How To Solve A Problem Like Jesus?
I find myself in a bind around the time of Christmas. We live in a culture that foists religion upon on us. It’s in the casual acceptance of phrases, it’s in the national holidays, it’s in the television programming and –increasingly- it’s in the workplaces that want to force horrors like “Christmas Jumper Day” on us. I intend never to have children, however if I do, and I raise them without the trappings of religion to allow them freedom of choice as adults, I would be considered a bad parent if I chose not to share Christmas traditions with them, or even worse, if I chose not to tell them an immoral and magical lie for the first 8 years of their life that a fat old white man is allowed to sneak into their room, and that he knows what they’ve been doing.
So those of us who do not believe in any of this humbug live with these things daily. And yet, when we voice our own opinions, we are accused of being intolerant or of not respecting other people’s beliefs. I’m afraid that if I have to tolerate yours, then I’m going to insist on the same myself.
It’s also worth pointing out that I’m not railing against the many kind people who wish me ‘Merry Christmas,’ ‘Happy Holidays’ or take the time and thought to send me a card. Each and every one of those is, of course, taken in the spirit it’s intended, with thanks and appreciation. And it’s partially out of respect for these people that I usually bite my tongue at this time of year. Who am I to want to throw good wishes back in their face? By all means send me cards and wish me a happy holiday, and most times I’ll return the wishes. Hugs and kisses, punk rock style.
No, it’s something else that’s got me writing today. Stop filling up my Facebook feed with posts about what a swell guy Jesus was. Or how mean-spirited it would be for me to voice an opposing opinion. I’m even respecting that to the extent that I’m choosing, in return, not to fill the same public space with my replies. I’m happy for people to believe all of that if they wish, but I’m not going to sit down and shut up out of some weird one-way modern version of tolerance or respect.
So, on my own little corner of the web, where people can choose to read or ignore me, I’m going to get a few things off my chest.
I wrote at the top that I find myself in a bind at Christmas. One of the chief reasons for that is Jesus. El Jefe. The chief dude of the winter pomposity pageant. Atheists often hide from this issue. We stumble over our words when charged with the idea; “well, even if you don’t believe he was god, you’ve still got to accept he was a nice guy.” This concept ramps up this time of year with all of the memes about how Christians should be more like Christ, and what a nice wee dude he was, and how he probably loved kittens and would think that the internet was invented for sharing pictures of dogs in Santa hats. If only, the argument goes, Christianity was more about Christ, we’d all be happy.
And why do I find this a bind? Because it’s bullshit of the highest order. It’s a dodge. But to voice that opinion in any public forum is to be accused of that gravest of modern crimes, being offensive. Well, I don’t write to be inoffensive.
He was a nice guy, Jesus. All he preached was love. All he asked for was compassion. All he did was heal the sick. He even threw out the rich people. He told us to turn the other cheek. He said we shouldn’t cast the first stone.
He was nice, right? It doesn’t matter if he was actually god, right?
No. It matters.
Let’s take for a moment the words of C.S. Lewis;
“That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic -on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell…….(edit)…But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us.”*
Putting aside debates of historical accuracy, and over which versions of the stories should be considered canon, let’s for a moment simply take the bible at face value. If we judge the man based on the book, and we actually read the book, we have to make certain observations.
Jesus talked about Hell more than Heaven. In fact, Hell doesn’t exist in the bible until Jesus comes along. The Old Testament has references to a pit, and a grave, but nothing about eternal hellfire. That concept came to us from the mouth of the peace-loving hippy. He preached immorality as often as morality. He spoke of damnation more than salvation. He picked and chose whom to save.
Here we have the case of a man wandering around Palestine making grand claims to be acting for God. He backed up his grand claims with zero proof, other than that he was the product of a virgin birth (by the by, Jesus is constantly rude and dismissive to Mary in the bible.) The act that supported his claim was when his entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah. This, according to Matthew (21:4) “was done that it might be fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet.” It was done because they’d all been told that was how the Messiah would arrive. So, in modern terms, it was a con trick. A politician kissing babies. I wonder if I could walk into Buckingham Palace with a sword and say, “hey, I pulled this out of a stone, I guess that makes me king like the old stories said. Here, Lizzy, fuck off out my new house.”
So, on the back of these grand claims and scant evidence, Jesus promises that you must follow his way in order to attain an eternal reward, and that if you do not, you are damned for all time to hell. The religious leaders of the Old Testament may have been largely immoral violent warlords, but at least they did their worst to you while you were alive. At worst they brutally took your life from you, perhaps at the end of a long process of torture and/or rape. But once you were dead, you were left alone. Not so with the “kind, mild, loving man,” Jesus Christ Superstar. If you do not bend to his will, you are to be cast off forever, with no hope of reprieve.
Let us take a look at some of his moral teachings.
Matthew 6:34**
“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Do not think of tomorrow? Do not save. Do not think of your health or your future. Do not build anything, do not plan anything, do not worry about an economy, a health care plan, social welfare reform. Do not think of investment or pensions. A society that actually follows this teaching is a society that doesn’t make it past day one.
Matthew 10:37
“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”
Are there any less moral lines that could be spoken? Love me above your parents, love me more than your children, I demand this of you. These are not the words of a nice man. At best, we can argue they are the words of someone who is mentally unstable. At worst they are spoken by a megalomaniac.
In Matthew 15:21-28 we have the case of Jesus initially refusing to heal the sick daughter of a Canaanite, saying that she is the wrong sort; “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” To translate, “you are not a Jew, I will not help.” Eventually he agrees to help and heals the child, but only after the mother begs again and proves her faith to him. To repeat again, he will not help a sick child from another ethnic group or tribe until the mother of that sick child proves she has faith in his way. Is this moral? Is this the version of Jesus that Facebook want to convince us we should believe in at this time of year?
Let’s look also at one of the most famous tales. John 8 3-11. The woman taken in adultery. The scribes ask Jesus to choose whether to follow Mosaic Law, which dictates the woman must be stoned to death. Jesus speaks the famous line, “he that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her.”
Let us ignore that he failed to tell them, as perhaps he would if truly divine and preaching love and equality, that theirs was a misogynist and patriarchal law system. Let us also ignore the question of where the man who was caught in the act got to, since he should also have been stoned. And let us finally overlook the basic idea that Jesus seems to be saying that adultery is fine, and that he could forgive the woman on behalf of the actual wronged parties who were not present at the scene.
Ignore all of that.
My question about that story is this; if ‘let he that is without sin, cast the first stone,’ is a great principle upon which we should base our ethics and our lives, then how could we operate a fair criminal justice system? We have to take the word ‘sin’ in the context of the book it appears in, and therefore conclude that nobody who has ever coveted, lusted, masturbated, stolen, profaned or idolised can, in fact, pass judgement. And so it would be impossible to try anyone by a jury of their peers. Do we simply sit back and let people behave as they wish, whenever they wish, simply because none of us are in a position to judge?
These kind of bizarre, short-term rules only make sense if you believe the world is going to end very soon. In that context, there truly is no point thinking of the future, it doesn’t really matter whether you love a cult leader over your family, and there is no need to build a criminal justice system. And, for those who choose to actually read the bible rather than pick and choose the bits they were given at Sunday school, that is exactly the context in which you have to take Jesus’ words.
He believed the end was coming. Soon. He promised that his followers would live to see the final revelation. He also welcomed it. And here’s the thing, the basic idea that so many of the truly kind and decent religious folks either ignore or expect us to ignore; religion is not an open-ended story. Each of the major faiths has a beginning, middle and end. And believing in those religions is a tacit acceptance of that end. To preach those religions is to welcome that end, to relish it.
To believe in Jesus is to believe in everything he preached. And that includes the immorality. It includes the man on the mound in equal measure with the man of the Book Of Revelation.
This is a man who condemns you to hellfire if you disagree with him. Who claims to have the ability to heal the sick, but will only do so if you praise him, and may ignore you if you’re not of his own ethnic group. A man who demands that you love him more than your own family, and who impels you to plan nothing for the future. This is a man who announces to the world that he can die for their sins, whether they want him to or not, and not just for the sins already committed but those you may one day choose to transgress. You’re being forgiven for thought crimes that you haven’t even committed yet, by a man who has not asked for your permission or vote.
This time of year is a religious festival based around him. And I respect people’s desire to join in the celebration. I’ll stand back and stay silent at having religious dogma thrown at me constantly, and I’ll even refrain from sharing my own beliefs every time someone chooses to share theirs. Even if, on the rare occasion I actually voice my opinion, I’m called disrespectful or offensive by those who do not themselves refrain.
About the only thing I ask, is that if you’re going to worship him, you read the book you draw him from. You worship him for what he actually is and was, and not for some nice new-aged mystical figure that you take from a dumbed down, prettied up, storybook version.
Something I am often puzzled by is the lengths that decent, compassionate and caring people will go to in order to overlook the bits of the bible that they don’t like. It becomes an all-you-can-believe buffet, where people select the chapters they agree with, and ignore the ones they don’t. We can take the fuzzy-wuzzy love bits, but ignore the bigotry, the hatred, and the violence. Religion is already a form of supreme arrogance, it’s already saying that our small mammalian brains have been capable of writing down all there is to know about the big black space above us. But to pick and choose in the manner that so many do is to take that arrogance one step further. Not only is it saying we’ve been able to write down the thoughts of the omnipotent creator, but we’re able to second-guess him/her/it. We can judge that “this is what God meant to say.” We don’t really have that option available to us. It’s either right, or it’s not, and if it’s not, then it’s false.
To expect me to respect that Jesus said and did some nice things, also means I expect you to accept that he taught immorality and welcomed the end of the world. You can have neither or you can have both, but you can’t have one without the other. As C.S. Lewis put it, “he has not left that option open to us.”
Merry Christmas.
*Taken from Mere Christianity by C.S.Lewis. It should be noted that he wrote that in defence of the idea that Jesus was God. I, of course, believe the opposite, so I’m making his position clear to avoid a charge of selective quoting.
**The biblical quotes are taken from the King James version.
Footnote; Though there are no direct quotes from Christopher Hitchens in this post, it would be wrong not to acknowledge his presence in the words. His book God Is Not Great is a very effective summation of the argument against religion, and helped me to pull my many disparate opinions together. His comments on the ‘woman taken in adultery’ have been especially influential on this post, and he was the reason I sought out the C.S. Lewis text.
