Category Archives: Conversion

Jesus and the Blind Man

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This time we’ll take a closer look at Mark 8:22-26, a story about Jesus healing a blind man:

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”

He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”

Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village.”

This parable is doing a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting.

First, it is located in Bethsaida, the home of some of the disciples as well as the place where Jesus does some of his most spectacular miracles, only later to curse the village for its lack of interest in him (Mark 11:21). It is symbolic of those who reject the cult’s message, or are too dim to see that their heavenly Jesus is the Messiah.

Second, the story is sandwiched (no pun intended) between the feeding of the four thousand, in which the hapless disciples fail to recognise Jesus’ miraculous status, and the account of Peter realising that Jesus is in fact the Messiah. The healing of the blind man, neatly placed between the two, is therefore an allegory within allegories about seeing (gettit?) Jesus for who he really is (i.e. what cultists believed him to be.)

Third, the story is a prophecy-fulfilled parable. Isaiah 35:5 says that when the Messiah comes ‘the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.’ Jesus has to be made to do these things – he performs some ear unstopping too (Mark 7:31-35) – to show he is indeed the prophesied Messiah.

Fourth, physical blindness is a very obvious metaphor for spiritual blindness. The preceding story reminds those who can’t ‘see’ the cult’s truth for themselves: ‘Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?’ (Mark 8:18). This is itself a borrowing of Isaiah 6:9-10. Indeed, the entire story, together with that of the deaf man being cured, is a parable of Isaiah’s ‘prophecy’:

You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.

Jesus’ healing of blindness then becomes a metaphor for seeing the light, as Peter does in the subsequent story when he finally recognises him, like the cult has done, as the Messiah.

Fifth, Jesus spits on or in the man’s eyes: a very clumsy metaphor for the streams of living water that emanate from God himself in Jeremiah 2:13. Perhaps too there’s a reference to the baptism ritual beloved of the early cult. (Christian bloggers themselves have trouble explaining this gross detail that Mark sees fit to include in his story.)

Sixth, in order to give sight to the blind man, Jesus (or rather the cult) first removes him – the initiate – from the village, from those who don’t even know they are blind. Next, Jesus/the cult shows him how those who are spiritually blind are no better than trees wandering around aimlessly (yes, Mark really does mix his metaphors). Jesus/the cult then opens the initiate’s eyes to the Truth so that finally he sees ‘everything clearly.’ He can now never return to his former state; his ‘home’ is with the cult, not with the spiritually blind outside it.

The story is evidently metaphorical. That Jesus spits in the man’s face is not, as some Christians claim, evidence that it really happened. It is weighed down by so much symbolism and clunky metaphor, and at the same time strategically placed between two other ‘seeing the light’ stories that its literary origins are apparent. Mark and his fellow cultists knew what they were doing when they dressed their beliefs up in stories like these. As they themselves insist, you need only open your eyes to see it.

Deconversion

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In the late 1980s I reach a crisis point in my life. I pray for God’s guidance . I pray for wisdom. I don’t pray to ask him to resolve the situation (not of my making). The heavens, however, are as brass. I begin to entertain the idea that rather than God ignoring me or expecting me to sort the problem (which eventually led to me having a breakdown) he might not – gasp – exist! I had gone from being someone who heard God speaking clearly in my head – telling me I should ‘witness’ to some ‘lost’ soul or other – to someone contemplating whether I’d imagined it all.

What at first seemed like a possibility began over time to feel more like a probability. I borrowed books from my local library written not by evangelical authors but by secular scholars (if bishops can be regarded as such) – John Robinson’s Honest to God, Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician Resurrection: Myth or Reality? John Shelby Spong’s A Bishop’s Search for the Origins of Christianity, and later still Bart Ehrman’s many books.

I began a journey of discovery, exploring what it was I had believed when a committed Christian. Irrationally perhaps, I clung to a belief in God longer than I did other aspects of Christianity. After all, God is kind of generic and could conceivably exist and operate independently of Christianity. I reasoned that God must, by definition, be superior to the anthropomorphic concepts of the Bible. I held on to this idea of a generic God for another decade or so. It gave me a sort of comfort, I suppose. I was aware he wasn’t compatible with all the Jesus stuff I’d once believed. Would a god who created the universe really require a human sacrifice to make peace with his own creation? It seemed unlikely.

My friendly but distant god sat comfortably in the back of my mind while I got on happily with life without him and without thinking about him very much either. Until one day, walking home from work, I suddenly wondered why I was bothering. Why was I sustaining the idea of a god? Any god: generic, biblical or comfort blanket. I didn’t need to. I didn’t need him (nor, if we pretend he really exists, he me.) Everything about life, the universe and everything was, in any case, more than adequately explained by science, evolution, astronomy, psychology (in which I have a qualification). In something like a revelation, I realised that no God existed. Not the YHWH variations in the Bible and not my nicer version of him. In that instant I stopped believing in God, god and gods. One second I was a believer (of sorts), the next I wasn’t.

It was liberating. I didn’t have to work out what God was really about, didn’t have to please him, ask his forgiveness, seek his grace, or any of the other convoluted nonsense that goes along with ‘him’.

  • Was this revelation as emotional as my original conversion? I don’t think so. It was the culmination of years of thinking, reading and challenging myself. My ultimate deconversion from god-belief was a rational process.

It had repercussions of course, which I’ll deal with next time. In the meantime, how does my deconversion compare with yours, those of you who’ve had the good fortune to have one?

 

Conversion

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I’d be interested to know, of those of you who are no longer Christians, what led you to become one in the first place.

It seems to me there are thousands of websites, books that argue philosophically for the validity of Christianity, present their evidence for the resurrection and generally take an intellectual approach to promoting the faith.

I’d be very surprised if this ‘evidence’, which is poor at best, and Christians’ philosophical arguments lead anyone to Jesus/God/faith.

My own experience is that conversion is an emotional experience. As a teen I listened to speaker after speaker at the YMCA I attended tell me how their sins had been forgiven and how getting to knew Jesus had given them a great sense of peace and purpose. I originally went along to the YM, as we called it, to meet friends, play table–tennis and drink coffee while listening to the juke-box. I had no idea I was a sinner nor that I needed forgiven but I liked the enthusiasm – they said it was ‘joy’ – that the speakers conveyed. I thought too I could maybe do with a sense of purpose though I was, as a fifteen year old, quite happy drifting along relatively aimlessly.

The persistent drip feed of what Jesus could do for me (and others) was persuasive. It sowed the seed, as the Christian cliché has it. It took a lively young American evangelist from Arthur Blessitt ministries to convict me. Jesus had turned his life around and he was on his way to heaven. Denying Jesus, he said, was to crucify him all over again. So I prayed the sinner’s prayer and gave my life to Jesus too.

Nowhere in any of this was there anything philosophical, no ’proof’ of the resurrection, no explanation of how the Bible was the Word of God. All the talks were appeals to emotion – how I could feel forgiven, how I could know love, joy and peace, how I could live forever after I died, up there with God in heaven.

All the rationalisation came later, like it always does. Psychologists tell us that the intuitive part of the brain makes decisions ahead of the rational part, which seeks to catch up afterwards, supply the reasons why the decision we’ve made is a good one. We’ve all done it when we’ve bought that item we don’t really need and have justified it all the way home. Religious conversion follows this pattern.

The thinking mind only becomes involved afterwards, hence ‘post hoc rationalisation’. We then become complicit in our own indoctrination: Bible study (both group and individual), listening to sermons, learning from more mature Christians, worship (all those song and hymn lyrics reinforcing the mumbo jumbo), reading Christian books, immersing ourselves in the complexities of the religion. This is how it’s always been. As Paul puts in 1 Corinthians 3:2, we move from milk to meat as we delve further into ‘the mysteries of Christ’. Or, more accurately, we become more deeply indoctrinated.

But all of this comes later. The emotional experience is first, as it was for Paul, C S. Lewis (who described it as being ‘surprised by joy’), George W. Bush and millions of other converts. In my Christian days, I personally ‘led people to the Lord’, by ‘sharing my testimony’ (I’ve still got the jargon!) and can assure you, those involved felt the Holy Spirit with a profound intensely. Only kidding. They became pretty emotional.

I know of no-one who became a Christian by assessing the evidence for the resurrection, reading Paul’s theobabble or analysing the central claims of Christianity. I suppose there might be some who, like Lee Strobel, insist they ‘came to faith’ this way. But faith and rational analysis are incompatible. When the writer of Hebrews (11:1) says: ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ he is oblivious to the fact that there isn’t any ‘evidence’ of unseen spiritual ‘things’. There are only our own feelings and emotional confirmation bias.

So that’s how it was it for me. How was it for you?

Next time I’ll take a look at the deconversion process.

The Great Resurrection Scam

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Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

How the Bible tells us the Resurrection was nothing more than Visions

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I’ve written about this before, but want to pull together some strands that demonstrate the risen Jesus was a vision or hallucination. He appeared only in the mind of others: the New Testament tells us as much.

Exhibit 1. Paul writes of the appearance of the risen Jesus, whom he sees as a ‘life-giving Spirit’, being ‘in’ him (Galatians 1.16). Paul has more than one such vision, including his trip to heaven recounted in 2 Corinthians 12.2, which he refers to as his ‘revelations’.

Exhibit 2. Paul implies in Corinthians 15.5-8 that others who have experienced the post-mortem Jesus ‘saw’ him in exactly the same way he did. For Paul, there was no difference between his inner-visions and those experienced by the so-called apostles.

Exhibit 3. The author of Acts creates a story out of Paul’s first vision, the famous account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a fabrication of course, told differently each time it’s referred to Even so, Luke retains the visionary nature of the experience: Jesus is a bright light and a disembodied voice.

Exhibit 4. The other sightings of the risen Jesus in Acts are visions. When, for example, Stephen is about to be stoned (Acts 7:54-56) he sees in his mind’s eye the heavens open and Jesus sitting at the right hand of god. Other New Testament encounters of the resurrected Jesus, such as John’s Revelation, are explicitly said to be visions.

Exhibit 5. Many of the sightings of the risen Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not of a real, physical human being. Those who experience him see him materialising in locked rooms, vanishing at will and floating up into the clouds. None of these events actually happened; they are the gospel writers’ literary realisations of visions experienced decades earlier, and they retain the hallucinatory qualities of those experiences.

Exhibit 6. Remaining with the gospels’ accounts of the risen Jesus, there is the strange phenomenon of those experiencing him failing to recognise him. Mary in the garden thinks he’s the gardener; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t know its him until he breaks bread; the disciples mistake him for someone else on the shore until he tells them how to fish properly. Most damning of all, some of the inner circle of disciples doubt it’s Jesus they’re seeing in their collective visions (Matt 28:17-18). Again, these stories preserve the tradition that the earlier visions weren’t always recognised as Jesus. And why wasn’t he? Because he was an hallucination

Exhibit 7. The risen Jesus has to prove who he is. According to Acts 1:1-3, he ‘presents himself’ his followers, some of whom have wandered around aimlessly with him for three years, and has to convince them he is who he appears to be. And, the text suggests, it takes him forty days to do it. This makes no sense. A far better explanation of this story (and it is a story) is that having experienced their visions of something-they-took-to-be-the-resurrected-Jesus (bright lights? Disembodied voices?), his followers set about convincing themselves that what they experienced really was their former Master. This they did by scouring the scriptures to find ‘proof’ that the Messiah would die and rise again. We know this is how their thinking worked. The same process was used to create the gospels and is evident throughout the New Testament.

Exhibit 8. Dead people stay dead. They do not resurrect.. This is not an a priori assumption. No corpse has ever revived after 36 hours or indeed any other period of time. We know this experientially, statistically and scientifically. Only in stories and religious myth do the dead return. This is what we are dealing with here: stories and myth that flesh out the visions and hallucinations of a few religious zealots.

Mark and the Oral Tradition

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Paul never refers to ‘the disciples’, the term used for Jesus’ inner circle in the later gospels. Instead, he refers to the founders of the cult as ‘apostles’ (literally ‘messengers’). Cephas is described as an apostle, as is Barnabas (Acts 14:14) and Paul himself. Paul defines the term more specifically as someone who has been commissioned directly by Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians 1:1-2). Evidently he himself was not: he encountered the risen Christ only in his head. He felt this was more than good enough. For Paul it was the only qualification anyone needed to be an apostle. He cites others who had encountered Jesus in the same way:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15: 3-8)

What he goes on to say is crucial in understanding the nature of ‘the gospel’ that was in circulation in the years before Mark’s gospel:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15: 8-11; my emphasis.)

What they preached was their visions of a celestial Saviour. The witness of these visionaries of the risen Christ was the only gospel they knew and, Paul suggests here and elsewhere, the only one that was being transmitted orally when he was active. As we saw last time, he knew no other details of Jesus’ life, had none passed on to him and passed none on to others, except for these visions and the teaching he worked out from them – his ‘revelations’. Let me say that again: the visions of the risen Jesus were all he, Cephas and others knew. Paul says so categorically. There was no other ‘oral tradition’.

Paul builds his subsequent teaching on Jewish scripture, showing how his ‘revelations’ must be from the Christ because they comply with this scripture (even though he has to manipulate it to make it do so: in Romans 9, for example). Nowhere does he say he is referring to any history he has learnt, nor to anything passed on to him orally about Jesus’ teaching, ministry, life or miracles. Just the opposite in fact:

I want you to know… that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it; rather I received it (directly) by revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1: 11-12).

About seven years after Paul’s death, a literate member of the one of the cult communities – known to us as Mark – decided to set down Paul’s teaching about the Christ in allegorical form. He tells us this is what he is doing several times in his gospel, including Mark 4:11-12:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

Mark did not depend on any oral tradition for his information about Jesus’ life because apart from the ‘announcement’ built on Cephas’, Paul’s and others’ visions there was no oral tradition. Mark took Paul’s teaching and like him, used Jewish scripture as the basis for the story he developed from it. Thus, Paul’s ‘revelation’ of a bread and wine ritual (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) becomes the Last Supper (Mark 4:22-24); Paul’s teaching about forgiveness becomes Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness; Paul’s dispute with Cephas leads to a gospel Peter who is bungling and disloyal; Paul’s mention of The Twelve in 1 Corinthians becomes, with a miscalculation, the disciples; Paul’s instruction to obey the authorities (Roman’s 13:1) becomes Jesus’ (Mark 12:17); Paul’s, and Jewish scriptures’, promise of the spiritually blind (2 Corinthians 4:3-6) being helped to see becomes Jesus’ miracles of healing; Paul’s predictions about the end of the age (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17) become Jesus’ (Mark 13); Paul’s talk of the coming of the Christ in person (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11) becomes Jesus’ prophecies about the Son of Man appearing (Mark 14:61); Paul’s vision of the risen Christ becomes the resurrection. And on and on. There is nothing in Mark’s gospel that doesn’t derive from Paul’s teaching, and Jewish scripture in turn. it is, in short, made up.

All of this accounts for the absence of any resurrection appearances in Mark. His gospel ends with the discovery of the allegorical empty tomb and leaves off there because it is where his audience came in, as it were. They had been converted by hearing of the ‘appearances’ of the celestial Christ to Cephas and those Paul lists in 1 Corinthians. They already knew how the story ended or, more accurately, how it had begun: with those visions.

Later, Matthew, Luke and John would take Mark’s allegory and use it as the basis for their gospels, adding new, invented material of their own. The myth, in both the technical and popular sense, was born.

Redeemed: From Slavery to… erm, Slavery

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Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7:25)

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? (Romans 6:16)

(We are) justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ. (Romans 3:24)

When a slave had served sufficient time and had accumulated sufficient wealth or found a benefactor, he or she could buy their freedom. This seems particularly egregious when their servitude was already, in the case of debt, the means of paying back what was owed. In effect the enslaved individual was paying twice for their freedom. Be that as it may, the act of buying oneself out of slavery was known as redeeming oneself; redemption. Likewise, a third party buying your release was also known as redeeming. We still use the term in this sense today: a pawned item can be redeemed, bought back, for a greater amount of cash than the pawnbroker originally paid for it. The related term ‘ransom’, in Mark 10.45 has the same sense; paying money to secure the release of a captive.

The principle of buying oneself out of captivity and slavery underscores the Christian idea of redemption. It is the analogy Paul and other New Testament writers use, to explain Christ’s paying the price, through his sacrificial death, for the slave’s release. He redeems (or will do at some future point depending on which fantasist you’re reading) in exactly the same way a slave was redeemed, from a life of captive slavery to sin/the Law/Satan and his minions. 

There’s a catch. If a slave was redeemed by a third party, he was likely to find himself not free at all but the property of whoever had redeemed him. His debt having been paid off to his first owner, he might very well find himself in hock to a new one. So it is with Christian redemption. Christ may have paid off your perceived debt to your original owner (sin, Satan or whoever) but now you’re indebted to him. You’re his slave, as we saw in the previous post.

To downplay slavery as it was practised in the centuries before the cult adopted it as an analogy, is to undercut redemption as Paul and early cultists perceived it. Arguing that slavery was a relatively benign practice removes the basis of Christian redemption; if being a slave wasn’t really too bad then neither can being a slave of sin/the Law/Satan be too serious either. There’s really no great need to be redeemed and what Paul says in Romans and elsewhere counts for nothing.

But we knew that anyway.

 

Saved by Faith Alone

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For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Hi!

I heard this fabulous new speaker last night and have given my life to Jesus. All the things I’ve said and written critical of God, Jesus and the Bible, I take back and repent of. Jesus now lives in my heart. Through God’s grace I am saved, and his grace alone. I have done nothing to save myself. The speaker explained I am saved by faith alone through the atoning blood of Christ. Hallelujah! Saved from sin, from the wrath I merit and from death and hell. I am going to live forever in heaven with God.

There’s nothing I need to do. God has done it all.

There was a wonderful Christian lady, Donna, whom I spoke to afterwards. She knew everything about God and Jesus, she really did. She’s been saved for most of her life. Amazing! Anyway, Donna told me it was really important I should start to work out my salvation. I wasn’t sure what she meant when the speaker had said faith was all I needed, but I will try. Donna also said that now I’m a Christian, the devil will increase his attacks on me. I never really thought about the devil before but now I know he’s real, I’ll be on the lookout for him. Satan and his demon hordes rule the world, but only because God lets them. Of course there’s the angels too, taking care of us, which makes up for Satan’s wickedness.

Donna said I should talk with Jesus as much as I can. He’s always listening and will guide me in my walk with him. She said I will hear him speaking to me. He wants to give me anything I ask for, which is just amazing. Or maybe it’s God who does that. I’ll have to check. She also said that I need to join a church and gave me the addresses of some locally. It’s important, she told me, to worship Jesus on a regular basis and to thank him for saving me. I must make sure I take part in the Lord’s supper too, sharing his body and blood, till he comes back to Earth to take us all to heaven. ‘Us’ just means those who believe in Jesus, obviously.

Donna said it was vital I read my bible as well because it’s the Word of God and is full of his Truth. I’m should get to know more about what the Lord requires of me in my daily walk with him. She recommended I join a bible study group, so I’m going to do that. I asked her about the stuff in the Bible that says to give money to anyone who asks and to forgive people loads of times, but she said that that was all metaphorical and I needn’t bother with it.

She told me I have to tell everyone I can that I now belong to Jesus. I’m never going to be ashamed of proclaiming his holy name and telling others how they can be saved, through his precious blood alone.

She told me my life should reflect the fact that I now belong to Jesus, so no more swearing, smoking or drinking for me! Not that I did those much anyway.

Which brings me to why I’m sending you this message, apart from telling you how wonderful it is to be saved by faith alone, of course. Donna was, I have to say, a little taken aback when I mentioned I was gay. She explained very patiently that it’s a sin God really, really doesn’t approve of. She said Jesus would help me defeat it and as a start I really, really couldn’t live with someone of the same sex any longer, not if I wanted to claim my inheritance from the Lord. I have to turn away from sin, especially that one. Donna says it seriously offends God and he’d never let me into the Kingdom of Heaven as, well… you know, as an abomination. So I’m giving up my previous life.

I know you’ll be a little upset by this, but it’s really why I’m writing. By the time you see this, I’ll have moved out. I still love you, course I do, but it’s for the best. I have to make all the sacrifices I need to preserve my salvation. And think of it this way, it’ll help you give up your life of sin too, so you can be redeemed.

Well, that’s it. Remember, you too can be saved by faith alone and the blood of Jesus and all those other things I’ve mentioned. Simple really. I hope and pray you’ll give your heart to Jesus soon.

Love in Christ who saves us,

Sam

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum

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So I’m saved now.

Saved? From what?

My sins.

Your sins. Right. How’d this happen then?

My friend Marcus told me about a new Saviour.

And how did Marcus know about a new Saviour?

Gaius told him.

And Gaius?

His neighbour Livia told him.

And where’d she hear it?

She said she was told it by a travelling preacher.

Well, travelling preachers are always reliable, so sure.

Paûlos I think she said he was called. Anyway, Livia heard him talking about the new Saviour in the forum and she told Gaius, Gaius told Marcus and he told me.

Right. So what did this Paûlos say?

That he’d had a vision or something and had seen this new Saviour in his vision. I think he said he was called Iesous. Something like that.

So a Jewish Saviour then. I take it this Paûlos was Jewish?

I don’t think Livia said.

So what’s a Jewish Saviour to you? Or Livia and Gaius and Marcus for that matter?

Well, that’s the great thing. Marcus said that Gaius said that Livia said that Paûlos said that this particular Jewish Saviour is for everyone, not just Jews.

And Paûlos worked this out from his vision, did he?

Yes. Iesous told him all about it.

In his vision.

Yeah. He told Paûlos that anyone who wanted to could ask him to save them from their sins. So Livia did, and then when she told Gaius, he did too, and then Marcus.

So, Paûlos. He ever meet this Iesous? In the flesh, I mean.

Oh, I don’t think so. Paûlos didn’t need to, you see. Iesous talked to him from Heaven. He didn’t need to meet him.

He say whether he’d met anyone who had actually met him?

No. He knew of some fellas who’d seen Iesous same as him, in marvellous visions, but he said he didn’t need to meet them either. Like I said, Iesous the Saviour spoke to Paûlos direct. You don’t need any more than that. I’m hoping he’ll speak direct to me before long.

So, how’d you know this Iesous existed if nobody knows anyone who’s seen him in the flesh?

I told you, Paûlos saw him right there in his head and Iesous told him all he needed to know. The Saviour said that when he comes down from the sky, which he will real soon, those of us he’s saved will live with him forever, right here on Earth.

Live forever, you say?

Sure. And there’s free wine while we wait.

Free wine? Why didn’t you say? Where do I sign up?

 

This time it’s personal

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Desperately searching for another reason to dismiss recent critiques of Christianity, Don has suggested that my views and those of commenters here are somehow invalid because they’re ‘personal’. (I declined to publish Don’s latest comment in which he elaborated on this theme; not only was he already on enforced rest but he also decided to have a rant about ‘sexual depravity’. This would appear to have been directed  at my own happy same-sex relationship, as well as all other forms of consensual sex that God Don disapproves of.)

So what’s wrong with ‘personal’? My faith, when I had it was personal. I’d prayed the sinner’s prayer in which I confessed I was a sinner and I received Jesus into my heart (or so I thought) and began to live my life in accordance with what he required of me. This personal relationship with Jesus, as it was usually described in evangelical circles, was reinforced by the preaching I heard in church, by prayer meetings and Bible studies, by the devotional books I read, C. S. Lewis’s writing and the notes I used alongside my personal Bible reading.

I’ve written before how I abandoned all of this when, in a time of crisis, God wasn’t there, and I eventually came to realise, in what I can only describe as a moment of personal revelation, that this was because he didn’t exist.

I then set about discovering what it was I had believed for the previous 30 years; what were these beliefs that had shaped my life, determining what I did, who I married, my morality, my sense of guilt and failure… essentially all that I was. That quest, which began with my broadening my reading well beyond the bounds of devotional Christian books (how treacherous I felt when I first picked them up!) was personal. It was fuelled by the reaction of some Christian friends who attacked me personally when, still later, I came out not only as an atheist but as gay too. My dealings with one particular zealous and homophobic friend led to my first book and ultimately, over 12 years ago, to this blog.

RejectingJesus is a personal working out of my love-hate relationship with Christianity. It is, I hope, informed by my reading but it is first and foremost personal. The posts are my analysis of Christianity as it is practised and my own dissection of the Bible. I’m not a historian nor a theologian (thank god); my Masters is in English Literary Research and it is these skills, together with my knowledge of the Bible from my Christian days, that I apply in my sometimes irreverent analyses. Nothing is sacred, though I’m aware of the importance of providing evidence for my claims and, where relevant, in citing appropriate sources, which is why I provide links and reference relevant verses from the Bible. Perversely, Don also accuses me of being in thrall to the scholars I cite; the opposite of his complaint that posts are ‘personal’.

Do I then, as Don implies, try to discredit the Bible because I’m gay? Am I, as Don suggests, motivated by the ‘constraints’ the Bible places on my sexuality? I don’t believe so. Once I recognised that God didn’t exist, it followed that he could not have any opinion about homosexuality or indeed anything else. Like any other fictional character, his views were created by those who presumed to speak for him: ‘I am so mysterious and my ways unknowable. Oh, but by the way, I really don’t like those depraved gays. Feel at liberty to stone them.’ God’s self-appointed homophobes have to be challenged because of the damage they do.

Am I as an atheist predisposed to being critical of both faith and the Bible, as Christian readers sometimes say? Undoubtedly, but I’m no more predisposed than as a Christian I was predisposed to see God everywhere. As Nan put it in a recent comment:

Any individual who allows him/herself to put aside the centuries-long teachings of Christianity … and read the scriptures without bias and/or preconception … cannot fail to see the multitude of inconsistencies.

Nor can they fail to see the Bible’s flights of fancy, its reliance on dreams and visions, its make-believe and pretend fulfilment of prophecy, its forgeries and false promises, its disconnect from reality and magical thinking, its supernaturalism and sheer cultishness. Critically evaluating scriptures at face value, without making excuses for them or trying to guessing what the original writers might have ‘intended’ or deciding that unpalatable parts are ‘really’ symbolic/metaphorical is, however ‘personal’, by far the more honest approach.

To insinuate with a personal slur that having ‘personal’ reasons for criticising Christianity is a weak ad hominem. It does not address the arguments in question nor the issues at hand. Anyone who wants to demonstrate that what I say about the Bible, Christian belief and practice is wrong needs to provide evidence of their own. Insult, screeds of Bible quotation and ‘a legion of “work arounds”’ (Nan again) is not how to go about it.