Epistle to the Christians

 First, a little background. When I was four my father began college on a pre-sem track. Seven years later he was ordained a Protestant minister and began his life career as a pastor. My comments on Christianity are from the status of a PK (Preacher’s Kid).

I’m a secular student and follower of Yeshua. Because he lived in the Hellenistic Near East of the first century, the world knows Yeshua by the koine Greek form of his name, Jesus. The Hellenistic town Sepphoris was less than an hour’s walk from Jesus’ boyhood home, Nazareth. Jesus grew up and lived out his life in the concept-rich environment of the Roman Empire. (I’ve already used a number of Graeco-Roman terms - comment, status, concept, Christianity.) His crucifixion was formally authorized by a colonial Roman overseer.

Jesus belonged to a third-world African culture and spoke a third-world language related to Arabic, but the entirety of the scriptural writings about him were in one of the languages of his European overlords, the koine Greek of the first century. For example, the word Christ was no more a word in Jesus’ language than Caudillo is in ours.

Jesus’ culture was no more likely to wonder if a person who had a mother and father, and siblings, was divine than ours is. His monotheistic religion, Judaism, had a built-in antipathy to adding another god, however that might be done. The Europeans did impute divinity - it was claimed that Emperor Caesar Augustus was divine, for example.

So Jesus’ alternative name, Christ, and the “Christian” doctrine of his divinity, came from the European overlords of Palestine who wrote his story and wrought Christian theology, creating an organized religion as Judaism, Islam, etc., have their organized religions.

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My epistle to the Christians objects to organized Christianity, on the grounds that it is intellectually unsupportable; is reactionary in a world of democracy and civil rights; and is unChristian in major beliefs, particularly rejecting Yeshua’s teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good in favor of a jealous God, a God of wrath who is angry, punitive, and vindictive.

1. Christians’ intellectual problems begin with the oxymoron “literal interpretation,” failing to understand that their scripture is one of the longest, most complex texts in existence. Such a text can’t have a single literal transparent meaning. Jesus himself reinterpreted the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,” saying “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

One viable approach to the scriptures is that it is the felicitous outcome of a Semitic tribe, related to the Phoenicians who invented our alphabet, deciding to become the people of the book. They wrote down the best of their thought. Then, for centuries, public intellectuals they called prophets looked at where their predecessors had been - and raised the consciousness of their culture. “Write the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that it may be read readily”, wrote Habakkuk. “The vision will come - Wait for it, it will not be late.”

2. There is no democracy, no leaders chosen by the people and responsible to them, in the Tanakh, the Israelite scriptures Christians call the Old Testament. Much of it presents God in the autocratic terms of the kings, shahs, rajahs and emperors of the time, demanding fear, unquestioning obedience, and fawning worship of sinful human beings. Sometimes sin is presented as a violation of the rights of God.

Christian theology presents humans’ capacity for sin as exceeding humans’ capacity to make amends. That theology portrays us as inheriting the original sin of Adam, and as such, born guilty.(1) Under this outlook, salvation is an unreturnable favor, coming from God, and putting humankind permanently in the one-down position relative to him.

This is unhealthy; and the founder of “Christianity” disagreed with it in the parable of the prodigal son. Raised on the estate of his wealthy father, this son obtains his inheritance in cash, goes to a city, and blows it all on an extravagant lifestyle, becoming a beggar. Then, Jesus said, “He came to himself.” He returns to his father’s estate, hoping that there he will be better than a beggar, and to his surprise, his father welcomes him with open arms and prepares a feast.

Frankly, this upends Christian doctrine. There is no sin, but rather correctable error. The son, representing fallible humankind, does correct the error by his own action, able to recognize his mistake, and change the course of his life. In doctrine, there would be “salvation” — sin, rescue by a Power to whom one would be in debt, and at best forgiveness. Interestingly here the father, representing God, is focused on the joyful future with his returned son, not the past, thus does not need to forgive. No sin; no salvation; no lingering taint implying ongoing subservience.

3. Doctrine is “unChristian”: Rejects the founder of Christianity’s” teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good, and other important teachings.

I once asked a Christian teacher why God is often portrayed as dominating, demanding, punishing those who disobey him in fearsome ways. They said, “God is so great that he gets to do whatever he wants to do.” Again, Jesus of Nazareth disagreed, saying, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

God’s greatness, it is implied, requires him to be better than we are.

It seems to me that organized Christianity has never bothered to explore the implication of their term, God the father who is even better than earthly fathers. In this context, language should change: “Lord” is inappropriate, and “every knee should bow,” and even “worship,” if applied to the creator rather than the creation. On the other hand “Jesus wept,” which according to theology would betoken an incidence of a Weeping God, is well worth pondering. At my grandson’s christening a priest cited a Concerned God passage from Ezekiel, which I paraphrase from memory: You say that I am unfair. But I am not pleased by the death of him that dieth. Wherefore turn ye from the way of death to the way of life, that ye may live life alive.

I understand, from the example of the prodigal son, that Jesus had progressed beyond the doctrine of original sin, but the Greek Paul and the Roman St. Augustine bore false witness to his teaching on this matter.

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Other matters — I found the Jesus Seminar persuasive on a number of matters: Jesus did not predict his death and resurrection; he did not utter the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John; Jesus’ family and disciples knew him to be a perfectly ordinary human being.

In Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - The one-time theologian Thomas Cahill writes: “Though the idea that Christ died to repay his Father for human sin is still a favorite theory of many (especially evangelical) Christians, it is a doctrine that no one can make logical sense of, … it necessitates a sort of voraciously pagan Father God steeped in cruelty and, in the case of Jesus’s horrific death, his son’s blood.” p. 199

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(1) In Romans 5:12 the Greek St. Paul wrote, according to the Geneva Study Bible: “Wherefore, as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: From Adam, in whom all have sinned, both guiltiness and death (which is the punishment of the guiltiness) came upon all.”

“I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.”

During the second administration of W. Bush, the late, inimitable Englishman Christopher Hitchens rejected the claim of practitioners of Islam that they had the right to prevent, by violence, the scholarly analysis of Islam, or the creation of any image whatever of the Prophet:

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize … Islam … Islam makes very large claims for itself. …

The prohibition on picturing the prophet … is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. … [He seems to be saying,] For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Implicit in American liberal democracy from the Founding is that rulership is forbidden. Our highest official is a “presider,” not a “ruler.” No one anywhere in our society can subject us to their will. And as Kant says below, no one can tell us what to think and say:

In “What is Enlightenment?” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote,

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] “Have courage to use your own reason!”—that is the motto of enlightenment.

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That is what bothers me about the way Bernie Sanders speaks to us. He lectures. He harangues. Constantly raises his right arm and points.

I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice.

Judging by the recent election, so do most Democrats.

[Afterword: The Hitchens article cited claims to make a “case for mocking religion.” I do not. I seek to identify and correct the errors of organized religion, which, not honoring the insight of Jesus of Nazareth, that God is to be considered kind, generous, loving, and good, seems to prefer the red meat of the Jealous God; the God of Wrath.

For me, religion is a sensibility, an intuition that reality is deeper, richer, more profound and wondrous than the secular outlook imagines.]

[https://tinyurl.com/I-RefuseToBeLectured]

[http://www.indiana.edu/~cahist/Readings/2010Fall/Islam_and_Modernity/Kant_Enlightenment.pdf]

At common law, merchants prohibited “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

NPR: “Business Leaders Oppose 'License To Discriminate' Against LGBT Texans”

How would you feel if you called a plumber because a burst pipe was flooding your house, and he, seeing a cross displayed, turned around and left because he had “a sincere religious belief” that Christians are infidels? A proposed Texas law would legitimize such bigotry to protect “sincerely held” personal “beliefs.”

For centuries, common law has prohibited merchants “from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Almost a quarter of a century ago, the Supreme Court ruled against Colorado Amendment 2, which forbade local jurisdictions from passing laws protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ people. In Romer v. Evans, the Court said, “A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

Romer v. Evans also noted: “At common law, innkeepers, smiths, and others who `made profession of a public employment,' were prohibited from refusing, without good reason, to serve a customer.”

Nevertheless, here we go again. Austin Chronicle: Texas Senate Bill 17 is “a far-reaching religious liberty bill that would give any professional licensed by the state of Texas – including doctors, lawyers, teachers, real estate agents, and even mold assessors – a license to discriminate under the guise of protecting “freedom of speech” regarding “sincerely held” religious beliefs. If passed into law, SB 17 would protect licensed professionals who wish to deny services to those who defy their religious beliefs.”

The sad part is that such malevolent religious right foolishness is bad for Texas commerce. Wade Goodwyn:

The convention and travel industries in particular tend to be the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to these types of bills. Phillip Jones, president and CEO of VisitDallas, says they'd be the first to keel over if the controversial 'religious refusal' legislation passes.

"One in ten trade shows held in America are held in Texas. I've got a hundred million dollar's worth of business that's currently at risk, if this legislation were to pass," says Jones. "Based on our experience with the bathroom bill they have a provision in their contracts that spells out that, should Texas pass any form of discriminatory legislation, then they can cancel their meeting in Texas or in Dallas without any penalties."

The irrationality underlying all this is the implied argument that, (at least for people you approve of) “sincerely held personal beliefs” must be true and just. People are often most convinced where they are most wrong. The Inquisition, the Holocaust, and Jim Crow are all examples of how intensely emotional beliefs can have consequences which shock the conscience. They can lead to conduct not bounded by ethics, by the laws, or by the least vestige of humane sympathy. Sincerely held, but wrong, personal beliefs can lack the constraints of justice, resulting in extrajudicial determination of guilt and kangaroo court justice.