fortitude for the ordeal to come, not to mention the necessity of it all.  One can imagine him in the garden, first praying to be let off the hook, and then going resignedly to his doom, with a smile--maybe even with the Aramaic equivalent of “Let’s do it!” on his lips. What can you do but laugh?

   Weiner notes that only seven percent of “Nones” call themselves atheists. That may be because we (I consider myself a “None”) doubt that the atheist knows the “truth” any more than does the True Believer, or it may be because, for one reason or another, as Weiner says: “We may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.” 

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.    

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.

  

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. 

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.

Preaching to the choir

Bill Maher gives skeptics a bad name. His sophomoric rants about the absurdity of the Jesus story ("God sent him on a suicide mission...") probably make the faithful even more adamantine. He's smug and, frankly, creepy.

What was the question again?

"Jesus is the answer."

Shouldn't it be "Jesus is the question?" Jesus didn't have any answers; whenever someone asked him anything, he responded with another question, or with a statement that prompted further questions.

"Nicodemus saith unto him, 'How can a man be born when he is old?'

"Jesus answered, 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God...'

"Nicodemus answered and said unto him, 'How can these things be?'

"Jesus answered and said unto him, 'Art thou a master of Israel, and know not these things?'"