Flames
religion
No Parties in Hell
Another one of these memes I ran into on Twitter: “There are no parties in hell. There’s no cool rock music, no hanging out with friends. You will be burning. Forever. Repent and give your life to Jesus Christ!”
This is clearly aimed at Christians who more fundamentalist Christians see as living a life of sin. It’s certainly not going to convince any unbelievers. In fact, most of us will just read this, shake our heads, and say, “Yes, but Jesus, as God, is the one sending us to this place. What kind of an abusive relationship is this?!”
Coexist
Another gem from social media: fundamentalist Christians like to point out the perceived tendency in Islam to force conversions. In their defense, this was the way Islam initially spread, and there is a fair amount of coercion in Islamic countries to remain Islamic (the death penalty for apostasy will do that to you), and there are certainly fundamentalist Muslims who still wish to spread Islam by force. But fundamentalist Christians, despite all their protestations to the contrary, are not all that different.
“Daily reminder that Christ is King and all false creeds will be destroyed.”
Using Tragedy
Of course, this asshole has been prophecying Jesus’s imminent return — complete with dates — for about five years now. He sets a date, the date passes, and he sets another date. Over and over and over and over.
On the Corner
I could hear him long before I could see him. K and I were walking up Main Street last night, returning to our car after a night out, and I could hear an amplified male voice in the distance.
“Most likely a street preacher,” I thought, although sometimes the Black Hebrew Israelites make an appearance on the downtown sidewalks. As we approached, though, it was clear it was an evangelical street preacher.
“You need Jesus! If you don’t know the name of Jesus, you need to invite him into your life…”
It always astounds me how these guys say nonsense like that: we live in America, in the damn Bible Belt. There is no one in this area who has never heard of Jesus. It is utterly impossible, regardless of your religious views, not to have heard of Jesus while living in South Carolina.
“There is no one walking on Main Street,” I said to K, “who might be thinking, ‘Now this Jesus fellow — never heard of him. Who is he?'”
As we neared, we had to stop at the corner to wait for the light. Our street preacher started going on about the perils of living a self-centered life, completely oblivious to the irony.
“Here these people are, taking advantage of the lovely weather to enjoy their favorite restaurant’s outdoor seating option, and they have to listen to this jackass as he gets his saving-the-world fix,” I said to no one in particular and everyone in earshot. One guy laughed a little, most everyone else ignored my stupid comment.
I wanted to say that to the preacher himself, and came close to doing just that, but in the end, I decided not to add to the guy’s persecution complex.
Changed His Mind
Science Did That
People throughout the centuries have begged their gods for healing. We see the religious praying for healing. We see the faith healers preying upon their vulnerabilities. We hear of miracles like reversed blindness and re-growing toes.
We hear about this, but we don’t see the evidence. The toe woman won’t show any images of her toes. While it was supposedly happening, apparently no one videoed it or photographed it. People have written about it, and there’s even a website called showmethetoes.com.
Crickets. Not a word.
And then science comes along and simply does what no god has ever done. It gives voice to someone who can’t speak.
It makes the paralyzed able to walk.
Why is science superior to prayer? Because it works. Pure and simple.
Not Sure
Saw this on Twitter the other day:
I’m not even sure what this means. “The earth was created some 5000 years ago,” this person suggests, but at “some point God fast-forwarded time to the end of the world and then reversed earth’s time billions of years to the beginning of the universe.” How does that work? God moved us to the end of the world — does that mean after Jesus returned and set up shop a second time and punished all the pro-science/anti-god baddies? And then reversed time?! And then the purpose of all this is so “God’s enemies [can] choose ‘science’ over Him”? This god is doing some kind of time-travel trickery to fool people so they’ll end up in hell?! What?!
When you believe in a literal story about a talking snake convincing a woman to eat something to initiate some kind of fruit-based curse that dooms humanity for all eternity until — well, when you just start with that as your basis for knowledge, you end up vulnerable to believing all kinds of craziness. And it doesn’t even have to make sense…
No Rest in Hell
I recently dipped into a social media feed titled “HELL IS REAL” to see what kind of discussion goes on there. Not much discussion — mainly just a bunch of disturbing memes.
Meme 1: No Rest in Hell
The question that comes immediately to mind: why would an all-loving and omniscient god create a bunch of creatures he knew would end up in eternal torment that he himself created? It just makes no sense.
Meme 2: Hell is not a joke
Two things struck me about this: first, the imagery is so disturbing. Second, “affirm yes”? Did the creator of this meme think that at some point we would be standing in front of God, and he’d patiently point out that we didn’t affirm “Yes” (redundant much?) in our social media feed so it’s off to eternal torment for us…
Meme 3: Hear Hell
This one is so oddly specific. If we could hear the people screaming in hell, we might not fornicate. We might lie; we might do drugs; we might murder (see meme below), but we sure as hell wouldn’t fornicate.
Meme 4: Choices
Why is the devil eating this guy? And do hoodies lead you to hell?
Meme 5: Roads
If only this god who so wants to spend eternity with us had done a better job getting us to that point…
It’s disturbing that in 2023 people still have such simplistic, brutal, and illogical views. They pass this poison on to children and scar them for life. I just can’t understand how they can posit a) a loving god and b) an eternity of torment. It just makes no sense to me.
Crusades
The meme — I couldn’t pass it up. The Crusades — not something one would joke about. So I said so.
In the end, the original poster devolved to this:
I’m not sure what he was referring to when he complained I deleted a comment: I didn’t knowingly delete any comment. Still, the rest of the comment left me wondering how someone like that can function in society. If you’re an adult willing to call someone stupid, who is willing to behave in such a juvenile manner, how can you hold a job? If it takes so relatively little to get you to behave like a pouting child, how can you keep your mouth shut when it really matters?
In the end, I left the conversation with the following final words: “Thanks for the wonderful Christian example. I’ll leave you to have the last word. Make it a good one!”
Observations and Scripture
A member of a Catholic forum recently asked the following question:
Should we allow our observations of the material world and the universe to inform our interpretation of scripture?
To many of us, this seems like a simple issue — the cliche “no-brainer.” It’s literally asking, “Should the things we learn from humanity’s scientific endeavors affect how we view a 2,000+ year-old book?” Of course it should! In what common-sense universe would it not?
But the responses went the other way:
We should allow the word of God to inform us of the interpretations of the study of the material world.
I’m not sure what the hell would be the point of this. If we were to do this, we would be looking for the firmament of water above the earth, and our study of genetics would consist of putting striped sticks by mating animals to see if it produced striped offspring. Hint: it won’t. Yet both of these ideas are from the Bible…
Another response:
No, the opposite..we should view the world from a biblical perspective, seeing through the lens of the word so as not to be deceived
Talk about pots and kettles!
Religious Time Machine
I’ve sometimes wondered what it might be like to travel back in time with our current understanding of the physical world to a time when people thought witches cast spells, that comets were harbingers of the future, that thunder and lightning were from the gods. What kind of frustrating hell would that be to experience others making decisions — occasionally life and death decisions — based solely on uneducated superstition? We would watch in horror as pseudo-physicians drilled holes in epileptics’ heads to allow the evil spirits to escape. We would watch aghast as women accused of witchcraft were burned at the stake, crushed, drowned, and killed in ineffably evil ways. We would witness the spread of the Black Death through Europe and the accompanying brutal attacks against the Jews, whom the non-Jews viewed as responsible for the plague through supernatural means.
With all this swirling around us, we would, I think, find it difficult to keep quiet. As we would attempt to explain to these scientific illiterates the reality of germs, epilepsy, and the complete lack of evidence for the efficacy of witchcraft, we would likely find ourselves labeled as perpetrators of similar acts. Our defense would get us labeled as being “in league with the devil” and likely result in our own persecution or death. If we kept quiet, the frustration of watching people killed, maimed, and tortured in the name of superstition and illogic would take quite a toll on our mental health.
Yet we don’t have to imagine what it would be like to live among the scientifically illiterate who have only the most tenuous grasp on logic because we already do. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching Qanon proponents try to explain that there is a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who harvest adrenochrome from kidnapped babies who are then raped and devoured. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching people make unsubstantiated claims about stolen elections even when adequate evidence to the contrary exists. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching people fall in line behind the far-right position that Russia is the good guy in its war with Ukraine, which has in fact been in various nefarious conspiracies with this or that group bent on world domination. People are swallowing whole lies that are so obviously and ridiculously false that it strains one’s imagination that anyone could respond to such suppositions with anything other than incredulous laughter.
Why would people believe this?
It’s simple: they’re primed to believe things like this. Most of those who hold these various conspiracy theories are on the far-right of the political spectrum, and that usually aligns with the fundamentalist wing of Christianity. These individuals are disproportionally evangelical Christians, and this means they take the Bible literally. There really was a talking snake in the Garden of Eden (indeed, there really was a Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve). Balaam’s donkey really did rebuke Balaam for beating him. Jonah really did survive in a fish for three days. People really do suffer demon possession that results in behavior suspiciously similar to epilepsy. And behind this all lurks an evil spirit secretly pulling the strings of all left-leaning individuals, institutions, and ideologies in an effort to ensnare souls and drag them down to hell with him.
Evangelicals are not the only ones holding these conspiracy theories; Catholics increasingly are falling for them as well. Their view of the source of evil in the world so much the less nuanced that they have a prayer about it:
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
Yet no matter whether Evangelical or Catholic, these fundamentalists have one thing in common: their religion itself is a conspiracy theory.
Modern Gnosticism
I encountered a meme that got me thinking about the relationship between Christianity and conspiracy theories. It was a meme dealing with the supposedly soon-coming apocalypse that will usher in the end of the world and the return of Jesus (if you’re a post-trib millennialist, I guess).
This sort of hyperventilating anticipation of being able to say “I told you so!” is fairly typical of the fundamentalist Christian mindset, and it’s one of the reasons I’d be nervous having a fundamentalist Evangelical in the White House: he (and it would certainly be a “he”) would be tempted to make decisions based on a sense of what might help prophecy along. At any rate, the meme suggests that skeptics will soon be put in their place:
This sort of gnostic conspiracy theory is part and parcel of the Evangelical tradition. They await anxiously the events suggested in the meme, and the suggestion that Christians have been waiting for 2000 years for something like this is wasted breath. Every Christian generation has had a portion of people who are sure that they are the last generation. Indeed, Jesus himself in the earliest gospel seems to think this:
And he said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with[a] power.’
Mark 9:1
I grew up in a heterodox sect that took this gnostic conspiracy theory nonsense to the next level, suggesting that its members (numbering less than 150,000 at its peak) were the only true Christians on the entire planet. That’s probably why I’m so skeptical of this nonsense.
Review: The End of White Christian America
Evangelical Christianity as the dominant political force in America is dying from a self-inflicted wound. To suggest that Christianity in America is not waning is to ignore the obvious. But just in case, there are data to back it up:
Robert Jones’s book looks at the decline of white Christian America (which he shortens to WCA) through a couple of lenses, but most significantly, the decline of WCA is due to its stance on homosexuality:
Today, many white Christian Americans feel profoundly anxious. As is common among extended families, WCA’s two primary branches, white mainline and white evangelical Protestants, have competing narratives about WCA’s decline. White mainline Protestants blame evangelical Protestants for turning off the younger generation with their antigay rhetoric and tendency to conflate Christianity with conservative, nationalistic politics. White evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, blame mainline Protestants for undermining Christianity because of their willingness to sell out traditional beliefs to accommodate contemporary culture.
Traditional Protestantism and more progressive Protestantism are both point their finger at the other, but the dilemma is real:
Moreover, more than seven in ten (72 percent) Millennials agree that religious groups are estranging young people by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues. Seniors are the only age group among whom less than a majority (44 percent) agree. The dilemma for many churches is this: they are anchored, both financially and in terms of lay support, by older Americans, who are less likely to perceive a problem that the overwhelming majority of younger Americans say is there.
As a skeptic, I can’t help but find hope in this.
A Chart
Selective Reading
The kids were reading about Jim Crow laws as part of the To Kill a Mockingbird unit that we started a couple of weeks ago. Part of the article dealt with the religious justification some Christians used to explain the harsh segregation of Jim Crow times. One young lady — a sweet kid that always has a smile — wrote the following comment:
It reminded me of the suggestion that Christians who don’t read their Bibles are Catholic, Christians who read their favorite parts are Protestants, and Christians who read the Bible critically from cover to cover become atheists. It is, perhaps, an over-simplification, but I’d be willing to bet this young lady goes to one of those Protestant churches that are well-versed (no pun initially intended) in the parts of the Bible that make the feel good and avoid completely the tricky parts.
Parts like 1 Peter 2:18: “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh.”
Or Philemon 1: 15, 16, in which Paul sends back a slave to his owner, suggesting, “Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever—no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.” He could have suggested that slavery is wrong, but he chose not to.
Or all the countless passages in the Old Testament instructing Israelites on the proper use of their slaves.
I, of course, said none of these things to her. It’s not my place: I’m there to teach them, in part, how to think critically, not what to think. However, a close reading of the text…
Check, Please
I need to contest some of these charges.
To begin with, I don’t accept your view of sin. Sin is the violation of a deity’s will; since I don’t believe in a deity, I don’t sin. You can say I sin, but that’s just in your perspective, accepting as a given the deity you believe in.
Additionally, the shame you indicate I should have never showed up. I don’t feel shame for sinning — see above.
As for the pain and past mistakes, I don’t think your product does anything for that. My past mistakes remain mistakes; pain remains. It’s a defective product, in other words.
Rejection and loneliness? I know a lot of people who use your product and experience that. Indeed, your sales force itself practices rejection on a regular basis. Come to think of it, it regularly engages in shaming people as well.
Slavery to sin? See above.
Spiritual death? I don’t even know what that could possibly mean.
Jesus might have paid it all in your scheme of things, but I bought none of it.
Clerical Education
I’m currently reading The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession by John Cornwell, and it’s enlightening and depressing, as one might imagine. The crux of the argument is that confession has been damaging in a lot of ways throughout history, but it has been most damaging in the last 100 years to children. When Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (Pope Pius X), at the start of the twentieth century, mandated that first communion and first confession shouldn’t happen at age fourteen but rather age seven, he opened a door to the potential emotional abuse of children. Seven year olds don’t really have a good conception of what “sin” might be, and they get conflicting ideas from various people. Therefore, we’ve had several generations of cradle Catholics who have grown up suffering from guilt over the silliest thing, tormenting themselves mentally about “sinning.” For instance, one young boy was terrified that he was going to hell for breaking the pre-communion fast because he’d opened his mouth to catch some raindrops in his mouth on the way to church.
“But wouldn’t these priests hearing these confessions realize this and apply the child psychology they’d learned in seminary to help teach these kids what the church considers sin to be and how to deal with guilt constructively?” one might ask.
Child psychology classes? What are you thinking? That’s not what the pre-Vatican II seminarians learned.
What did they learn?
It was taught that to break the fast and receive the Blessed Sacrament, as we have seen, was a mortal sin. The textbooks enlarged on the circumstances in which the fast might or might not be broken. The rule admitted, it was pointed out, of no exception, and it extended to the smallest quantity of food or drink taken as such’.
So what does it mean to ‘eat’ or ‘drink? The thing consumed must be ‘taken exteriorly. So it is not a violation of the fast, for example, ‘to swallow blood from the gums, or teeth, or tongue, or nasal cavities’, although it would be a violation of the fast to swallow blood flowing externally from the exterior parts of the lips, or from a cut finger, or from the nose, or to swallow tears, unless in each case only a few drops entered the mouth and were mingled with the saliva.’ To violate the fast, moreover, requires that a substance ‘must pass from the mouth into the stomach, so that the fast is not broken if liquid is taken into the mouth, as an antiseptic or for gargling, and is not swallowed. A third condition insists that violation of the fast occurs by the action of eating and drinking, and inadvertence ‘has no bearing on the matter even if it is a ‘drink given to a patient during sleep?
Davis declares that the ‘divines are still disagreeing whether a ‘nutritive injection’ is food, but certainly the introduction of soup or milk through a stomach pump is not allowed, whether the injected liquid be intended to nourish or merely to flush.’ Turning to the vexed question of nail-biting, Davis reports that he believes that this does not affect the fast, but biting off and swallowing pieces of finger skin might do so, if the particles were more than the smallest and not mixed with saliva.’
Such useful information.
My hope is that in the sixty years since Vatican II there has been a change. Surely there’s been a realization that some basic psychology might be necessary. When I look at a seminary’s course offerings at random, though, I don’t see that. I see courses like this:
- CHUR 501 The First Millennium: Patrology (3)
- LITY 501 Introduction to the Liturgy (3)
- MORL 501 Fundamental Moral Theology (3)
- SCRP 501 Introduction to Biblical Studies: Wisdom & Psalms (3)
- SYST 501 Revelation, Faith, & Theology (3)
- ORDN 501 1T Formation Seminar: Celibate Witness (0)
- PAMU 501 Pastoral Music I (0.5)
- PFED 502 1T Field Ed Placement: Catechetics & Teaching Ministry (1)
- PFED 599 Pedagogy seminar (0)
Or like this
- CANL 601 Code of Canon Law (3)
- CHUR 601 Modern & Contemporary Church History (3)
- SCRP 601 The Prophets (3)
- SYST 605 Protology & Anthropology (3)
- ORDN 601 2T Formation Seminar: Personal Conduct/Character of Priest (0)
- PAMU 601 Pastoral Music II (0.5)
- PFED 601 2T Field Ed Placement: Health Care or Social Justice Ministry (1)
Or this:
- HOML 701 Models of Preaching (3)
- LITY 701 Deacon Practicum (1)
- SCRP 701 Luke & Acts of the Apostles (3)
- SYST 707 Ecclesiology (1)
- SYST 709 Ecumenism (1)
- SYST 711 Mariology (1)
- ORDN 701 3T Formation Seminar: Parish Admin/Human Resources (0)
- PAMU 701 Pastoral Music III (0.5)
- PFED 701 3T Field Ed Placement: Evangelization or Parish Ministry (1)
All very practical. All very helpful. All a bunch of lofty-sounding nonsense.
With each passing year, my disgust at the Catholic church grows.
An Apologist’s Response
While discussing the difference between the Old Testament god and the vision of the Christian god we see in Jesus, a social media commenter suggested I read Dr. Jeff Mirus’s “Making Sense of the Old Testament God” in which he attempts to “make God’s ways under the Old Covenant easier to understand” as a reader had requested. He concludes his introduction by admitting that he “can only do [his] best,” which seems to be a tacit admission that there really is no way definitively to reconcile these two visions of the Christian god and that it’s a matter of faith.
Mirus begins by suggesting that there’s not such a disparity between the seemingly harsh god of the OT and the loving god of the NT. There are two ways he does this. First, he argues that there are many passages in the OT that show a deity in line with what we see from Jesus. Fair enough. But he then suggests that Jesus had a harsh streak himself: Jesus’s “denouncing hard-hearted Jewish leaders, lamenting those who lead others into sin, rebuking the wealthy, condemning hypocrites, and foretelling disaster for unbelieving communities” were harsh elements of “Our Lord’s effort to wake us up.” He then quotes Matthew 11:21-24 in which Jesus does a lot of “Woe to you”-ing. Yet there is a big difference between genocide and harsh words. There is a chasm between rebuking someone and stoning them. This is like saying Truman was as harsh as Stalin because he yelled at people.
As the article develops, so does the offensive weirdness of Mirus’s logic. Regarding the harsh nature of the OT god’s commands to slaughter so many people, he suggests, “Finally, we must not forget the decisive separation of the sheep from the goats—those who will be sent into eternal fire.” He is literally saying that the acts of cruelty we see from the Christian god in the OT pale in comparison to hell. In other words, “Yes, our god was pretty cruel in those times, but just think about how cruel he’ll be toward you for eternity in hell!” There are elements of our god that are even more appalling than what we see in the OT, so this god is really actually good. This is another example of how Christians seem to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome: the very god that “saves” them is the being that creates the conditions from which they long to be saved!
Mirus then deals with a second “misconception [..] that the Old Testament authors thought of God’s will in exactly the same way as we do today.”
This gets at the tension between the obvious fact that humans wrote the Bible and yet Christians claim that their god inspired the Bible. Where does divine authorship/inspiration leave off and human creation begin? In saying that “the Old Testament author thought of God’s will” in any way that could be discernable in the text is to negate the divine authorship. Surely what the human authors thought would not interfere with the divinely giving knowledge of the reality of the situation. But this very idea that somehow the Biblical authors’ own ideas got inadvertently mixed in with the divine revelation gives apologists the room they need to excuse the OT god of any wrongdoing.
Mirus continues by asserting that many of the abuses in the Bible are not God’s responsibility: “It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that everything recounted in the Old Testament is the will of God.” He then relates the story of Jephthah, who made a vow to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his door if his god would grant him military victory. When Jephthah returns home, his daughter runs out to greet him, which necessitates him slaughtering her as a sacrifice to his god.
Mirus argues that this is all on Jephthah and that we cannot hold the OT god accountable for this. That might very well be a good point that solves this dilemma, but it does nothing for the seemingly-countless times this god does indeed command people to do awful things. It’s a softball pitch intended to make readers more confident in the Bible and Mirus’s argument.
In dealing with the OT god’s commands for genocide, he asks, “Is there a significant difference between reading what God has done to this or that person or this or that people in the Old Testament, either directly or indirectly, as compared with the manner in which He appoints our lives, including the circumstances and agencies through which we will die, and which He alone both knows and contains within His own Providential limits?” In other words, our god is in control of how we die anyway, so does it really make him such a monster to kill us in this manner or that manner? He is, after all, a god: he can do what he wants! He made us; he sustains us; it’s his choice.
First, imagine saying that about your own infant child: “Surely I can kill this child. I made her. I sustain her.” What wretched monster would think like that?
Second, apologists can use this line of reasoning to excuse any action they undertake, no matter how horrific
Why Question?
