John Draper's Blog: A Danger to God Himself, page 2

The Bible makes sense when you realize it’s nonsensical – Part 2

For hundreds of years, learned folks have struggled over the dichotomous picture of God presented in the Old and New testaments: Angry God, Loving God. Could you see the Prince of Peace leading the charge to exterminate the tick-ridden Canaanites? It strains credulity, hence the hundreds of years of struggle—and cockamamie explanations/rationalizations/allegories. Back when I was religious, I had a book titled Show Them no Mercy, Four Views on God and Canaanite Genocide—the four views being “Strong Discontinuity,” “Moderate Discontinuity, “Spiritual Continuity” and “Eschatological Continuity.” (Bullshit sounds more plausible when you use big words.) The most common cockamamie rationalization among biblical literalists is that the Israelites had to exterminate the Canaanites lest they be swayed to follow their gods. They had it coming. In his Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason Archer apologizes for the Israelites thusly:  “Just as the wise surgeon removes dangerous cancer from his patient’s body by use of the scalpel, so God employed the Israelites to remove such dangerous malignancies from human society.” In other words, the Canaanites weren’t just Israel’s enemy. They were God’s enemy.

Okay. . .  But what if we apply Occam’s Razor to this particular Bible Difficulty?

God Bless Israel

What if the first five books of the Bible were written as political propaganda, written out of a mixture of hubris and guilt? The hallmarks of said propaganda

God chose the Jews above all people upon the face of the earth (Deuteronomy 7:6)
God wants the state of Israel to rule the world (Deuteronomy 15:6)
God wants the Jewish state of Israel to commit genocide against the gentile people around them. (Deuteronomy 7:2)

It all seems so . . . likely. Governments do this kind of shit all the time. God is on our side! Remember when Congress stood together after 9/11 and sang God Bless America? (I wonder what tune the Jihadists had rolling through their brains before they drove those airplanes into those buildings.)

The men who wrote the Pentateuch didn’t care about the picture of God they were painting. They just wanted to show that Israel had God’s sanction. God Bless Israel. They were propagandists for the State—tools—just following orders. They didn’t believe any of that shit actually happened. Why would they? Their experience of God was the same as ours: He’s mainly uninvolved, off attending to something else more important perhaps, maybe cleaning His apartment—certainly not opening up chasms in the good earth to swallow up fifthly sinners.

Little did those Tools of the State know the Western world was going to erect an entire theology based on the apoplectic God from their political propaganda. Even Jesus—he, along his fellow Jews, believed that wrath was a perfectly good word to describe how God feels about sin.

Don’t blame God for the Bible

And, of course, men lie. (Bought anything off an infomercial lately? Kitchen Miracle, my ass!) Add that to the mix when you’re discussing the humanness of scripture. For example, archeology has shown the stories of the Canaanite conquest are, again, more Party Line than Gospel Truth. Battles that were supposed to have happened, clearly didn’t. On more than one occasion, the Old Testament has the Israelites laying siege to a city that didn’t exist at the time. Men lie. Archeology doesn’t.

And neither does God, one hopes, which is why He’s off the hook for the whole trainwreck we call Holy Writ. That’s on us.

The good news is that, on the whole, the backwards parts of the Bible don’t rear their heads often. Most people’s refrigerator magnets bear such affirmations as You Can Do All Things Through Jesus Who Strengthens You and He Works Out All Things For Good For Those Who Are Called By His Name. Stuff like that. People don’t use the Canaanite genocide as their model when they move into a neighborhood of unbelievers. They’re more neighborly, more Christian.

(Why didn’t the ancient Jews think of that? Send over a fruit basket. Have the Canaanites over for dinner. The Canaanites probably would have preferred those to the alternative, given the choice. When they throw the fruit basket back into our face—that’s when we attack!)

I think we’re stuck with the Bible. But can we admit that it’s a mixed bag, at best? Kudos to Jesus for telling us to love our enemies—not so much for the times he condemns people to hell. (Unless of course the people he’s sending to hell are someone else. Those bastards.) The Bible’s no more inspired than any other book, if God actually inspires people.

Better yet, let’s inspire ourselves to be kind. After all, if God empowers us to be kind, is it really kindness? It’s just God pulling our strings, isn’t it? Good news, though: We don’t need the Bible to tell us how to be good and we don’t need God to make us good.

All we need is ourselves—and each other.

 

Photo: IMG_5409 by Satanoid CC BY 2.0

 

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The Bible makes sense when you realize it’s nonsensical — Part 1

Back when I was religious, I couldn’t get enough of the Bible. Its mysteries just prodded me to dig deeper. Soon enough, I found a series of books put out by one of the mega-Christian publishing houses devoted to the most well-worn doctrinal disputes. It was called the Counterpoints Collection and included such titles as “Five Views on Sanctification,” “Four Views on Eternal Security,” and “Four Views on the Lord’s Supper.”

And I read’ em all. Like I said, I couldn’t get enough.

The volume I want to talk about was “Five Views on Law and Gospel,” its existence engendered by the fact that the New Testament seems to speak with, at least, two voices about whether or not Christians must follow the Law of Moses. Sometimes the New Testament seems to say yes, sometimes no. The volume boasted the thoughts of five theologians:

One of whom posited a “non-theonomic reformed view of the use of the law.
One who argued for a “theonomic reformed approach.”
One who maintained that “the weightier issues of the law of Moses are binding on believers today”
One who advocated for “the dispensational view”
And one who proposed a “modified Lutheran approach with a clear antithesis between the Law and Gospel.”

(I’m still waiting to meet a Modified Lutheran. I suppose I’ll know him when I see him, won’t I?)

After reading this volume—and all the volumes in the Counterpoints Collection—one is left to fall back on some version of the familiar bulwark of the religious: “We’ll just have to ask God about this when we get to heaven.” Ah well. Makes sense. God is absolutely simple, yes, in that He is an undivided One, but he is mind-bogglingly complex. What were we thinking—assuming we could fathom scripture’s mysteries?

Or . . . maybe’s there’s another reason the Bible’s a mishmash. What if the Bible is all over the map on theological issues because it was written by men who were, literally and figuratively, all over the map? The riddles of the Bible suddenly make sense when you accept the fact that the book was written by hapless schlubs like ourselves, hopelessly prone to walking around with our flies open and being none the wiser—i.e. imprudent and clueless, just parading around with our wangs wobbling in the breeze and thinking we’re all that. Such folly. Stupid humans.

To wit:

The reason the New Testament speaks with varied voices on the issue of Law vs. Gospel is that different men with different opinions wrote different sections of scripture. For example, Jesus was all about obeying the Torah—hence his take on the final judgment:

A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.

People who do good go to heaven. People who do bad go to hell. Jesus didn’t know anything about being washed of one’s sins by the blood of the lamb—amazing grace—as advocated 30 years later by the Apostle Paul.

Oh. . . so men wrote the Bible? That explains a l

Still, though, we’re stuck with the Bible, for better or worse. It’s a worldwide sacred and revered text, the Word of God, read in hundreds of languages and dialects, the number one bestselling book of all time, with billions of copies sold and a hundred million more sold each year. (In your face, Harry Potter.) The genie’s not going back into the bottle.

Look at the bright side. The Bible provides scant answers. But it makes us ask important questions.

We must view the Bible differently. The church that’s coming—and, make no mistake, the church will either spin a chrysalis about itself and reappear renewed or it will ossify like a McDonald’s French fry left under the passenger side seat—the church that’s coming will have a new view of the Bible. The Bible we have is not what God would have provided for us assuming He could have controlled everything. One hopes. He doesn’t, though—control everything.

That’s why Christendom is going to change or die. Believers must change the way they view God, doing away with outmoded ideas like omnipotence, change the way they view scripture, change the way they view the whole bloody undertaking we call religion. Change or die.

I blame the internet. More on that in a later post.

Photo:  Bible  by  Lauri Rantala . CCBY 2.0

The post The Bible makes sense when you realize it’s nonsensical — Part 1 appeared first on A Danger to God Himself.

Can you be spiritual but not religious?

More and more, when you ask Americans what creed they profess, they check the box that says “Spiritual But Not Religious.” I think what people mean when they say they’re Spiritual But Not Religious, is they have an inner sense of the divine that they’d prefer to keep to themselves, thank you. I have my spirituality. You have yours. Don’t harsh my vibe with your . . . religion. Spirituality’s all about the inward person, following one’s beatific impulses, one’s true self—all that stuff that Jiminy Cricket talked about. Religion, Religion’s all about rules—white men in robes with hair growing out of their ears forcing you to do something that doesn’t come naturally.

I don’t get it.

Spirituality—whatever that means, it must mean connecting with our best self. And our best self focuses outward. Trouble is, we’re selfish sons of bitches. I’ll take a leap: Original Sin—the focus on one’s self and one’s benefit—is the only Christian doctrine that is empirically verifiable. Consider history. It’s our self-interest that causes our woes. James 4:1-3: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” (Surprised I quote scripture? Don’t be. Nuggets exist amidst the dross—as much as one would expect in any document written by humans. See Does God Speak Through Scripture? Yes and No.)

I’d posit you are the most spiritual when you’re being the most religious—when you’re forcing yourself to do something you’d rather not. The spiritual person isn’t the person who is empowered by God. The spiritual person is the person who swears under his breath about the particular pain in the ass who is monopolizing his study time yet puts down his book and engages in an encouraging conversation, lends a hand. A spiritual person is not the person who is removed from the “cares of this world.” The spiritual person is the person is sees the need and attends to it when they’d prefer not to.

Really what alternative do we have? If God gave you the power to sacrifice, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. A sacrifice has to cost you something. Turns out, being selfless requires an extreme exertion of the self.

Fittingly—providentially?—that’s the way the universe works. We’re on our own. God doesn’t interact with the world/humans in any meaningful way. Me, I think He doesn’t because He can’t. That’s the nature of God. He is wholly other.

We are left to deal with the pains in the ass that wander into our lives with naught but own wits and gumption. Spiritual forces—if they exist—are unavailable to humankind. We aren’t tuned to that frequency. We are machines made out of meat. You can’t run a material machine on something other than matter—corn flakes and bean sprouts. Supplications and rainbows won’t do the trick. Get off your ass.

So don’t worry about being spiritual. Worry about being more human. But consider yourself warned: It’s damn hard work and God is no help whatsoever.

John Draper is the author of the novel A Danger to God Himself

Photo: Meditating by Take back your health conference’s photostream CC BY 2.0

An atheist and a deist walk into a bar . . .

That’s me and my friend, Chris, in the photo above. We met at what I now refer to as my bar. I started going there at night to work on my novel. (In the mornings before work, I’d go to Starbucks.) At first, I’d keep to myself. I’d sit in a corner amidst all the noise and carousing and work on my book. People mostly left me alone, assuming I was a schoolteacher grading papers. Then one night, Chris’ husband, Wayne, sat next to me and says, “What are you doing?”

Soon enough, I had a posse, which included Chris. I mean, it’s like Cheers, back in the day during Prime Time. I walk in and everyone says, “John!”

I digress. Back to the above photo. I post that because, you see, Chris is an atheist and, me, I’m a former theist, now deist. (I lost my religion while writing above-mentioned novel, which is about a Mormon missionary who goes insane on his mission. To see the story of that “falling away,” click here.) Chris and I have the most mind-blowing discussions about belief and disbelief and the mysteries that lay between. I find our profundity tends to rise from Beer 1 to 3. When the last of Beer 3 goes down your gullet, you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. (After Beer 3 it’s mainly talk about politics and pop culture and who the biggest badass rock guitarist of all time is. It’s Terry Kath, by the way.)

And you know what’s funny? We never get mad without one another. Never think of it. Actually, we mostly laugh.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I’m on a number of atheist/agnostic groups on Facebook and the tenor of the discussion there is often different than it is between Chris and myself. So much backbiting and self-righteousness online! So many pissed off atheists—and so many of them are my “friends.” Sometimes it seems like the most innocuous point made by a non-atheist will drive atheists to distraction. (The reaction is all but automatic, like poking bear with a stick, which has given rise to the sport of atheist bating.)

So . . . I started thinking: Why all the vitriol?

Obviously, a big part of it is the anonymity of the internet. I think, though, the biggest factor is that most people go on Facebook to prove themselves right or someone else wrong.

It’s the exact opposite of how Chris and I are around one another. I have no fear of making a bold assertion around Chris—taking a risk. I don’t need to be right. In fact, if he can show me where I err, I’m grateful.

Not so on Facebook. Human nature, I guess, which is why I mainly lurk—and learn. If I’m going to go out on a limb, it’s going to be here, on my blog. And, always, before I post a post, I have Chris read it first. The hope is he’ll keep me from looking like I moron.

That’s what friends do.

John Draper is the author of the novel, A Danger to God Himself

Who lays claim to the true gospel?

Everyone says they bear the true gospel. Mormons say it. (They call it the Restored Gospel.) Pentecostals say it. (They call it the Full Gospel.) Holy Rollers say it. (They call it The Foursquare Gospel.)

And so on.

What they’re all saying when they make this claim is “We believe in the gospel that the first apostles believed in!” (For example, Mormons claim that after the last apostle died, there was a Great Apostasy—the gospel was lost and the priesthood power withdrawn from the faithful.)

Everyone wants to be like The First Christians.

The whole effort’s wrongheaded, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not even sure the First Christians were Christians. I think they thought they were Jews—Torah-observant Jews. The only difference between them and their fellow Jews was their devotion to Jesus, who was very adamant about observing the Torah. The early church was based in Jerusalem and headed up by James, the brother of Jesus, who wouldn’t let you in the club unless you got circumcised. Without anesthesia. Ouch. How’s that for being born again?

I believe that what is promoted as apostolic doctrine by most churches is not what the apostles taught. For example, what mainline Christians believe as “gospel” is the dogma introduced by Paul, which he called “my gospel”—I think to distinguish it from the pro-Torah “gospel” pushed by James and the apostles in Jerusalem.

Paul was the one who invented the whole “salvation by grace through faith” idea, not Jesus.

The First Christians weren’t about grace. They were about strict observance.

Problem is, strict observance sucks as a Rule of Life. Whether or not you believe in God, it’s best to give yourself grace. Allow screw ups. Have a fried egg sandwich now and then—with bacon. Realize that when you try to learn something new, you’re going to suck at it at first. Stop being your worst critic. Rules—enough with all the rules! Everyone who has found peace by following rules, raise your hand. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Stop trying to be like the first-century church. They were just as lost as we are. If you want to have religion in your life, let your religion evolve—improve. Stop looking backward. Let’s keep learning and growing, throwing away the rules that don’t get us anywhere.

That’s my gospel.

John Draper is the author of the novel, A Danger to God Himself .

  Photo: Prepare for the end of this world by Stephen McCulloch  CC BY 2.0

All Christians will accept homosexuals — and soon

Well, maybe not all Christians. Probably not the Westboro Baptist types and the snake handlers. But other than that, yes, I think everyone who believes, in some fashion, in Jesus and the Bible will come to embrace homosexuals. Oh, yeah, and the Mormons—they’ll probably never budge on homosexuality either. (Don’t be so sure, though. The LDS church is infamous for flip-flops on doctrine.)

Right now, it’s pretty much only progressive Christians who accept homosexuals. In my experience, they back up their acceptance with faulty interpretations of the Six Killer Verses About Homosexuality in the Bible—for example, “abomination” didn’t mean, well, “abomination;” it meant “taboo.”

More about biblical interpretation later, but first let me explain why I think all Christians will soon embrace homosexuals.

I think that eventually The Church will come to accept homosexuality, but it won’t be because they adopt progressive Christianity’s’ unorthodox biblical interpretations I mention above. Rather, it’s going to happen because, more and more, believers are encountering gays at work and elsewhere and they’re learning that they’re just normal people. They’re coming to find out that gays aren’t “wicked” or some such thing. They are moral and they just want what straight people want: happiness, healthy marriages, security, etc. It’s a Virtuous Circle, I think: As society becomes more accepting of gays, gays are emboldened to “come out” at work and in their neighborhoods. And as gays come out, their straight peers are finding that they are actually likable, which results in more societal acceptance, which results in gays being more emboldened to come out. You get the idea.

And that Virtuous Circle is going to force Christians to adopt a new attitude toward scripture. What do I mean? I mean the progressive Christians don’t go far enough. We don’t need new interpretations of scripture. We need a new understanding of what we mean when we call scripture “inspired.” The Bible—or the Koran or the book of Mormon or any “holy” book—isn’t the Word of God. It’s the word of humans, and, as such, it’s prone to all the limitations of the human authors.

The truth is the Bible is an adamantly heterosexual book. It assumes heterosexuality. That’s because it was written by ancient people—mainly men—who weren’t particularly enlightened. When the Westboro Baptist types insist that the Bible condemns homosexuality, they are right.

Let me be more plain. The Bible was wrong about homosexuality. Paul was wrong about homosexuality. Jesus was wrong about homosexuality.

In this coming gay-friendly Christianity, believers will still read the Bible but they’ll do so more cautiously. They’ll pick out the wisdom and disregard the nonsense. They’ll realize that all truth is God’s truth.

Or maybe they won’t. Who’s to say? But if the Church doesn’t change its stance on homosexuals and on scripture, it will die.

John Draper is the author of the novel A Danger to God Himself .

Photo: Westboro Baptist Church in Madison by Cometstarmoon CC BY 2.0

What do people mean when they say, “I follow God”?

Nestled at the core of every religion is the assumption that we are meant to give ourselves to God, join His “side,” if you will. Life lived right is a life oriented around God. “He must become greater. I must become less,” as the bushy bearded John the Baptist said. We must serve God.

Which begs the question, “How is it we are supposed to know what He wants us to do?”

I mean, He is silent and invisible, after all. It’s not like He leaves a sticky note on your bathroom mirror each morning so you’ll see “God’s To Do List For Today” while you’re shaving.

Let’s review our options.

One, we could hear the audible voice of God. Obviously, this is a non-starter. When someone tells us they hear the audible voice of God we think they only have one oar in the water, that they’re one taco shy of a combo platter.

Number two, we could lean on a sacred text. This really isn’t much better. Every sacred text out there leaks like a sieve. I mean, look at Christianity. Jesus never wrote down any instructions for his apostles. And the apostles never wrote down any instructions for us. Most Christian dogma comes from the writings of Paul, and he never even met Jesus. And the Book of Mormon—don’t get me started on the Book of Mormon! Really.

Three, God could speak to us through that Still, Small Voice that scripture speaks of—that inkling that we’re headed in the right or wrong direction. “I feel a peace about this,” so many believers say when explaining their decision to take a particular course. Here’s the problem with the Still, Small Voice. It’s always what we would have decided left to our own intuition. In fact, I’d go further: It is our intuition—and it’s usually over trifling matters. When the problem’s really thorny, we just end up throwing our hands in the air and taking our best guess.

(I’m sorry, but I must throw out Mormon tidbit. I read about 50 books on Mormonism to research my novel, so I’m just chock full of these things. When the Mormon prophet Spencer Kimball was personally troubled by the church’s long-held doctrine of excluding black men from the priesthood in the late 70s, he sought out the will of God by entering into earnest prayer. He had the other apostles join in. No word, though—neither audible nor of the Still, Small variety. So here’s what Kimball did. He told Heavenly Father that he was going to go ahead and remove the ban unless Heavenly Father interceded and told him not to. Heavenly Father didn’t, and Kimball lifted the ban on black men. It was a Revelation of Omission. There’s the Still, Small Voice in action for you.)

Four, God could speak to us through other people. This one doesn’t go anywhere, either. Turns out everyone else is as in the dark about what God wants as we are, so they’re no help.

So . . . how in the world do we know what God wants us to do? Turns out, believers are just doing the same thing non-believers do when it comes to making life choices: making it up as they go along and hoping for the best.

What more could you possibly expect from the God Who Hides?

John Draper is the author of the novel A Danger to God Himself .

Does God require worship?

First off, let me say that worship is real. I’ve experienced it. Back when I went to church, I loved to worship God. In fact, it might have been my favorite part of the service. (The sermons were always pretty boring.) I felt a . . . yearning . . . for God when I would be caught up in worship. Caught up. That’s a good description. Reminds me of body surfing in Hawaii. Sometimes you wouldn’t time it quite right and the wave would grab you and fling you around. For a moment, you weren’t sure in which direction the surface lay and you panicked realizing you weren’t in control of the situation.

Worship’s like that. You’re engulfed. At times, there’s even a sense of panic—a taste of what it means to fear God. It is awful—in that you’re full of awe. Caught up in the wave.

Worship feels so . . . right. So fitting—as if we were made for this very thing and we’re not fully ourselves until we are engaged in it.

So I don’t think people are deluding themselves when they worship God. I think it’s a natural outcome of trying to conceive of the inconceivable. No other response seems right when we try to grasp how high and wide God is.

That said, I don’t think God really cares one way or another if we worship Him/Her/It/Them. If you pushed Him/Her/It/Them, the answer you’d get is that there was probably a better way you could be spending your time.

Saying this, I realize it runs counter to the express instruction of Jesus Christ. He was asked what the greatest commandment was and He said it was to love “the Lord they God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Coming up a close second was loving your neighbor as yourself.

Putting God at the center of your life—that was the point of life, according to Jesus.

Jesus got it wrong. You can’t blame Him, though. What else was He supposed to say? He was a first-century devout Jew. The people who were questioning about the greatest commandment were just looking for a way to accuse him of blasphemy. He had to give the politically correct answer. He was just telling the truth, to his way of thinking.

He was wrong, though. God doesn’t care about worship.

I’d go further. I think the primary error of religion is the notion that God wants us to focus on Him/Her/It/Them. I think He/She/It/They want us to focus on one another.

I mean, God certainly isn’t vain. A self-centered God isn’t worth worshipping.

Some religious folks may say that the reason we devote ourselves to God—and lose ourselves in worship—is that it gives us perspective. It puts us in our place. We are not on the pedestal. God is. I understand the sentiment. God is awful—terrifying, even, when you think about it, even a God Of Love. The fitting reaction is to fall upon one’s face, as the Bible says.

Problem is, worship actually makes us more self-centered. After all, we have the correct God. All those others—hapless boobs—they worship false Gods. No God but God, the Muslims say, for example, by which they mean Allah. A staunch Baptist will tell you Mormons worship the devil.

Everyone says their God is the God—ergo holy wars.

It’s Jesus’ greatest commandment that causes all the religious friction in the world. I mean, no one will argue with doing good to one’s fellow man/woman. But to insist that we worship God begs the question: Whose God?

God is, well, God and, as such, is due the devotion of every heart, soul and mind on the planet. Those who think otherwise must be . . . corrected.

Why can’t religion not be about God.

Going to church to worship God on Sundays isn’t wrong. It’s understandable, but it’s unnecessary. The value of church is that it’s a community of people who care for each other.

That’s the religion I want.

Jesus would have been against gay marriage

A gay Christian friend of mine likes to point out that Jesus never said a single word one way or the other about homosexuality—this by way of suggesting that Jesus would have been in favor of committed, monogamous  homosexual unions

Puh.

To me, it’s a silly argument.

In the first place, it’s an argument from silence. Jesus didn’t talk about a lot of things. He was focused on the Kingdom of God. That was his main message—the messianic age is nigh. Anyway, why should Jesus talk about homosexuality? He didn’t need to tell the Jews that homosexuality was sinful. They already believed that. In fact, it was such a gross offense it was considered a gentile sin.

(The same people who like to point out that Jesus never spoke about homosexuality also like to point out that there are only six verses in the entire Bible that speak against homosexuality. To me, that’s not surprising. The Bible assumes heterosexuality. A man and woman joined to make one flesh was considered the natural order as far as the Bible is concerned.)

As a first century conservative religious Jew, Jesus would have considered Adam and Eve—sexuality complementariness—as the norm for all humans. Deviations from that would be seen as deviations from the created order. Jesus was all about following the Torah. The Torah puts homosexual acts in the same class as adultery, incest, bestiality, idolatry, and sacrificing children to idols, condemning them in the strongest possible terms. Jesus didn’t have to condemn homosexuality any more than He had to condemn sins like bestiality, since every God-fearing Jew in the nation knew these things were wrong according to God’s holy Torah.

If Jesus disagreed with the Torah on some point, he would make it known—hence his declaration that no food is unclean. But he never said, “You know what, Moses had homosexuality all wrong! Let me set you straight.” His silence was an admission he agreed with the Torah’s view of homosexuality.

Jesus was a real stickler for following the Torah—a real hardass.

My gay Christian friend balks at this. He says that when Jesus seems strict on observing the law it’s a hyperbolic device to make a point about the gospel. Jesus’ point was to show that no one could be holy by following the law because no one was capable of following the law, wretched sinners that we are. Instead, we need a savior. Stop striving. Just trust in the Blood of the Lamb to wash away your sins. You can’t save yourself. It’s all about God’s grace.

Puh.

Jesus didn’t know anything about that. My gay Christian friend is reading Paul’s theology back on to Jesus. Jesus knew nothing about salvation by grace through faith. In the Kingdom of God, you carry your own weight or else. Stragglers get left behind.

Jesus would have been strongly opposed to the idea of gay marriage. Strongly. But, you know what? What Jesus thought is irrelevant. Why do we want to pattern our lives after an ancient Jew? He said a lot of cool things about loving your enemy and such, but many of his ideas are outmoded. We’ve learned so much about life that Jesus never knew. Two thousand years from now, we’ll know even more. Jesus said a lot of great things, but on the topic of homosexuality, we need to move beyond Jesus.

It’s what God wants.

John Draper is the author of the novel A Danger to God Himself.

Can you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?

Evangelical Christians will tell you “Christianity’s not a religion. It’s a relationship.” What they really mean is that they don’t follow a set of “rituals.” Evangelicals detest ritual. That’s what Catholics do, for gosh sakes. Rituals are all about mindless repetition. Relationships are spontaneous.

Nice sentiment, but it doesn’t work. Yes, it’s true. Relationships are spontaneous. You crack a joke, fart in an elevator, and I laugh. God doesn’t work that way, though. He hides. Every religious person knows that—but they insist they know God.

But think about it: Whenever someone talks about relating to God as one would relate to another human—hearing their audible voice, for example—we think they’re unhinged, or scamming us. We all know God doesn’t act that way. We all know we don’t relate to God as if we’re chatting across the backyard fence. Admit it: When someone tells you, “God told me such and such,” you may smile politely, but inside you’re thinking, “Yeah, right!”

But still just about every Evangelical will insist they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Just how do people have a relationship with this invisible, silent person, Jesus Christ?

Here’s the way it works. A Christian is inspired by a pastor’s sermon and it’s “Jesus spoke to me through that sermon.” A Christian tears up during a moving worship song and it’s “Jesus touched me through that song.” And, of course, we always have the standard refrain: God speaks through his Word, the Bible, the Koran, et al. If that’s the case, why can’t we agree what He is saying in scripture? (See my blog post “Does God speak through scripture? Yes and No.”)

We attribute actions to Jesus—in essence, make him personal—by focusing on Him acting through other people, who are in fact personal, unlike God.

Not much of a relationship, is it?

If there is a God—and I believe there is a God—He/She/It/They is totally other than human. We need to accept the God We Have, not the God we want or the God our platitudes claim we know. We need to stop acting like God’s our Best Friend. He’s not. Best friends come over when your girlfriend dumps you and commiserate over beer, chew the fat. God doesn’t. I think the message is clear from God—the ultimate Argument From Silence: He doesn’t want a relationship with us. If he did, He’d speak up. He wants us to have relationships with one another. God’s not knowable. People are.

John Draper is the author of the novel A Danger to God Himself.