Author Archives: Neil

Things a Christian Wishes (Some) Atheists Would Stop Doing (And Saying)

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corey

On his blog recently, Doctor Benjamin Corey offered up a post called ‘S%#t I Wish (Some) Atheists Would Stop Doing (And Saying)’. I discovered it via the Friendly Atheist blog and naturally felt compelled to respond to Doctor Corey’s four bits of S%#t. The comment I posted on The Official Blog of Benjamin L. Corey is as follows:

S%#t 1: Please stop saying or insinuating that we’re a bunch of uneducated or unenlightened idiots.

Do atheists say or insinuate this? I’m not sure they do. I would suggest atheists find it difficult to understand why people of evident intelligence choose to believe propositions for which little or no evidence exists, that are rooted in myth and which, in reality, fail to deliver on their promise. It’s not that believers are necessarily unintelligent or idiots – clearly many are not – it’s that they are prepared to disengage their intelligence, critical faculties and rationality in order to believe all manner of spurious nonsense.

S%#t 2: Please stop insisting that we read our Bible like right-wing fundamentalists.

I’m surprised you offer this as something you wish atheists would stop ‘insisting’. First of course, atheists don’t insist that anyone read the Bible the same way as anyone else. We would prefer it if no-one read it at all. It is well past its sell-by date and has nothing to offer people living nearly two thousand years after its creation; it is after all a testimony to the failure of the beliefs that spawned it (the Son of Man ascending to the Earth to establish the Kingdom of God here).

Second, implicit in this demand is that there is an intelligent way to read the Bible and there’s the ‘ring-wing fundamentalist’ way. In fact, you don’t even insinuate that certain Christians are ‘ignorant’ and ‘unenlightened’ because of how they read the Bible, you say so explicitly when you talk, ungrammatically, about the ‘unenlightened, ignorant nonsense that fundamentalists do with the Bible.’

But at least fundamentalists regard the Bible as the Word of God (agreed they cherry-pick it and don’t behave according to it precepts) and claim it is ineffable and infallible. Perhaps, as you suggest, more enlightened Christians are free to interpret it in more liberal ways, dismissing that which is context-bound and so on. But then, where does that leave it? Is it authoritative or not? Does it speak directly to people or can it only ‘really’ be understood through the exegesis of scholars? If the latter, as you imply, then can it only be read and understood by those with above average intelligence? How does this square with Jesus’ insistence that his Kingdom was for those with child-like trust?

S%#t 3: Please stop referring to our belief system(s) as fairy tales.

Difficult this one. It depends whether myth and fairy tale are synonymous. Having taught English literature for many years at a university in the UK, I would argue they’re not. To the layman, however, they probably are in that both involve fantasy beings, implausible events, symbolic characters, sacrifice and enlightenment – just like religion really. So no, there is definitely a case here, Dr Corey, that if the cap fits… if your ‘belief-system’ walks, talks and smells like a myth (or fairy tale) then it probably is. You are stuck with atheists pointing this out to you, I’m afraid.

(By the way, your examples of Mickey Mouse and the Old Woman in the Shoe are not fairy tales. One is a commercial enterprise involving anthropomorphised animals and the other a nursery rhyme. I suggest you consult scholars who can explain to you what a fairy tale is, and the differences and similarities between it and myth.)

S%#t 4: Maybe lay off the whole, “religion hasn’t done any good for humanity” type of argument, because it’s obnoxiously untrue.

Reference for this quotation or did you just make it up? Sam Harris perhaps comes closest to saying this sort of thing – comes close but doesn’t actually say it. He says on balance that the good religion has done is outweighed by the evil perpetrated in its name. He doesn’t, though, say no good has come from religion. Sorry, Benjamin, but this is a straw man ‘argument’ you’re presenting here and is itself ‘obnoxiously untrue’.

Would we be better of without religion? Without the myth, the deadening of critical faculties and the adversarial nature of ideologies (even within Christianity)? Of course we would. Without precepts like ‘love your neighbor, love your enemies’? No, but then these are not exclusively religious. Far too many believers disregard them anyway.

 

To Hell and back

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jesusguitar2

The self-righteous have taken it upon themselves this week to indulge in a little rejoicing, and not a little bit more gloating, at the death of George Michael. They are particularly pleased that, in all likelihood, he has gone to Hell, what with him being gay and all. Because of his sexuality – and this is how their damaged minds work – some of these Christians have also decreed George must also have been a ‘paedophile’, a victim of AIDs and possessed by evil spirits. Incredibly, he still managed to fit in a singing career. He was, these true-believers say, an enemy of God and is now frying in Hell forever. Yippee!

Here’s how the Christ-like Steven Anderson puts it:

First of all, George Michael’s burning in Hell right now. He was a very wicked, God-hating sodomite reprobate, and he’s getting the punishment that he deserves right now… If you just look at the lyrics to one of his most famous songs, one of his biggest hits, you can just totally tell this is written by a paedophile… It’s clearly written by a sick pervert because that’s what these homosexuals are. They’re a bunch of paedophiles… Quit mourning the death of this filthy pervert. He’s rotting in Hell right now for being a God-hating homosexual reprobate.

George Michael was none of the things these Christians claim he was. His post-mortem was inconclusive, but even if he had died of an AIDs related illness it would not be a cause for celebration. He was not a paedophile nor demon-possessed, but Christians, having happily embraced today’s post-truth world, think it’s absolutely fine for them to say he was.

They see evil spirits and demons everywhere, particularly in people who don’t share their primitive views; homosexuality is caused by their malevolent presence, and so, apparently, are depression, eating disorders, insomnia, self-harming and sex before marriage. Little wonder, of course, when that first-century ignoramus they claim to follow regarded Satan’s little helpers as the source of sickness and disease (when it wasn’t sin itself that was doing it). It hardly matters there’s absolutely no evidence that such beings exist; Christians are more than happy to take on the demonisation of others themselves.

As for Hell itself, it isn’t real either, as I discuss here. George Michael isn’t there, nor is anyone else who’s died. But let’s humour all those fanatics gentle souls who have persuaded themselves that it does. What does the Bible say about it?

First, it doesn’t claim that individuals go to Hell after death. Rather, it sees Hell as a pit into which Satan and his minions will be thrown at the end of time (Revelation 20.10). No mention humans will go there with them. Instead, the whack-job who wrote Revelation suggests (20.7-9) that the unrighteous dead, once resurrected, will be consumed by the fire God is going to destroy the Earth with at the end of time. You might wonder why God would bother resurrecting bodies only to murder them again, but he’s God, and you know, mysterious ways and all that. Still, he doesn’t seem to have perpetual torment in mind, even so.

Second, Paul tells us that after they’ve died, the dead sleep until the final judgement (1 Thessalonians 4.15-17). So even if they are eventually to be consigned to Hell it certainly won’t be immediately after death. As the final judgement has yet to occur – and won’t ever – dead souls, including George’s, still slumber. (It’s possible of course that for the dead time ceases to exist and the period between death and judgement appears, from their perspective, instantaneous. But this is not what the Bible teaches. It’s not nearly as imaginative as that.)

Third, Jesus is made to imply (it’s all very vague) that those with whom he is displeased will, after death, simply be discarded – thrown on some sort of metaphorical rubbish tip (Matthew 23.33). In fact, he tells only one parable about the after-life (Luke 16.19-31) in which a resurrected rich man finds himself excluded from God’s presence Abraham’s bosom. Not, you’ll note, because he failed to accept Jesus as his personal saviour but because of his disregard for the poor. So, given his philanthropy, it doesn’t look as if George Michael will be spending his eternity in the Hell that Jesus imagined either.

All of those who threaten us with Hell, and who think George Michael is already there, don’t know, and probably don’t care, what God’s Word™ has to say about the place where they’d be happy to see the rest of us suffer everlasting torment. It hardly matters when it doesn’t exist, being a fantasy of primitive zealots, but it does make you wish those who delude themselves into thinking it does would shut the hell up about it. Yes, you Franklin, Stephen, Bob, Kim and Keith. You’re only showing yourselves up for the ignorant hypocrites you are.

 

The Virgin Birth: what really happened?

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mary2

Menachem Av: Month 2

I’ve missed twice. No pains or discharge now for two months. I thought the first time I was just late. I’ve not been having the uncleanness for long so it could have just been things not working like they should. That happens right? But then a second time. Not so good. And then I started to show. How as I going to explain it – to the family, the village and most of all to Yossef who they’ve decided I’m marrying?

It wasn’t him. We haven’t, you know, done anything. I’ve only met him a couple of times. He’s older of course, nearly twice my age. He seems nice enough, though it wouldn’t make any difference if he wasn’t. He’s going to be my husband. I’m going to be his wife. Or I am if I survive this.

So what am I going to say? Can’t tell them who it really was. Thaddaios, Shim’on the builder’s boy. Same age as me. We just got to messing about. I didn’t want to, knew it was wrong. Knew it would land us, specially me, in trouble one way or another. But I did want to do it too. It was nice. Nice being touched under my clothes. He was gentle and kind.

But then there was blood and mess. The blood was mine, the mess was his. I wasn’t expecting that – the blood, I mean. I was shocked. I touched it and cried. Touched myself after I’d touched him. That’s when it must’ve happened. Some of his mess found its way inside me, off my fingers, and that’s how the seed of his baby began to grow in me.

Technically, though, I’m still a virgin. I can tell Yossef that: ‘technically I’m still a virgin’, ’cause technically that’s true. Thaddaios never put his thing in me. I wouldn’t let him even though he wanted to, ’cause I know how important it is I’m a virgin on my wedding night. Yossef’s family could do bad things to me if they found out I wasn’t. But I am. Technically anyway.

So that’s the story. I’m a virgin but, you know, with child. Yeah, doesn’t make sense. Yossef’s going to have trouble believing it. I know I would. Maybe I can tell him the Lord had a hand in it somewhere. The Lord’s hand instead of my fingers! Maybe. He might go for that. His family’s very orthodox.

Ellul: Month 3

‘Come off it, Miriam,’ Yoseff said when I told him. ‘Who was it?’ But I stuck to my story. So he prayed about it and said the Lord told him he’d to stand by me, so he has done. He says that when it comes everyone’ll thinks it’s his and he’ll just let them. He’s not such a bad sort. It could be a lot worse. But, he says, it’d be best if we took off somewhere, away from all the questions, to hide my shame, he said, when I really begin to show So we’re trekking off to some God-forsaken part of the country where he has relatives or something.

Nissan: Month 9

So that’s how we ended up here, in one room where the animals come in at night. It could’ve been worse, I suppose. His aunt or whoever she is delivered it. The baby that is. It went okay, if you think having your body just about ripped in two is okay. The baby was fine though and I’m recovering. After, his aunt held it up; a bloody mess, arms outstretched. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it won’t change the world, but you have a fine healthy baby.’ I might’ve smiled then. She cleaned it up and wrapped it in the swaddling. I looked and thought, maybe it’s not too bad.

Yoseff came in and peered at it.

‘So,’ he said, as if he was interested, ‘what you going to call her?’

 

God’s Wrath (and those who direct it)

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typhoon-phillipines

The idea that natural disasters and death are punishments from God – for whatever we humans have done to offend him – is still with us. As I suggested here, such a notion has been around from the beginnings of religious belief. It, together with its counterpart – that we need to appease the god(s) who so afflict us – is responsible for the genesis of all religion. There are those today whose thinking is wilfully stranded in the ancient world-views of ‘sacred’ texts that embody this dual notion of punishment that’s somehow merited and the need to appease the deity dishing out the punishment.

Here it is expressed recently by bear of little brain, Sam Rohrer, who has it directly from the Lord that he, the Almighty, has turned his back on America because it does not force immigrants to believe in him. America, he says has

changed the historic biblical rules (regarding immigration) … this is a reason why God must discipline our country.

Looney tune Pat Robertson, with his direct hotline to the Almighty, insists that it’s abortion that’s going to bring down God’s wrath:

One day, a righteous, holy God is going to demand an accounting for every drop of blood that has been spilled of innocent, unborn babies. And we just keep it in mind, when it happens it’s going to be awful.

Andrew Bieszad, on the other hand, knows that Hurricane Matthew which struck Florida back in August was God punishing the State for its tolerance of ‘evil sodomites’ (you don’t get much more tolerant than that.):

Stop sinning, especially with sodomy, as it is one of the four sins in the Bible which cry out to God for vengeance, which we are seeing now.

And these are just a few examples. There are many more. According to his whack-job servants, God can punish us, entirely indiscriminately, by unleashing earthquakes, tsunamis and floods; he can turn his back on us so that we wallow in our own filth; he can show his distaste for our ‘sin’ by raining down death and destruction upon us.

Naturally there’s plenty of this kind of thinking in the Old Testament, where God is credited with drowning his entire creation when a few ancient tribesmen misbehave (Genesis 6); he’s made to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah after every male turns inexplicably violent-gay (Genesis 19) and he’s said to wipe out whole swathes of his chosen people because they don’t pay him enough attention (Exodus 32.28).

None of these things happened, of course. They’re stories, myths or legends that incorporate the primitive thinking of the pre-scientific people who devised them, people who could only explain violent events in terms of divine punishment. It is this same thinking that is perpetuated today by those whose development is similarly arrested: through exposure to these same stories, an unwillingness to think rationally, an unhealthy preoccupation with God-nonsense and an overweening sense of self-righteousness (‘don’t blame us; it’s those others that attract God’s wrath.’)

There is no correlation between the disasters that befall humankind and God. Not one of the self-appointed prophets who say there is offer a single scrap of evidence that they are inflicted by a deity. Not one of their cause-and-effect assertions has ever been tested, can ever be tested. And – the clincher – there is no God anyway. All of which renders appeasement unnecessary and is good enough reason not to believe a word from these misguided charlatans.

When the Salt of the Earth loses its flavour*

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linda-harvey

Embittered fanatic Linda Harvey (above) has it from the Lord that gay people are unnecessary. And even if there are those around who’ve ‘chosen’ this ‘lifestyle’, there’s absolutely no need for them to be having -yuk – sex together:

… as most well-informed Americans know (read: ‘as people who share my prejudices would agree’), no person is born “gay,” so this conduct is completely unnecessary… No male ever needs to engage in anal sex with another male, and we need to stop accommodating homosexual behavior and “gay” identity…”

How right you are, Linda, and I’m sure we can all look forward soon to reading about how how women of a certain age who don’t keep quiet like they’re supposed to (1 Timothy 2.12) are completely unnecessary too. And how there’s absolutely no need for them to wear make-up and jewellery or obsess about other people’s sex lives (Linda talks about little else). Equally, no-one needs to admire art, read a book or listen to music; survival doesn’t depend on these things so they are, by definition, ‘unnecessary’. Likewise driving, watching TV, drinking anything but water, celebrating Christmas. Since when does necessity determine what people can and can’t do? And who decides what’s necessary, anyway? Certainly not cranks like Linda.

Her Lord and Saviour had a go it’s true; nothing was necessary, he said, that didn’t advance the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6.33 etc). That’s the Kingdom he was sure was going to materialise some time in the first century (Matt 16.27-28; Luke 21.27-28, 33-34 etc) As for those activities he did think were necessary – selling your possessions, helping the poor, giving to all who ask, loving your enemy, not judging others – he was evidently wrong about, which is why Christians have long since abandoned them.

Which should make us ask: are Christians really necessary? Isn’t it long past time we stopped accommodating their misguided behaviour and their “holier than thou” identities?

* Matthew 5.13: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

How It Works: God

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Let’s see. If there’s a God – and how could there not be? – he’d have to be perfect. And powerful and really, really good. Not like all those pagan Gods who are just a bit too much like us. No, the most bestest God of all would have to be big and powerful, and good and perfect. I mean, why bother otherwise?

Oh, oh… first problem. If he’s good and perfect, how to explain us and the fact life can be pretty crap and not good or perfect at all? That can’t be his fault, can it? He’s perfect, so he couldn’t possibly make something that isn’t. Soooo… only logical conclusion – the crap must be our fault. Something we do, or maybe something we are. Yes, that’s what it must be (plus we get to bump up our part.)

And shit happens. Tsunamis, earthquakes, the crops fail, the rains don’t come. Life can be tough and seem pointless. It’s all depressing, then we die. It can feel like we’re being punished. Wait! Maybe we are being punished! For things we’ve done, or for what we are. That would fit wouldn’t it? A good and perfect God would surely want to punish us, with death and destruction and stuff. So that’s what these things must be!

Let’s get all this written down, that this is how things are. This good and perfect God finds us offensive and that’s why life is so shit. Except, except… surely God’s a reasonable bloke at heart and can be appeased? We could wheedle our way back into his good books and then life wouldn’t be quite so bad. Not sure how, though. Maybe sending him presents would do the trick, though how to get them to him when we can’t see him or anything…

I know! Let’s eviscerate some animals and then burn them and that way, he’ll be able to smell our efforts up where he lives, in the sky. That’s bound to work. And to be doubly sure, let’s mutilate our genitals and keep our women subjugated – because he can’t fail to like that.

Or maybe not. Maybe life will still be shit and we’ll still be shit. Maybe we need something more… imaginative. So let’s pretend that this God of ours puts together a rescue package. And what this means is he zaps us with some magic that obliterates the bits of us he can’t stand, which is pretty much all of it. And – here’s the good bit – we get to keep some of the eviscerating and sacrifice stuff.

Let’s get that written down too. And, and… maybe we can have it that this God is really going to rescue us and make everything not shit any more. He’s going to shake things up down here… no, no, wait – better than that, we’re going to go and live with him in the sky once we die, which gets rid of how shit death really is, and we’ll all live happily ever after, those of us he’s zapped anyway. Everyone else he can torture and burn forever! Yes that’s it! That’s how it’s got to be. God can still be good and perfect, even though he murders just about everyone, and some of us will get to be good and perfect too, and all the crap will just disappear, as if by magic.

That’s it. That’s how it really is. I can see it all now.

Oops. Gotta go. Time for my medication.

straitjacket

Prophets At A Loss

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prophets

God’s prophets; holy men who are God’s confidantes, his mouthpiece on Earth. They know how he thinks, what his plans are, what pleases him, what annoys him, what he intends doing in the future. They’re the first to know all of these things because they’re so much in touch with him, he speaks to them personally.

That’s how Jim Bakker knows God plans to punish those counties in the States that voted for Hillary Clinton. God simply can’t stand her, you see, and is going to vent his anger at those who thought she’d make a better president than his anointed one, the Donald.

It’s how Cindy Jacobs knew in 2015 that Civil War and Christian persecution were coming to America, how Michelle Bachmann knew Obama would start World War III, how William Tapley (‘the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse’, don’t you know) sees the signs of the End Times™ everywhere, and how John McTernan can tell us that natural disasters are the result of America’s lack of support for Israel.

These men and women (who evidently don’t know they’re supposed to keep quiet [1 Timothy 2:12] ), are also proficient, or so they’d have us believe, at interpreting the signs of the times. They know when events are actually God meting out punishment (usually) or trampling over someone’s much vaunted free-will to ensure his purposes are met. Hence, their conviction that natural disasters are divine tantrums, caused by a growing acceptance of LGBT people, or abortion, or some other damn thing they don’t care for much. And they know for sure that Trump’s election was because God wanted him to be the next president, because the Almighty told them so himself.

There are others, however, who think these fellow-Christians have got it all wrong. God has no need of prophets today (Luke 16.16). He used them only in more primitive times when people were more credulous and superstitious – Bible times, in fact. The only way of knowing what God is up to these days, these prophecy-denying Christians say, is to read and interpret his Holy Word.™

If only it wasn’t filled with the same sort ramblings as those of the current crop of fantasists, the only difference between today’s and yesterday’s prophets being that the earlier nutjobs were lucky enough to have their words preserved – by those with a need to believe and the self-interested – in the supposedly ‘ineffable’ Bible. Their prophecies are no more accurate and have no more bearing on reality than the messages of Bakker, Jacobs, Tapley, McTernan and the like claim to receive from God today. They’re of the same lunatic level, offering the same sort of vacuous bullshit.

How do we know? Because of the Bible’s prophecies written before the events they purport to predict, none has come to pass. This includes Jesus’ prophecy that the Son of Man would soon appear in the sky with the heavenly host to usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth (Matt 16.27-28; Matt 24:27-31. Including his and Paul’s predictions of an imminent judgement (Matthew 7.22 & 25:36-40; 1 Corinthians 4.5); Paul’s promise of a rapture (1 Corinthians 15.51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17); John’s prophecy of the armies of heaven defeating the Whore of Babylon (the Romans) and Jesus being put in charge instead (Revelation 17.8-14 & 20.11-15). These prophets were certain these events were going to happen soon, within, as the text spells out, the lifetimes of their listeners and readers. They didn’t and they’re not going to happen now either, two thousand years after their sell-by date. They’re not going to happen at all.

They are fantasies, every one of them. As are the messages supplied by the self-appointed prophets of our day. Fraudulent twaddle from charlatans with a pathological need to have their delusions taken seriously; these men and women of God can no more divine the future than you or I. True, once in a while events in the real world might bear some coincidental resemblance to one of their predictions, but that is all it is – coincidence. As the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump have reminded us, we can’t ever see the future with any degree of certainty. Soothsayers, fortune-tellers and Prophets of God who tell us we can – tell us they can – are liars and deceivers. And we know, don’t we, what the Bible says should be done about them (Deuteronomy 13.5).

Picture: Artist’s impression of JC, archetypal false prophet (as if there’s any other sort); Jim Bakker, crook and adulterer; Cindy Jacobs (loose screw not shown) and William Tapley, Looney Tune of the Apocalypse.

God sends New Savior!

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jesuscity

Well, Stateside Christians, you got your man. Donald Trump will be president come January and you’re largely responsible for that. 81% of you voted for him. By my reckoning that’s about 50% of his total vote; he couldn’t have done it without you. Now he’s going to be your nation’s savior. He’s going to make America great again. He’ll return the nation to Christian values and morals. He’ll honour God and bring him back into the public arena, just like you want him to.

Or will he? How do you get God-fearing Savior from a petulant, misogynistic individual who has repeatedly shown himself to be racist, sexist, xenophobic, divisive, adulterous, abusive, ignorant, vitriolic, dishonest and avaricious; a man who denies climate change, is full of his importance (and nothing else), who makes promises he can’t keep and probably had no intention of keeping even as he made them. A man who couldn’t name a single verse in his ‘favourite book’, the Bible; who admits he’s never asked God for forgiveness and who has shown no sign of any kind of Christian humility, compassion or morality; a man who is even now appointing the most reactionary, right-wing extremists to his transitional team (so much for draining the swamp!) How can this man be the one who is going to restore America to a glorious Christian past it never really had, and make it a truly God-fearing nation once again?

Someone with these ‘qualities’ cannot possibly turn America into the promised land, even though you’ve convinced yourselves he’s another King Cyrus, the heathen king in the Old Testament who helped God’s people in their time of need. Trump is no Cyrus, even if he is the 45th president and Cyrus’s story is told in Isaiah 45 (yes, some of you think this is significant). You have been duped, again, American believers. But it is not Trump who has deluded you; it is you yourselves. You have persuaded yourselves that despite all of the evidence, Trump is man who can be greatly used by God.

There was no divine guidance behind Trump’s campaign and God won’t be manipulating him into doing his bidding once he takes office. This is because, primarily, there is no God to do any these things, but even if there were, why would he? Why would he ensure a man whose values are the direct antithesis of all (you say) he stands for, became the leader of the free world? Why would he be interested in making a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that is Donald Trump? Wouldn’t your God of Reason start with someone who is already one of his own? Someone who is genuinely a Christian; someone, say, who has tacky pictures of himself and Jesus hanging in his house? Or an evangelical – let’s call him Mike Pence – who comes pre-packaged with genuine, and genuinely vicious, Christian faith and a necessary anti-abortion, anti-gay agenda?

It’s you and you alone, Christians, who have turned Trump into a Savior. It is you who have created the silk purse. You’ve ignored what has been in front of you throughout the presidential campaign and have projected on to an individual who has done nothing but tell you what you wanted to hear, a spiritual significance he does not have. You have made of Trump an artificial Man of God, just like your predecessors did two thousand years ago with that other imposter, Yeshua Bar Joseph. Like them, you’re going to find out that the man you’ve elevated to savior status is anything but, because the Donald Trump you’ve elected is a construct of your collective imaginations. You’re about to discover that the real Donald Trump is not the man you’ve deluded yourselves into thinking he is.

I Know What It’s Like To Be Dead

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lazarus

And you do too.

We experienced what it was like last night and, you know, it really wasn’t too bad.

We entered, at some point, a deep, dreamless sleep (we dream for only a quarter of the time we’re asleep and even then often can’t remember what we’ve dreamt about) and the rest of the time we were, as far as subjective experience was concerned, dead to the world. During that deep sleep, our conscious mind was completely switched off; we did not experience anything while we were in this state and as far as awareness is concerned, we did not exist. And when we woke this morning we were none the worse for our period of non-existence. We booted up reasonably satisfactorily and the memories we had yesterday, before our deep sleep, were restored and the entity we call our self began to interact with the day.

This period of deep sleep, this unconscious oblivion, is precisely what it is like to be dead. Of course, in death we switch off permanently; there’s with no reboot afterwards, either in our beds, our graves or in heaven. The oblivion that is death is permanent. But, and this is my point, being dead is no more painful or unendurable, and no more to be feared, than the deep sleep you had last night and that you will enjoy tonight. We might not much like the idea that once we fall into the ultimate sleep there will be no waking up, but that is only a concern, if it’s a concern at all, of the living. I guarantee that it does not cross the minds of those who are already dead. They have no minds, the same as you didn’t last night, for it to cross.

Being dead, to paraphrase Mark Twain, does not trouble us at all. Its prospect, while we remain on this side of it, should encourage us to enjoy life and live it to the full. It shouldn’t cause us to worry about being dead, because there’s nothing we can do about it and, in any case, it’s no worse than being in deep sleep. Nor should we be concerned about whether we’ve subscribed to the right incantation, appeased the right God in the right way or lived a good enough life, in order to avoid death. There’s no avoiding death and the promises of religions that we can if only we believe the right magic, are utterly false. Understandable perhaps, but false.

Oh death, where is thy sting, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.55. Well, death still has its sting. It has it in its inevitability – every organic creature, of which we are one, must die – and it has it, depending on your perspective, in our individual obliteration. (Though, frankly, why anyone should think their own personal bundle of thoughts, impulses and prejudices merits everlasting existence is a mystery). Most significantly, however, it has it in the dying process, which for many of us can be debilitating and painful. This is the way of it for all of us, including those who believe religions’ false promises. They are not spared the suffering, even though modern medicine can help alleviate much of it. Christians, Muslims and Hindus, despite their belief that a deity smiles benevolently upon them, are not guaranteed a comfortable passage from this life to non-existence.

Death is the great leveller; we all experience dying in much the same way and we none of us experience anything after it. One of these – maybe both if we’re lucky – isn’t too bad. Just like deep sleep in fact.

Until then, we should make the most of life while we still have it.

Sleep well.

 

Rejecting Jesus the Christian way

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I’m sometimes taken to task for pointing out that Christians don’t make much effort to live as their saviour says they should. The title of my first book, Why Christians Don’t Do What Jesus Tells Them To …And What They Believe Instead sums it up. Since the very beginning, believers have replaced the radical commands attributed to Jesus with mythology, mysticism and magic formulae, none of which he’d recognise and all of which are far less demanding than going the extra mile, turning the other cheek and loving enemies. So today, when confronted with what Jesus says is expected of his followers, believers are inclined to say, ‘what right have you to tell us how we should be living?’ to which the answer is, ‘it’s not I, nor any other commentator, who tells you how to live; it is your Lord and Saviour. All we do – all I do – is remind you of what that is.’

Christians don’t like this, primarily because they don’t like what Jesus commands – it’s too exacting, too radical, too impractical – and they want to go on disregarding it. It’s damned annoying being reminded of it and being challenged on how far they are from complying with it.

Have those of us who point out Christians’ failings any right to do so? Well, of course. Christians spend their time judging, castigating and condemning others and as Jesus himself points out, judging others leads to being judged in return (Matthew 7.1-5). He sees this as something of a natural consequence, a yin for a yang. But ‘judge not that ye be not judged’ is another of his commands his followers like to ignore. Even so, if Christians are going to insist on pointing out the speck in others’ eyes, they must expect others will have something to say about the plank in theirs. That’s the way it works – Jesus says so.

So, Christians, if you don’t like me and others challenging you on how far you fall short of your Lord’s expectations maybe you need to lay off atheists, LGBT people, those you consider to be sinners, those of other faiths and even fellow Christians you think haven’t got the right theology. Put your own house in order first and then maybe we’ll listen to you (or maybe not). But don’t say we’ve no right to look at how far you measure up to Jesus’ standards. We’ve every right to ask whether the so-called Salt of the Earth (Matthew 5.13) has any of its flavour left.