Category Archives: Christian extremists

If not Metaphor, then what?

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I’ve been arguing that everything in Mark’s gospel is metaphor (because he says so) but there are some pronouncements credited to Jesus in the synoptic that do seem to read as if they’re not. These look as if they are meant to be taken at face value: 

Mark 9:1 And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.”

Mark 10:21. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

Matthew 5:39. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

Matthew 5:40. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

Matthew 5: 43-44. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,

Matthew 6:24. No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Matthew 6.25. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?

Matthew 7:6. Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Luke 6:30. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.

Luke 14:26 If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple.

Perversely, these are the very commands that most Christians insist are intended metaphorically. This includes those who oppose the idea that, Jesus’ parables excepted, the gospels are in any way symbolic. I know from experience that they have any number of unconvincing arguments of why Jesus doesn’t really mean what he is made to say. For example: ‘these pronouncements are too severe and impractical to be taken literally’; ‘the verses are being taken out of context’, and ‘they have a deeper spiritual meaning’ (oops – that’d be metaphor, wouldn’t it?). Ask these same folk if the statements are therefore metaphorical and you can expect to be met with barrage of abuse.

If they’re not metaphorical, why do we not find Christians striving to live according to them: renouncing wealth, giving to all who ask, selling all they have, resisting no-one, judging no-one, hating family, becoming a slave and having no care for their own welfare for the sake of the kingdom that Jesus promised was imminent.

Because they don’t believe him. Easier to disregard his words about the kingdom arriving within his disciples’ lifetime and the instructions for living in the short time until then. The hard stuff is treated as metaphorical when it makes demands on Christians themselves.

Possibly they’re right. I’d suggest that the pronouncements like those above were not Jesus’s at all. They’re cult-speak; the extreme demands of cult leaders seeking to control their acolytes. In case this sounds like an about face on my part, let me assure you it isn’t; I’ve long argued that among the metaphor and the reworking of Jewish scripture, the gospels include copious amounts of early cult rules.

Whether they’re metaphor or extreme demands once imposed on cult members, no-one today takes much notice of Jesus’ commands. What does this tell us about their worth? What does it tell us about Christians from the earliest days until now? What does it say about their willingness to crucify themselves (definitely a metaphor) in order to follow him?

Beyond The Grave

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A few years ago, a friend of mine was working in his front garden when he spotted what he was sure were a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses further down the street. He aimed to back inside before they reached his house, from where he could safely ignore them. But he timed it badly and before he knew it, the JWs were upon him.

My friend was under some stress at the time so when they asked him, ‘Wouldn’t you like to live forever?‘ he responded with, ‘Good God, no. This life’s bad enough. Why would I want it to go on forever?’ This took the wind out of their sail though didn’t divert them from their sales pitch for very long.

I’ve been in the same state of mind myself, and maybe you have, when life was so difficult I spent far too much time contemplating whether being dead might not be a better option. Thankfully, I couldn’t really contemplate doing anything about it, and was aware of the effect it would have on my loved ones if I did, but nonetheless I spent too much time considering – desiring even – my own non-existence.

I was pretty sure this was what awaited after death. I hadn’t, by this stage of my life, the conviction of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and mainstream Christians that a better life, one that would last forever, lay beyond this one. Instead, I made radical changes to my life in the here and now, to lift myself out of the slough of despond in which I found myself.

I love life now. It isn’t without its difficulties, not least the physical problems that come with older age, but I enjoy it to the full (apart from supermarket shopping). Having found my pearl of great price, I hope life will last for many years yet. I can’t guarantee it will, of course, so I make the most of every moment, surrounded by people I love and who love me.

Would I like my life to go on forever? Certainly, but I know it won’t. There is simply no evidence life continues after death. Assurances that it does in religious texts is no evidence at all. Even if it were, the type of eternal life suggested by the Bible, worshipping a needy, despotic God for evermore, is not the way I’d like to spend eternity.

Ask Christians how they know they will and the best that can come up with is that the Bible tells them so or that Jesus promises they will (which amounts to the same thing.) Ask them where this everlasting life will be lived and you’ll get one of two answers: in heaven or here on a restored Earth, once Jesus ‘returns’. The earliest writings in the New Testament support the here-on-Earth scenario. The later ones – perhaps because their authors had begun to realise Jesus wasn’t coming back any time soon – start, like John 14:2, to hint at a celestial existence.

No Christian – no non-believer either – has survived death to face eternal bliss or eternal damnation. Some will tell you that rising from the dead happens in an ethereal way immediately following death. The soul (or whatever) is resurrected either to be reunited with God outside of time and space or thrown to the demons in hell. The biblically savvy, like the JWs, will tell you the resurrection will not occur until Jesus’ return at some point in the future. Significantly, both expectations occur off-stage: the first in a undemonstrable plane of existence, the second in a future that never arrives. Both are wishful thinking, scenarios dreamt up by those frightened of their own non-existence.

The offer of everlasting life is one of the New Testament’s most pernicious lies. The idea is not to be found in the Jewish scriptures that make up the Christian Old Testament. It is a later development, dreamt up by extremists who convinced themselves, on the basis of a few visions, that God would ensure their continued survival, just as he had Jesus’s.

If this isn’t how the promise of living forever came about, then what is the evidence there is an existence beyond death? Empty assurances by first and second century cultists are not it.

  • Show me someone other than Jesus – whose ‘resurrection’ is metaphorical at best – who has risen from the dead.
  • Show me evidence that ordinary human Christians have already gone on to eternal life.
  • Show me, if you don’t subscribe to this view of immortality, the souls who rest with God awaiting a future resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Revelation 6:9-11).
  • Show me just one human, Christian or otherwise, who has gone on beyond death.
  • Prove that the promise of eternal life is real.

Jesus’ Ungrateful Slaves

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Jesus really liked telling stories about slaves. It’s as if he’d no objection to the inequitable arrangement of one person owning another. You’d think, if he really was the Son of God, he wouldn’t be quite so ready to assume unquestioningly, the zeitgeist of his day that decreed slavery was acceptable; necessary even. His being a man of his time, incapable of thinking beyond the assumptions and indoctrination of his culture might suggest he wasn’t a heavenly being at all. Either that or his creators, the writers of the gospels and the likes of Paul, were incapable of seeing beyond the zeitgeist and so made their god-man in its image.

In any case, they have Jesus tell a parable in Matthew 18:21-35 about forgiveness, which is populated once again with slaves and a slave owner. The story, in which a slave is forgiven by his master but fails in turn to forgive a fellow slave, ends with the following:

…after he had summoned him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And his master got angry and handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he could pay everything that was owed. So My Heavenly Father will also do to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart.”

Of course, the slave owner, referred at the start of the tale as ‘the king’ is – predictable metaphor alert – Jesus himself. He’s fond of casting himself in the role of kingly slave owner, with ordinary mortals his slaves. As we’ve seen already, this is the favoured analogy of New Testament writers to describe the relationship between their manufactured saviour and themselves.

Actually, the moral of the tale in this instance isn’t too bad; if you’re forgiven much it’s not unreasonable to suppose you could, in turn, forgive others their more minor offences. But this isn’t quite enough for Jesus’ script writers who have him drag jail, torture and retribution into the story. These, Jesus concludes, are the very things his wonderful Heavenly Father – based on the despotic rulers of the time – will inflict on anyone who doesn’t forgive as generously as they might.

What hypocrisy! Forgiveness is all according to Jesus but his Heavenly Father, he says with relish, will torture unforgivably anyone who doesn’t comply. What were the cultists who created this awful malicious character thinking? Jesus and everything to do with him is anti-human and soul-destroying.

As for me, I’d recommend forgiving others where you can, learning from the experience (once bitten twice shy and all that) and moving on. You won’t, whatever you do, be tortured by a fictitious, vindictive slave owner and his bullying idea of a god.

 

 

A Reply to a Slave

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I’ve discovered this new gizmo that lets me look stuff up on the Interweb. Goober or somesuch. I used it to find the meaning of ‘doulos’ that the absence of dictionary prevented you from doing. All of the results Goober brought up described doulos thusly:

Doulos (Ancient Greek: δοῦλος, Greek: δούλος, Linear B: do-e-ro) is a Greek masculine noun meaning “slave”. Wikipedia

Doulos (a masculine noun of uncertain derivation) – properly, someone who belongs to another; a bond-slave, without any ownership rights of their own. Biblehub (Christian site)

…anyone could become a slave, in a sense. However, once someone was sold into slavery, they remained a slave for life, and all of their offspring automatically became slaves as well. The only standard way of obtaining freedom was to earn enough money to pay your owner back as much as he had paid for you in the first place. This was a nearly impossible task to accomplish because slave owners did not often facilitate their slaves ability to earn money on the side. As such, most slaves, and their offspring remained slaves for the totality of their lives. Slavesandsons (Christian site)

Doulos is a Greek word in the Bible that has only one true historical option for accurate translation into English, which is slave. It literally means to be owned by someone for a lifetime. This word is found at least 127 times in 119 verses in the New Testament scriptures. It is used in the context of human slavery, which, sadly, was very common throughout the ancient Roman Empire for hundreds of years. Recorder.com (Christian site)

You’ll see none of them say what you say, Don. None think slavery was a nice amicable arrangement. Christian sites especially emphasise how slavery was a downright awful thing so’s they can sermonise about how Jesus saves us from slavery to sin.

If you’re going to reduce real world, God-approved slavery to something akin to a nice comfortable arrangement, you diminish the metaphor of Christ’s redemptive work to… not much at all. (Which of course it isn’t.) I noticed you didn’t comment on this point when I mentioned it in an earlier post and here you are digging yourself in deeper with your ‘slavery wasn’t really all that bad’. Good work, Don!

You’re certainly enslaved to all this Christian mumbo-jumbo. To Christ though, not really. There’s no such being and you certainly don’t give the impression of being a slave in any real world sense. Perhaps that’s because you have no understanding of what slavery was and is.

Jesus Shows How To Treat Slaves

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Jesus’ parable of the talents

Three slaves are given money by their owner, two invest it while the third buries his share. He is castigated by his master (yes, it’s Jesus as his favourite metaphor: slave master) who says to him on his return:

I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me. (Luke 19:26-27)

I know, that last sentence doesn’t fit the rest of the story, but it tells us what a despicable s**t Jesus was, quite happy to see those who didn’t want a peasant with delusions of grandeur lording it over them exterminated. Thank God the Romans got to him first (if indeed he existed.) No-one likes a dictator, specially not another dictator.

How about the conclusion to the actual parable, the one about the slaves and the money? The talents are evidently a metaphor for something or other. According to Christianity.com, it’s that the third slave, ‘didn’t take joy in the promise of the master’s return but instead wasted his time, his opportunities, and the master’s money.’

In other words, it’s fanatic talk aimed at those with a lack of commitment to the cult and its beliefs, including the ‘master’s’ imminent return, when wastrels will be in big trouble. As Christianity.com puts it:

Those who are not (faithful) may face the harsh reality of being called a wicked and lazy servant. Worst of all, they may not share in the joy of their master’s presence when he returns.

And there we have it, the softening of Jesus’ dictatorial original: ‘will’, as in ‘will lose everything’ becomes the hedging-your-bets ‘may’ while ‘slave’ (doulos again) becomes the watered-down ‘servant’. After all, we wouldn’t want to draw attention to how much of a cruel bastard Jesus was originally conceived as being. (Because, yes, these stories were invented by the early Jesus cult.)

The cult took no prisoners; in terms of commitment. It was all or nothing. Waiver in that commitment and you risked expulsion when the slave-master returned. So much for being redeemed unto salvation, so much for salvation by grace alone. If you weren’t utterly committed you stood to lose it all. What the original cultists weren’t to know, of course, was that the master would never return. The whole sorry parable was as irrelevant then as it is now.

God’s Agents?

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Christians are agents of God or so we’re informed. I’ve tried to locate where in the Bible it says that the Lord appoints fallible humans to be his 007s, but alas, I can’t find it anywhere. The best I can do are the claims in the fourth gospel that Jesus was God’s agent on Earth, but that’s not the same thing.

What about the idea then, also touted by Christians, that they are somehow God’s ‘partner’? No, that’s not there either. God regards himself as so far above us, his creators, that it would be like you or I partnering one of the ants crawling around in our gardens.

So how does the Bible describe the Christian’s relationship with God? It refers to it as master and servant. The word usually translated as ‘servant’ however, is doulos, which actually means ‘slave’. God doesn’t want you as an agent, partner or servant. He expects you to be his slave. Christian blogger, Sam Storms, explains what this means:

I, in the totality of who I am, have been purchased by Jesus Christ. He literally owns me. I belong to him, body, soul, spirit, mind, affections, abilities, talents, heart, will, and emotions. There is nothing in me or about me that belongs to me.

As a slave of God you are stripped of the very agency other Christians claim they gain from aligning themselves with the divine despot. And when you’ve done all he requires of you he’ll barely acknowledge you. As Jesus puts it in Luke 17:5-10:

Suppose one of you has a slave (doulos) ploughing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the slave when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the slave because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have only done our duty.’”

Whatever you do as God’s or Jesus’ slave won’t be enough, they’ll still regard you as a worthless slave.

I didn’t know about you, but this isn’t for me. I have more self-respect than to submit to a life as a slave. So have you. So in fact has everyone.

Most Christians agree. Almost all of them disregard the expectation that they become slaves. We know this because –

  • The majority don’t act as if they’re slaves, serving their fellow human beings till they’re fit to drop (Matthew 25 etc).

  • Most seem unaware even that Jesus insists they must be slaves when successive translators have deliberately altered the unsavoury ‘slave’ to the more palatable ‘servant’.

  • Those who are aware of his expectation seem to regard it as a metaphor; always a good get-out. And doesn’t Paul remark in his letters that believers are sons of God? That’s much more acceptable.

  • They omit the slavery element from their evangelising because no-one is going to be attracted by the offer of life-long servitude; far better to present Jesus as a would-be friend, big brother and all round good guy with whom people can be in ‘partnership’ or a fellow special ‘agent’.

  • They talk about free will when a slave, either of sin (John 8:34) or of Christ’s, has no freedom and no free will to exercise.

  • They convince themselves that sitting at a computer arguing with atheists online is the kind of slavery Jesus had in mind.

  • They turn a blind eye to the fact that the Bible teaches slavery is what they can expect not just now but for all eternity (Revelation 22:3-4).

It’s almost as if they don’t really believe such self-abasing, masochistic nonsense themselves.

 

 

God’s Obsession

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The first of a series of posts by guest contributor YHWH who posts on AllMadeUpandImaginary.com.

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Hi guys! And gals too though I have to confess I’m not really as interested in gals. I like cocks. I’m obsessed by them. I like them cut, and the sooner the better. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, you see. I made the first cock for the original human male, a beefcake called Adam. His name was a little joke on my part. You see, I knew the Hebrews would become my best buddies in few millennia’s time and that they’d use the word ‘Adam’ to mean ‘man’. Good pun, don’t you think?

Admittedly, it only works in the long term.

Anyway, Adam had the first. Cock that is. I’d made it so he was hung like a horse, and I thought he’d get some fun out of it with the female I’d thoughtfully supplied him with, though not for reproductive purposes. I hadn’t predicted at that stage how much trouble Adam and the woman were going to be, so when they were, I had to rethink my plan and invent procreation. I didn’t want to start again from scratch so I just repurposed the penis, shrunk it down a little and got the Adam prototype to cover it up. I didn’t want to get rid of it entirely because of course I was so pleased with it. Also it had some other function at the time, though I can’t recall now what that was.

After watching humans copulate for what seemed like an eternity (in what they imagined was privacy, which still makes me laugh), I felt that I hadn’t got the design of the dick quite right. It looked, well, comical with all that superfluous skin at the end that folded away anyway when the damn thing raised itself up in praise. I thought I could do better, but you know, by then I’d already restarted the whole damn project for a second time and to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered going back to the drawing board a third time.

So first chance I got, I came up with a contingency plan. I would find some way of getting them to cut it off. Not the whole cock, don’t get me wrong, ’cause as I say, I like that. No. The extra skin on the end. I figured they just didn’t need it and the whole thing would look more streamlined without it. Sure, they might lose some sensitivity when fucking, but so what. 

So I wait for the right dickhead (see what I did there?) to come along. Someone who’d be daft enough to sacrifice his offspring to me if I told him to. Sure enough, one soon comes along and I actually have to stop him from murdering his own son because, despite my reputation, I’m not really into that kind of thing. Well, not much. No, the cock’s the thing. So I tell him he can be my extra special buddy if only he’ll cut the skin off the end of his penis. I tell him that this’ll show me and the world that we have a special pact. In return, I promise that I’ll look after him and his descendants forever and ever. Not that he was gonna get to show his cock to the world, you understand, but you get my drift. And whaddya know, the idiot agrees to it and there and then takes an old rock to his old man, and his kids’, his slaves’ and anyone else he could lay his hands on, and hacks off the ends. I tell you, there’s one born every minute.

It wasn’t a pretty sight, I admit, what with all the blood and ragged skin, but it had more or less healed after a few months, infections notwithstanding, into something presentable. I took a look, ’cause I like looking at cocks and anything humans do with them, and I decided I approved. It looked more like I should’ve made the thing in the first place.

So for the next few hundreds years I’m happy with all the mutilated penises. I give their owners instructions about what they can and can’t do with them:

Slice off the top: That’s a must.

Rape female captives and slaves: Of course.

Fuck as many women as you can afford to keep: Naturally.

Have sex with your daughters: Well, okay but only if you’re pissed and they make the first move.

Don’t play around with other men’s cocks: Oh now, come on! Only I’m supposed to have an interest in other males’ members. So that’s a no. There are limits!

Then along comes some twerp who starts saying that anyone wants to be my buddy doesn’t have to crop their foreskin. I mean, who the hell does he think he is? I nudge a couple of my old mates and get them to tell this killjoy that I’m dead against the idea. But he ignores them and pretty soon there’s a whole bunch of fanatics who won’t get their dicks out for me. I ask you.

Thank God Me, there are still those who will though, including that other lot of God-botherers I’ve been keeping my eye on. They’re more than happy to slice and dice their young son’s willies. That’s what I like to see: commitment. And a nice bit of genital mutilation.

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Thanks YHWH for a really enlightening blog. Next time, His Almightiness will be talking about what he calls ‘The Spare Rib Problem: the Dickless Chicks.

The Power of Figments

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Since his death, no-one has seen the itinerant preacher now known as Jesus. Some dispute he existed in the first place and certainly the character depicted in the gospels is a fictional creation. Assuming, however, that there was a real individual on whom this character was based, no-one has seen him in the flesh for 2000 years.

This includes all or most of those who wrote about him in the early years of the cult and whose writing now forms the New Testament. They either learnt about Jesus by word of mouth, as most converts throughout history have done, or they had a vision within their own heads of – what exactly? Those who write of such visions are either vague about what they claim they saw (Paul in Galatians 1: 15-16), are evidently making it up (John of Patmos in Revelation) or their visions are related by third parties many years down the line (Peter and Mary in the gospels, Stephen in Acts.)

Either way, the character believers claim to have seen or have heard about is a fantasy figure, not the rabbi who may or may not have existed. It’s this fantasy who lives in heaven snuggled up to his equally fictitious father, monitoring people’s behaviour, listening into their thoughts while simultaneously observing ‘the destruction the world is bringing on itself’ and doing not a thing to help.

All this from the heaven no Christian can locate: in another unspecified, invisible, undetectable dimension is the best they can offer. Nonetheless, if only more people would turn to him, Super-Jesus would help us solve the problems we face.

Because theocracies have always been so effective. They’ve led to a more just, fairer world as wise compassionate religionists have listened to their heavenly leaders – God, Allah, Jesus, Muhammed – and have applied the principles of their holy books to the running of their societies. Only obstinate sinners have had anything to fear from the arrangement: the degenerate, like those who have sex outside marriage and want access to contraceptives; gay people (especially); women who don’t know their place; women who seek abortions; the powerless; other, ‘inferior’ races; those of other religions, non-believers and atheists. None of these would have a place in Jesus’s new perfect world either, just as they don’t in societies controlled by Muhammed’s holy ones. Jesus’ agents will be happy to exterminate them, just as he instructs.

Magic Jesus as a figment of his followers’ imaginations can be made to say whatever they want, just as he was when he was being created by Paul and the gospel writers. He is a perpetual work in process, constantly changing to conform to what those who claim to know him want him to be. It’s easy to achieve this with a non-existent being from a non-existent place.

The Guilt Legacy

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A couple of nights ago I watched a programme called Jehovah’s Witnesses and Me fronted by Rebekah Vardy. I know nothing about Rebekah apart from the fact she’s a footballer’s wife who was recently involved in a social media scandal, but her reflections on being brought up in a Jehovah’s Witness household were honest and sincere. She said one of the legacies of her mother being ‘disfellowshipped’ when she, Rebekah, was 8 was that she felt, and still feels, guilty about much in life. The teaching of the organisation was, as it is in many evangelical churches, that the individual is a hopeless sinner who cannot please Jehovah, though must nevertheless endeavour to work out their own salvation. For JWs this involved (and still does, as you may know from personal encounters with them) going door to door and standing for hours on end in public spaces with a trolley-full of Watchtower publications.

I could relate to Rebekah’s feelings of guilt. While not a Jehovah’s Witness (I was never that gullible) my years as a Christian left me with a legacy of guilt. For many years it was the dominant emotion of my life. While a Christian I constantly felt I was letting God down: not as good a Christian as those around me, not witnessing enough, listening to pop music instead of worship songs – practically anything could trigger my not-good-enough feelings. I also felt responsible for anything that went wrong, even when I couldn’t possibly be, and guilt about my secret sexual feelings and, most especially that I wasn’t been a good enough father. To this day, I feel awful if I’m unable to help with my grown-up children’s problems. I am moving away from such fruitless thinking, and recognise that possibly I am naturally inclined to blame myself for events both within and outside my control. Christianity nonetheless exacerbated the problem, with its emphasis on the sinful worthlessness of the individual who is nothing without Jesus. I have, I’m pleased to say, got a lot better since abandoning its negative anti-human philosophy.

What scars has religion left those of you who are escapees from religion with? I’d be more then pleased to hear it’s none, but most of the ex-Christians I know have not come away unscathed. Feel free to share in the comments.

Real Christianity v Catholicism

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I visited a Catholic cathedral in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, while on my latest adventure. Not, I hasten to add, as a worshipper but as a tourist. One of the Canary Islands, Tenerife is a Spanish territory with a long association with Catholicism. Its name means Holy Cross, reflecting its history and the pervasiveness of the church. The cathedral’s altar can be seen in the picture above, highly ornate and completely over the top, with a statue of Mary, the Holy Mother, as its centrepiece. .Her son, you’ll note, plays only a bit part in the picture above her.

Real Christians™ of course don’t regard Catholics as true Christians. They point to their reliance on the Pope, when Jesus himself says his followers should call no-one Father apart from God; the army of dead saints that intercedes in heaven when all people really need is Jesus; the need to confess sins to a priest and the worship of Mary as the immaculately conceived ‘Mother of God’, who works miracles on their behalf.

People – Catholics – who believe these things can never be part of the club. ‘Their ideas are as ridiculous as they are unbiblical. No-one in their right mind,’ Real Christians™ say, ‘should believe such fanciful stuff. Stick resolutely to what we know to be true: the resurrection of a dead man; the Virgin birth and the promise of eternal life. These things are biblical and as such we can know and trust them. Not rubbish about saints in… erm, heaven living forever, having to ask for our sins to be forgiven and thinking Mary was conceived free from the scourge of sin.’

It seems to me that it’s only a short hop from believing one lot of far-fetched rubbish to believing still more. Maybe the Catholic stuff isn’t strictly biblical (though at a stretch it could be said to have been drawn from the make-believe found there) but then there’s nothing particularly special, plausible or reasonable about that which has found its way into God’s Word. Just because something is in there doesn’t make it true. Those who invented Jesus’ Virgin birth, his resurrection and the promise of everlasting life were making it all up, just as those who, further down the line, created the phantasmagoria that is Catholicism.

Santa Cruz is nice though.