Atheist survey meme
Stolen from Hemant Mehta. In boldface is the stuff I’ve done…
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Entries Tagged as 'Religion'
Why I Am an Atheist
Life has a tendency of throwing us curveballs. For me, the biggest was realizing that I no longer believed in God.
All my life I was raised to believe in a soft variety of the Christian god. He was an all-powerful, all-knowing being living off in some indescribably wonderful place who loved me and listened intently to even the quietest whisper of a prayer. He was a comfort when times were rough and gave me confidence when my spirit sagged.
I never gave much thought to why I believed as I did. It’s just what I was raised to be; in our family, we were Christians. We were members of the United Church of Christ, a church that tends to be liberal and open to anyone’s interpretations – basically a step away from being Unitarian. We knew there was a God. And that was enough for me, at first; just to believe. I didn’t think He needed anything from me other than that simple belief. That is, until I reached high school.
In high school, I idolized my brother. He was everything I wasn’t – strong, tall, athletic, sociable, confident. I was a shy, weird little kid with a severe lack of confidence and a tiny social circle. I looked at my brother as the perfect example of what I could be. And so when he joined Young Life, a Christian evangelist group that doubled as a sort of social club for high school kids, I had to join, too.
It was fun. I met a lot of really great, friendly people. We sang songs, had parties, played icebreaker games to get to know each other; that sort of thing. I learned a lot about what other people believed about God, about life, about the afterlife, and about Jesus. My eyes were opened to a lot of things I’d never seen before, growing up in a mild church where a sense of community and kindness seemed more common than a deep and abiding faith.
Until then, my religious beliefs hadn’t been all that important. I basically made things up as I went, and occasionally I’d read bits and pieces of the Bible to learn about what other people might think about God. My education in traditional Christian doctrine was essentially nonexistent. I could never make myself pay much attention during the church services, and Sunday school was all about the same old Bible stories kids learn about. Junior high Bible study was interesting, because we looked into more of the New Testament than I’d read before. But it was never much more than a baseline pseudo-Christian form of theism – there’s a God, he loves you, he made everything (some way or another), and he’ll heap rewards upon you when you die. Heaven was a chance to get back together with all the loved ones who went before you. There wasn’t much theology to it at all. It was just a simple, comforting, unquestioned belief.
It was in the Young Life meetings that I was presented with a kind of “soft evangelism”. Looking back on it, I can identify it as a sort of love bombing – everyone was accepting of you, regardless of your faults; they were eager to tell you what a great person you were; they sang happy songs (both religious and secular); they encouraged you to agree with what the leaders told you was right; and they really pushed for you to come to their week-long summer camp. So, of course, I went. I liked the people, I liked the atmosphere, and I liked feeling like I was accepted. I’d always been the social outcast before, and I craved that wonderful feeling of being a part of something where people accepted me despite all my quirks and insecurities.
The camp was a blast. There was a lake, a pool, a rock climbing wall – all sorts of great activities. Plenty of stuff to keep us busy and keep reinforcing the positive, warm, euphoric atmosphere. Every now and then, we’d gather in the main lodge for a series of skits or games. It was at the lodge that they hit us with the standard evangelical positions – that we all sin, that we all need redemption because God is a just and righteous judge who cannot abide with sin, and that Jesus was persecuted and slain so that we could enter into the presence of God. They told it to us gently, but in a way that still managed to impress upon us that we should feel guilty and ashamed if we rejected God’s gift after all the pain and suffering he went through just because he loved us so completely and perfectly.
During the week I discovered the Left Behind series. The camp store had all of the books in paperback, and I blazed through them one by one, fascinated by the stories and by what people believed God was going to do for his people eventually. Combining that with the “plan for salvation” that the skits drilled into us, and by the fourth or fifth day I was really hurting to be saved. I felt like the fact that I hadn’t accepted Christ into my heart as my lord and savior was no better than if I had spat in God’s face. Forget the fact that, before all this, my religious beliefs had been a comfort to me; now, I knew I had been incredibly wrong about God. Just being a good person wasn’t enough. I had to develop a stronger faith, accept Christ’s sacrifice for my sin, to repent, and follow the Bible.
I honestly don’t know what year it was when this happened. It was important to me at the time, but these things fade as time passes. In any case, I came away from Young Life camp feeling like a whole new person. I threw myself into my faith harder than ever, diving into the Bible with gusto and wondering at the glory of God’s creation. I was sure that I was saved; that my sins were forgiven and I was free of my past.
During my first year in college, I lived in what was called the Healthy Living House – a part of our dorm set off for young men and women to live away from drugs and alcohol, where some students volunteered to be counselors who would help us keep each other in check. One of our counselors was a girl named A. who lived across the hall from me. A. and I became fast friends; she was a polite, friendly, cheerful girl, who also happened to be a Christian. She and I talked about God and Jesus all the time, and eventually she introduced me to Campus Crusade for Christ.
Crusade was like a more serious form of Young Life; we met once a week to watch skits, sing, pray, etc. Being among a community of believers only reinforced my faith, and it drew me more and more toward the Biblical literalist position that so many of the other members held. After all, the more I learned about God and the plans he had for me, the more I felt like I was on the right path. I was proud to hold my head high and proclaim the gospel to everyone.
There were only two things that troubled me. The first was that many of my other friends were either atheists or members of some other religion. It worried me terribly that they were putting their immortal souls in peril by turning their backs on God and Jesus. I tried as best as I could to understand why they didn’t believe, but it all seemed so obvious to me. Of course God was real; how else could we be here?
The second was my love of science and my literal mind. As I read the Bible I of course ran into things that were problematic – why would God punish Adam and Eve if they didn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Of course, as I spent more and more time with A. and other Crusade members, I learned all the “right” answers to these and other problems. (Adam and Eve may not have had knowledge about good and evil, but after all, God put his morality in our hearts from the very beginning!)
But I still ran into things that I couldn’t so easily accept. The idea of the Earth being less than 10,000 years old, for example, or that evolution was really a lie that scientists told to lead people away from God. My mind told me that it didn’t make sense. But my fellow Christians told me not to rely so much on my mind, since I’m only a human and I’m fallible; instead, I should rely on God’s immutable, perfect word. After all, it was right about so many other things; it must be right about these, too.
So I became a believer through and through. The Bible was literally true – after all, God wouldn’t lie or try to mislead us. (Disregard the verses that say God lies; I hadn’t read those yet, of course.) Science didn’t really know anything for sure; the only way we could ever be certain about what was real was to rely on God through prayer, meditation, and proper reading of the Bible.
At some point I began to wonder if my faith was true. Not if it was correct; just if I was believing the way I was supposed to, or if somehow I hadn’t quite gotten the formula right. I felt the joy and the presence of God, the reassurance in hard times, and all the things I was told I should feel. But I never really felt like God spoke to me. I spoke to him all the time. I almost always had a prayer in my mind, if not on my lips. But I never got that strong impression that he was giving me any kind of answer – the sort of certainty I heard of people who said things like “God has put it into my heart that X” or “When Y happened, I knew that it was God telling me Z”. I never had this sort of feeling! Was I doing something wrong? It tortured me. I was in fear of my soul all over again. So I pushed even harder to learn about God and the Bible. I read The Case for Christ, Darwin On Trial, More than a Carpenter, anything I could sink my teeth into. I devoured the Bible cover to cover. I took notes. I kept a journal. I prayed more fervently than ever.
I knew I was saved. I loved Jesus more than anything. I’d throw myself on the floor, weeping, thanking him through my tears for all that he’d sacrificed for someone as unworthy of grace as myself. I begged him to take over my life and guide me in whatever ways he desired. At some point, I considered leaving school to take up the seminary. I felt like I had to tell the world about what I knew about Jesus and salvation. I had to let them know about the joy that comes with a certainty that you’ll spend eternity with the loving, mighty God who made the universe and all within it. I wanted to be a beacon to them, to guide them to the hope that dwelt within me.
It was during this time that I was credulous to essentially everything – aliens, ghosts, psychic phenomena, conspiracies, alternative medicine; you name it, I probably believed in it. It never really struck me until years later that much of what I believed contradicted my religious beliefs, but that’s primarily because I never thought too long or hard about what it would mean if they were all true. Thinking deeply about things wasn’t promoted as useful by my fellow Crusaders – it was enough to trust that things were the way God wanted them to be, and leave it at that. Nothing beyond that was really important, anyways.
I spent the first two years of my college career in the Healthy Living House. The third year, I moved into an apartment with my friend J., who I’d met through some of my classes and who I really got along with. The subject of God and religion seldom arose, and when it did he tended to change it quickly. He knew what I believed, and I could tell that he didn’t believe it. Once we moved in together, things changed somewhat. I learned that he was an atheist (or at least an agnostic, I’m not sure), which in my mind put him just a step or two up from Satan himself. I was aghast. But I was also interested. I wanted to learn why he didn’t believe what I did. After all, I thought, it was so obviously true, and it brought great peace, comfort, and reassurance. Why wouldn’t everyone want that?
And so I asked him questions. He seemed eager to answer them, and to pose questions to me in return. Often I couldn’t answer him, or when I did, he pointed out the flaws in the answers I’d been taught. I tended to brush his objections aside; after all, I was basing my beliefs on something that absolutely had to be true. It was perfect, complete, immutable, infallible, and unchanging.
The thing that finally stuck with me was his accusation that the Bible wasn’t everything that had been written about God and Jesus. What a thing to say! After all, I knew that God wanted us to know everything we could about him; why would there be anything left out? I really got upset about it. I demanded that he prove what he’d said. And, of course, he did. He introduced me to the Catholic Apocrypha, pointed out the differences between their version of the Ten Commandments and ours, and introduced me to the Gnostic texts that had been left out of the Bible.
I was staggered. How could I not have learned about all this? Surely the other Crusade members had to know about these things, too; why didn’t they ever talk about them? I told A. about what J. had showed me, and she seemed nervous. She seemed to think I’d been spending too much time with him, and that it might not be a good thing for me to be living with a nonbeliever. I was shocked that she didn’t want to learn about these things! After all, if these writings were made about God and Jesus and had survived just as long as all the Biblical texts, why didn’t we ever learn about them? How did we know they weren’t God’s word, too?
The more I read the Gnostic texts, the more I was amazed. Everything I’d learned about the origins of modern Christianity was wrong. The Bible wasn’t the complete word of God; the beliefs I held weren’t the same ones people had held over the centuries; for goodness sake, the Bible as I knew it was just the result of a vote on what was and wasn’t going to be part of the canon! What was going on here? Why wasn’t there any other Christian I knew who had read these things? Why were they so violently rejected or scoffed at by any believer I mentioned them to?
I began to do more and more research into the origins of my faith. I learned about the Gnostic ideas of God – that God manifests in the universe in several forms called “aeons”, which could be principles, physical beings, attributes, and so on. I learned that so much of what we believed to be Christianity was really just stuff tacked on centuries after Jesus died, and that there were hundreds of competing early forms that were snuffed out by that which would eventually become what we know today.
I was outraged – not at God, but by my fellow Christians who were so closed-minded about these things and what they meant about the truth of our beliefs. Why did so few of them care if what they believed was true or not? Why was it more important for them to hold onto modern teachings and to abandon the truer, ancient ones?
Eventually I began to question all the things I’d been told in Crusade. After all, they were arguments based on a distorted, limited, chopped up and shuffled version of God’s word. Why should I simply accept them? The Bible was hardly a representation of what the early church was really like – rather, it was a representation of what had dominated and eliminated other early competing sects. I thought of it in much the same way as what would happen if the Lutherans (or any other modern sect) managed to eliminate the competition and rewrite the holy text to take out the bits they don’t like and add bits that sound more appealing to them. I wanted to get back to the earliest, purest roots I could find.
Worse still was when I discovered that for all my belief, there was nothing outside the Bible to confirm that Jesus had ever done anything at all that the Bible said. The only record we had of Jesus’ words was the Bible itself, and even that wasn’t good enough, because nobody who ever met him actually wrote anything that’s in the Bible today. I just basically assumed uncritically that people wouldn’t believe all these things if there weren’t evidence somewhere to back it all up, and that this assumption was enough to justify my faith. Of course, it’s not true; seldom will you find something in the Bible that has been confirmed by archaeology, and never has anything miraculous or supernatural been reinforced by any kind of discovery.
By the time I finally learned about who had really written the gospels and just how shaky the veracity of the Bible was, I wasn’t sure what to call myself anymore. I couldn’t call myself a Christian; after all, for most people, that would mean I believed (or at least believed in) the Bible. And I didn’t. I wanted to get back to what God really was, not what man had twisted him and voted him into being, and not all the unsupported mythology. I began to resent Christian apologists, because I saw in them the sort of short-sighted ignorance I had embraced myself just a short while before. Science, reason, critical thinking, and logic became more and more important as I sifted through the evidence to try to find out the truth. And when it came to my faith, these four things would become the four horsemen of the apocalypse, uprooting everything that remained of what I’d believed.
I was out of college and living on my own now, and I was close to being a Deist. I believed that God had, at the very least, made the universe. I figured that God was the spark that ignited the Big Bang, that he had perhaps guided evolution to lead it toward where we are today, and that maybe – just maybe – he was actually still around to listen to me when I prayed. Even if he didn’t bother to respond.
After a long period of consideration I began to question God even further. Could we ever really know the difference between God not answering prayer and God not being there at all? What evidence do we have that there is a soul, let alone an afterlife? Isn’t it possible that when we see something we think is unexplainable and that it must be a miracle, that instead it’s really just something we don’t understand yet that could be entirely natural? If a purely natural explanation can solve just as many problems, why do we need to tack on the supernatural? How can we possibly claim to know anything about God at all, especially when you discard the Bible as a book of fairy tales?
And so I became an agnostic. I spent hours debating on the Internet with Christians about the bible, about god, about anything. I tried to get them to give me some sort of rational reason to believe any of it, and time after time I heard the same tired, old, and worn-out apologetics that I’d heard from my fellow Crusade members. Nobody was able to tell me why their particular flavor of mythology should be considered any different from that of the Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology I’d learned about in school. And nobody could give me a reasonable answer to the problem of evil – that is, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why does evil exist, unless he allows it to?
Then my uncle died. Numb from emotional pain and confusion, and hours away from anyone I loved, I went out to a bar the night I found out to try to shift my focus from mourning to just trying to cope. And after a little while at the bar, I returned to my car, where I wept like a lost child, screaming at God to come back into my life and tell me what to do. I poured my entire being into it. I wanted nothing more than for something solid and permanent to reassure me that everything would be okay. I wanted that old comforting certainty again. And for a while, I felt like I had it. I started praying again, if not quite so fervently as before. And, of course, I noticed that the prayers continued to go unanswered beyond the realm of sheer chance and coincidence. The more obvious the result I prayed for, the less likely I would get what I needed. I had re-entered the echo chamber of prayer, and this time I realized right away that the voice I heard bouncing back was mine and mine alone.
So I lapsed back into agnosticism again. I truly wanted to believe that there was a God out there somewhere. But I was unconvinced. Through a proper application of skeptical and critical reasoning, Occam’s Razor slowly sliced bit after bit off of my faith, until there was nothing left of it but “God exists.” And I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but at some point, that fell away too. Likely it disappeared around the time I realized that I was using “God” as nothing more than a catch-all term to describe the things I didn’t know, and I convinced myself that if I didn’t know the right answer to a question, that it didn’t make any sense to just make one up. It slowly became acceptable to me to say “I don’t know” in response to the biggest questions.
I was an atheist. I no longer believed that there was any sort of god. The universe was what it was; nothing was certain or guaranteed, and we were all stuck here on our own to figure things out and make things better for each other. Prayer was just a way to try to make yourself feel good about doing nothing of real value. Rather than take comfort in the delusion that some invisible, inaudible, intangible, unknowable being was watching out for me – after all, if his eye were on the sparrow, why all the strife in the world? – instead I took comfort in the realization that I didn’t have to know everything. Not having the answers to all the deepest questions didn’t make me shallow or lost; it meant that I was being intellectually honest and open to change.
Since then I’ve been seeking out guidance from people who’ve been where I am now. I meet regularly with a nice-sized local atheist/agnostic group for coffee or beer; I read books on humanist philosophy and ethics; I devour science and politics. I’ve gone to church a few times, though it feels like an alien world to me now, and I do it mainly to see it all as an outsider looking in.
I don’t resent my parents for bringing me up the way they did. How could I? They only did it because it was how they were raised themselves. The depth my faith went to was far beyond what they’d ingrained in me. To them, God is very generic. They believe Jesus’ death saved everyone, no matter what; that everyone goes to heaven; that our dead relatives watch over us as some sort of guardian angels; that God cares more about what we do in our lives than what we believe; things like that. It’s a very liberal form of Christianity, and it gives them peace and comfort and a way to socialize with politically and theologically like-minded people. I can’t fault them for it; our minds are wired to receive pleasure from hearing people say things we agree with or we already believe. It’s all a part of being a social species. I won’t say that I want them become atheists, too, because I don’t have any right to try to take away something that gives them hope (even if I think it’s false hope). It
So, what now? If there’s no God, what hope can I possibly have? Well, if this is the only life I have, I have to do everything I can to enjoy it and make it useful to myself and others while I have it. I have true moral responsibility – if I wrong someone, I have to make it right myself; I can’t just ask some uninvolved third party to forgive me. I take great pride and joy in my ability to determine what is and isn’t likely to be real or correct. Reason, logic, critical thinking, and skepticism help me understand the world and what is and isn’t worth my time.
When I was a Christian, life was just a waiting room for something better when I died. I didn’t need to involve myself in anything worldly, because I knew that nothing in this life really meant anything, apart from worshiping God. Eternity cheapens a temporary life. Now, I know that there’s no guarantee. There’s no big payoff at the end of the game; it’s the game itself that has to be meaningful. Life is precious because it’s short, and because once it’s gone we can’t get it back. There’s no do-overs. We get one shot to make a difference to the world. And yes, the world itself will eventually be gone, and everything we do is ultimately meaningless. But I think that it’s enough to try to make life a little easier, a little brighter, and a little more enlightened for the people who will come after me, and that maybe someday we as a species will reach the point where we can throw off our security blankets. After all, there’s no monster in the closet or under the bed; there’s just the big, scary, wonderful, real world out there.
Once again: SUCK IT, CREATIONISTS.
Synthetic Life Form Grows in Florida Lab
Duh. It was only a matter of time.
Evolution: It WORKS, bitches.
Just saw this nifty little story online: How Did Life Begin? RNA That Replicates Itself Indefinitely Developed For First Time
One of the most enduring questions is how life could have begun on Earth. Molecules that can make copies of themselves are thought to be crucial to understanding this process as they provide the basis for heritability, a critical characteristic of living systems. New findings could inform biochemical questions about how life began.
Now, a pair of Scripps Research Institute scientists has taken a significant step toward answering that question. The scientists have synthesized for the first time RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.
Oh, well… so much for those Creationists who say life can’t come from non-life… we’re just about ready to prove them wrong 
Podcast: The Marguerite Perrin Interview
I “interviewed” this crazy woman today about politics.
Here’s the interview!
*what*
I received this e-mail from the woman who runs this batshit insane website:
Subject: [XXXXXX] Sarah Palin To Be Dropped From McCain Ticket
From: Ruth Calabria <ruthcalabria2@matrix-evolutions.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:01:18 -0400
To: XXXXXXDear Friends,
The guns on the conviction of the sinner, Senator Barack Obama, are about to be silenced. Sarah Palin has done her job of connecting with the everyday people who will make the difference in the election. She has managed to make the Republicans, the party of, by and for the ruling class, the hope of the people in the margin, the smarter evangelicals who might have voted for Obama, the moms who struggle so hard to raise their kids in this mom unfriendly environment, the moose hunters and those Hillary women who can’t distinguish their bras from their pocketbooks.
Palin has also managed to distract us all from the consequences of the hundred billion dollar bank bailout necessitated by the blind greed of Republican mortgage scammers, a grand heist on all who work for a living whose paychecks will be cut in half by the stupendous inflation this will bring about. Stocks, mostly owned by the rich, go up; and the real income of the workers and middle class goes down. This effective transfer of wealth from worker to ruling class is a continuation of the broader capitalist Republican manipulations that have caused worker incomes to drop by 2% in the last decade while those in the top tier went up by 200%.
McCain’s conservative handlers have planned from the beginning to have Sarah leave the scene, once her job was finished, along with the baggage of her Trooper-gate conniving and her obvious lack of qualifications for the presidency. We suspect her coming exit to have been intelligently designed from the start in its reeking of our situation down here in Texas where my fundamentalist mother still tries to control me, a 67 year old woman, from the grave by having left me an inheritance totally controlled by my castrated conservative brother, a lawyer who made it clear immediately after my mother’s death that there’s no way I would ever see a penny of the money left me unless I left my evolutionist professor husband of 35 years who rescued me from this moron, child abusing, family I had the misfortune to be born into. And if I know these scheming conservative game players correctly, Palin’s exit will be blamed on something Michelle Obama said about Christmas or some equally absurd and vicious zinger.
The communists used to say that the capitalists would sell them the rope they needed to hang them. This has proved to be unnecessary. Instead we have seen our greedy pig ruling class hang themselves with their mortgage scam that backfired, and hang all of us in the process. To highlight their lunatic decadence and stupidity, we note the dribbling remarks of an upper class jerk by the name of Wayne Angel, a retired Fed Board member who owns his own seven homes and blames the economic meltdown on unions demanding more money for the workers! Did we really hear him say that!? Such callousness and the fact that he truly believes it (!) borders on a criminality that calls for the forced feeding of cake to Marie Antoinette’s severed head. This bailout grand theft, soft peddled and hidden by media shills whose employment is at the discretion of said ruling class, the same crew of peppy liars who helped sell the War in Iraq that has been used as an excuse for the taking away of o ur freedom, fairness and justice in America, must be reversed. The upper class must go!
But rather than have the rerun of the French Revolution that these rich pigs so richly deserve, it is much easier to throw them out of power by electing Barack Obama, who, whatever his shortcomings, is a hell of a lot smarter and a hell of a lot more caring than these ruling class wolves and their loathsome surrogate in sheep’s clothing, the truly dippy, smiling lunatic, John McCain, who however he may come off in well edited sound bites on TV, looks in person like he would have trouble finding his way to the men’s room.
Don’t be fooled by kindly Uncle John. Be scared on Election Day, scared enough to make sure you go out and vote. Hidden in briefly appearing stories on the net are the new rules for domestic spying and for FBI surveillance and harassment without due cause, also known as, welcome to the police state. The Republicans are as treacherous in their plans for the coming Inquisition as they are in consistently making black out to be white in presidential campaigning.
And while we are at it, let’s put the blame for the personal unhappiness and heartache of young people where it belongs to make sure they get out and vote. It’s not hard to understand. First turn off Dr. Phil, a castrated propagandist who has enough money to buy a trophy wife to cover up the fact that his fast talking is as cross wired as his face is goofy. The problem of the breakdown of love and happiness in America is not a mental problem.
Rule #1: The ruling class has the power to do whatever they want to do.
Rule #2: What they and their managers want to do is screw all the women, which they do in the workplace and in the schools in various ways.
Rule #3: If you want to keep your job or get an A on that term paper, honey, pull up your skirt, as happens as often as folks drink coffee in the morning.
Rule #4: Every woman comes to know these rules.
Rule #5: No woman talks about them.
Today’s women are a harem for the ruling class. The owners and bosses and the worst teachers and priests get to toy with the women (and with the kids) while the men who fall in love with the women are DENIED ACCESS, crowded out by the creepy lechers whose taking advantage insults the women and destroys the self respect and emotional integrity necessary for successful courtship and love, with the problem made all the worse with the cockeyed morality spouted on corporate run TV. And men being made obedient fools out of by bosses, also as common as morning coffee, doesn’t improve their attractiveness to women. It’s time for a revolution and electing Obama is the first step. We make the case for what we say, as taboo as these truths are in an America where lies rule by swift condemnation of truth tellers as evil or crazy, on www.matrix-evolutions.com where we use a compelling scientific argument based on a mathemat ical understanding of evolution and information.
Mrs. Ruth and Dr. Peter V. Calabria
Figured I’d leave the name/email in since it’s on their site.
Christ Drives a Buick
Note: I wrote this in 2005 for a rhetoric class. we were supposed to write a rhetorical dialogue between two figures, alive or dead, real or fictional…
Christ Drives a Buick: A Dialogue on Morality
It was a dark and stormy night. I was alone in my house, and the pounding of the rain upon the roof was the only sound I could hear.
The only sound, that is, save for the sudden rapping on the front door.
I placed my book on the side table and rose from my chair. “Who in their right mind would be out in this weather?” I mumbled.
I opened the door. It was Jesus.
I scoffed. This was too surreal. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“My car broke down up the road,” He said. He was soaked to the bone. “I’ve called AAA, but they’ll probably be a while yet.”
I looked Him up and down, wondering whether to throw a tarp on the couch. “I suppose that would be okay.”
“Thanks, man. I owe you one.” He shook my hand gratefully and stepped across the threshold. It struck me as a bit odd that the Son of God needed to call AAA, let alone that He drove at all.
He took His sandals off and walked into the living room.
“So…” I began.
“Just because I can doesn’t mean I should,” He interrupted. “Yeah, I could’ve just fixed the car, but to be honest, omnipotence gets boring after a while. Besides, men are often judged by the ways in which we do things. What would people say if they knew that God takes the easy way out?”
“I was actually going to ask you why you were out driving in this storm,” I said.
“I know that,” He said, annoyed. “I’m here to give you a message on the nature of morality.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a blunt way to introduce the subject of a dialogue?” I said.
“Yes, it is. I find that it’s better to be blunt sometimes. Now stop breaking the fourth wall and listen.” He motioned for me to sit down. I did so.
“Go ahead, then,” I said with a sigh.
“I drive an ‘87 Buick LeSabre Estate,” He said. I waited for Him to say more, but He apparently wanted a response.
“Oh,” I said.
“I drive it because it is sturdy. It can take a beating, but it’s still just as reliable as ever. It may not be the fastest car around, or the most attractive, but it’s the best.” He paused. “Morality is similar. That which is moral is not always that which is most attractive. It is not always the fastest way to success or happiness. But it is reliable. A man with sturdy morals can take the abuse of his peers without being compromised.”
“So you drive a Buick because it’s moral?” I said incredulously.
“The Buick is just a metaphor. You know that. The point is that the moral path is the one that is often mocked for its simplicity and lack of aesthetic value.”
“Didn’t you say that you were going to give me a lesson on morality?” I wondered aloud, not sure where He was going.
“And I will. I feel that it’s important to set up the framework for a discussion before engaging in it.”
“People often wish to believe that they are moral simply because they live good lives. However, I have always taught that the best, most moral behavior is that which benefits others. Selfless giving and all that. While it may be pleasing to the body to satisfy your selfish pleasures, it is more pleasing and rewarding to the soul to help your fellow man.”
I was a bit skeptical. “If your idea of morality is so great, why were you crucified for it?”
He rolled His eyes. “Thanks for the memory. I don’t see how that’s at all relevant. The people of my day didn’t understand what I was trying to do. I didn’t want to rule the world. I already had that. I just wanted everybody to be decent to one another. Was it really so revolutionary? For crying out loud, the first thing people learn nowadays is to play nice!”
“Now I know that my lessons can be twisted, analyzed, poked and prodded ad infinitum. I’m going to let you in on a little secret, though: it’s all bunk. Just do what I said. If you don’t want someone doing something to you, don’t do it to them.”
I nodded. This was all fairly obvious to me, but it still didn’t seem like much of a lesson. “Let’s get into some specific examples here. Is it moral for a homeless man to steal a loaf of bread to feed his dying child?”
“Of course. It is not the action that matters, but the intent. If a thief steals food to feed himself, he is being greedy. If he steals to feed his child, he is being valiant, and showing devotion to his child.”
“What about poverty? If a man becomes destitute because of poor life choices, is it the moral responsibility of those more fortunate to support him?”
“Absolutely. You may recall something I said a few thousand years ago: ‘If you’ve done something good for my brother, even the least important of my brothers, you have done it for me.’ Something like that. What most people fail to realize is that the good deeds they do for the poor are done for me. If you saw the Son of God sitting in stinking rags on the side of the road, would you just walk right by without so much as a glance?”
I remembered the passage.
“I see why you said that the most important commandment was to love my neighbor as myself. I’m beginning to understand morality, but what of divinity? Are the two equivalent, or is there a sensible way to divide the two?”
“Does it really matter?” He said. “If your goal in life is to be divine, you must be moral. If your goal is to be moral, you will approach divinity. The two may not be one and the same, but they are irrevocably entwined.”
“But what is the nature of divinity?” I asked.
“Now you’re beginning to ask the right questions!” He leaned forward. “Divinity is the state in which one has achieved an enlightenment that allows one to understand without needing to debate.”
“Understand what?”
“Exactly,” He said. “Whatever you want to understand, you will if you become divine.”
“Then how can I become divine?” I asked.
“Every man achieves divinity in a different way. I was lucky – I was born divine, as well as holy. Some achieve divinity by separating themselves from society and meditating on the essence of reality. Others, by becoming master artists. There is no single path to divinity.”
“But what about that whole ‘none come to the Father but through me’ stuff?”
“Being divine and being holy are two totally different things. Holiness is a religious state of being – a connection between the soul and eternity. Divinity has to do with the soul’s connection to the world. Not every person has religion, but all have souls. If your external life portrays the image of your soul, you have achieved divinity. If your soul mirrors the way I have laid out for you, then you have achieved holiness.”
“Then is it better to be holy or divine?” I queried.
“Neither,” He said.
“What?”
“Neither,” He repeated. “It isn’t a matter of better; only different. Nothing pleases me more than to see my brothers and sisters striving for holiness or divinity. Which one they decide is merely a matter of preference.”
“Then the way to please God is not merely by being moral, but by striving for morality or divinity?”
“As I said earlier, morality and divinity are intertwined. It is the same for morality and holiness. However, it is less important to be moral if you wish to be divine. Divinity can be achieved through acts of sheer nonsense, so long as they are reflections of your soul.”
“It is important to be moral. However, divinity and holiness may be polar opposites for some. It may be divine for one man to do that which is utterly absurd, while being holy requires devotion and consideration.”
I still wasn’t satisfied. “What is morality, really?” I asked.
“Morality is a way of being. It is living in a way that maximizes the happiness, well-being, independence, and satisfaction of all involved parties. In your example of the thief stealing bread to feed his child, the thief is moral because the happiness lost by the baker is far outweighed by the well-being gained by the child.”
“There is no single way to say, ‘this is moral and that is not’. It is best to consider each situation separately, as the circumstances are sure to be unique each time. Determining the morality of an action is an intellectual exercise. It gets easier with time.”
“But how do I know if I’ve make the wrong decisions? And what do I do if I have?” I asked.
“You’ll know that you have done something wrong if your conscience nags you about it. Your mother gave you some good advice, you know: if you wouldn’t do something in front of her, you probably shouldn’t do it at all.” He broke into a smile. “Of course, that can’t be applied universally,” He said, and winked.
“As for what to do about it, don’t worry about it too much. Just make a mental note to correct that behavior in the future, and move on.”
A horn honked outside. I glanced out of the window. To my dismay, the tow truck had already arrived. Jesus rose from His chair.
“I think it would be best if I left now. I have given you much to think about. Try your best to remember it all.” He tapped His forefinger against His temple.
“Before you go, I have just one more question,” I said.
“Ask, and ye shall receive an answer,” He said, walking to the door. He placed His hand on the knob and slipped His sandals onto His feet.
“What if you don’t exist?” I asked.
He paused, and smiled. “What do you mean?”
“What if this is all a dream?”
“I see,” He chuckled. “Then feel free to ignore everything I said.” With that, He pulled the door open and stepped out into the rain.
“But what if I have more questions?” I shouted over the din.
“You know how to reach me,” He said.
I’m still not sure that He actually gave me a lesson.
Intentional deceit from ucctruths.com
On my previous post, I used to have a comment from someone named ‘drew’ containing text which I eventually realized was quoted from www.ucctruths.com , an ex-UCC-member website that purports to be exposing the dark side of the church.
Not surprisingly, the e-mail address ‘drew’ supplied was false, so I could not contact him to confront the fact that his exact words appeared on at least a dozen different websites. So, I deleted his post as spam.
Now, there’s a new post on ucctruths.com, where ‘drew’ often gets in the first comments on several posts (almost certainly the poster himself on another account):
Fair minded but boring
The Hartford Courant has another columnist piping in on the IRS investigation of the United Church of Christ and this site gets mentioned. I think this is a compliment, but I’m not sure:
Actually, the complaint was most likely filed by the guy who runs “UCC Truths,” an organization and website for lapsed UCCers, heretics who dissent from the church’s leadership and publish items such as “UCC Hierarchy Uses Neurosurgically Altered Monkeys to Make Cheap Sensible Shoes.” Actually, no, they don’t. UCC Truths is easily the most fair-minded and polite and boring apostate group in the history of religious dissent. It says on the website: “Any employee of the UCC national office or leaders of any of the UCC Conferences are welcome to submit their own commentary which will be posted, unedited, at the top of the site, at any time.” If Martin Luther had been a Congregationalist, he would have nailed the “95 Other Possible Ways of Looking at Things” to the church door in Wittenberg.
That’s actually pretty funny. Boring? Yes, but I really don’t know how I could make this stuff any more exciting.
And before anyone gets carried away, I didn’t file the complaint but this site has certainly been the most visable on raising the issue.
posted by UCCtruths, Sunday, March 02, 2008
Here’s the interesting part: Those little remarks at the end? False. According to a WHOIS:Domain Name: UCCTRUTHS.COM
Administrative Contact:
Hutchins, James w924c3ba58m@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
ATTN: UCCTRUTHS.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447
570-708-8780
And according to this news story:
The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State — a religious liberty watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. — shares the concern of the IRS and said it has filed 11 complaints with the agency about electioneering by religious organizations since January 2007 — including one against a Las Vegas pastor who endorsed Obama from the pulpit.
It did not file the complaint against the UCC, however, Lynn said, because it didn’t find any violations when it looked into the matter last summer at the urging of James Hutchins, who runs the “UCCtruths” website that is critical of the UCC.
…
Hutchins posted news of the investigation on his website Wednesday and said he had received an anonymous copy of the complaint to the IRS with information redacted that identified the person who filed it.
Right. So the guy who initially pushed for an investigation “received an anonymous copy” of the complaint and posted news about it on his website.
Sorry, Jimmy boy. It’s pretty obvious that you filed the complaint, and the fact that you removed the name of the filer is pretty good evidence of that.
If not, why not post it again with the filer’s name intact?
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