Author Archives: Neil

More Questions Than Answers

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In today’s troubled world, we are fed stories intended to convince us of the rightness of the direction in which we’re travelling. I’ve chosen some that have been circulating in the UK for a while now and comment on them afterwards: remember, question everything! While I’ve paraphrased the stories, I’ve tried to represent them as accurately as I can. You can always click on the links to access their source. I stress that I’m not claiming there’s no evidence for these narratives; there may well be, at least for elements of some of them. I offer them simply as the stories they are, ones that are repeated often, widely circulated and widely believed. The evidence or absence of evidence for them is neither here nor there. It’s the stories as presented by those who want us to believe them that count:

The number of people with autism, children in particular, has expanded exponentially recently. We don’t fully understand why this should be but as we’ve found out more about autism, we’ve come to realise that far more people have the condition than was previously thought. In fact, we now recognise that everyone is on the autistic spectrum somewhere. What this means, for children in particular, is that extra provision needs to be made for them in school and additional money must be found to address their problems.

Except… Dame Uta Frith, the psychologist who first proposed that autistic traits were on a spectrum now says the attempts to diagnose and place every one on this spectrum somewhere is not what she intended. In fact, the overreach that has led to this represents a broadening of the definition of autism to the extent it has become meaningless. In consequence, those who do exhibit genuine artistic traits are overshadowed by those with traits well within the boundaries of normal and are often overlooked. This story, therefore, doesn’t stand up.

Unless we reverse or halt climate change, the planet, and life on it, is doomed. To achieve this the UK must go further and faster, eliminating all fossil fuel vehicles by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050. It doesn’t matter how much this will cost households, businesses and the UK economy: for the sake of the planet, Britain must be a world leader in this endeavour.

So many questions! (Some already addressed here.) Is climate change as calamitous as some scientists and unqualified commenters suggest? There are other scientists who think not. And what about those dates? Where did they come from? Were they chosen arbitrarily or is there good scientific evidence that if they are missed there will be no reversing climate change? Which leads to, ‘can climate change really be reversed? Can it even be halted?’ We might ask too how much the current, liberal bombing going on in practically every part of the world is accelerating climate change (and why doesn’t the media ask this question?) Does the UK’s importing of gas and oil from other parts of the world really reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? (No) How much gas and oil are involved in the making, functioning and maintenance of wind turbines? How much agricultural land will be lost when the planned 500,000 additional acres of countryside are given over to solar farms? How many animal habitats will be destroyed? Why must the UK, with its 0.8% contribution to carbon emissions, be a (or even the) World Leader in Net Zero? Does any other nation notice or care what the UK is doing? Do China, USA, India or Russia feel compelled to emulate the UK’s virtuous example? (No). Is Net Zero unachievable in any case?

More stories next time…

Showing Off

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We interrupt this blogcast to bring you breaking news of shenanigans in the wonderful, wacky world of religion.

There’s been a kerfuffle here these last few days after Muslims gathered in Trafalgar Square to engage in mass prayers (that’s mass as in ‘3,000 men‘, not Mass as in the cannibalistic ritual beloved of Catholics.) This was not well received by many in the capital with a number of politicians on the right questioning whether it was really the Good Thing the Muslim mayor of London (and number one Donald Trump fan), Sadiq Khan, thought it was. Sadiq is himself is a Muslim and was present at the pray-in, taking selfies with his admirer. One politician who thought this wasn’t kosher (am I confusing things here?) was Nigel Farage – Donald’s real number one fan – who suggested that if he were ever to become Prime Minister (there’s a chance), he would ban ‘performative public prayer’ of the sort witnessed in Trafalgar Square.

This seems to me not an unreasonable proposition given the Quran (Surah Ma’oon, 107:4-7) regards ostentatious public prayer gatherings as not quite the done thing:

So woe to those who pray yet are unmindful of their prayers; those who show off…

Naturally, Christians have waded into the controversy, wailing that should Muslims be stopped from enjoying prayer spectaculars, they too might be prevented from doing the same thing. Some fear carol singing and pushing their faith on others who have no interest whatever in hearing it might similarly be prohibited. Of course, banning public prayer would not, unfortunately, include carol singing or proselytising on account of the fact that neither of these two activities are prayer bonanzas in and of themselves.

The authors of the Bible also seemed to think that ‘performative prayer’ is a no-no. As Jesus’ script writers have him say in Matthew 6:5-6:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Let’s not forget that as well as being God incarnate for brainwashed Christians, JC is a prophet in Islam. Both Christians and Muslims are prepared, naturally, to ignore their holy books, their prophets even, when they take to the streets and squares of modern cities ‘to be seen by others’ as they debase themselves in front of imaginary gods. It’s not Nigel Farage who wants to forbid ostentatious public displays of piety. Jesus and Mohammed got there first.

As a post script, can I mention that as an atheist, I find these prayer pantomimes, by whichever brand of the deluded, to be both unnecessary and offensive?

No, I thought not.

True Stories (or perhaps not)

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Stories work best. We’re all susceptible to them. As Yuval Noah Harari demonstrates in Nexus, we absorb them far more readily than cold hard facts, evidence, statistics. A narrative means much more to us, which is why humans have told stories since we evolved the ability to speak and, later – much later – write.

The gospel authors knew this and dressed up their beliefs about their heavenly saviour as stories about a man who lived and died in Galilee a few decades earlier. As we know, these stories became popular, were repeated and reshaped down the years by the church, still drawing people in today. They are effective because they’re memorable: the Nativity, the temptation in the wilderness, the miracles, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion and resurrection are all well constructed narratives that draw on archetypes of human experience.

Within these stories, Jesus is made to tell his own: he, or more likely his writers, knew this was the best way to drive a point home. Even today, many people know at least the outline of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep. Only a few can repeat, far less explain, Paul’s convoluted theology from Romans. The gospels are effective because they, and the stories within them, are well put together, relatable and memorable. This does not, however, mean they’re true in any meaningful sense.

That’s the problem with stories. It’s difficult to know whether they’re true (as in factual), convey (universal) truths, contain some element of truth or are entirely untrue. What we need to do is search for any evidence that supports or refutes them. Very often we don’t. We accept them on the basis of their plausibility or on the authority of those telling them. Their pedigree plays a part too – as with ancient religious claims – as does the way they’re often accepted uncritically by other people. Our own predisposition to believe certain stories (but not others) is a factor too. Then there’s the way that constant repetition of stories endows them with the ‘illusion of truth’ or, as Nazi leaders put it, ‘repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.’ It’s a maxim still applied today.

Not many of us hunt down the evidence for ourselves, and sometimes there isn’t any to hunt down: did George Washington really chop down his father’s cherry tree and follow it with his ‘I cannot tell a lie’ shtick? Probably not, but there’s no way of knowing for sure – and surely millions of people who do believe it can’t all be wrong. Very often we are complicit in our own conditioning.

How about stories that circulate today? Next time I’d like to offer some examples. In the meantime if you have any suspect narratives we’re subject to, please let me know.

How some see others as brainwashed while they themselves are not

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You may have been informed yesterday that a new post was available. For some reason, WordPress may have briefly put next week’s post online while I was working on it. If so, please ignore it as it really needs to be read after this week’s post. As we’ve recently been reminded, context is all! Here’s the correct post for today:

Apparently, I’m anti-intellectual and a fascist. This was revealed to me when I became involved in a discussion on Facebook about a highly suspect report claiming less well educated people were more likely to vote for right-wing parties. This, the Facebook ‘experts’ scoffed, was because less well educated people were brainwashed and indoctrinated. My mistake was in suggesting that better educated people were just as likely to be indoctrinated as their less well educated counterparts. Perhaps higher education institutions, inclined to the left, might influence the views those attending them to the extent that they too are conditioned. Hence, the accusation I’m anti-intellectual and a fascist*.

This happy experience got me to thinking about the extent to which we’re all indoctrinated/ conditioned/brainwashed.

Like many of you reading this, I was brainwashed as a Christian. I swallowed whole the story I was told: that I was a sinner in need of salvation because my sin alienated me from God. Jesus had to give his life so that I might be reconciled to God. I had to accept Jesus into my life. I would then live forever, going to heaven after I died to be with God, Jesus and the angels. You know this story. And a story it is. As Yuval Noah Harari shows in his book Nexus we – all of us not just the less well educated – are more susceptible to investing in a story than in cold hard facts or evidence (not that there is any evidence for this Christian narrative, as with so many of the others we’re subject to.)

Then there were too all those optional additions to the Jesus story that weren’t optional at all: God would meet my needs if I prayed in earnest, read His Word (always with the capitals), met with fellow-believers and listened to the prompting of God’s Holy Spirit inside me. (Deep breath.) Also If I shared my faith with others (‘witnessed’), grew in my walk with him (a mixed metaphor, surely?) and regularly gave money to the work of the church, then I’d be a True Christian™. You and I could not be reasoned out of any of this, because we weren’t reasoned into it in the first place.

The indoctrination was reinforced on an ongoing basis, which is why we were constantly told that we must ‘fellowship’ with those who had been similarly brainwashed. We were told we must also reject and separate ourselves from the thinking and values of non-believers (‘the world’) because they might be a threat to what we were being taught, causing us to backslide and out of the Truth (a feature of every cult.)

There came a point for some of us, however, when a small chink appeared in our armour of God conditioning: an unanswered question about something we’d been told that seemed, well… a little off; an unconvincing attempt to reconcile faith with an aspect of science; the realisation in a crisis that God wasn’t there at all.

It was this latter for me, and as I’ve said before, I began to read books I hoped would throw some light on what I’d believed for so many years. Did these books condition me in ways contrary to those I had escaped from? Yes, probably. But I didn’t subscribe to their stories unquestioningly. I weighed arguments and evidence, taking some on board, putting some aside and creating a synthesis of views as diverse as Carrier’s (Jesus was probably mythical) and Ehrman’s (Jesus existed but was mythologised by early converts.)

I’m quite prepared to accept that this too was a form of conditioning, my selection and rejection of arguments and evidence being determined by my being predisposed to find some persuasive and others not. This predisposition was of course part of earlier conditioning to which I had already been subject, the result of my liberal education that taught me to be impressed by sound argument and evidence. We can’t invest in a position, idea or even propaganda without previous conditioning predisposing us to. Our politics, religious beliefs, rejection of religious beliefs, perspective on life and morality are not genetic. We do not arrive equipped with them, rather we learn them from our environment, our parents, our education, influential people in our early lives, the media, our reading, our culture, the zeitgeist, the groupthink we’re subjected to and the bubble in which we find ourselves. In short, the views we’re exposed to, which is why most of us in the West are not communist or Muslim. Even rebelling against familial or societal values is a form of conditioning, replacing the views and values of our parents or school with others from, for example, a subculture or political cause.

We are never in a position to exercise ‘free will’. We can only make decisions about that which confronts us in the present, with whatever we have internalised in the past. I don’t think there’s ever been a truly original thought in the history of humankind because each thought depends on that which has gone before, both in our own heads and in the heads of others. Your position on any issue, your opinions, views, religious/anti-religious beliefs politics are all the result of conditioning, as selective as that might have been as a result of your conditioned predispositions.

Where does that leave us? Not as ‘free thinkers’ (your free thinking will conform fairly closely with that of other ‘free thinkers’) nor as entirely open-minded (your previous conditioning and the predispositions it led to have taken care of that.) It will, in all likelihood leave you exposed – even though you may regard yourself to be immune – to whatever political and social propaganda is circulating in your particular culture. We’ll take a look at this next time – if you’re predisposed to.

*For the record, I have not so far voted for a right wing party in all of my 70 years. I get my news from a variety of outlets, some left wing, some right. I spent all of my working life in Education, the latter part as an academic; anti-intellectual I am not, though I have little time for those who flaunt their credentials and use them to cudgel others.

The Prophet’s Return

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He’s back! After all this time, Jesus has returned! He came through the clouds the other day to judge us and save us from our sin and ignorance!

Oh wait… it’s not Jesus. It’s Don. Yes, Don’s back, eager to rescue us from ourselves. That’s almost as good as JC making a long overdue appearance, don’t you agree?

Let’s see what the sage has to say this time. He commented on three posts: Racism? What Would Jesus Do?, Conversion Porn and Falling By The Wayside. I’m not going to address his comment on Falling By The Wayside as it’s merely a plug for his own blog, something I’ve previously asked him not to do. His other two comments are below. All typos, leaps of logic and condescension are in the originals.

First his response to Racism? What Would Jesus Do?:

A alwaysNeil, you display a particularly poor knowledge of he N.T. and a surprisingly poor ability to read a text given you are a literature guy. You should know, though perhaps it was not part of the curriculum, that any chunk in a text is connected to all the rest and should be read with that in mind. And you should know that there is a cultural and historical context to every piece of writing. You wouldn’t read Tale of Two Cities without considering those, right? Why read Matthew in bits and pieces, then?

Thanks Don, I do know how to read a book, but like you I focus on a particular section when constructing a blog post. Just like preachers do when preaching, just like the set readings do in the liturgy, just like Christian bloggers do. Just like you do, in fact. You do exactly this in the post for which you sent the link. Why do you do that? Don’t you know how to read a book?

All the same, I do set what I say in Racism? What Would Jesus Do? in context: the milieu in which Jesus and his scriptwriters existed. For example, I say, ‘Many of Jesus’ admonishments were written by cultists anticipating the end of the age for members of their own group; they were all too happy to lash out at those who weren’t part of it.’ We know this from the way NT writers address dissidents (‘anti-Christs’), Jews (‘children of the devil’ etc) and those they saw as opponents (‘evil-doers’, ‘dogs’). I also referenced the racism Jesus exhibits in the other gospels. Did you miss this? Do you not know how to read?

Your ‘argument’ is actually nothing but that old chestnut, ‘you took it out of context’. So tell me, Don, what would Jesus’ unpleasantness look like if it were in context as you might define it? Of course you don’t actually tell us how you define it: are you talking about the surrounding verses? The chapter? The whole gospel? The entire New Testament? The Bible from beginning to end? Would Jesus’ behaviour be any more justifiable in these ‘contexts’? Would you be able to excuse it more easily? Do tell us how a wider context would change what Jesus says.

Next, Don passes judgement on Conversion Porn:

Greetings Neil. It jewels to me from your tone, you have reached the bottom of the barrel. So let me give you some more conversion porn.

Richared Bransford, Air Force surgeon who after his toru went to Africa with African Island Mission and spent 30+ years building hospitals and medical clinics and training African medical personnel across east africa. And worked himself in surgery where I visited him in the early 90s. He didn’t write a book or get rich.

Corrie ten Boom. prisoner of the Nazis who lived (her family did not) to tell about how God changed her to love her captors and went on to tell how God made her a new person through her painful imprisonment. Yes, she wrote a book. The Hiding Place.

Harriet Tubman, a slave, who escaped and helped many, many of her fellow negro slaves find freedom. She did not write a book or get rich, though many books have been written about her and a movie was made more recently.

Eric Liddell, olympic runner and missionary to China where he served the poor and where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. Poor I might add. He wrote no books and made no movies, though there have been those made about him.

These are some of the well-known followers of Jesus. Add to them many thousands who worked in rescue missions for nothing, who served as nurses, as my wife did, with no recognition, who fought slavery, who went to India, as my daughter did, to create homes for rescued traffic girls, who build homes for homeless people, as I have done, at their own cost. No one will ever know of them.

What about them, Neil? They believed the “conversion porn” and made a difference in the world.

Don, most of these examples are the same ones trotted out 55 years ago when I was a young Christian. No doubt these individuals did remarkable things, and ‘Richared’ Bransford too. But they’re a select few out of the millions of Christian converts in the hundred years since Eric Lidell. What about all those others? What did they all do? And what about the non-Christians who achieved as much?: Oskar Schindler, Nicholas Winton, Chiune Sugihara, Malala Yousafzai, Chen Shu-chu, Lou Xiaoying (look them up). And, seeing as we’re including people known to us, the young atheist surgeon, the daughter of a friend of mine, who has spent years now in African hospitals working for nothing, despite being diagnosed with cancer herself (now recovered, thanks to medical science, not Jesus).

You see, Don, you’ve selected half a dozen remarkable individuals out of millions without considering the context. Statistically, your examples are insignificant. Maybe most of them didn’t make money from writing books or otherwise cashing in on their service but as I noted in the post, there are certainly those who do. We all know of the many preachers and evangelist who are multi-millionaires. You’ll no doubt say these are not True Christians™, so should be disregarded. Except… they can’t be; they are Christians and they’ve done very well off the back of it. Conversion porn, indeed.

Don, if you’re back to commenting, bear in mind that you won’t get off as lightly this time as you did a couple of years back. I’m not going to put up with your sly ad hominem remarks, your limited, narrow perspective of the Bible, your evasiveness and condescension and your shoddy promotion of Jesus. Comment at your peril.

We Will Judge Angels

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The guy in this video has had his mind bent by Paul’s crazy assertion in 1 Corinthians 6:3 that Believers will judge the angels at the Final Judgement.

This is pretty mind bending, I think you’ll agree, not to mention totally insane. The video incidentally turned up in my Facebook feed; I didn’t go looking for it. I’m not that masochistic. My Facebook is back to being inundated with posts and videos from evangelicals. That algorithm certainly needs attention. Just because I write about Jesus doesn’t mean I want to receive wacky posts about him from Christians.

Anyway, Mr Mind-Bent (I can’t track down his name) got me thinking what this judging will be like. For a start, and despite the video’s claim, Paul doesn’t specify that the judgement will be part of the Final Judgement. This is what he actually says:

…do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! (1 Corinthians 6:2-3)

My God, the Lord’s people will not only judge angels: they’ll judge the world too. We’re really in trouble if God is going to hand the job over to some of the most unstable people in existence. They are also, as the video claims, going to be unleashed on the angels. You might wonder, as I did, what the angels might need to be judged about. The Masked Singer maybe, or which of them farted in the elevator? It could be the Lord’s people will be required to sit in judgement on the Bad Angels: Satan and his minions who rebelled against God back at the beginning of time. Paul doesn’t specify, though elsewhere in the infallible, never-contradictory scriptures, the devil has already been judged (John 16:11) and his fate sealed (Revelation 20:10).

Why in any case would beings who can never sin merit judgement? Sin doesn’t exist in heaven. The presence of God makes it impossible, which doesn’t account for how Satan and his mob managed it. I’m sure there’s a Bible verse somewhere that gets round it some way or other.

Of course none of this judging of the world and angels is ever going to happen. Angels, God, Heaven: none of them exist. Our man in the video has had his mind bent for nothing. While he admits he doesn’t fully understand Paul’s claim, nevertheless he believes it. He has faith in it, he preaches it (‘preach it brother, preach it!’) and wants other people to believe it. He’d be better thinking it through then he’d realise – maybe just maybe – that the Bible is full of crap.

Falling By The Wayside

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Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity was short lived. Those who trumpeted his being ‘saved by the blood if the lamb’* in 1979 were strangely silent about his leaving the faith in 1982.

Didn’t Jesus say this sort of thing would happen? Sure he did. In Mark 4:1-20 he warns that not everyone who heard ‘the word’ about the coming of the Kingdom of God would take it to heart. He dressed it up as a story about a sower who scattered seed willy-nilly so that most of it was wasted. Some fell by the wayside, some in shallow soil, some the birds carried away. Only a fraction of the message took hold, and those who in whom it did endured.

It’s as if Jesus knew in advance that many of those who heard his message once he’d gone would lack the resolve to persist in ’the way’. Or did he? Isn’t it more likely that by the time Mark wrote his gospel, 40 years after the cult had got underway, there were may who’d given up on the idea that the Messiah was soon going to come through the clouds to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on Earth. They had abandoned such a ridiculous notion and had left the cult behind.

How then to explain such a destabilising and unexpected course of events? Wouldn’t the Saviour have known this would happen? Of course. And so the parable of the Sower was invented to ensure it looked that way.

The writers of the fourth gospel try a different tack by having Jesus pray for unity (John 17:20-23) which of course they wouldn’t have had to do if there wasn’t already disunity. We know there was division in the early church because Paul and the authors of Hebrews and 1 John (2:!9) write about it. Hence the sticking-plaster solutions to the problem in the gospels – the parable of the Sower and Jesus’ unity prayer. It surely couldn’t be ‘the word’ itself that was the problem. No, it had to be the shallowness and flightiness of those who heard it. Or maybe, as Paul suggests, it was simply that God hadn’t chosen them, back at the dawn of time, to be part of his glee club. They were deluded if they thought so. Nevertheless, they needed a means of letting God and Jesus off the hook.

Bob Dylan and those like him in the centuries that followed didn’t stand a chance with this kind of reverse-engineered thinking. 

*Dylan’s own words in his song ‘Saved’ (1980)

Racism? What Would Jesus Do?

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The Church Of England recently issued guidelines to its London clergy advising them to preach anti-racist sermons and suggesting how they might go about it. Asked about it on UK TV, the reverend Sam Norton said he was worried that expressing concerns about the number of migrants entering this small island, many of them illegally, might unreasonably be construed as racist. He argued that it is not; I agree. The reverend was at pains to emphasise that racism was abhorrent (again, I agree) and was not something Jesus would condone.

So, again, Jesus gets a free pass. As he’s portrayed in the four gospels, Jesus is racist. Or, rather, the men who made up his script, the early cult members now known as Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, were. They were racist about those who were not part of the new movement, particularly towards those who were hostile towards it. Granted the gospel creators had Jesus say some pretty good things too: love your neighbour as yourself, love and pray for your enemies, the parable of the good Samaritan; all wildly impractical and widely ignored by Christians everywhere.

Many of Jesus’ admonishments were written by cultists anticipating the end of the age for members of their own group; they were all too happy to lash out at those who weren’t part of it. Hence, the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7:24–37 whom Jesus calls a ‘dog’, dogs being unclean in Judaism. This woman would have had a paler complexion than Jesus, who would not be the fair Caucasian he’s often portrayed as being. His name-calling is racist; it is only the woman’s pluckiness that persuades him to respond to her pleas.

The story is repeated in Matthew 15:21-28 where the woman is said specifically to be from Canaan, Jesus says explicitly that he ‘was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’. Earlier, in Matthew 10:5, he instructs his disciples not to take his supposed life-saving message to anyone other than his fellow Jews: ‘Do not go into the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans’. Matthew would, of course, have his version of Jesus exclude those who were not Jewish. Jesus’ racism here reflects Matthew’s community intent on preserving their Jewish heritage. Which makes the anti-Semitism Jesus is made to express in the fourth gospel all the more startling;

You (Jews) belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies… Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God [‘the right cult’?]

This is the racism of John 8:44, the rift between the new cult and Judaism having widened by the time the fourth gospel was written.

There are those online who argue that even though Jesus was God incarnate, his ‘human side’ and his upbringing in a prejudiced environment account for his narrow views of ethnicity.  This excuses his racism, they say, and shows how like us he really was. It doesn’t. It reflects the prejudices and racism of those who created the various versions of him. (Alternatively, online Christians argue, as here, that the pericope is invariably read ‘out of context’.) And, please, don’t get me started on the overt racism of Jesus ‘Holy Father’, the genocidal tyrant of the Old Testament.

The Bible as a whole is rife with blatant, divinely-inspired racism. Apart from this, I agree with the reverend Norton: having concerns about the scale of immigration is not racism. Just as criticism of Jesus is not blasphemy and censure of Muslim beliefs and practices is not Islamophobic.

Conversion Porn

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You’ll recall, I’m sure, all those stories you were told at church, youth group or summer camp about people, almost always the worst of sinners, who had wonderful, supernatural conversions. They turned from debauched lifestyles to Jesus, who set them on the right path and turned their lives around. I’m sure there were people who experienced something like this, but any overpowering emotional experience can produce similar results. Remember those high-profile conversions though? When Jewish Bob Dylan gave his life to Jesus and made gospel albums. My, how we rejoiced! Nicky Cruz of Run Baby Run fame, saved by Jesus from a life of knife crime. Doreen Irvine, one time prostitute, stripper, heroin addict and witch who turned to Jesus to find redemption, not to mention a best-selling book, From Witchcraft to Christ. Joni Eareckson who broke her neck diving into shallow water and, paralysed, called upon the Lord to help and restore her.

Boy, did we love these stories back in the early 1970s. I can’t remember how many times the church youth group was shown The Cross and the Switchblade, with Eric Estrada as Nicky Cruz and Pat Boone as David Wilkerson, the pastor who converted him. I know a dog-eared copy of From Witchcraft to Christ was passed round too and that we took a bus trip to see Doreen Irvine speak somewhere. Likewise Joni Eareckson’s and her best-seller. (I still have some admiration for Joni, who seems the most genuine of them all, despite making a living from her life-changing accident and subsequent conversion.)

Bob Dylan’s gospel albums? Not so much. Who wants to hear him torturing some less than sparkling songs about Jesus? Certainly not me, not now, not even then. Despite claiming he saw Jesus in a vision, Dylan’s love affair with JC was mercifully brief.

What I didn’t do at the time was ask questions of these stories, particularly whether they were really credible. It’s strange how all of their protagonists got best-sellers out of their miraculous conversions. How most hitched a ride on the Christian speaking circuit, not to mention the movies some of them had made of their stories. It seems a good living could be made from meeting Jesus. But credible? Not so much. Certainly Doreen Irvine’s story has been disputed and debunked. I should have asked too why Nicky Cruz and his gang were the only ones saved out of all of the knife gangs in New York in the 1960s. Was Jesus not interested in the others, nor their potential victims? What about their non-conversion stories? And Joni: why did she have to be paralysed for Jesus to get in touch? Was she really restored by him? Certainly not physically; she remains paraplegic to this day, still clinging to stories of how Jesus saved her. Does she not wonder why he didn’t act a few seconds earlier to prevent her terrible accident? (Apparently not: she ‘rationalises’ her accident as God discipline of her in order to bring her to himself. Nice God you got there, Joni).

I wish I had asked these questions back when I was a gullible teenager subject to the church’s propaganda, instead of lapping up the conversion porn they made sure came my way.

Replacement Post

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This is not the scheduled post. I’ve shelved that for the time being for fear of nasty repercussions. I don’t believe it was inflammatory; in fact, it was well researched and perfectly reasonable. However, as all theistic religions are barbaric at heart, with followers and supporters prepared to take radical action in defence of their particular man-made deity, I’m not prepared to take that risk just yet.

We live in turbulent times and religion is in the midst of it all, maniacally stirring the pot. It may well turn out to be the death of us all. Let us wait and see.