Let’s Put the Merry Back in Christmas!
I had an experience last week that, for me, sums up just how much has been lost as a result of the “War on Christmas.” I was in a religious book store in a desperate attempt to find a book of Christmas songs. I had looked all over, initially thinking every store would have a wide selection of song books with all the old favorites, from Away in the Manger to Here Comes Santa Claus. But guess what? There were none to be found!
I should back up. For years, my children and I have gathered together to celebrate Christmas. We have a number of traditions, such as burning a Yule Log with wishes for the coming year, which we always write down, store away and read the following year to see which ones came true. But this year, we wanted to add another tradition–to sing Christmas carols, though we’re not sure how many of us can carry a tune. When I mentioned it to my kids, they were very enthused, so off I went last weekend to find some songbooks. But store after store (and I mean stores that had every other immaginable Christmas product) had not one Christmas song book.
Oh, there were plenty of every other type of Christmas song books, such as ones with special music by this or that performing artist. There were scores of Christmas song CDs by all sorts of bands, choirs and pop stars. There was even a book about the history of Christmas carols at my local book store. But no simple song books.
“So,” I thought, “surely, that little Evangelical book store run by those who, these days, are so adament about putting Christ back in Christmas, will have plenty to choose from.” Though I had this uneasy feeling in my gut that I was going to face some sort of diappointment.
And sure enough, as I went through the doors of the Family Christian Bookstore and bounded up to the check out/information desk, I was greeted by an employee who said some very familar words, but the way in which he said it stopped me in my tracks–”Merry Christmas!” Yes, he greeted me with a Merry Christmas…but not in what I or what I should think most ordinary people would consider “traditional.” In other words, not Merry Christmas with a smile and some sense of happiness to it. Not Merry Christmas with any sort of joy or peace or good will. And no where near the sort of Merry Christmas Old Saint Nick would heartily bellow.
No, it was an angry Merry Christmas! It was the sort of Merry Christmas in Scrooge’s opening comments of A Christmas Carol, followed by his wish that any who said it ought to be boiled in their Christmas pudding. It was the sort of Merry Christmas that the mocking Grinch would say (before his heart was increased in size). Now that I think about it, it was very close to the kind of Merry Christmas that I heard from a popular comedian some years ago who inserted a vulgarity inbetween–”Merry F***ing Christmas!” It was the most UNmerry Christmas I’ve ever heard!
How did it come to this? While there have always been some controversies and questions raised about Christmas, it seems to me that in the past several years, the complaints about what’s happened to Christmas have gone into overdrive…and the direction has changed. Before, I recall hearing complaints (most of them quite justified) about how Christmas has become too commercialized, a materialistic orgy, and a season that leaves millions of people in too much credit card debt.
But now, it’s about something else. Now, there is a war, yeah a war on Christmas! That is, if you believe what’s coming from the Evangelicals these days and their partners on right wing TV and talk radio:
Forces of evil, inspired by Satan, himself, are motivating atheists to rob us of Christmas. These evil forces are what’s responsible for holiday cards that say, “Seasons Greetings,” instead of “Merry Christmas.” The enemies of the Church have denied children the right to celebrate Christmas at school (and according to Governor and candidate for president Rick Perry, the same enemies who made it OK for gays to serve openly in the military, yeah, like that’s a bad thing.) And, of course, the most wicked organization on earth, the ACLU, by virtue of their direct pact with Beelazub, have removed manger scene decorations from city hall lawns.
So now, they’re fighting back! Onward Christian soldiers to defend and put Christ back in Christmas, starting with a campaign to say “Merry Christmas” any time they can to whomever they can, because they’re gonna show everyone that they’re not gonna take it anymore.
Really? So, Evangelicals are just responding to decades of anti-Christmas oppression and a godless movement determined to stamp out Christianity, starting with this revered holiday? They were just minding their own business and as merry as could be with the salvation of Christ and the love of God in their hearts and didn’t feel the need to do any of this fighting back until they were “attacked”? And poor, defensely Baby Jesus, was essentially kidnapped, not just from his manger, but apparently with his manger, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the three kings, the oxen and the donkeys? Oh, and the Star of Bethlehem, too!
Or did this war start a bit differently?
I’m gonna say, “Very differently!”
You see, this so-called War on Christmas didn’t begin with atheists or Satan worshippers…not even gays. No, this all began when someone who had a whole lot of the religion named after Christ, but who didn’t have an ounce of the Spirit of Christ decided it would be a great idea to use Christmas as an avenue to ram their politicized, tribalistic version of Jesus onto everyone in society and if they didn’t respond by joining up with the “INs,” then they would be dehumanized and labeled as the “OUTs.” In no time at all, it became clear that Evangelicals were gonna have none of the unifying spirit of Christmas that each year, for a litle while anyway, brought people together, offered a light of hope and inspired charity. Of course, the result has been a severe loss of the Merry of Christmas and, sure, this Christmas-become-a-proselytizing-tool has scared a lot of non Evangelical believers, some of whom, now feel they have to do all they can to reinforce the wall of separation between Church and State.
And I can’t help but feel that was just the response they were hoping for! Having pushed those who don’t believe as they do to push back–just like the bullies at school used to do when I was young–now they can claim whatever they do is justified because “they started it.”
But what the Evangelicals don’t get is that almost all the athiests and non Evangelicals out there used to be very tolerant of (and I bet would be quite tolerant again) the Christmas holiday season, if not actively happy to participate in it! I dare say many long for the time when Christmas was just about, well, Christmas! And there’s a growing sadness for how Christmas has become bitterly politicized!
What to do? Well, I know where I’m going to start–I’m going to do what I can to revive the Merry of Christmas.
Getting back to my songbook story, not even the religious book store had any regular Christmas song books. I’m still not sure why. I’d like to think there are so many families hoping to sing together that they had already bought up all the song books, and it’s too close to Christmas for the stores to back order them. Or it could be that people just aren’t singing carols that much any more…but I was still determined.
So I finally just went on the Internet, found a website that had about 20 Christmas songs, printed them out, made copies and made my own little song booklets. When my kids and grandkids come over to celebrate Christmas, we’re gonna sing them as best we can, but however it sounds, we’ll do so with joy. On Christmas Eve, I even hope to go out and do some caroling. And, yes, in case you didn’t catch it, we’re going to sing, not just the Baby Jesus songs, but the Santa Claus ones too.
In spite of all the efforts of those who have done all they can to subvert the Good News of Jesus, twisting him and God the Father into the most hateful and cruel beings in the universe, I don’t think it’s an accident that the Spirit of the real Christ continues to find ways to break through all the distortion, even in the form of a jolly, loving and giving grandfather figure who, joyfully, wished Merry Christmas to all!
I’ve come to the conclusion that we were all a whole lot better off back when there was no particular conflict between Baby Jesus and Santa or, at least, no acute problem. There was a peaceful coexistence–Rudolf, Frosty and Santa’s elves got along just fine with Mary, Joseph, the 3 Wise Men and the shepherds. Jingle Bells had the effect of arousing the joy of Christmas, and when anyone said, “Merry Christmas!” they were actually doing so with merriment.
In other words, we don’t have to and no one should co-opt the birthday of Jesus and use it as a platform to convert people. It’s missing the point of the whole reason Christ came in the first place to use Christmas greetings as a type of secret hand-shake to determine who is with us and who is against us. The War on Christmas is an oxymoran. To wage war, even in “defense” of Christmas is to repudiate the message of the angels who proclaimed, “Peace on earth and good will to [all] men!”
So, I will be wishing people a Merry Christmas. Why? Simply because Christ the Savior is Born and Santa Claus is coming to town!
December 16, 2011 at 12:14 am
Rick, I think the way you signed off, mentioning Christ and Claus, says worlds. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are creatures of grace, But according to most Christians, Jesus has the ethics of a pit viper. If you don’t believe in him, despite the fact that he is either unable or unwilling to communicate with human beings personally, he will send you to hell, or eternally destroy you, or punish you in some unjust way. Orthodox Christianity with its gospel of “Jesus saves BUT” turns Jesus into the biggest Grinch of all time. If he could save the thief on the cross with a nod of his head, why doesn’t he just nod his head at everyone? If he is unable to save, why call him the Savior? If he can save people of other religions but refuses to do so, why did he tell the tale of the Good Samaritan? If Jesus is not a Good Samaritan himself, that parable would make him a hypocrite, but of course Jesus saved nearly all his criticism for hypocrites.
Obviously something is wrong with the “Jesus saves” dogma. If human beings are unable to save themselves, and Jesus is able to save them, he ought to save everyone. Until Christians stop condemning all the world to hell (including their own children if they decide not to believe), the religion just makes thinking, compassionate people disgusted. I now celebrate Claus but not Christ, because his so-called “disciples” have turned him into a bigot, a petty egomaniac and monster willing to turn his back on most of the human race. Here’s a poem I wrote on the subject:
What Would Santa Claus Say
by Michael R. Burch
What would Santa Claus say,
I wonder,
about Jesus returning
to kill and plunder?
For he’ll likely return
on Christmas Day
to blow the bad
little boys away!
When He flashes like lightning
across the skies
and many a homosexual
dies,
when the harlots and heretics
are ripped asunder,
what will the Easter Bunny think,
I wonder?
What would creatures of grace like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny think of the Jesus of Revelation, who according to John of Patmos will return to destroy trillions of animals (after they had all just suing the praises of God!). John also said that Jesus would murder the children of a woman who was alive and committing adultery at the time Revelation was written. Did Jesus kill hrt children or was John a false prophet? John also said that human beings would be tortured with fire and brimstone, “in the presence of the lamb and holy angels.” So much for hell being “separation from God.”
According to Christians like John of Patmos, Tertullian and Jonathan Edwards, the “saints” will look down into hell from “heaven” and gloat to see people of other religions being tortured.
Perhaps it would be better to make Xmas more about Santa and presents, and less about a compassionate man that an insane religion turned into the biggest Grinch in human history. Even Hitler didn’t torture his victims beyond the grave. Before parents give the Bible to innocent children, they ought to read it and circle all the verses no good person would do themselves. When I started circling all the questionable verses in my Bible, I was amazed at how few verses there were that were worthy of my belief. Why should I believe in someone who refuses to speak to me? Why should I put Jesus on a pedestal over my own family and friends? Why should I love a God who condemned every living creature to death unfairly? If a man murdered my mother, I would want him locked up to keep him from doing the same thing to someone else. What, then, should we do with a being who murdered every baby that was ever born, sooner or later, on false charges (since we now know that trillions of animals suffered and died before man ever walked the earth)?
Merry Xmas,
Mike Burch
December 16, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Hello Mike,
Once more, you’ve asked a number of very poignant questions, and I appreciate you taking the time to post them. If I may make an early Christmas wish, it would be that every Evangelical read and consider the questions you raise and ask themselves if the version of Jesus they believe in is the cruel being Man has constructed in place of the original Jesus.
The short answer to your questions is that the original message of Jesus has been greatly obscured and nearly blotted out. I am convinced this was and continues to be no accident, but that wicked men have actively done all they could to turn what was the GOOD News into the most horrific news ever. Sadly, this process began even before the last of the 12 disciples had passed away or were martyred. Within a few decades, yes, there were people like John of Patmos who revised Jesus, from the one who taught us to love our enemies, forgive without measure and to turn the other cheek into a vengeful mass murderer whose followers cried out for vengence.
Given the vengeful, cruel nature of Man, it’s a wonder that ANY of Jesus’ original message survives at all, that, inspite of all the many efforts in the past to corrupt the gospels, to adulterate them, to mistranslate them, to heap on apochraphal revisions and to constantly reinterpret his words, if not bury them in the rhetoric of hate and condemnation, somehow the message has survived and is still available to us even two millennia later!
As you noticed, the real good news, is often hidden. Santa is a perfect example of how God’s abundant goodness that He wishes to lavish upon us has had to come in the form of a loving and giving grandfather figure. It’s as if, no matter how many pains are taken to turn Jesus into the ultimate symbol of hate, the Spirit of Jesus finds ways to break through to us!
I’m not one to make a lot of claims for biblical prophesy. I think it’s so easy to make things said thousands of years ago into whatever one wishes in order to make it seem like a specific prediction of what’s going on at the present time. That said, the prediction of a mass delusion, said to begin at the time of the aging apostles until the coming of the Messiah, (sometimes translated as the “last days,” though a better translation would be “the latter part of the current age”) during which many people would embrace the belief in a being who is the exact opposite of Jesus, thus the term “Anti-Christ,” sure seems to have come true.
December 16, 2011 at 7:33 pm
Rick, i agree with you. I think the Bible mingles the words of compassionate men who believed in social justice (Jesus, the early apostles, and the Hebrew prophets) with the words of men who were the antithesis of Jesus (the Levites scribes who wrote the book of Deuteronomy and pretended to find it during the reign of the boy-king Josiah, then went on an orgy of murder, killing any priest who disagreed with them). John of Patmos was just the last in a long line of people who called for God to favor them and destroy anyone who disagreed with them. Unfortunately, as a result, parts of the Bible are worse than Mein Kampf.
That doesn’t mean that Jesus, Paul and the other apostles agreed with the insanity. In fact, I once had a vision in which I saw Peter and James leaving the church they founded, not in anger, but in disappointment. I believe the time was just before the Roman legions reached Jerusalem. The city was peaceful, but I could feel danger on the horizon. At that time many Jews decided to stay in Jerusalem because they believe God and the Messiah would destroy the Roman legions. If my vision is true, perhaps the people who knew Jesus best, Peter and James, did not believe he would return like Genghis Khan.
I cannot claim that my vision is “true,” but it’s interesting that I knew the names of the apostles, and that I knew danger was approaching and they had chosen to leave the region. I never heard a word spoken, and of course I don’t understand Aramaic.
I have often wondered if John of Patmos was one of the ringleaders of the religious zealots who convinced so many Jews to stay and die during the siege of Jerusalem. We know from the accounts of Josephus and other literate writers of the time that Jews inside Jerusalem at times killed other Jews who wanted to make peace, and threw them over the walls.
It is hard to imagine the compassionate Jesus of the Gospels suddenly becoming the monstrous Jesus of Revelation … killing children if their mother has extramarital sex … condemning Christians for eating the wrong foods (contradicting what he, Peter and Paul had clearly said, that Christians can eat what they please) … destroying trillions of animals after they had sung the praises of God … and torturing human beings with fire and brimstone in heaven, at the foot of the throne of God, while the angels watched and did nothing, and the “saints” screamed for vengeance and blood.
When I was a young boy and adults who called themselves “Christians” told me that the entire Bible was the “infallible word of God,” I read the entire Bible and was sick at heart and in despair until I finally told God that I would have to go to hell, because I couldn’t trust anyone so evil and unjust. Now I worry about the millions of children who are being misled by so-called Christians who refuse to admit the obvious truth about the Bible. Having a young child read the Bible is a very dangerous enterprise, because over and over again the Bible descends into the wildest injustices and most horrifying depictions of God.
If parents love their children, they should realize that the Bible can send children off the deep end, if they believe everything they read.
The main reason I left Christianity is that I think Christian churches have abused billions of children over the last 2,000 years. I wonder what Jesus thinks about the religion, if he still lives in some other, hopefully better, dimension?
December 16, 2011 at 9:05 pm
One of the things that I’ve often thought about that would be of great help to those of us who are trying to get the good news out would be a version of the Bible that clearly isolates the human reactions to the unfolding Word from the Word itself. Maybe something akin to the Red Letter Bibles.
But it would be an enormous undertaking. First, it would require a group of excellent scholars. Second, they would have to be the sort of people who are boldly unafraid to put their names in print, willing to be labeled as heretics and, quite possibly, have their lives put at risk.
Up until recently, it would also have required that a publisher be equally unafraid to print such an edition along with book stores willing to stock them.
Now, though, with the Internet and e-book readers becoming more popular, perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so difficult.
- Original Message –
December 18, 2011 at 6:39 am
Rick, you said:
. First, it would require a group of excellent scholars. Second, they would have to be the sort of people who are boldly unafraid to put their names in print, willing to be labeled as heretics and, quite possibly, have their lives put at risk.
I think that Bishop Spong is of that ilk.
December 18, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Spong is for sure a courageous man of God! He certainly also has the scholarly ability
Sent from my iPhone
December 18, 2011 at 12:20 pm
Regarding the Christmas/Santa thing, I just wondered if “political correctness” raised it’s ugly head in there somewhere? Can’t offend the Muslims
December 18, 2011 at 10:49 pm
Here in the US, I don’t sense any particular over-sensitivity to the Muslim community at Christmastime. The main conflict is coming from the Radical Christian Right and civil rights groups. The great irony is how the Pseudo Evangelicals have managed to take so much of Spirit of Christ out of Christmas in the NAME of keeping Christ in Christmas!
Sent from my iPhone
December 19, 2011 at 8:17 am
Cameron and Rick,
As a publisher of Jewish Holocaust poetry, also known as Shoah (Hebrew for “catastrophe”) poetry, and Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) poetry, I think Christians need to understand what Christians and Jews have done to Muslims in the Middle East, particularly the Palestinians. Anyone who studies the facts, rather than subscribing to pro-Israel and pro-U.S. propaganda, will soon come to the sickening understanding that millions of completely innocent Muslim women and children have been punished collectively for the “crime” of having been born into the “wrong” race and the “wrong” creed. That is, in a word, bigotry.
My Cherokee ancestors had a saying: Don’t judge someone else till you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. If we were Palestinians farmers, and had seen our mothers, sisters, wives and children robbed of their land and human rights by hypocrisy-spouting Jews and Christians who use the Bible to claim vastly superior rights, we would be very, very angry.
American Christians have funded and supported three Holocausts:
(1) Forcing millions of completely innocent Native American women and children to walk the Trail of Tears.
(2) Forcing millions of completely innocent African American women and children to be enslaved, then go without human rights for another century.
(3) By blindly believing verses in the Bible that command and condone racism and intolerance (even ethnic cleansing and genocide), forcing millions of completely innocent Palestinian women and children to walk a new Trail of Tears, and in many cases be treated worse than slaves (because slaves at least had economic value).
We have done far more than “offend” Muslims. Our “Christian” churches and government have allowed them to be treated worse than livestock on their native land. They have good cause to be angry with Jews and Christians, who act as if they have no human rights, not even the right to own the farmland they need to feed their children.
The blindness of many Christians to simple matters of compassion and justice brings great shame to the name of Jesus.
December 19, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Thanks Mike for reminding us…
that God does not play favorites (is “no respector of persons” in the KJV) and
that even if Muslims were all our enemies (which 99.9999999% are not because only a very small number have committed or supported terrorist acts), Jesus STILL calls us to love them.
Perhaps, even those who are turning to the hate and violence of Islamic Fundamentalism would not be doing so if only we could reel in the Christian Fundamentalists and begin following Jesus’ instructions to do good, even to those who do evil.
- Original Message –
December 19, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Rick, I agree. Christian fundamentalism is helping to cause the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Extremist Muslims have only to tell the truth, saying, “Look how hypocritical and unjust Christians are! They say they believe in love, compassion and justice, but how do they treat millions of innocent Palestinian women and children? They say they believe in equality, but why do they always favor Jews over Palestinians, denying innocent children the most basic of human rights.” When they tell the truth, they are able to recruit large numbers of angry young men (many of whom become terrorists and suicide bombers) and raise donations.
Christians need to remember that Jesus, the apostles and Hebrew prophets spoke of the need for chesed (mercy, compassion, lovingkindness) and social justice. But for more than half a century, the US has preached sermons on equality, democracy and justice to the rest of the world, while turning a blind eye a dear ear to the suffering of Palestinians. To their credit, more than a billion Muslims have not forgotten the Palestinians. In polls conducted by an American research firm, a high percentage of Muslims in other nations place justice for Palestinians above their own economic welfare. Of course most Muslims are not extremists or fundamentalists, and if Christian would act in accordance with their faith, a more moderate version of Islam might emerge all over the world, because most Muslims are as sick of war and injustice as most Americans are.
Large-scale injustice always leads to unrest and violence on the part of the victims. Christian injustices that led to the Trail of Tears soon led to massacres on both sides. Christian injustices that led to American slavery soon led to the Civil War, still the bloodiest war in American history. Christian injustices against Palestinians led to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), 9-11, and two horrific, needless wars.
It is sickening to know that millions of American Christians who call Jesus the Prince of Peace still refuse to treat darker-skinned people with compassion and justice. Our policy in the Middle East has been terribly hypocritical, and of course Jesus saved nearly all his sternest criticism for religious hypocrites.
If Christians want peace, they need to practice compassion and social justice. If they want ceaseless war, they can just continue to be hypocrites and practice injustice, while blaming their victims: Native Americans, black slaves and now darker-skinned Muslims.
December 19, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Amen! This is why it is so important for those of us who have found the real Good News to speak out against the Anti- False Gospel that has overtaken so many.
- Original Message –
December 19, 2011 at 5:58 pm
I don’t consider myself a Christian any longer, because I see no evidence that Jesus loves me and is able to communicate with me. But I have studied near-death-experiences and my wife was with her grandmother when she had a vision of heaven, speaking to her departed loved ones. Atheists, agnostics and people of other religions have visions of what sounds like heaven during NDEs. My educated guess is that Jesus was a compassionate, loving man who may have been able to communicate with his loved ones from beyond the grave. One of five Americans has had such an experience, according to a poll I read. The Hebrew prophets spoke of a heaven without hell. Paul agreed with Ezekiel that all Israel would be saved, and Ezekiel said that Sodom and Gentile nations like Samaria (the modern-day West Bank) would be restored along with Israel.
No one can “prove” that God exists, or that Jesus is God or the unique Son of God. No one can “prove” that heaven exists. NDEs do seem to confirm the possibility of heaven, just not for only Christians.
If more Christians would read the Bible from cover to cover, and use an accurate modern translation, they would see that “hell” and suffering after death were basically never even suggested by the Hebrew prophets. Paul seems to have been a universalist whose message of love and everyone being saved in stages was corrupted by later revisionists who tried to reserve heaven for themselves. In his second sermon after Pentecost, Peter spoke of the restitution of all things to God, spoken of by all the Holy Prophets since the world began. Yes, there are a few verses in the Bible that seem to describe something like hell, but there are also verses that command and/or condone the worst crimes known to man: slavery, sex slavery, matricide, infanticide, ethnic cleaning and genocide.
If Christians would do what Jesus did — practice compassion and social justice, helping other people as they are able and opposing injustice, violence and hypocrisy — and not subscribe to bizarre ideas that turn Jesus into a monster willing to murder people and send them to hell for not “believing” in him, we might see Christianity become what it was in the beginning: a source of hope. But how can anyone hope to be “saved” while billions of human beings suffer for all eternity in hell? Any compassionate person would flee such a “heaven” and its Gods.
December 19, 2011 at 6:25 pm
For all the reasons you mention, I have to believe that, if Jesus were here today, he would be aghast at the religion that bears his name.
- Original Message –
December 20, 2011 at 4:43 am
Yes, the christian faith has a dark past and America is the only nation that has used nuclear weapons in anger. But, all that said, we (esp in Europe and especially in the UK) are facing a threat, not from Muslims themselves but from the totalitarian ideology that is, Islam.
I don’t hate anyone but I am alarmed that the most common new born boy’s name for 2010, was Mohammad. Call me a racist if you want, but I am concerned about Islam and Sharia law.
What you say about Christians in the past is true, Michael but two wrongs don’t make a right!
December 20, 2011 at 6:27 am
This is a reasonably short interview with Jamie Glazov from Front Page Magazine. He deals with the threat we face, imminently, right now!
http://vimeo.com/20413324
December 20, 2011 at 6:58 am
An article concerning what Newt Gingrich ssaid comcerning Palestinians
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/12/gingrich-gets-it-right-1-2/
December 20, 2011 at 7:05 am
London 2011
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/14/the-islamization-of-london-a-photo-tour/
Anyways, this thread was supposed to be about Christmas. Merry Christmas guys.
December 20, 2011 at 8:43 am
Rick, you said:
” that even if Muslims were all our enemies (which 99.9999999% are not because only a very small number have committed or supported terrorist acts”
I was wondering how you came about this data? In small towns, Muslims are polarized but in large cities, they are not as moderate as you think. The thing is, we can make excuses for this or turn a blind eye to it under the umbrella of calling dissenters, racists, bigots etc but people are largely unaware of what is happeniing and the threat it poses to our way of life, our families and the freedoms we so readily take for granted.
Ok, so be like Jesus! How do you love someone who is bent on killing you? I can’t. I am asking the Lord to show me how???
It is NOT muslims I hate, it is their ideology.
December 20, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Cameron,
I think you have a very one-sided view of things. You seem to believe that most or nearly all Muslims are to be feared. But do you think Native Americans and African Americans viewed white Christians, up until around 50 years ago? Christianity has a long history of torturing, killing or enslaving non-Christians. It’s not as if the U.S. has been the shining light it pretends to be. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died. Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, then send them to some other country because he didn’t think they were equal to whites.
It wasn’t until Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement that Christianity finally started to exhibit a sense of justice here at home. That was just a few years ago. And overseas Christianity still shows no sense of justice where Muslims are concerned. So how do you expect them to act? If you beat a child unmercifully all his life, do you expect him to be a saint?
Christianity showed the ability to overcome racism, intolerance and injustice here at home, in a short period of time. But improvement meant ending terrible injustices. If the US were to end its terrible injustices against Muslims, they could probably do the same thing.
It is hypocrisy to damn other people for doing what we do ourselves. It is bigotry to say that other people cannot do what we can do, given the same circumstances. The Bible is full of commandments to enslave people, take sex slaves, murder children, etc. Most Christian no longer believe those verses. The Koran also commands slavery, but most Muslims no longer own slaves or believe in slavery.
Therefore, it seems obvious that Christians and Muslims share the same problem (religious texts that contain palpably evil verses), and that both religions are on the same path … trying to find a better form of ancient religions for the modern world.
You would have much less fear of Islam if Christians hadn’t treated Muslims so unjustly for so many years. Injustice always leads to unrest and violence. Religions do change for the better, but not when women and children are being treated like serfs, slaves or animals. Christians need to look in the mirror, and stop being hypocrites who condemn their victims for not being saints.
December 20, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Newt Gingrich is wrong. There is NO people on earth that don’t exist, unless they have been exterminated. Who is Newt Gingrich to decide that your family are not really “people” and thus have no human rights? According to the American Declaration of Independence, all human beings are created equal. To say that a Jewish baby has vastly superior rights to a Palestinian baby is the height of bigotry. Christians who say such horribly grotesque, unjust things only drive more Muslims toward the extremists.
Christians once acted as if Native Americans were not really people, and Muslims know what happened to them.
Christians once acted as if African Americans were not really people, and Muslims know what happened to them.
Now Christians act as if Palestinians and other Arabs are not really people, and Muslims know what that probably means for them.
The problem is that many American Christians are blind to these simple realities, while their victims understand the reality all too well.
If Christians want peace, they need to understand what Jesus, the apostles and Hebrew prophets all called for compassion and social justice. When our government refuses to act with compassion and justice for people suffering in the Middle East due to our horrendous history there, the result is bound to be violence and war.
Peace requires justice, and removing the beam in our own eye before we try to help other people see better.
December 20, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Cameron, I know many moderate Muslims myself. The Muslim government of Tunisia just invited all Jews back, promising them full citizenship. The Muslim government of Morocco recently granted women a number of more modern rights. If you read books written by young people who have traveled through the Middle East, such as “Children of the Jihad,” you will see that many young Muslims hate their current regimes and want more personal freedom, similar to those of Americans.
But what most Muslims agree on is that they do not want the US military invading their nations and telling them how to live. Those same young Muslims who admire American freedoms HATE our government because they UNDERSTAND what our government is really doing: trying to preserve it power and influence over Middle Easter government, many of which are run by power-mad despots who deny their citizens basic human rights like freedom of speech.
Fundamentalist Islam is a problem, but at its roots like nearly a century of the US and its allies ignoring the rights of ordinary Muslim citizens, while supplying despots with billions of dollars in advanced weapons which are used to keep the ordinary people in chains. Of course they are angry with the US. If we want peace with them, we need to observe the golden rule, and not do to them and their women and children, what we would never accept being done to our loved ones.
December 20, 2011 at 3:55 pm
First, let me commend both of you, Mike and Cameron, for having a very respectful debate. Seems rare these days, but when two people can disagree, but do so in a civil manner, good things come.
At this point, all I feel I could add is that it makes a HUGE difference to get to know someone from any particular group before making any judgments about the group as a whole.
I had a very close relationship with a Muslim a few years ago and did a LOT of listening. Now, I didn’t end up agreeing with all her points of view and, in fact, I had to say that I could never subscribe to even the most moderate beliefs of Islam. That said, I learned that Muslims are a LOT more like us than we are different. They just want to live in peace, prosper, have healthy children, get a good education, and have opportunities. Muslim women, in particular, want what many women in the West take for granted–equality or near equality with men.
Therefore, I believe the best approach to the growth of Islamic Fundamentalism is not to lump them in with all Muslims but to do the opposite, to join with moderate Muslims against all forms of Fundamentalist, tribalistic violent religion regardless of whether it bears the name of Christianity or Islam or Judaism or what have you.
- Original Message –
December 20, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Rick, I agree. I don’t agree with many things most Christians believe. I don’t agree with many things most Muslims believe. However, I know that most Christians and Muslims are able to live together in relative peace if they live in countries that establish fair laws and courts. Until the 1960′s the US was not a democracy for minorities, not did it have fair laws and courts for minorities. We did make a lot of progress in a fairly short time, when we decided to treat everyone equally in the eyes of the law (although we still have work to do in this regard). It was not the Christian religion that ended large-scale racial violence in the U.S. It was the creation of fairer laws and fairer courts that became “race-blind” and “color-blind.”
So I think we need to be honest and understand that Muslims are fully capable of doing what American Christians did, if our government backs off and stops driving them into the arms of extremists. Some Muslim nations have already taken strides toward equality and fairer laws and courts. Some Muslim nations are more regressive. But the US was a regressive nation until just a few years ago. So let’s be honest and tell our government to stop bombing Muslim nations and stop killing Muslim women and children, however accidentally. If China was bombing the US and killing American women and children, would we listen to anything they said about freedom, equality and justice? Of course not. Would we want to become members of their religions? Of course not.
It is very strange to see evangelical Christians supporting injustices that make Muslims see Christianity and Jesus in a terrible light. Whatever happened to “blessed are the peacemakers,” to Good Samaritans who help people of other religions, and to helping widows and orphans, rather than creating more widows and orphans?
Is the true meaning of Christmas that people who believe in Jesus can do things he would never have done himself?
December 21, 2011 at 4:33 am
Michael & Rick
I know several Muslims myself, they are nice guys, but I live in a small town in rural Scotland.
Michael, I agree with a lot of what you say. We have done so many things to infuriate Muslim people in the Middle East. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were/are abysmal and we left Iraq as not much more than a shell of a country. No doubt it will be occupied now with Shia Muslims, probably from Iran.
Our intervention in Lybia was also heavy handed. As I said before, I don’t hate anybody but I do hate their dogma and their Sharia Law.
I also hate their hatred of Israel. My wife is Jewish so maybe that makes me slightly biased. My daughter in law is a full blooded Ajibwe in Canada.
You speak of hate, Michael but I have to read your long diatribes against Christians, the Bible and even God Himself. If all we are about is hatred for various groups then I might as well bag it.
Rick, I see that hatred of Christians in you too. I live in Britain and I see what is happening here in our large cities and our government changing our laws to inhibit free speech whilst giving the Muslims almost free reign. I’m telling you that regardless of the past, there is a big problem in my country, then Michael, you infer that I am a bigot and a racist. Well, that is your opinion but it doesn’t change matters on the ground.
There are a hundred LEGAL Sharia Law courts operating in London alone. What happened to my country??
December 21, 2011 at 5:14 pm
Well, I think it’s not only permissible, but necessary to point out any hurtful behavior and call upon those who are engaging in it to stop. Yes, my focus has been upon the evils committed by Evangelical leaders, but this is not to say that I hate those persons. We can and should care about everyone, even while, and especially while they are doing bad things.
I am opposed to the evils that radical, fundamentalist Muslims commit and advocate, but that doesn’t mean I hate Muslims. I am opposed to the evils commited by radical, fundamentalist Christians, but I am called to love them too. The same holds for radical, fundamentalist Jews or Israelis (Remember that it was a radical Israelis fundamentalist who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin!). All of these radicals try to inflame hatred within their respective religions in the hope of radicalizing them and oppressing other groups unlike them. When we begin to think that everyone who is a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or Fill-in-the-blank is inherently evil, we play right into their hands!
What, then, is the answer? No, we certainly should not condone the outrages committed by fundamentalist radicals, no matter which type it is. But we, especially if we follow the real Jesus, should not give in to hate and use the evil acts of some to respond in kind or worse. When we do, we only feed their hate and give them more power to recruit more to their cause.
Instead, let’s reverse the process. Sure, we shouldn’t allow any Muslim Sharia laws in our respective nations, at least the ones that advocate oppression of women, cruel punishments, etc. But we should equally oppose the radical laws which Pseudo-Evangelical Christian Fundamentalists are pushing for.
In many ways, these groups are all the same. They all believe in a deity who is cruel, torturous and vindictive. This is why I am heavily focused on exposing the doctrine of Hell, in that it is one of the principle ways in which radicals can, ulitmately, get people to abandon their good sense of right and wrong and begin to think it is OK after all to be cruel and torturous. Once people believe God inflicts pain, it’s usually not long before they begin to imitate him.
- Original Message –
December 21, 2011 at 6:28 am
As I said, Merry Christmas!!!
December 21, 2011 at 9:42 am
Cameron,
Merry Christmas. I don’t “hate” Christians. My mother, father, sisters, wife and virtually all my family are Christians.
Many Muslims have every reason in the world to be very angry with Israel, just as many Native Americans and African Americans had every reason to be angry with white Americans. But once the US stopped practicing terrible injustices that caused the suffering and deaths of millions of innocent native and black women and children, we soon found that we were all capable of living together in peace.
Was it ‘wrong’ for Americans to hate what Germany did to the Jews during the Holocaust? Well, Israel has done to the Palestinians everything done to the Jews during the early stages of the Holocaust: stolen their land via ethnic cleansing, robbed them of their human rights by creating Jim Crow laws and kangaroo courts, forced them into walled ghettos and concentration camps, created “Jewish only” roads and towns, said that Palestinians are “not really a people” (said by Golda Meir and other high-ranking Jews), and so on.
If anyone treated our loved ones this way, we would either hate them, or hate everything about the system they chose for a “government.” As the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said (I paraphrase), “I don’t hate the Jews, but I have no reason to love them.”
Do I hate Christians? No. Do I have any reason to love Christianity, after having abused with the grotesque dogma of an “eternal hell” from the day I was able to understand what my pastors and Sunday School teachers were really saying to me? I would lie awake in bed weeping that God and Jesus could be so cruel. Yes, I hate the religion called Christianity because I understand how it has abused billions of children over the last 2,000 years, because so many Christians refuse to be honest about the many horrors enshrined in the Bible as the “word of God” rather than the word of barbaric men.
But I still like to think that Jesus was a good, compassionate man who would never have condoned the kind of child abuse that I experienced. He was very angry with hypocritical “religious experts” who lacked empathy and a sense of justice. I am very angry with Christians who lack the simple empathy and sense of justice to understand that it is a terrible thing to teach young, highly impressionable children that God and Jesus are egoists so petty they will send billions of people to “hell” for not “believing” in them, when the never used their superpowers (which presumably include the power to speak) to communicate with human beings.
I understand why Native Americans and African Americans were so angry with Christians. I understand why Muslims are so angry with Israel. I understand why today so many people consider Christianity a false religion … because they understand what Christians believe and how it leads to bigotry, intolerance and hypocrisy.
If more Christians were to give up belief in hell and the idea that the “chosen few” are “favored by God” over everyone else, and especially if they stopped brainwashing innocent children to believe that evil is good if the Bible says so (which it does in many, many passages), perhaps the Christian religion would fulfill its early promise.
But I do wish you and yours a very merry Christmas.
Mike
December 21, 2011 at 10:23 am
Well, Mike
I can see that you are angry about many things, especially past injustices. It blows my mind, the things that men do to each other, especially in the name of God! Whether that be the Christian God, or Allah. However, my concern is not about past misdeeds but about what confronts me on the ground, right now in the present.
Islam is a problem any way you cut it and it is spreading fast, Britain, Europe, USA, Australia, Canada and even India.
I have seen extremism right up close and it was American Christian extremism and for six years I was indoctrinated (my wife too) to be a Christian Patriot. The people we were involved with have an arsenal of military hardware and they mean to use them. Fortunately we got out 5 years ago but it has left it’s mark on both of us. Their beef is with the US Federal government. Kind of like the same ilk as Timothy McVeigh.
The religious ideology of Islam is extremely dangerous, we can sit back and make excuses for it and reap the whirlwind, or speak out wherever and whenever we can. I take your point about the past but my eyes are on, now.
Best wishes
Cameron.
December 21, 2011 at 6:31 pm
I’m not familiar enough with the Koran (Quoran?) to speak with any authority about it. However, it is my understanding from moderate Muslims that they take their holy book in much the same way I, as a “liberal” Christian view the Bible–that not all of what’s written is to be taken as literal or applicable to today or enough to base an entire doctrine upon without taking into consideration other verses.
Why, for example, do most Muslim men only marry one wife, even in countries that allow for having up to four wives at a time? I have asked this question and heard some very interesting answers–one is that Mohammed was actually putting a limit on the practice of the rich and powerful of his day to take dozens, even hundreds of wives. Another is that the selah (verse) about the 4 wife maximum is qualified by the following selah saying that a man could only take more than one wife if he is able to treat them all equally, which is interpreted by many modern Muslims to be an impossibility and, thus, Mohammed’s indirect way of advocating for monogamy.
Therefore, instead of treating all Muslims as if they are all radical Islamists and, thus, playing right into their hands, I should think we could and should reach out to the moderates who do not subscribe to these oppressive laws, and join with them to oppose any efforts to impose Sharia on anyone. The real conflict, then, is not Christianity Vs. Islam, but people of good will vs. evil behavior.
- Original Message –
December 21, 2011 at 11:00 am
Best wishes to you also, Cameron. I think Islamic extremism is obviously a problem, but to some degree it is reaction to English imperialism and U.S. military action overseas. If you think Timothy McVeigh and those types are dangerous, just consider how Muslims feel when they see Christian fundamentalists like GWB, Palin, Bachmann and Perry armed with thousands of nukes and making it obvious that they support Israel’s ethnic cleansing and slow genocide of Palestinians. Muslims know that Jewish fascists like Menachem Begin and Bibi Netanyahu consider Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria, Egypt and Iraq to “belong” to Israel. In his letter to the New York Times in 1948, the greatest Jewish intellectual of all time, Albert Einstein, accurately predicted what would happen if fascists like Menachem Begin rose to power in Israel. In his book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,” Jimmy Carter pointed out the sea change in Israel after Begin became Prime Minister. Israel only spoke publicly of wanting peace, while pursing a policy of ethnically cleaning Palestinians farm families from their land by using raw power rather than justice. A hallmark of fascism is the belief that only power matters, and that justice is only for the “chosen few.”
The combination of Israel’s territorial expansionism and the U.S.’s military expansionism, with both nations possessing huge military power and nukes, and their almost complete disregard of the rights of Muslims, is driving many fearful, angry young men into the arms of Islamic extremists.
I think the danger of Jewish and Christian extremism vastly dwarfs the danger of radical Islam. Conversely, ending the injustices of Israel and the U.S. would give a more moderate version of Islam a chance to emerge. So I think what depends to the world — war or peace — depends on American Christians looking in the mirror rather than blaming Islam for everything that goes wrong. The victims of injustice will always look for solutions to their problems, When they lack the military power to confront two military superpowers, it is natural for them to look to God for help. The extremists claim that if Muslims fight Israel and the US, God will be on their side, because their enemies are unjust.
I don’t know if they’re right about God desiring justice. That is a matter of faith. But the evidence of history is that large-scale injustices lead to violence and war. The best way to have peace rather than violence and war is to act with justice. But in the Middle East, the great military superpowers trample on the rights of innocents. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, if we sow the wind of injustice, we will reap the whirlwind of violence and war.
So I don’t focus on what I can do little or nothing about: Islamic extremism. Most American Muslims are not extremists. Rather, I focus on what I can do: encourage people who call themselves Christians to consider the advantages of justice, here at home and abroad. Surrendering to fear is not going to help anyone. Standing for justice will help everyone.
Mike
December 21, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Well, the Muslim’s hatred of the Jews dates back to the 7th Century. It’s in the Quaran. It’s a part of their religion, long before there was a Palestine. Mohammad was a warrior. Islam is not a religion of peace, but one of war. I won’t get into Sharia law or what they do to women, you probably already know.
Lets say you are right about Israel and you were speaking with a Muslim, what would be your advice to him with regards to the Jews?
What should they do about Israel?
Here’s a film if you want to take the time:
http://vimeo.com/20348491
December 21, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Sadly, by the time Mohammed came along, the religion bearing the name of Jesus had long lost the message of the actual Jesus.
But I wonder what might have happened differently had Mohammed met a real disciple of Jesus before he went to the mountain!
Sent from my iPhone
December 21, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Cameron, if you read the Bible, the history of Jews (then the ancient Hebrew tribes) carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide against the ancient Palestinians predates the creation of Islam by many centuries. “Men of God” like Moses, Joshua and King David slaughtered ancient Palestinian women and children wantonly, according to the Bible. Read Numbers 31, where Moses commanded his warriors to kill all the mature women and male babies and children, keeping only the virgin girls alive as sex slaves. There are many such passages in the Bible. To this day, the government of Israel treats non-Jews like serfs or animals.
Too many Christians focus narrowly on Islam and refuse to consider the fact that Jews and Christians have treated Muslims abysmally on their native soil. Sitting Bull didn’t want to go to war, but he had no choice. Most black slaves didn’t want war; they wanted their freedom. But when the Civil War broke out, is was obvious which side they would fight for. German Jews didn’t want to fight against their adopted nation, but the Nazis left them no choice. So we shouldn’t be surprised that large numbers of Muslims will join any side that opposes the governments of Israel and the U.S.
I agree that radical Islam is a problem. I just think Jews and Christians who focus on Islam and ignore the horrors of what the “people of the book” have done to millions of innocents is a worse problem. But I have found it of no use to talk to people who have decided that Islam is the “problem.” I’m an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry. I have studied the history of these events, and similar events. In every case, the oppressors demonized their victims and blamed them for every problem known to man. Christians did that to Native Americans, African Americans and Jews. Now they are doing the same thing to Muslims. As a wise man once said, if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it.
But there is no use belaboring the point. If we continue down the present path, we face World War III against more than a billion Muslims who think Christians are nothing like Jesus. Gandhi said the same thing: that he admired Jesus, but Christians were nothing like Jesus. Jesus said to remove the beam from our own eyes, before we try to help other people with their vision problems. Perhaps one day Christians will remember that Jesus saved virtually all of his sternest criticism for religious people who practiced injustice and hypocrisy. There is nothing more hypocritical than focusing on how badly some Muslim men treat women, when Christian nations like the U.S. and Great Britain have combined with Israel to do terrible things to millions of Muslim women and their children. Whenever I think of what Christianity has done in the Middle East, I feel much the way most Muslims do: I want to throw up.
December 21, 2011 at 1:53 pm
Well, it’s a hot topic, I agree and have respect for many of the points you make, Michael.
Some things I disagree with quite strongly but I think you’re right, we are just going round and round here. So we have debated as Rick said but we are still friends?
Al the best
December 21, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Cameron, agreed. Let’s be friends and keep open minds. I was a staunch supporter of Israel and a critic of Islam until I took the time to thoroughly research the real “facts on the ground” of the Middle East. The ironic thing is this: it only took me a few minutes of studying the laws and courts of Israel, and the fact that Israel’s “defensive” walls are not built on the borders of Israel, to know that I had been duped all my life. A few minutes of honest study, thinking about how I would feel if I was an Palestinian who had never committed a crime, led me to completely change my thinking. My family has always believed in justice, which includes racial justice and justice for people of all religions. The superpowers of the West have not acted with justice in the Middle East. After WWII, the Allies established the Marshall Plan for our former enemies, and a Martial Plan for people in the Middle East who had never done anything to harm us. You might consider reading “The Great War for Civilisation” by Robert Fisk, who is known for his objectivity, or “Witness in Palestine” by Anna Balzter, a young Jewish-American woman who used her body as a human shield in the West Bank, protecting Palestinian farmers and their children from Jewish settlers, who often act like the KKK before American courts started protecting blacks from white supremacists.
But in any case, Happy Holidays!
December 21, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Rick, the most common English spellings are Koran and Quran (the latter without an “o”) but there are probably other spellings as well.
I think a lot boils down to the idea of “infallibility” for both religions. People who claim that the Bible is “infallible” have a hard time explaining why Moses allowed fathers to sell their own daughters as sex slaves with the option to buy them back if they didn’t please their own masters (Exodus 21 or 31, if I remember correctly), or why Moses commanded that girls who had been raped within earshot of a town should be either stoned to death or sold to their rapists, so that they could be raped the rest of their lives (Deuteronomy 22).
Of course the Koran presents similar problems. Both books command and/or condone slavery, but most Christians and most Muslims no longer believe in slavery.
Fundamentalists who claim the books are “infallible” in effect say that God is unjust and barbaric. People who are free to believe the things that make sense from a standpoint of compassion and justice pretty much have to admit that the most horrendous passages were the product of the hearts and minds of primitive barbarians.
Ironically, Christians who call Islam a “false religion” because of the way women are to be treated according to certain verses in the Koran can find the most horrendous verses in the Bible. According to men of God like Moses, Joshua, Caleb and King David, women and children could either be killed or enslaved at whim. David, the “man after God’s own heart” killed every woman when he smote the land, and had the lame and blind slaughtered when Jerusalem was taken from the Jebusites because he “hated” them. If Christians are honest about the Bible, they have to admit that it’s worse than Mein Kampf in many passages.
Just imagine what happens when young children are told that Moses and David were men of God, and then they read what the Bible really says about them.
December 21, 2011 at 11:27 pm
I agree. One of the biggest lies going around is that the BIBLE is God’s Word. As with all lies, there is truth in the statement, but it’s the twist of it that makes is such a huge falsehood. What we should say is that the Word of God can be found in the Bible. Even if one doesn’t believe in God, it is remarkable that, in some places (most notably, in the gospels), there are extraordinary leaps ahead of moral insight, that are all the more remarkable because of the atrocious evils going on at the times they were expressed. My hope is that more of us “liberal” believers will begin publicly pointing out this very important distinction.
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 12:13 am
Rick, I think we almost agree, except that I am more skeptical about the source of the better verses in the Bible. Suppose there is a God who is more advanced than mankind in love, compassion and justice. How then is it possible that in the entire Bible, neither God nor Jesus nor any Hebrew prophet or apostle managed to clearly say that slavery was an abomination, and that Jews and Christians should never practice or condone slavery? That communication of wisdom could have saved hundreds of millions of people terrible misery, and could have avoided the Civil War, with more than half a million people dead and millions more mutilated and/or homeless.
If God is compassionate and wise, why didn’t he warn Christians that better rat control, hygiene and sanitation could have avoided the Bubonic Plague, which at times killed up to one third of the Christians of Europe?
How can we call any of the Bible the word of God, when it seems God didn’t know the simplest of things? Why did Jesus and Paul spend so much time debating diet and Sabbath laws, when there were slaves everywhere whose plight went almost unmentioned and never properly addressed?
If any passage of the Bible is inspired, I would vote for 1 Corinthians 13, but it contradicts most of the rest of the Bible. It says, in effect, that if God is not love, all the Bible is mere noise, and God is nothing despite all his wisdom and power. But that wisdom and power is pretty hard to find, in my opinion. Nearly every human society has prohibitions against robbery and murder. Many religions have a golden rule. Much of the “wisdom” of the Bible doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Will beating children with rods improve their behavior? Should people be condemned to death and/or hell for having extramarital sex? Is lust “evil”? Should people of other faiths be exterminated? Which of the three different versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible is the correct one? If God “gave” the Promised Land to the ancient Hebrews, why did they end up taking the land via ethnic cleansing and genocide?
Yes, there are some nice passages in the Bible, but if there is a Holy Spirit, why did most Christians end up believing the worst passages, leading to Holy Wars, Inquisitions, witch hunts, heretic burnings, slavery, the Civil War, the Holocaust, the Nakba (which continues to this day)?
If God was wise and able to see the future, would he have ever spoken to human beings, knowing what they would do with his “word”?
December 22, 2011 at 1:40 am
The short answer is that, just as conventional Christianity has perpetuated the idea that the Bible itself is God’s word (which is really just a form of idolatry), the same holds true for the notion that God is all-powerful. Of course, had a loving God the ability to intervene and correct all the wrongs in the world, He most certainly would do so. Only a cruel and uncaring god could have such ability and do nothing.
By contrast(though I make no claim to understand this fully,) I would argue that the God of Jesus (or if not Jesus, whoever it was that put forward the revolutionary concepts of a kind, forgiving and unconditionally loving God) is a spirit being and, because He exists in a another reality, is incapable of directly intervening into our world much as He would like to. The only way God can change things is through people.
Of course, people being quite fallible, makes the task of God working through us a huge challenge. This explains why there is so much misinformation in the bible about what God is like, what He approves us, what He wishes and so on.
That said, given the tendency of Man to be so cruel and uncaring, it is, in my view, quite amazing that the message of a kind, caring and forgiving God made its way into the Bible to any degree at all. And yet, somehow it did!
After all, had the message of compassion, of the universal membership of all humans in one family, of the cycle-of-suffering breaking idea of forgiveness, and so on, not come to us by some avenue, we would not look back on all the horrors contained in the Bible and think them odd or contradictory or immoral. Perhaps we disagree that this message came through Jesus, but it would be no less remarkable and, I would still say, miraculous, that it came to us at all no matter whom we attribute its origin to.
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 4:05 am
I know God in the Spirit, the still small voice deep within me. It can be like a whisper so I have to empty my mind of all outward things and “keep still”.
When He speaks, it’s like nothing else on earth. I don’t question His power, I stand in awe of it. He has cared for me and my wife (as I look back) all of our lives. I don’t trust the Bible but I know that some of His Words are contained therein.
It’s a walk, a journey if you will. The Holy Spirit leads me into all truth, that’s why He led me to your book and website, Rick, so that I may know the truth about Hell. Your studies are bearing fruit!
December 22, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Thank you Cameron. It does my heart good to know I’ve been helpful to others.
It is a journey, and we’re always learning. Sometimes, maybe, a LOT of the time, it’s more UNlearning.
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 4:06 am
Rick, I sympathize with the desire to believe in a loving, compassionate God, since that was the way I tried to imagine God during my last period of belief. But I think Christians tend to damn man too much, and praise God too much. Man is by nature a predator. Predators can be very cruel to their prey and very compassionate to their own kind. If you watch nature shows and watch mother lions relentlessly stalk and kill their prey, then shower love on their young, then think about human beings in the same light, it doesn’t seem that man is “fallen” but simply what nature made him. Paul’s salvation gospel is entirely backwards because he believed the earth was created perfect, that the earth is “fallen” due to man’s “original sin” and that the one who created the perfect earth came to earth and redeemed it. But we don’t blame lions for killing and eating prey animals, or for being kinder to their closest kin than to other lions. Male lions often kill the cubs of other male lions.
Since we now know that trillions of animals suffered and died long before man walked the earth, Paul’s gospel makes no sense. If any needs to be redeemed, it is the Creator of such a terrible world, if such a Creator exists. He should take responsibility for his errors, rather than trying to persuade human beings to condemn each other for being born human into a very imperfect world.
My friend the poet/philosopher Richard Moore, an atheist, called Americans “children of the book.” It’s interesting that many atheists and agnostics are still so influenced by the Bible that they regularly condemn human beings, while accepting that every other life form on earth behaves the same way — favoring their closest family members and pretty much leaving outsiders to perish. If anything, man is more altruistic than most animals. It’s interesting that dogs, the closest animals to human beings over the centuries, show a high degree of inter-species compassion and loyalty. So perhaps human beings — while imperfect — are both at the top of the food chain and at the top of the compassion chain. My wife, mother and sisters are wonderfully compassionate. So I don’t agree with the Christian idea that human beings can only be good if God works through them. Nature is cruel and unjust. Most predators show little compassion for any animal outside their small family circle. I’d say the evidence seems to suggest that if there is any being to be praised, it would be man, not God. Perhaps Jesus and people like him showed God a better way, rather than the other way around.
December 22, 2011 at 6:13 pm
There is definitely a whole bunch of religious ideas that are contained in the Bible that need to be exposed as the sort of ill-conceptions that God’s spirit has been trying to free us from.
Here we have another one–the crazy idea that a good God would intentionally create a natural system based on the principle of preditor and prey. But we can understand why primitive humans thought that nature could only have come into existence by the direct creation of a deity or deities. Therefore, they had to assume that these gods did what they did on purpose.
Interestingly, though, there is contained in the Bible a sense that something is wrong with the predator/prey system. Were this not the case, then there would have been no prediction that, once the Messiah returns, the lamb will lay down next to the lion, and kids with play with snakes and not be harmed. The creation stories in Genesis teach that something bad happened to ruin what God first created everything as good. In the New Testament, we read about nature “growning” until the day when this system is changed.
This may sound a bit ethereal, but it seems to me that God’s role in creation is actually a work in progress. He has, somehow, connected with humanity to some degree, elevating us from the “Law of the Jungle”…but we have a long way to go.
The real follower of Jesus, then, is someone who responds to the remaining evils in this world with a sense of responsibility to do what s/he can to further that progress and to join with anyone else, no matter their religious or areligious affiliation who is working toward the same goal.
This is why I find such passages as Acts 10:35 so amazing, in that we have a record of the moment when a person who had, all his life, thought he belonged to a tribe that his deity favored above all the rest had a remarkable insight that God actually accepts ALL people.
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 4:18 am
It kind of galls me when Christians suggest that human beings can “only be good” when God does this, that and the other thing. Billions of human mothers have treated their children with love and compassion even though they never heard of the Bible or Jesus, including my Cherokee ancestors. Here’s a poem I wrote in honor of the love of good mothers:
Mother’s Smile
There never was a fonder smile
than mother’s smile, no softer touch
than mother’s touch. So sleep awhile
and know she loves you more than “much.”
So more than “much,” much more than “all.”
Though tender words, these do not speak
of love at all, nor how we fall
and mother’s there, nor how we reach
from nightmares in the ticking night
and she is there to hold us tight.
There never was a stronger back
than father’s back, that held our weight
and lifted us when we were small
and bore us till we reached the gate,
then held our hands that first bright mile
till we could run, and did, and flew.
But, O, a mother’s tender smile
will leap and follow after you!
Published by TALESetc, Care2Care, Famous Poets and Poems, Poems for Big Kids (Anthology); also Penguin Books Valentine’s Day Contest Winner
December 22, 2011 at 1:19 pm
I would agree that the belief that “One can only do good with God’s help” is greatly skewed when coupled with the false notion that only true Christians can have that divine assistance. Though it took a while, Peter finally got the message when he saw Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit, “I now see that God is with all people who walk in righteousness.”
Sent from my iPhone
December 22, 2011 at 9:42 am
I was thinking that “love your enemy” “pray for those who despitefully use you” etc, is a work that God has to do in our hearts.
He said He would take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. It is His work with our cooperation.
I need for Him to do this in my heart.
December 22, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Rick, my point is that most human mothers are naturally loving and compassionate, and don’t need the “Holy Spirit” to act with love and compassion. Cavewomen loved and cared for their children long before the Bible was written. Perhaps some men could use “help” but billions of human beings have led decent (if imperfect) lives without having any clue about the “Holy Spirit.” If there is a need to be filled with the “Holy Spirit” isn’t it odd that God didn’t reveal this to most people who have lived on the planet?
December 22, 2011 at 9:20 pm
While Christians, even those of the more liberal persuasion, tend to speak of terms of divine “persons” (even the Holy Spirit is thought to be one of the three persons of the Trinity), the fact is we are all just trying to describe an invisible power of good. The love of most parents, whether they are modern humans or Cro-magnun or Autralopithecine (sp), for my part, is every bit a manifestation of God the Holy Spirit as any other.
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Rick, regardless of anything else, I too would like to compliment you for your good work on the matter of leaving “hell” behind. I think “hell” is child abuse, having suffered it myself, and I have a hard time thinking of Jesus sending Einstein and Gandhi to hell, after telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, and calling for compassion and justice.
One day we may discover who was right and who was wrong, or we may find that we all had a lot to learn, but I don’t see why a Savior who could save the thief on the cross with a nod of his head would need “hell.”
So on this very important subject, and on the need for Christians (and everyone) to consider the need for compassion and justice, I think we are closer than we are apart.
In the spirit of Christmas,
Mike Burch
December 22, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Absolutely, along with the angels on the first Christmas, peace be upon you as to all men and women of good will!
- Original Message –
December 22, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Rick,
I think you raise an interesting point. Jesus said that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. So how did a good God create a world where every life form constantly battles other life forms, simply to live?
I think the honest answer is that no one knows. Anyone who has read the Genesis account honestly knows that God comes across as the Devil, with Adam, Eve and all the innocent animals being his victims.
As Mark Twain pointed out, Adam and Eve were in a Catch-22 position, because they didn’t know right from wrong, and the only way they could discover it was “wrong” to eat the forbidden fruit was to eat it, which meant a world full of horrors.
Even if Adam and Eve were “sinners,” why did God become the first murderer, killing innocent animals to give their skins to Adam and Eve? If he was loving, wise, compassionate and just, why didn’t he give them clothes of cotton or wool?
I think the answer is that the ancient Hebrews had no idea how the world came to be created. Their vision of a a loving, wise, just God was constantly contradicted by their claim that their God controlled nature, which is terribly unjust. Therefore, the God of the Bible became schizophrenic. In human relationships he demanded compassion and justice. But because he was also the Creator and had control of nature, he was also the unjust murderer of innocent women, children and animals.
Christianity still claims two contrary things about God. It claims that God is loving, wise, compassionate and just. But because it claims that God is all-powerful, and controls the elements, it accuses God of doing things that human beings are forbidden to do, such as killing women and children.
December 22, 2011 at 9:28 pm
If you haven’t had a chance, I highly recommend Bishop Spong’s book, “Saving the Bible From Fundamentalism.” I found it very helpful, as it explains why the Bible is not to be taken as God’s Word, but the story of God breaking through to humanity in spite of Man’s evil and ignorance or false assumptions about Him.
- Original Message –
December 23, 2011 at 6:12 am
Rick, while I agree with you on many points, you still sound like a “true believer” to me on the matters of man being “imperfect” and God somehow intervening to “save” or “improve” him. But I think there is very little evidence that God has really imparted wisdom to human beings. Rather, the history of Christianity is that it has imparted profound ignorance, intolerance and injustice. Just ask the many millions of people who were tortured and killed by Christians over the centuries. How is it possible that God and Jesus never once spoke to the religion-mad hordes and told them clearly, “This is not the right path”?
The fact that God and Jesus have never spoken to 99% of Christians and corrected their blasphemies and wild injustices seems like proof positive that God and Jesus either don’t exist, or have never been wiser than the human beings of a given time, or are unable to communicate with most human beings. Whatever the case, it seems wildly wrong to damn human beings and praise God.
Since the Bible is obviously full of errors and contradictions, why believe that man is evil and ignorant, just because the Bible says so? The Bible is wrong about many things, so why trust the Bible on the nature of man? If there is a Creator, it seems more likely that man will redeem the Creator, than the other way around. When I look at my wife and son, I don’t see evil and ignorance. I see good, compassionate, intelligent people living a world that is inherently unjust and dangerous. Who created the world without having the wisdom or power to keep innocents from suffering and death? When I read the Bible, I find ignorance called wisdom and evil called good.
Where is there any evidence that God has been helping the human race evolve in a better direction? The Americans who did the most to aid progress — Jefferson, Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln — were not Christians and didn’t believe the main ideas of the Bible. Where would the U.S. be today, if “Bible believers” had had their way? We would probably still have people being burned at the stake as heretics, and women being killed as “harlots” and “witches,” since such things are Biblical teachings.
Why not be honest and admit that most progress in Christian nations has been a matter of abandoning Biblical beliefs, rather than embracing them? The process still continues, as Christians try to wean themselves from Bible-induced homophobia and intolerance, especially against Muslims, and teaching children things that obviously are not true, such as the earth being created “perfect.” The Bible has impeded progress more than it has aided progress, because once people believe that God spoke to human beings, they tend to stop thinking for themselves. But the God of the Bible never knew simple things, such as the existence of naturally occurring wonder drugs like aspirin and penicillin, the need for better rat control to avoid the Bubonic Plague, or the fact that racism, intolerance and slavery would lead to incredible suffering and millions of deaths throughout human history.
So why praise God and accuse human beings of ignorance? After all, it was human beings who figured out the things God and Jesus failed to understand.
December 27, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Well, if we’re talking about the “God” of modern Pseudo-Evangelicalism, then I would be in agreement with you. They have so redefined and re-imaged God, that the actual Jesus would not recognize him at all, except to see how the religious hypocrites of his day were doing the same thing.
This is why it’s so important to distinguish between the propaganda that claims the Bible is God’s word and the actual Word. The real Word of God is found or contained in the Bible, but there are many other things in the Bible that stand in contradiction to it. This is why I frequently appeal to Christians to “rightly divide the Word of truth.” In other words, to understand that the Bible is much more a record of how Man has resisted and misinterpreted and even intentionally twisted God’s message, than a record of God getting his message across clearly.
You do bring up several good questions, though. First, it’s not so much that God chooses not to make His will known, but that He has been trying, and keeps trying to get it across, but Man rarely listens, and when he does, he often rejects it.
Secondly, the idea that God has the ability to do whatever He pleases and can, at any time, forcibly intervene in our universe is false! God is a spirit, meaning, He is beyond the cosmos we live in…and given the vastness of our cosmos which is, itself, incomprehensible, how much greater and further incomprehensible is God? He can no more walk up and talk to us than can we have a chat with an amoeba. So, the only way God can do anything in our world or say anything to us is through the “portal,” which we sometimes call the “soul” or the “spirit,” that mysterious part of us that makes us different from all the rest of creation.
Thirdly, the word “creation” is also so re-defined that it’s misleading. We’ve been led to think that God made everything directly and then He was done…maybe because Genesis says He “rested” on the 7th day, as if He could actually get tired! But “creation” is still going on! Our universe is expanding…and the rate at which it’s growing is increasing! Much more is left to do, and since God cannot intervene into our world directly, the only way He can change things for the better is through US!
Fourthly, we’ve also been misled by those who claim God can only work through Christians! As you point out, there are many instances of people who were atheists who responded to something deep down inside of them calling them to do good. For those of us who are trying to follow the real Jesus, that “something” is God. For others it may be called “a sense of right and wrong,” or “a great idea” or “a leap in evolution.” Whatever we call it, though, isn’t it awesome when someone responds and does their part to either impede evil or advance good!
Maybe it would help if you could think of us who are trying to be disciples of the real, historical Jesus in the same way you and I have said we look to Moderate Muslims. It’s going to be difficult enough for us “liberal” believers to impede the influence of radical, right-wing, Christian fundamentalists, but we stand a much better chance of making the case for the real Good News of Jesus before other Christians who, without us, might fall prey to the Christian form of radicalization.
My hope is that, as we partner with people of good will of all religious beliefs or no religious beliefs, we can effectively work against evil, no matter the source. As a follower of Jesus, I believe that is what he calls me to do.
December 27, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Rick, I think we can agree on such things as Jesus wanting and practicing compassion, tolerance and social justice. It’s a shame to hear the name of Jesus being blasphemed by fundamentalists who make him seem like the Devil, when they say billions of human beings will be tortured for all eternity for not believing in a God who is so petty and cruel.
But I doubt we will ever agree on the Christian idea of “God.” The fundamental articles of the Christian faith make no sense to me. Why should I believe in God? I prayed to God as a child, and God never answered me. Therefore, for God to demand my belief is unjust. That makes Paul’s gospel unjust, because he said faith is required for salvation. But why should I believe in a God who unjustly demands human faith, without ever earning it?
If a human father refused to speak to his children, then demanded that they “believe” in him, we would consider him to be terribly unjust, or insane. When the New Testament goes on and on about the need to believe in God and Jesus, it strikes me as terribly unjust, or insane, or both.
December 27, 2011 at 11:33 pm
I believe the answer to your question hinges on further shedding what religion has made of the idea of faith–that one has to “believe in God,” and if not, he’s gonna get ya! But what passes for “faith” these days is so NOT what Jesus talked about.
My reading of the God of Jesus (now that would be reading the Gospels without those Doctrine Goggles from the religion that has co-opted Jesus) is that “faith” is better defined as “confidence” or “trust” or “being fully convinced.” So, it’s not a matter of some Angry Man in the sky who is demanding I believe he exists and if I don’t, he’s going to set me on fire. No, it’s a matter of whether I come to really and truly think the MESSAGE of Jesus is the best way to live!
For example, let’s say you were my neighbor and you told me that our lawns would look so much better if you and I and all the rest of our neighbors would just agree not to walk on each others’ lawns. I could ignore this idea and resort to putting up one of those short white fences, with No Trespassing signs on it, calling the cops, yelling at anyone I see taking a short-cut, etc. But when I stop long enough to figure out that, whatever benefit I may have thought to be derived from cutting across my neighbors’ lawns, all the while not caring that I’m doing the same thing, it wasn’t worth all the trouble of us all being constantly at each other. Then, as if a light goes on in my head, I get this revelation: “Hey, it just makes life easier for ALL of us, to say, ‘Let’s all just agree to stop it.’” And the next thing ya know, not only does my lawn look better, but so does my entire neighborhood!
OK, I know that’s a bit over-simplified, but I used it to illustrate what I mean by having the kind of faith Jesus talked about. When I become really and truly convinced that not walking on other people is the best way to live, I’m not forcing myself to think something is true when there is no evidence of it, but actually observing the results right away. Perhaps, at first, I might wonder if this new approach is going to work, but I don’t have to wait too long before my willingness to try out this new way of approaching life is shored up by good results and, thus, I am convinced of it, I have trust in it, I have faith in it.
If you are really and truly convinced that the best way to live is to not hurt other people or yourself but, instead, to do what you can to make things better, then you already believe in the message of Jesus and you already subscribe to the real Word of God. You don’t have to see a Man in the Sky or the scars on Jesus’ hands (right, the real point of the Doubting Thomas story) to know that what his entire life represented is true.
It seems that you do, indeed, believe in his Word, without all the magic tricks that so many make so much of. After all, isn’t a real miracle when we see people who once hated each other burying their hatchets? Or a rescue worker crawling through the rubble left by an earthquake to save a child? Or a victim of a crime setting aside revenge and imploring a court to send the perpetrator to an institution where he’ll be helped instead of to a dungeon to be tormented. Isn’t it a miracle when any of us start to believe in love instead of hate?
I wonder, then, if your prayer may have been answered after all! Maybe not in the way you were hoping, but an answer never the less?
December 28, 2011 at 7:00 am
Excellent words there, Rick. Amen.