Category Archives: The human origins of religion

Smash! Kill! Destroy!

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handsofgod

So how has the great God of Reason done so far?

We’re still not out of Genesis and he’s –

Trashed his entire creation just because a couple who didn’t know how touchy he is managed to upset him;

Destroyed two towns and almost everyone in them because he found the locals offensive;

Drowned everyone in existence (except for an old piss-head and his family) because – you guessed it – they offended him;

Engineered a spot of child-abuse;

Decided the best way for people to show him they’re his bestest buddies is to have them disfigure their genitals.

Now, honestly, Christians, how can you say any of this is rational or logical, reasonable or considered? Your God’s response to everything is Smash! Kill! Mutilate! Destroy! – never as a last resort, always as his first reaction. He’s the Hulk, Godzilla and ISIS all rolled into one. Not once does he apply reason or logic. Smash! Kill! Mutilate! Destroy! And not only in Genesis but throughout the Old Testament:

His chums want the land occupied by other tribes? Smash! Kill! Destroy!

They don’t show him enough love? Smash! Kill! Destroy!

They break one or other of his mostly petty rules? Smash! Kill! Destroy!

They offend him in some remarkably trivial way (collecting sticks, teasing a bald bloke, doing sex wrong)? Smash! Kill! Destroy!

Over and over again.

Until, at last, he has another big idea! Another Master Plan! The Master Plan to end all Master Plans! (His fourth at least.) And guess what? It’s all Smash! Kill! Destroy! Especially Kill! This is a dude who really can’t think outside the box.

Here’s how it goes: the Lord gives up on his previous Master Plan, which he’d told some selected desert marauders was forever and ever, and decides its time to have another go at sorting out mankind that he helped screw-up in the first place. His idea this time is to come to Earth himself as a sort of clone, which he creates by raping a young woman, just like all the other gods of old. When he grows up this clone/avatar tells everyone how God wants them to behave so they don’t upset the version still in Heaven quite so much. The clone then gets himself murdered at the hands of the very people he’s come to visit – the same ones the Lord promised to take care of forever and ever in his previous Master Plan – which magically allows anyone who repeats a special incantation to join an exclusive club. Everyone else he plans to torture and murder for all eternity, because that’s what he likes doing best. Of course, the version of himself he sends to Earth won’t actually make any of this clear – that’ll be left to someone else to make up afterwards – but, in the best illusion yet, he’ll come back to life before beaming up to Heaven to cosy up to his other self, the one preoccupied with death, destruction and mutilation.

This time it’s foolproof: a well-thought through, logical, rational and reasonable plan.

Except… not really. It’s bullshit. There’s no reasoning here, just a lot of stuff made up as people went along. None of it makes sense. The copy seems to have no idea what’s going on and certainly no inkling that his death has cosmic significance. On top of that, no-one really knows how the magic works – everyone who mentions it has a different idea – and the record of it all is scrappily cobbled together donkeys’ years after it all was supposed to have happened. Still, the main thing is it all involves a lot of killing – the clone first; then the poor sap manipulated into ‘betraying’ him; a couple who don’t want to give away all their belongings; some of the dudes who believe the magic is for real then, after they’ve really pissed off the Romans, lots more of them and finally, once the nutjobs get the upper hand, loads and loads of other people – which must really have pleased the God of Death Reason.

If this is the best he can do, then we’re in trouble deep. If our ability to reason comes from him, as Christians claim, it’s no wonder we can be irrational, illogical, unreasonable and unreasoning. Which of course is why he is, because he’s a reflection of the beings  that created him – us. Human emotions and cognitive capabilities came first and were projected onto the gods we created, including, eventually, the monotheistic monster, Yahweh. It was he primitive tribesmen decided must be responsible for natural disasters and the brevity and brutality of life. Such things had to be punishments, hadn’t they? And if punishments, then there had to be One doing the punishing. One who must be appeased if he was ever to stop. Hence sacrifices, behaving in ways that might please him, killing those who don’t, worship. All futile, like pleading with one’s own reflection in a mirror.

The God created by this kind of thinking only reflected back at his makers the worst of themselves; jealousy, anger, intolerance, belligerence, petulance, vengefulness and violence. Hardly ever Reason. 

And so does he still.

 

Idiotic Stuff Jesus Said

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JC&ManJust what did Jesus say? The Jesus Seminar and other scholars* conclude that only about 18% of the words attributed to him in the gospels are authentically his. They reach this conclusion because so much of what Jesus ‘said’ – 82% of his utterances – is demonstrably derived from elsewhere.

There were four major sources for his words, which I’ll discuss briefly here, providing an example of each. Bear in mind also that whatever the derivation of Jesus’ words, those we have today have been subject to, in their earliest days, an unreliable oral tradition, repeated copying and deliberate and accidental alteration. The earliest surviving ‘words of Jesus’ (a few fragments of the fourth gospel) date to a century after he lived.

1. The early church created a good deal of the Jesus narrative, making him say what was important to them. For example, ‘take, eat, this is my body,’ and ‘take, drink, this is my blood that is shed for you,’ is clearly a post-crucifixion perspective. While it appears in arguably the most Jewish of the gospels (Matthew’s) the idea of drinking blood, even symbolically, would have been, and remains, anathema to Jews, whose scriptures forbid it (Leviticus 17.10 -16). Jesus was an orthodox Jew; it was the Hellenised Paul who transplanted the pagan ritual into nascent Christianity. He relates in 1 Corinthians 11.23-26, written about 15 years before the first gospel, how his wholly imaginary ‘Christ’ told him of this bizarre activity. Once established in the early church, Jesus then had to be made to endorse it and it was written back into the gospels.

2. The gospel writers (or others) invented dialogue for him. His entire conversation with Pilate, for example, is invented not once but four times, the encounter being rendered differently in all four gospels. It is probable that the entire scenario is fiction, given the likelihood the excessively cruel Roman governor would even entertain the idea of questioning a seditious nobody himself. And then there’s the ‘I am’ statements of John’s Jesus that I considered here.

3. The gospel writers altered difficult sayings into something more palatable. For example, in Matthew 15.24 Jesus says he was ‘sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’ (my italics). By the end of the same gospel, as well as in Luke and John, this has become a commandment to ‘make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28.19). So which was it? Was the message exclusively for Jews or was it for all? It suited early churches, filled with non-Jews, that the gospel was for everyone, just as Paul had argued. Jesus’ words to the contrary – even if they were sufficiently widely known to have had to be included in Matthew’s original account – needed to be amended. Who amended them and when we shall never know, but it was certainly after the idea of the Trinity had taken hold.

4. Statements Jesus actually made. The Jesus Seminar regards as authentic sayings such as:

If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also (Matthew 5.39)

If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well (Matthew 5.40)

Love your enemies (Luke 6.27)

Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God (Luke 6.20) [changed in Matthew’s gospel to the less radical ‘poor in spirit’!]

If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile (Matthew 5.41)

As inspiring as these might initially appear, they actually mean very little; they’re either prophecies that didn’t come to pass, impractical moral expectations or pseudo-spiritual homilies. And how much of this advice, these admonitions, do today’s Christians follow? You’d be hard pushed to find many that do. After all, following Jesus doesn’t entail doing what he says.

* I have used Robert W. Funk et al‘s The Five Gospels (HarperOne, 1997), Simon Loveday’s The Bible For Grown-Ups (Iconbooks, 2016) and Mark Allan Powell’s rather less impartial The Jesus Debate (Lion, 1998) for this post

Recent Encounters of the Religious Kind

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3. Prophecy Fulfilled

DB&JC

Back in January I predicted that David Bowie’s demise would lead to his apotheosis. And so it comes to pass.

First there’s this, from the Guardian‘s Suzanne Moore:

The theory that it was in fact, David Bowie’s presence in the universe that was holding everything together is one I find hard to resist, given how awful everything has been of late…

Second is Paul Morley’s new Bowie biography, the cleverly titled The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference, with its abundance of publicity including Radio 4’s broadcast ‘book of the week’. It is probably worth a look if you’re at all interested in the Thin White Duke and his various incarnations.

Two aspects of the biography stand out: first, Morley’s admission that he’s had to invent some details of Bowie’s life because either there is a lack of information – about his pre-fame period, for example – or, there are too many contradictory reports of certain events (often from Bowie himself) – or, a biography is so much more interesting when ‘facts’ are reorganised, again as Mr Bowie himself was wont to do when it suited him.

Second, the tone is uncritical to the point of sycophancy. Morley’s evident respect and admiration for Bowie translate into an adulation that elevates the late star to a priestly, semi-divine status. Within the first few pages Bowie is described as someone who manipulates time (xii); has a voice that pierces straight to the heart (p2); possesses the wisdom of the ages (p8); is capable of rearranging others’ minds (p8); can recreate the cosmic order (p8); symbolises the future (p8); dramatically splits reality wide open and penetrates time itself (p9); hunts for kindred spirits ready to surrender to his ways (p11); is obsessed with the deeper truths of existence (p14) and is a kind of teacher (p15) who proclaimed, ‘look how amazing this is. I am never, ever going to die’ (p20). Bowie would surely have been amused by most of these claims.

Written only a matter of months, perhaps weeks, after the singer’s death, in a time when, after his initial success in the 1970s, his every word, note, movement, metamorphosis, transformation, declaration and pronouncement was seized upon, broadcast and preserved for posterity, it is remarkable how much of the biography has to be constructed. Remarkable too how much it reflects Morley’s own experience of Bowie, how he writes about his Bowie, or series of Bowies.

Imagine if he were writing this same biography 40 or more years from now, with no personal or direct experience of the Bowie phenomenon, when no-one who had first-hand experience of it was alive, or if they were, had to rely on shaky memories of events that had happened – or maybe not – in their youth. How much more would the author have had to invent, even if he had access to archive material, about the impact the subject had, the effect of his music, his presence, his vision(s), his theatricality, his changes, his highs, his lows, his philosophy, his influence, the contribution he made to popular music and to art, the difference he made to ordinary individuals’ lives…

Now: imagine there are no reliable archives; no recordings, no film, no contemporaneous newspaper reports. Imagine too the author is not a twenty-first century journalist and musician, but has, like all those around him, including his audience, little or no scientific understanding of the world. Rather, he has a mind-set dominated by God, angels and devils, and is prone to superstition and the possibility people can and do rise from the dead. How much more readily would the half-forgotten charismatic of this ‘biography’ be elevated to god-like status. How much more miraculous the behaviour attributed to him. How much more a priest and saviour than any modern day icon.

And so the gospels came to be.