“A pleasant tale with a touch of pathos”
29 March 2007 by Stardust
When I was a Christian, how often I sat in church listening to the sermons and scripture readings week after week, month after month, year after year. I was always incredibly bored and that hour seemed like a day as the pastor droned on and on reciting some silly analogies like how “life is like an Oreo cookie, hard-shelled on the outside and the creamy sweet reward at the center” or hearing the same old message that “life sucks, and you suck, but God is good.” “God loves us even though we are very bad, and there is a place called Hell we can avoid being condemned to after our deaths by simply saying the magic words…”I believe”. Most of you who were Christians before “seeing the light” have listened to similar lectures.
We have often discussed how Christians cherry-pick from the Bible according to what suits their own thinking, and to support their version of the oxymoron “Biblical truth”. Looking back to the 1600s, we can read in most history books how Christians would use “evidences and justifications” from the “Good Book” such as “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) for their cruel and barbaric acts against other human beings. Today’s fundamentalist Christians and many moderate Christians use passages from their mythology books to support their bigotry against homosexuals. Leviticus 20:13 “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Thank human goodness we now have laws that (ironically in a “Christian” nation) prevent Bible literalists from carrying out most of the horrendous acts that are prescribed by the evil commands of an ancient text.
In all the years I sat in church services in a number of different churches of varying denominations, I heard numerous variations of Hell, where one would go if we did not say the magic words before our deaths that would get us a ticket to heaven. However, looking back, I realize I never heard from the pulpit “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother…all the men of the city shall stone him with stones, that he die…. (Deut. 21:18, 21), or Leviticus 20:18 “And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people..” or Leviticus 20:10 “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” (Just to name a few of hundreds of passages that are regularly ignored by clergy and congregations alike, thank human reason and goodness!)
We have had discussions with Christians where we bring up the point about the atrocities of the Bible and are blown off, or some make excuses like “that was then and this is now” and “those parts don’t apply to today’s world.” I remember during Bible studies when people brought up certain violent and cruel passages and they received responses like those mentioned above, or they were conveniently ignored and they would sidestep the subject and move on to other more pleasant topics.
Mark Twain, in his “Letters from the Earth” wrote a little story which illustrates just what I am talking about.
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos. A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, “Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him.” The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.
Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” were withheld from publication until 1962. The biting criticism of religion was considered so inflammatory by his daughter that she prevented its publication for more than 50 years.
29 March 2007, on 7:29 pm
It is to be expected that theists try to divert discussion from the parts of so-called holy scriptures that are unpalatable to them, whether these be in the Torah, the Bible, or the Qur’an, since the message is basically barbaric, and the behaviour exemplified and exhorted is an abomination to anyone who has a shred of human-decency.
What is perhaps more interesting, is that whilst the followers of the other two main Abrahamic religions have, in general, foregone perpetrating the atrocities that they are urged to commit by their respective ‘holy books’, many Muslims are still willing to perpetrate such monstrously inhumane acts as exhorted in the Qur’an on their fellow human-beings.
29 March 2007, on 7:34 pm
I think what I realized about christians, or any other religious group for that matter, is that they read their holy spcripture in light of their own sense of morality.
Those with a vengeful nature seek out the passages which depict how vengence or retribution is the way of god. Those who are of a peaceful nature, quote only from the passages which support their own moral foundations associated with peace.
This is, of course, cherry-picking. But more than that, there appears to be a congnitive disconnect that the process that they are employing is exactly that.
I fail to see how the god of the NT, jesus, can be anything else but the god of the OT. As, if jesus is god, then jesus is the god of the OT who performed some quite unsavoury “moral decisions.”
There really is a form of deliberate disconnect and I think it occurs because the majority of people read their holy books through their own moral lens. They rarely try to attain the overview of the book and its claims.
It is both strange and perturbing to me, to say the least.
29 March 2007, on 9:40 pm
beepbeep, jesus actually said many times that the old laws still existed. Few xians believe this too. Even my “religious degree” holding ethics teacher.
Those people who would commit those atrocities but can’t are also the ones who have wet dreams of the apocalypse.
What’s funny to me though is that Biblical LITERALISTS will say that those aren’t be taken literally.
29 March 2007, on 10:09 pm
Long time lurker surfacing for air here.
I dream of the day when the majority of our nation (USA), will have advanced enough to stand up and publicly recognize this overarching hypocrisy. Most atheists and freethinkers can easily reach the conclusions that most christians cannot face: That most of their holy text espouses behavior and tenents that they no longer believe in or follow. And by direct extension, those texts have lost their relevance in our “modern” world.
Perhaps this disconnect partially explains why Christianity is so prone to splintering off into different sects. Whenever a section or sections of the holy books become unbearable, it presents an opportunity for a group or leader to throw those parts out or reinterpret them. Voila: new sect.
I could go on, but I’ll shut up now. I just want to say that I deeply appreciate this site and the work put into it. Thanks for the island of sanity in this sea of idiocy.
Cheers
29 March 2007, on 10:53 pm
Thanks for sharing that with us Stardust. Also I am going to use your phrase “thank human reason and goodness” and “thank human goodness” from now on if you don’t mind? I really like them.
Amy
30 March 2007, on 12:15 am
Thanks for ’surfacing’, Ravensect…
I’m sure I’m not alone in suggesting that you surface here for air, more often.
What!…”Don’t hold your breath so long…that particular facial color doesn’t suit you!”
You brought up an interesting, and I think, very valid point about ’sect creation’.
Yikes!…indeed…how many Xtian sects are there, these days?
Of course, thanks, Stardust, for highlighting the whole subject; and the connection with Mark Twain.
Twain came up not too long ago in another post; and I commented about the fact the most people are not aware of his heavy critique of religion. Just that little tid-bit about 1962 and his daughter’s 50 year prevention of publication was the kind of thing I was unknowingly referring to. I’m 67, and am just getting ‘hip’ to that purposely obscured info about Twain.
Hmmm…that brings a whole new meaning to that old saying “Never the Twain shall meet!”…
Was it perhaps, some sneaky publishing agenda to intentionally protect the brainwashed religionists and morph the original saying…which might have been more like:
“Never the REAL Twain, shall YOU meet!…Harr!” [Yeah...I know...there are always Pirates!]
30 March 2007, on 12:48 am
Good call with the “Letters From the Earth.” I found that it was only disturbing because it was true.
30 March 2007, on 1:39 am
The Letters from the Earth are Twain speaking for Lucifer. Funnier yet are Adam’s Diary (what a twit Twain made him!) and Eve’s Diary.
When Twain described Heaven, he was scathing. The ideas of lolling on clouds, playing harps and listening to sermons were replaced by pretty innovative sex! The man was a treasure.
I well remember when they were released for publication. Our English teacher was agog with anticipation, having heard that they were rather “racy”. However, they were doomed to be banned in our school, and I had to wait for college to read them. It was well that they didn’t know I had read my way through all the novels by Frank Yerby that were on our bookshelves. Or that I had devoured Peyton Place and Lady Chatterly’s Lover behind my mother’s back.
As a result, I found Twain a little tame. But the newly published books beat the hell out of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Girls seem to find little relevance in those stories. Now, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was much better, as was Twain’s A Tramp Abroad–both of which I read in my 20s.
Find a used copy of Unabridged Twain–you will not be sorry!
Oh, and did I mention Twain was a treasure? I thought so…
30 March 2007, on 6:45 pm
I envy you, Naomi, being there when this book was finally published for the first time! But tell me: was Peyton Place really as racy as its reputation (I know the movie was toned down)?
30 March 2007, on 7:27 pm
Not really. There was more sex (not the “fade-to-black” of Hollywood) in Frank Yerby’s novels of the South.
Eve, it’s funny now to think back on what I felt then. That things were loosening up, that “banned in Boston” was joining the “buggy whip” in obscurity. I took my mother to an “adult film” in a mall cinema in 1968. (It wasn’t anything like Deep Throat; more like Eyes Wide Shut or any film that included both nudity and sex–but not porn.) When in the restroom on our way out, she ran into a friend and was “embarassed”! She exited with a line that was more poised that I’ve ever remembered her saying, “You never know who you’re going to run into at a dirty movie…”
Twain’s works are really delightful. From his A Tramp Abroad, there was the tale of a man who searched in the total darkness for something he had dropped on the floor of his hotel room in Germany. His small room was suddenly the size of interior of Versailles, and later, the size of Portugal! And as he groped, he found the most improbable things–and even people! It speaks, through his absurdities, of perception and memory, of quest and diversion. And every time I search for something under any bed, I think of Twain. I probably always will. At least, I hope so–the memory of that tale entertains me even now.
30 March 2007, on 8:23 pm
As kids and being raised catholic I remember that Twain was highly recommended NOT to read. Tom Sawyer was OK but it was the gateway principle that was in effect. LOL when I finally read some of his works I was happy to be no longer under the influence of the church or it’s lies. I read everything I could get my hands on and have forgotten most of it. I remember thinking that Twain was best at reconciling the ideals of free thought with the absurdities of scripture. And he was not afraid of saying so.