Category Archives: Fiction

‘Those who most want to rule others are least suited to do it.’

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More stories that we really should be questioning. First today, a perennial favourite:

We, the Left / Right / Green / Centrist / Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and I as party leader, pledge to solve the country’s problems / Make America Great Again / limit taxes / reduce bills and the cost of living / build new houses / curb immigration / lift families out of poverty etc, etc. We have fully costed these policies and they are achievable, unless we discover they are not, which we might though this is unlikely, but we can’t be sure. This we promise.

Admittedly there’s a hint of scepticism in this particular paraphrase, but even so, once elections roll round again, plenty of us will be taken in by guff like this. However, politicians create more problems than they solve. The difficulties the world faces right now, those that are not the result of religion, have been created by our political leaders. Whatever they promise in order to gain your vote, they will deliver only a small fraction. Don’t believe anything they tell you. Vote for the party that tells you they’ll do f**k all, and as well as being impressed by their honesty, you will find you’re not disappointed. Democracy is broken. As Douglas Adams put it:

It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

And:

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

We really are this much stuffed. And that’s before A.I. takes charge. 

Second, a much repeated mantra in the UK today:

Britain is a fully integrated and wonderfully diverse society. Diversity is truly one of our strengths. We also need people from other cultures to do menial jobs and boost the economy. We must be tolerant and understanding of the cultural practices of some of these newcomers, even if, for example, their attitude towards women and Western values is markedly different from our own. This doesn’t mean their beliefs are any less valid. Anyone who questions this or suggests we are not in fact a fully integrated, diverse society is a hater, racist or fascist. Such individuals are the cause of division. Diversity is our strength.

This sort of rhetoric is typical of the UK’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. If ever there was anyone who should on no account be allowed to do the job, it is Sir Keir. He has clearly watched too many episodes of Bridgerton in which all races and cultures enjoy a sumptuous life, rubbing along happily together in a comfortable upper class milieu. While many of us do co-exist happily with our neighbours from elsewhere, Britain today is not quite like Bridgerton.

According to Sir Keir, extreme right-wing views among the settled indigenous population prevent it from being fully realised. It is this faction who refuse to compromise or make any concession to accommodate the cultures who now live among us. This is simply not true.

Many cultures have assimilated into the British way of life, but equally many have not and do not wish to. Like Christians who shun ‘the world’ there are newcomers to the British Isles, many Muslims in particular, who reject the way of life here and seek to assert their own cultural values. Many of these are at odds with hard fought Western principles: the equality of women and gay people, religious tolerance, the humane treatment of animals, the long established rule of law, the rights of those who do not subscribe to the tenets of Islam. For many, such people are kaffar, infidels of lesser value than those within the Muslim fold. They see no reason to compromise or integrate with them. And yet, the obligation to do so is theirs; they are the ones who have chosen to make their homes in the UK just as it is. To try to change it to be more like the cultures they have come from – escaped from in many cases – is not how asylum works.

Starmer and his government, meanwhile, blame the indigenous population, many of whom are of immigrant stock themselves, for the lack of assimilation and unity. To teach them the error of their ways, he plans to appoint an ‘anti-Muslim hostility tsar’ to champion efforts across the UK to tackle hostility and hatred when directed, as he or she sees it, at the Muslim community. This, you’ll note, is a process intended only to work in one direction.

You might wonder why, if we’re already living in Sir Keir’s wonderful Bridgerton-esque society (the only division being caused by pesky extreme right-wingers) such an appointment is necessary, but if Sir Keir thinks it is, then surely it must be so.

You may have your own examples of the kinds of stories we’re told today that don’t hold up to closer inspection. You may feel I’ve been conditioned to feel uncomfortable with the particular narratives I’ve looked at, and you would no doubt be right. I’d be interested to hear your views.

 

True Stories (or perhaps not)

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Will Judge Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Exclusive Interview

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So what I say is if people had listened to me from the start a lot of these problems wouldn’t ever have happened. I think people know that now cos I’m indisputerbably the best there’s ever been. And haven’t I always been telling you that? Cos I am the best. [Note to Editor: you can cut out a lot of this]. What I’ve accomplished is the best, not like anything any of those other guys ever managed. The best.

And I’ve got plans, you know, cos the best is yet to come. All people have to do is show me the respect I deserve for doing all the good things, the really great things, I’ve done. But you know, they don’t all do that. Some of them, a lot of them, don’t appreciate all the great things I’ve done and all the great things I’m still gonna get done. And all I ask in return is a little respect. Maybe some appreciation, you know. Cos, and I know people know this, I’m the best there is. I’ve seen off my enemies, I’ve had my agents see off our enemies, like they deserve. I’ve had them all killed and more. Horrible, horrible people. I’ve had to punish some of my own people too. Horrible, horrible people, all of them.

I’m like the most wonderful king there’s ever been. I know, I know that some people don’t like the idea of a king but when you’ve done all the wonderful, really wonderful things I’ve done, like killing all our enemies dead and taking over all their shithole countries, which, trust me, they never really did much with anyway – it’s hard not to see yourself as a king, when you’ve done all that I’ve done, and that’s what I am, a really wonderful, really caring King. The best ever. [Edit this too]

So listen, Piggy, be sure to quote me word for word. Cos you know, I get really pissed – some people say far too easily, but of course they don’t really know me, how caring I am – when horrible people put my words in my mouth and make me say things I never said. And you wouldn’t like me to get pissed cos I can be really difficult to deal with then. So don’t do it, you hear?

Now if you don’t mind I gotta get to some meeting. I need a nap. Word for word, you hear. [Edit]

This interview with YHWH, Lord of Hosts and Best God Ever is brought to you completely unedited by Juan Isaiah Thanthe-Other.

A Big Myth-take

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The nativity story is evidently a myth. The evidence?

The virgin conception and birth (similar to other myths);

Angels everywhere;

Warnings in dreams;

The wand’rin’ star;

Events created from out-of-context scraps of Jewish scripture (the virgin birth again; the shoe-horning of Bethlehem; Herod’s massacre; the flight and return from Egypt);

The heavy-handed symbolism (shepherds and their gifts; the magi and theirs);

Historically inaccurate details (disparate dates, the Roman census, Herod’s massacre);

Discrepancies between the two accounts;

The absence of the nativity and its events in the other two canonical gospels,

Disparity with later events in the gospels (Mary treasures the nativity events in Luke 2:19 only to seemingly having no knowledge of them later (Mark 3:12); John and Jesus are second cousins… or not).

And on and on.

Yet the story is analysed endlessly – two thousand years (almost) and counting – as is all that follows in the gospels. There’s a whole lot of jargon to intellectualise this , of what is, in the end, just myth: exegesis, hermeneutics, soteriology, apologia, discourse analysis, close reading. All exist to expose the truth embedded in the text and to defend it. Even those who acknowledge that the nativity story is myth (quite an attractive, cosy myth admittedly) want to confine this admission to the nativity alone. The rest – the symbolic miracles, unfulfilled prophecies, literary sermons, the metaphorical pericopes (more jargon!), the trial, crucifixion and resurrection – they want honoured as historical, factual and mystically embodying Truth. Unfortunately, all of these stories bear the same hallmarks of myth as the nativity tales. Why should these other stories be regarded as anything different?

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Christmas is upon us. I’m happy to call it Christmas; the name has a long pedigree and ‘Holidays’ has, in any case, its own religious connotations. Dennis and I will be spending it with my daughter and her family. I hope you too are able to enjoy it in whichever way suits you best.

A happy Christmas to you, both my readers.

A Special Christmas Bible Study

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An angel of the Lord appeared to (the shepherds), and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.” (Luke 2:9-16)

Another chunk of scripture that will be proclaimed from pulpits and in nativity plays again this year. Let’s take a closer look at the scenario Luke creates. Does it bear any relation to something that might occur in reality?

First, an angel. Doesn’t this tell us from the outset that we’re in the realms of fantasy fiction? You can’t fault Luke for trying though, he does his best to impress by adding a whole host of them. You can hear him thinking that ‘a great company of angels’ should convince all but the most hardened of hearts. He’s inventing freely, throwing in the tropes of the genre with abandon. Doesn’t he know angels are fierce, two-faced, six-winged creatures (Ezekiel 14:18; Isaiah 6), not handsome youths in glowing white robes? There’s a reason they prefaced their every appearance, including this one, with ‘Do not be afraid’.

Good news that will cause great joy for all the people: All? Even as Luke wrote this paean to wishful thinking he knew that the Jesus myth had not brought joy to ‘all people’. Most had rejected the claims of the new cult and joy was hardly the prevalent emotion in some of the churches Paul wrote to.

This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. A baby wrapped in cloths, as was the custom, and lying in an animal feeding trough is a ‘sign’? A sign that the Messiah had arrived? Really? Granted a manger is not a conventional place for a new-born but it’s hardly miraculous. And what if by the time the shepherds had abandoned their flocks to the night and its marauding wolves, Mary had, say, picked up the child or found a better place for it? Imagine the confusion! Sorry, Luke but this is a very poorly constructed story. You just didn’t think it through.

As for the angels’ last proclamation, what does it really mean?

Glory to God: this of course is fawning to a God whose ego is more inflated and fragile than Donald Trump’s. He demands continual praise not only from his heavenly messengers but from those here below, or else he’ll go off on one. You really want to spend eternity with such a tyrant, Christians?

…in the highest heavens: a reference to the fact that early Christians believed in different layers of heaven; Paul writes about them too. God resides, as acknowledged here, in the highest, the top floor executive suite. No-one ever gets to go up there. Emails are sent down from on high.

And on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests: what sort of peace? Certainly not the absence of conflict or war. We’ve now had two more millennia of these, some in the past initiated by Christians themselves. Do people who are at peace with themselves start wars? Peace within then. Do Christians know greater peace than anyone else? Hard to say when it’s not something that can be measured but I’m sure Christians will claim it’s so.

On whom his favour rests: who exactly is this? Who enjoys the favour of a capricious deity? How do they know when he visits all manner of trials and tribulations, testing and tempering on those who count themselves as his. I’m sure the early Christians who helped write the angels’ speech thought it was they who enjoyed the Lord’s favour. Today’s Christians probably think the same. YHWH has always played favourites. Everyone else can go to hell.

So, the heralds of Jesus’ birth didn’t exactly bring good news, did they. Not even in Luke’s imaginary, completely invented, never-happened-in-reality and isn’t-even-a-decent-metaphor scenario.

Like a Virgin. Or Not

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To arrive at the nativity story most of us grew up with and which your kids and grandkids might well be performing this Christmas (mine are), the one with a stable, shepherds and wise-men, involves some cunning sleight of hand, not to mention a liberal dollop of invention.

The biblical ‘account’ of the story is spread across two gospels, Matthew and Luke. Mark hadn’t heard of it when he wrote his gospel so you won’t find it there. In fact, Mark’s Jesus doesn’t become God’s son until his baptism. Paul, writing earlier still, thinks God adopts Jesus only at his resurrection. Paul has no knowledge either of the nativity myth. John has no time for it: his Jesus is an eternal being who has existed with God from the beginning.

For Matthew, however, Jesus comes into existence when the Holy Spirit impregnates a virgin. Luke likes the idea and so copies it into his gospel. And now we have a problem: the idea that a virgin will bear the Messiah is lifted from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Jewish scripture, which renders Isaiah 7:14 as –

Therefore YHWH himself will give you a sign: the virgin (almah) will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

In the Septuagint, the Hebrew word almah, meaning ‘young woman’, is translated as virgin. However, the word for virgin in Hebrew is betulah, an entirely different word. Isaiah 7:14 is not a prophecy that a virgin will bear a son: only that a young woman will do so; in other words, a commonplace event. Matthew allowed himself to be misled: in his eagerness to find prophecies of Jesus in Jewish scriptures, he alighted on a mistranslation. He wrote his story accordingly, riffing freely on the error. Luke picked up on it a decade later, adding his own embellishments.

Neither does Isaiah 7:14 suggest the child being talked about will be the Messiah, nor that he will appear hundreds of years in the future. As subsequent verses make transparently clear, a short period of time is all that is suggested; no more than a few years:

He (the child) will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste. YHWH will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah – he will bring the king of Assyria (Isaiah 7:15-17).

These are all events contemporaneous with the writing of this part of Isaiah. All that is being said is that a young woman will become pregnant and produce a child in the near future. Even before this child properly knows right from wrong, YHWH will bring Israel’s enemies down upon it. (Because he’s such a caring God.)

None of this has anything to do with a virgin becoming pregnant, nothing to do with a Messiah, nothing to do with Jesus. It is not a prophecy about him, even if Matthew persuaded himself it was. Shamefully, almost all modern ‘translations’ of Isaiah retain ‘virgin’, when they know perfectly well it is not the word used, and that the context neither supports it’s use nor makes it necessary. They do so to maintain the lie that Isaiah 7:14 is about Jesus and to give credibility to Matthew and Luke’s ridiculous fiction that he fulfilled ‘prophecy’ by being born of a virgin. It’s a deception that will be repeated in church services around the world over the next couple of weeks.

The Anunciation: A Ghost Story for Advent

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The Nativity in Matthew and Luke begins long before Jesus’ birth. Matthew introduces Mary and Joseph once the former has been impregnated with The Holy Sperm. He doesn’t go into any detail about how this happened, he just drops in, in Matt 1:18, that the deed is done. Mary has had sex with a ghost.

This isn’t good enough for Luke though, who after reading Matthew’s tall tale, decides it needs some expansion. A lot of expansion, in fact. He takes the story back to before Mary’s non-consensual encounter with the Holy Spirit and picks on Elizabeth and Zechariah, an elderly couple well past the age of having kids. All the same, they do enjoy a tumble in the sack every now and then, and the Lord – ever the voyeur – decides he’ll bless one such union with fruitfulness. (There is much wrong with the details of this unbelievable yarn, some of which I consider here; I won’t reiterate them now for fear of awakening any amateur theologians who might be lurking here in the wings.)

Suffice to say, Luke – for it is he, lest we forget, who is making this stuff up – decides that Elizabeth is a long lost cousin of Mary’s, like in one of those soaps where long lost relatives pop up all the time, usually to no good end. In this particular episode, however, all goes well and Mary visits Elizabeth, whose baby is, in a strange twist of fate, destined to be John the Baptist from the earlier two gospels. In this story his embryonic self jumps for joy inside his mother once he realises his uterine Saviour has come to visit.

But were getting ahead of ourselves. First Mary has to go through the rigmarole of getting pregnant. Obviously as a good Catholic girl she can’t have sex with her betrothed prior to their wedding and just when she’s considering when that might be, an angel appears unto her. It’s Gabriel who has quite a bit to do in the Nativity story as a whole. As angels do, he annunciates to Mary all about the pregnancy part of the plot and she acquiesces to the Lord getting her with child by magically transferring his seed into her womb. I’m guessing it was by magic. It’s possible some sort of actual rumpy-pumpy occurred but Luke delicately passes over the intimate parts. As apparently the Holy Spirit does too.

Mary is so overjoyed to be pregnant before her 13th birthday that she bursts into song on the spot and spontaneously produces a hymn based on the Psalms and the future teaching of the baby she has only just conceived. It’s hard to believe that no actual time travel was involved. It is instead, a miracle, as her impromptu ditty flourishes into the literary masterpiece now known as The Magnificat, which is not, it turns out, a feline super-hero. Fortunately, she can remember it all, word for word, decades later when Luke decides he needs to invent record it. Honestly, the whole thing puts Cole Porter to shame.

You’d think then Mary would dash off to tell her betrothed, Joseph, the wonderful news that she is pregnant without his or any other man’s assistance, but Luke makes no mention of it. Luckily, it’s covered by Matthew, where an angel drops in on Joseph, a person of great gullibility faith. On hearing what the angel has to say, he swallows the story hook, line and stinker.

Then it’s back to where we came in. Mary’s sets off down the road to see the cousin, the wonderful bearer of John. She pitches up there for three whole months, perhaps to avoid Joseph, who, it turns out, was not as gullible as she thought.

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Honestly, this is really what happened. Would I lie to you? No, but someone would, and did. We’ll see what else he has in store in his over-worked imagination, next time.

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PS. Don, I know you like indulging in a bit of biblical exegesis. If you’d like to borrow this totally respectful effort for your blog, get in touch and we’ll work something out.

There May Be Trouble Ahead…

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Prophets, from left to right: Elijah, Julie Stephens,
Cindy Jacobs and er... Ed Miliband

Prophets don’t exist. A bunch of people intoxicated by religious fervour who think God has given them a special message that they must deliver to whoever will listen, are not prophets; they are a collection of extremists intoxicated with religious fervour.

We know this because no God exists. He can’t, as a result, drop messages, special or otherwise, into the heads of fanatics.

That’s it, really. No more to be said.

But so-called prophets exert quite an influence on our modern world. According to Abraham (I know, he’s a mythical figure but bear with me), God selected an ancient Jewish tribe to be his favourite buddies, so long as they did whatever he demanded of them, including hacking off their foreskins and that of their sons. What sort of prophet – what sort of God – comes up with this kind of lunatic fetishism?

Later the creators of a new prophet, whom they called Moses, came up with a story in which their hero encountered God in a bush (the symbolism is lost on us today.) This time he wanted his special buddies to invade their neighbour’s territory, slaughter them and take their land for themselves. This his favourite, de-foreskinned tribe did (modern genetic analysis of the peoples in the region suggests this isn’t what happened.)

After these fictional madmen came some potentially real fanatics who thought God had assigned them to lambast their fellow Jews for their shortcomings. These prophets promised the rubes rewards if they behaved as the prophets thought they should. These guys also came up with the idea that God would send a warrior Messiah to help his special little tribe take over the world. This is what happens when fanatics are allowed to get a hold of things.

A couple of centuries later, another self-proclaimed prophet turned up (or is invented) who seemed to think he’s the most special-est of all the prophets so far. This guy, called Yeshua (meaning ‘salvation’, so obviously not in any way symbolic) prophesied that the Messiah would be arriving real soon to sort the world out. He’d then hand it over to the Jewish people to manage. This guy’s script writers weren’t sure if Yeshua was talking about himself or some other supernatural character called the Son of Man. It doesn’t matter really. Nothing he prophesied happened when he confidently predicted it would: there was no Messiah who flies down from heaven, no final judgment, no great reset for the Earth. He was an absolute failure as a prophet; evidence, if more is needed, that those who claim to speak for God don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t worry, though, this guy was recast as a resurrected Godman, just like the ones in pagan myths.

A few other prophets appeared around about the same time. In fact, the extremist who changed his name to Paul seemed to think that just about anyone could become one so long as they ‘edified’ the brethren. It was a few years though before the next really big so-called prophet came along.

In the 8th century, a guy called Muhammad said he was told by an angel who represented a different version of God that, amongst other things, Islam would spread worldwide and there would be an increase in senseless murders. These rather nebulous and self-fulfilling predictions are even now coming to pass. Muhammad’s future followers are indeed spreading Islam across the globe while senseless murders continue being committed, a good many of them by Muslims themselves.

While Muslims have made it clear that Muhammad is the final prophet, history has blessed us since with a few more. Joseph Smith in the 1880s was commanded by a different God (or maybe by the same one who’s changed his mind again) to start a new church and to obliterate anyone who stood in his way. He was successful in this enterprise, despite managing to get himself killed in the process.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that given their abysmal success rate and the number of people who have suffered or perished as a result of their endeavours that we’d have had enough of prophets. While churches cannot agree on whether ‘genuine’ prophecy still exists, the prophets keep coming. Fanatics the world over, every bit as barmy as their predecessors, appoint themselves some deity’s spokesperson, and the ‘prophetic’ pronouncements begin: meaningless theobabble spattered across the Internet.

The Real Jesus

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Dear Christian,

When you became a Christian, did you meet the man who wandered around Galilee 2,000 years and who, according to ancient stories, died on a Roman cross? Was it an actual human being you met at the moment you ‘saw the light’ (the clue’s in the term)? Or was it something – an emotional experience perhaps – that you interpreted as the presence of a heavenly, supernatural being? If you’re honest you’ll acknowledge you didn’t meet a real person but felt something that you took to be one.

When you pray to Jesus, exactly who are you praying to? Is it the man who drifted around Galilee 2,000 years ago? Are your thoughts magically transported back in time so he hears you, somehow or other, in his head? No? So do you pray to a supernatural, celestial Jesus who for the past 2,000 years has been sitting at the right hand of God in a mythical never, never land? I’m guessing you’ll say this is the Jesus you commune with (while disputing my calling heaven never, never land).

When you worship Jesus are your honeyed words whisked back 2,000 years to sustain a man who meandered around Galilee spouting profundities before getting himself killed? Or do you envisage your prayers reaching a supernatural figure living out there in space or maybe in another dimension? (C’mon, you know it’s the latter.)

When you say Jesus was present at the creation of the world as described at the start of Genesis, do you mean the man who, billions of years later, would roam around Galilee? Or do you mean a celestial  Jesus who was a part of the Godhead in some mysterious, inexplicable way? (I’m guessing, again, it’s this latter.)

When you say Jesus will judge the living and the dead at the End of the Age, do you refer to the man who lived 2,000 years ago, trudging around Galilee? Or do you mean some mystical manifestation of this character who’s eager to separate the sheep from the goats while hovering in the sky prior to massacring the goats? (It’s this version, isn’t it.)

In the Bible, did Paul meet the flesh-and-blood man who had slogged around Galilee a few years earlier? Or did he hallucinate a celestial being as a flash of light? (It was the latter, wasn’t it.)

When you speak of the Jesus who died on the cross to save you from your sins, do you quote the individual who supposedly drifted round Galilee 2,000 years ago? Or do you more often reference Paul, who never met him and knows nothing of his supposed earthly life? (You know which.)

Yet despite your belief in mystical, spiritual versions of Jesus, you are adamant he was not a mythical being. Not at the start of time, not at the end, nor in Paul’s writings; not in your own conversion, not in your prayers or worship and especially not in your own inner experience of him. No, he was, according to you, a very real person.

Yet there are no signs you believe in this historical Jesus, the man who allegedly roamed around Galilee two millennia ago. You ignore him and his teaching if favour of a celestial superman. How do we know you ignore him? All the examples above for a start, but there’s also the way you don’t do what he says. You don’t love your neighbour and enemies alike, you don’t sell all you have to give to the poor, you don’t give to everyone who asks, you don’t despise riches, you don’t refrain from judging others. You rarely turn the other cheek or go the extra mile and you are not prepared to forgive endlessly. You don’t accept that this man believed the End of Age was coming in his own time (or at least that his script-writers did) nor that he was disastrously wrong. It’s the cosmic super-being you go for every time.

How very strange. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful phenomenon, don’t you think?