What is my beef with Christianity?

It's nothing against Jesus, who himself seems to have been a totally decent guy, if also prone to wild eccentricity. No, my beef is with JC's followers, today George W Bush in particular, for vetoing the stem-cell research funding bill. I quote from today's NY Times:

Mr. Bush also ordered Secretary Leavitt to “support alternative techniques,” the officials said...

[T]he White House was particularly encouraged by several new avenues of research, including studies involving stem cells obtained from amniotic fluid, and efforts to extract stem cells from embryos that had been declared “clinically dead.”

But scientists said those studies could be as ethically problematic as the ones Mr. Bush already opposes. John Gearhart, a stem cell researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said no one had figured out when an embryo could be declared clinically dead. The White House officials said it would be up to the health institutes to develop standards.

“It is not an alternative for embryonic stem cell research, because some of these alternative procedures still have ethical issues associated with them,” Dr. Gearhart said, adding, “Who is the god that says the embryo is dead?”

That last sentence is an extremely good question. I don't presume to have a more moral answer than the next person, and reasonable people will always be able to disagree on when exactly a fetus becomes a person. I do think reasonable people can mostly agree that personhood begins well after the stem-cell stage. Bush's moral position here is a short ride down the slippery slope to Monty Python's Every Sperm Is Sacred song. The frustating thing for me here isn't even so much the content of Bush's moral feeling about stem cells, it's the stated basis for that feeling. In the year 2007, we can't afford to have powerful people taking instructions from two thousand year old folklore, especially when the instructions concern concepts and technologies that would have knocked our folklore's authors on their collective asses with bewilderment. The Bible just was not written with microbiology in mind.

Even Stephen J Hawking can't let go of the Old Testament guy in the sky. The illustrated coffee-table edition of the not-recommended A Brief History Of Time literally depicts Yahweh in full Michaelangelo regalia, floating outside the spacetime continuum and setting off the Big Bang with His finger. To me, a more intellectually honest thing to put in Yahweh's place is a big fat question mark. It leaves open the possibility of resolving someday into a period, or at least some more semicolons and question marks.

I like	I don't like
immanence	transcendence
love thy neighbor	smiting with swords
the Gospel of Thomas	the Book of Revelations
Amazing Grace	Christian rock
love thy neighbor	God hates fags
deism	intelligent design

Smart things from the Gospel of Thomas that the living Jesus may actually have said, as translated by Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer:

2	Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all."
3	Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father's) kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."
6	His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?" Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."
25	Jesus said, "Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye."
26	Jesus said, "You see the sliver in your friend's eye, but you don't see the timber in your own eye. When you take the timber out of your own eye, then you will see well enough to remove the sliver from your friend's eye."
29	Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
32	Jesus said, "A city built on a high hill and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden."
37	His disciples said, "When will you appear to us, and when will we see you?" Jesus said, "When you strip without being ashamed, and you take your clothes and put them under your feet like little children and trample then, then [you] will see the son of the living one and you will not be afraid."
39	"As for you, be as sly as snakes and as simple as doves."
51	His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."
63	Jesus said, "There was a rich person who had a great deal of money. He said, 'I shall invest my money so that I may sow, reap, plant, and fill my storehouses with produce, that I may lack nothing.' These were the things he was thinking in his heart, but that very night he died. Anyone here with two ears had better listen!"
67	Jesus said, "Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking."
70	Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."
84	Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
86	Jesus said, "[Foxes have] their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings have no place to lay down and rest."
91	They said to him, "Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you." He said to them, "You examine the face of heaven and earth, but you have not come to know the one who is in your presence, and you do not know how to examine the present moment."
101	"Whoever does not hate [father] and mother as I do cannot be my [disciple], and whoever does [not] love [father and] mother as I do cannot be my [disciple]."
113	His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

The first written accounts of Jesus' life were not the Gospels as told firsthand by the disciples, as is widely believed. The disciples were illiterate, as was nearly everyone in those days. The oldest known written copies of the Gospels date to two hundred years after the death of Jesus. That's a long time for the word-of-mouth game of telephone to operate, a fertile breeding ground for preliterate confabulation, embroidery and politically-motivated distortion. The text of the Bible itself is a continually evolving document as it gets translated and retranslated, and of course a great deal of that text is effectively ignored by all modern believers. Taken a spin through Deuteronomy or Leviticus lately? God hates shrimp as much as he hates gay people.

I frequently pass myself off as a Seinfeldian New York Jew, but in fact, I'm an ethnic mutt. While my mom and legions of her relatives are Jewish to one degree of observance or another, my late father was not. Neither, for that matter, is my stepfather, and neither was my late stepmother. I wasn't Bar Mitzvahed, didn't go to Hebrew School, to this day can barely remember the difference between Purim and Rosh Hashanah. My dad's adoptive parents were devoutly observant Midwestern Christians, of the German Methodist persuasion. I was in Grandma and Grandpa's care for a few hours most weekends through my childhood, and felt close to them. Grandpa mostly related to us with amiable laissez-faire, but Grandma viewed it as her duty to instill some morals in us. She lectured me frequently about taking the Lord's name in vain; 'jeez' and 'oh my god' were sternly verboten. In case you ever forgot, her large oil portrait of Jesus knocking on the door of your heart was prominently displayed in the living room.

It was presumably Grandma who insisted I attend Sunday school at their church, which I did, for four years. It was utterly ordinary small-town New England Protestant observance, but with NYC as my baseline, it was like visiting a mosque or zen temple. Jesus sounded like he might have been a decent guy, but I don't ever remember feeling convinced by any of it, least of all the miracles. I would have happily joined a church devoted to Star Wars or Legos (or now, Lego Star Wars) since those both felt a lot more pertinent to my life in the world. Grandma eventually passed away (that would have been her term, she had that old-school Protestant fondness for euphemism) and that was the end of my Sunday schooling.

But the Christian component of my moral upbringing has been making its presence felt in my adult life, at the root-level, monkey-brain emotional level. This is ironic, since it's exactly the part of the brain that Christianity has spent two thousand years trying to deny and rid itself of. It's a failed effort and will continue to fail, but that hasn't stopped hundreds of millions of people from trying. As for me? I struggled hard against my ape self all the way through high school, college and into my early twenties. Then I met with a series of major crises, hit the floor and was forced to begin getting reacquianted with mister monkey brain in a whole new way. Since then, I've been working assiduously hard to dismantle the medieval dogma that stands between me and happiness. Ridding myself of the illusion of mind/body separation has turned out to be an enormous boost to my self-esteem and ability to have meaningful relationships. Fighting The War On The Mammal Within was a terribly expensive and self-destructive effort to no good end, like the Wars on Drugs and Terror. The monkey brain is no more seperable from us than our monkey-like endocrine or circulatory systems.

The Christian meme that has caused me the most grief is the idea that the body is dirty, evil, a burden, a temporary casing you should look forward to shedding. It's a brilliantly charismatic idea, and it's easy to see why it's been such a big hit. Christianity transforms your death from a terrifying prospect into a transformation to be eagerly anticipated. Against all the evidence suggesting that death means you become food for worms, the Christians promise a phase change from this grimy meat world into a pure and eternally happy state, a bodiless being, a sunbeam, like an obscene caterpillar metamorphosing into the pristinely beautiful butterly. One of my favorite bits from Family Guy is when Peter is potty-training Stewie, and goes to the library for a book.

Librarian: The standard, of course, is 'Everybody Poops'. Then there's the less-popular 'Nobody Poops But You'.

Peter: Well, we're Catholic.

Librarian: Oh, then you want 'You're A Naughty Child And That's Concentrated Evil Coming Out The Back Of You'.

Peter: Perfect!

Outside of our own wish-fulfillment fantasies, is there any reason to think the afterlife story could possibly be true? I know a lot of people believe in some vague notion of a soul that survives the death of the body, and if that's what it takes to get them out of bed in the morning, that's fine. For such a wildly counterintuitive thing to be true, though, I would want to see some evidence. As someone not culturally invested in this story, I've seen a lot of evidence out there, and all of it is against the afterlife. For example, reported 'out of body' experiences have a way of turning out to be in-body experiences. Dead people are still 'with us' in the sense that their component molecules are scattering and diffusing out to rejoin the rest of the world, but what makes up the person isn't the molecules themselves, it's the dynamic patterned arrangement they form, the "whirl in the world" as per Tor Nørretranders. Once the fire's out, it looks to me like it's out for good. The thing, though, is that before it goes out, a fire can start more fires. For example, two different halves of my late father's genes are walking around in my sister and me, as well as many of his memes. But the man himself is in the ground and in the past.

The miracles are the big selling points for many Christians. Even among the more skeptical New Agers, it's hard to let go of the idea of miracles, of magic and the supernatural in some form or another. Good friends whose opinions I respect have suggested to me that in definitively ruling out magic, I'm just not paying enough attention to my instincts, my emotions, my creative side. But it's precisely my instincts and emotions that are most disturbed by magical thinking. The concept of 'received texts' generally and The Book Of Revelations in particular made me queasy long before I could consciously articulate why. Once I learned about the universal human tendency to fill gaps in our knowledge with wish-fulfillment fantasies, it's been much easier to see behind Revelations and texts like it.

What's the difference between cosmology and mythology? Why do I think the Big Bang theory is a much more convincing story than the book of Genesis, or for that matter the karmic cycle or the Great Green Arkleseizure? The religious texts offer primarily their own insistent rhetorical tone as evidence. The theories of scientists are, at least in principle, bound by observations of the world as we find it. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation come out the same whether they're done by a Russian guy or a Chinese woman or a robot space probe. Responsible scientists remain instrinsically doubtful of their own assumptions and conclusions. In a review of Warped Passages by Lisa Randall, the New Yorker describes the author:

She is honest about the limits of the known, and almost revels in the uncertainties that underlie her work—including the possibility that some day it may all be proved wrong.

Not all scientists are responsible all of the time, but theories that don't match the evidence don't survive long.

The information we're getting from the telescopes is so freaky as to defy description, and our religious texts are in no way adequate to the task of making sense of them. Big bang cosmology and its more speculative cousins (string theory, higher-dimensional theories, etc) require a lot more imaginative heavy lifting than the origin myths that precede them. I think that's wonderfully good news, personally. I follow theoretical physics the way normal guys follow sports, and I'm rooting for the most wild-eyed theories that the respectable scientists have to offer: warped dimensions, branes bouncing off each other every trillion years, matter and energy as four-dimensional shadows cast by the vibrations of eleven-dimensional spacetime, etc. If none of these ideas turn out to be right, the history of science suggests that it's because they're nowhere near crazy enough - we're still trying to wrap our collective heads around Einstein.

What's been happening in the past hundred years or so is that some of the really Big Unknowns have all of a historical sudden started to become known. It wasn't until the past century that we were able to look at the world using the vast swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum outside the narrow visual range. There wasn't a Big Bang theory a hundred years ago, no one knew about subatomic particles, nuclear fission and fusion, gravitational warping of spacetime, television, computers, the Internet, DNA, other galaxies, the recession of those galaxies due to the universe's expansion, etc. Two hundred years ago no one knew about internal combustion engines, dinosaurs, evolution generally, the germ theory of disease, atoms, telephones or radios. Why are we so attached, then, to religious texts that are two thousand years old or more?

People have presumably been debating about who created the world since they evolved speech. But with all the new evidence pouring in from the radio telescopes and elsewhere, guys like Einstein were suddenly able to make more-informed speculations. The current thinking is that the universe began as a titanic explosion everywhere in space fourteen billion years ago, and that when everything settled slowly out, here we all eventually were. The universe is now known to be many orders of magnitude bigger and older than believed by earlier scientists, never mind world mythology. Cosmologies invented by humans use shorter, more human-scale timeframes (ie the Christian belief that the world is six thousand years old.) Humans also imagine the world to be smaller and more human-scale than we know it to be. "God created the heavens and the earth" is an awkward phrase, now that we know how much bigger the heavens are than the earth. Similarly, it's hard to believe that it was given to us to have dominion over all the animals when a human is a closer evolutionary relative to a chimpanzee than a white-eyed vireo is to a red-eyed vireo, when a human is biochemically more like a starfish than a euglyphid amoeba is like a lobose amoeba, when a human is more like a mushroom than an acrasid slime mold is like a plasmodial slime mold.

The weight of evidence notwithstanding, the intelligent design argument draws in a lot of reasonable people. How could RNA replication just start happening by itself four billion years ago? It seems so incredibly unlikely, and we naturally gravitate toward the idea of a humanoid being making it happen. But life on this planet may have arisen many times independently, only to be wiped out before DNA got its foothold and eventually produced us. During the Earth's youth, it was constantly bombarded by giant rocks and was a seething mass of volcanos. RNA and DNA replication seems to have taken off as soon as the conditions here became sufficiently tranquil. The discovery of organisms surrounding thermal vents at the pitch-black freezing cold bottom of the ocean, in tiny crevices miles underground, in the boiling water of geothermal springs and high in the stratosphere suggests that varieties of life could exist just about anywhere. That said, Earth's history also suggests that big complicated multicellular organisms like ourselves are relatively unusual. I'd bet that most of the life out there in the universe is microscopic and simple. Anyway, the bottom line is that remarkable though life is, the more we learn about it, the less miraculous it looks.

Lot of smart people out there are struggling to reconcile their desire to believe in magic with the annoyingly non-human-centric facts. The solution popular with everyone from my hippie friends on up to Stephen Hawking is to just draw a dotted line around everything we don't know and stick the label 'God' on it. To me, this is to chicken out of the really big scary, the really big thrill, which is to admit to yourself that maybe it just all happened by itself, for no good reason at all. Mythology can be fun, but the processes that created the heads our mythologies inhabit are way more tripped-out. Richard Dawkins would have you believe that billions of years ago, organic molecules self-assembled in pools or undersea volcanos or rock crevices deep underground, by accident, and that some of them did so in a way that set off a chain-reaction of self-replication, like a forest fire but more gradual in its pace and more complex in its structure, and that every last living thing on Earth is a direct ancestor of one of those accidental chemical chain reactions. Dawkins would further have you believe that your 'soul' and 'consciousness' are images generated by self-replicating entities residing in your brain, in much the same way that your digestion is aided (or hindered) by the billions of bacteria residing in your gastrointestinal tract. Copious evidence gathered by people all over the world who don't know or even agree with each other continues to support these assertions.

The idea of heaven, angels, etc might give some people happiness, but I, for one, don't like being lied to. It's infantilizing. Telling your four-year-old about Santa Claus is fine, but insisting on Santa's literal realness to a fourteen-year-old or forty-year-old would just be creepy. Darwinism got a bad rap from its Victorian-era misreadings, but it isn't all meaningless brutality. I can honestly say that Neural Darwinism saved my life by taking the Judeo-Christian judgment out of my decision to seek treatment for depression. Recognizing depression to be a disease like diabetes, rather than a character flaw like laziness, made possible my treating it and bringing it under control. Depression is rampant in my family, and while it's not generally fatal, its chronic form has made a godawful mess of many of my loved ones, and I feel like I've dodged a bullet. Understanding my brain to be more like a monkey's brain than unlike it, and more like my pancreas than unlike it, has been crucial to my becoming warmer, more imaginative, less hostile and distant, more focused, and in general a more completely formed human being.

Christianity as practiced by my Grandma is intimately interwoven into all of our social institutions. It informs the basis for the rules we mostly unconsciously follow at home, in school, at work, alone and in groups, in hospitals and prisons and factories. Like Christianity as practiced by my Grandma, America is too rigid, too compartmentalized, too Manichean, too black-and-white, too all-or-nothing, too angry, too fearful. It's this fear that's going to be the biggest obstacle to long-term acceptance of our evolutionary history and basic animal nature, the fear of letting go of belief in the soul, the individual self, a morality that exists outside human minds. Christianity assumes that free will is a necessary precondition for human morality, but the harder I scrutinize that assumption, the more it deteriorates. Rather than terrifying me, though, I'm finding this prospect increasingly comforting. Here's Robert Provine, from the fascinating book What I Believe But Cannot Prove:

Until proven otherwise, why not assume that consciousness does not play a role in human behavior? Although it may seem radical on first hearing, this is actually the conservative position that makes the fewest assumptions. The null position is an antidote to philosopher's disease, the inappropriate attribution of rational, conscious control over processes that may be irrational and unconscious. The argument here is not that we lack consciousness, but that we over-estimate the conscious control of behavior. I believe this statement to be true. But proving it is a challenge because it's difficult to think about consciousness. We are misled by an inner voice that generates a reasonable but often fallacious narrative and explanation of our actions. That the beam of conscious awareness that illuminates our actions is on only part of the time further complicates the task. Since we are not conscious of our state of unconsciousness, we vastly overestimate the amount of time that we are aware of our own actions, whatever their cause.

My thinking about unconscious control was shaped by my field studies of the primitive play vocalization of laughter. When I asked people to explain why they laughed in a particular situation, they would concoct some reasonable fiction about the cause of their behavior—"someone did something funny," "it was something she said," "I wanted to put her at ease." Observations of social context showed that such explanations were usually wrong. In clinical settings, such post hoc misattributions would be termed "confabulations," honest but flawed attempts to explain one's actions.

Subjects also incorrectly presumed that laughing is a choice and under conscious control, a reason for their confident, if bogus, explanations of their behavior. But laughing is not a matter speaking "ha-ha," as we would choose a word in speech. When challenged to laugh on command, most subjects could not do so. In certain, usually playful, social contexts, laughter simply happens. However, this lack of voluntary control does not preclude a lawful pattern of behavior. Laughter appears at those places where punctuation would appear in a transcription of a conversation—laughter seldom interrupts the phrase structure of speech. We may say, "I have to go now—ha-ha," but rarely, "I have to—ha-ha—go now." This punctuation effect is highly reliable and requires the coordination of laughing with the linguistic structure of speech, yet it is performed without conscious awareness of the speaker. Other airway maneuvers such as breathing and coughing punctuate speech and are performed without speaker awareness.

The discovery of lawful but unconsciously controlled laughter produced by people who could not accurately explain their actions led me to consider the generality of this situation to other kinds of behavior. Do we go through life listening to an inner voice that provides similar confabulations about the causes of our action? Are essential details of the neurological process governing human behavior inaccessible to introspection? Can the question of animal consciousness be stood on its head and treated in a more parsimonious manner? Instead of considering whether other animals are conscious, or have a different, or lesser consciousness than our own, should we question if our behavior is under no more conscious control than theirs? The complex social order of bees, ants, and termites documents what can be achieved with little, if any, conscious control as we think of it. Is machine consciousness possible or even desirable? Is intelligent behavior a sign of conscious control? What kinds of tasks require consciousness? Answering these questions requires an often counterintuitive approach to the role, evolution and development of consciousness.

Susan Blackmore, from the same book:

It is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will.

As Samuel Johnson said "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it." With recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time, more than 200 years ago. So I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.

But what happens? People say I'm lying! They say it's impossible and so I must be deluding myself to preserve my theory. And what can I do or say to challenge them? I have no idea—other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is.

When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove.

As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether—this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But though I cannot prove it, I think it is true that I don't.

Tor Nørretranders, ibid:

It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities.

Recent discoveries in behavioural sciences, such as experimental economics and game theory, shows that it is a common human attitude towards the world to have faith. It is vital in human interactions; and it is no coincidence that the importance of anchoring behaviour in riskful trust is stressed in worlds as far apart as Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist Christianity and modern theories of bargaining behaviour in economic interactions. Both stress the importance of the inner, subjective conviction as the basis for actions, the feeling of an inner glow.

One could say that modern behavioral science is re-discovering the importance of faith that has been known to religions for a long time. And I would argue that this re-discovery shows us that the activity of having faith can be decoupled from the belief in divine entities.

So here is what I have faith in: We have a hand backing us, not as a divine foresight or control, but in the very simple and concrete sense that we are all survivors. We are all the result of a very long line of survivors who survived long enough to have offspring. Amoeba, rodents and mammals. We can therefore have confidence that we are experts in survival. We have a wisdom inside, inherited from millions of generations of animals and humans, a knowledge of how to go about life. That does not in any way imply foresight or planning ahead on our behalf. It only implies that we have a reason to trust out ability to deal with whatever challenges we meet. We have inherited such an ability.

Therefore, we can trust each other, ourselves and life itself. We have no guarantee or promises for eternal life, not at all. The enigma of death is still there, ineradicable. But we a reason to have confidence in ourselves. The basic fact that we are still here, despite snakes, stupidity and nuclear weapons, gives us reason to have confidence in ourselves and each other, to trust others and to trust life. To have faith. Because we are here, we have reason for having faith in having faith.

I think it's a responsibility of a mature person to understand the psychological value of wish fulfillment fantasies, recognize their central place in our theories about the world, and then be able to put them aside when it's necessary. But there's no denying that counterfactual religious beliefs can be a powerful advantage in this world; ask George W Bush. Randolph Nesse, from WIBBCP:

I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove...People who are sometimes consumed by false beliefs do better than those who insist on evidence before they believe and act. People who are sometimes swept away by emotions do better in life than those who calculate every move. These advantages have, I believe, shaped mental capacities for intense emotion and passionate beliefs because they give a selective advantage in certain situations...[F]undamentalism remains a severe threat to enlightened civilization. I am arguing, however, that if we want to understand these tendencies we need to quit dismissing them as defects and start considering how they came to exist.

The angry person who might seek spiteful revenge is a force to be reckoned with, while a sensible opponent can be easily dealt with. The passionate lover sweeps away a superior but all too practical offer of marriage.

It is harder to explain the disadvantages suffered by people who lack a capacity for faith, but consider the outcomes for those who wait for proof before acting, compared to the those who act on confident conviction. The great things in life are done by people who go ahead when it seems senseless to others. Usually they fail, but sometimes they succeed.

Like nearly every other trait, tendencies for passionate emotions and irrational convictions are most advantageous in some middle range. The optimum for modern life seems to me to be quite a ways towards the rational side of the median, but there are advantages and disadvantages at every point along the spectrum. Making human life better requires that we understand these capacities, and to do that we must seek their origins and functions.

Christianity is too effective at making more Christians for it to completely collapse anytime soon, but its role as the primary shaper of our morals has been steadily evaporating in the past hundred years in the Western world, and I only see this trend continuing as people continue to grow up like I do: in an ideologically heterogenous environment where they're presented early on with a spectrum of fundamental assumptions that would have utterly blown the mind of the people who wrote the Bible. Jon Stewart observed about the culture war that never has any side of a war had its ass handed to it so consistently as the Christian right. This is for the best, and in the meantime no one needs to stop going to church or singing the songs or anything. We just need to get a little more interpretively hip with the source material. Did you know that Stephen Colbert teaches Sunday school at his church?

Let's bid farewell to the scary medieval piercing-fetish version of Jesus and have a closer and more skeptical look at the Jeffersonian miracle-free version. This fellow was full of useful suggestions, like the one Howard Dean turned into a new bumper sticker for the Democratic Party: Love Thy Neighbor, Because You Don't Get To Choose Thy Neighbor. To put it another way, the Philip Pullman way, let's get to work building the Republic of Heaven.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top