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Overview
This irreverent romp over the sacred cows of religion is a humorous and refreshingly down-to-earth call for common sense. Judith Hayes, the Erma Bombeck of the secular humanist community, has the unique ability to raise serious points while making us laugh as she throws buckets of cold water on the irrational beliefs and maddening inconsistencies that often characterize popular religion. She's at her best when recounting modern-day "miracles" such as the apparition of the Virgin Mary's face in a waffle at a Fresno diner; or when she describes how she started rubbing a stuffed penguin whenever she had the urge to pray, and got the same results.
But there are also poignant stories about believing friends and acquaintances whose struggles with irrational beliefs in the face of perplexing dilemmas and personal tragedies are in many cases heartrending. She also devotes a chapter to explaining in clear, concise, layperson's terms exactly what humanism is and stands for, in particular extolling its tolerance.
"When people ask me why I write what I write," she says, "I usually answer, 'To nudge people.' This is literally the truth. I try to nudge people into thinking about things they might otherwise never give a passing thought to. I try to make it easier for them to do so by using satire, vivid imagery, and a sprinkling of merry nonsense."
By turns funny, provocative, and touching, Judith Hayes is the perfect popular spokesperson for clear thinking and reason.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573928021 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2000 |
| Pages: | 268 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Judith Hayes (Valley Springs, CA), raised as a fundamentalist Christian, is a secular humanist writer who has an on-line web site also called "The Happy Heretic."
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
FAITH IS A WISH
YOUR HEART MAKES
It was the schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
—Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Religious beliefs can be very comforting. The idea of an eternal paradise of some sort is as comforting as it gets. No one wants to stay dead. And the buildings associated with religions, especially the cathedrals and mosques, can be exquisitely beautiful and inspiring all by themselves. The rituals can provide a soothing sense of security. There is often music—melodic, emotional, uplifting music. And of course there's the pleasure of meeting with like-minded fellow believers, providing a powerful sense of community. It can be beguiling and gratifying: an all around good time.
Of course, religion is not all sweetness and light. The number of things people have done in the name of religion is quite frightening. We all know about the carnage of the Crusades and the outright murder and theft known as the Inquisition. The remnants are still with us in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. And the so-called ethnic cleaning obscenity in the Balkans was not ethnic at all. It was religious—Muslims against Christians. We read about these things so often that after a while we become a bit callous and hardened. Oh, another pipe bomb killed a busload of children? Too bad. What a shame.
But when we personalize it, it seems so much worse. It isn't, of course, but it seems so. It is too repugnant toimagine one adorable four-year-old with big brown eyes, dying of starvation. It offends our sensibilities. Thinking about the world's cruel inequities is extremely distasteful—so mostly we don't. Instead we preen and pride ourselves on our own good fortune at having a God who takes such excellent care of us. But then—we deserve it, don't we?
O GIVE THANKS
Every Thanksgiving, all across the country, families sit down to give thanks to God for the many blessings they have received during the year. Lengthy, obsequious prayers are offered before everyone plunges into the fabulous feast laid before them. Adults as well as children seem to have racing stripes on their forks. The checkered flag signaling the end of this feeding frenzy is the pumpkin pie.
Soon thereafter, the tinkling sounds of china being washed by hand will mingle with the voice of an announcer reporting a football game. Children will run off their carbohydrates as seniors begin to doze. All around, belts will be surreptitiously loosened one notch. Life is good.
O give thanks.
In Bombay, a twelve-year-old girl is pushed into a three-by-six-foot cage on the infamous Falkland Road. Properly bedecked in costume jewelry and brightly colored sari, she is now on display with hundreds of other sex slaves. Through bars on her window facing the street, the girl can look out at the men as they look in at her, sizing her up as a possible rental. She is illuminated with bright lights so that the shoppers can see exactly what they're getting. This particular girl lost her value as a virgin several weeks ago, just before her twelfth birthday. But she is still youthful enough to fetch a handsome fee, all of which will be applied to her "rent" and food. She will never be out of debt. Like fifty percent of her fellow sex slaves, she will succumb to AIDS in a few years.
O give thanks unto the Lord.
In an upper-middle-class suburb of San Francisco, a group of energetic nine- to eleven-year-olds tussle for control of a soccer ball. Their Little League uniforms are pretty well stained by now, as small lungs gasp for air in this fierce competition. It is for the division championship. The score is tied with only minutes to go. There is much at stake. The shrill blast of a whistle announces a foul. One side of the field emits a loud groan in unison, immediately followed by angry protests directed at the referee. The free kick could mean the championship. Coiffured heads quiver with rage as inch-long, lacquered nails stab the air to emphasize pleas to reconsider the unjust call. Nearby males, in expensively casual sportswear with $150 sunglasses dangling from shirt fronts, add their bass voices to the rumble of complaints.
On the other side of the field, equally coiffured heads tilt sideways, lazily, as huge smiles greet the announced foul. These manicured nails delicately encircle bottles of imported mineral water. Dainty sips are taken. An occasional male belly laugh is heard in response to the truly impressive invective echoing from across the field.
Later the winners, with their children in tow (the actual players who won the game for these ecstatic adults), celebrate the victory at a pizza palace. Someone calls for silence, proposing a prayer of thanksgiving. Impatient children scowl as they bow their heads, eyes firmly fixed on the pieces of pizza that they will lunge for as soon as the interminable prayer is oven
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good.
In India, a three-year-old girl squats in a shanty. Her tiny fingers are stitching together the six-sided pieces of leather that will ultimately become a soccer ball. She earns six cents an hour for her work. Her hands are too small to manipulate scissors, so her older sister does the cutting for her. At the end of her labors, approximately sixty cents and ten hours later, the shiny new soccer ball will be ready to be shipped to the United States. There, with a major name brand proudly emblazoned on its skin, it will command a price of $30 to $50.
In Pakistan alone, an estimated eleven million children work for similar wages, in equally squalid conditions. The median age of children entering this dead-end workforce is seven. Stitching sheds dot the countryside, filled with child workers who have been sold by poverty-stricken parents for as little as $15 each.
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good;
for his mercy endureth.
In a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, an enraged matron screams at her maid for spilling coffee on the hall carpet. Tiffany jewelry jangling with her furious movements, the outraged employer asks the terrified employee if she knows how much that imported carpet cost. The maid stares at the floor, silently shaking her head to indicate no. At the end of the tirade, the maid is directed to fetch cold water and towels, with the full understanding that her employment ends at the precise moment that the coffee stain is deemed permanent.
Sputtering with impatience, the matron flips open her cell phone and calls the caterer. Just how many calls, she is wondering, will it take to arrange for a simple ice sculpture and food and drink for two hundred people? Her daughter's wedding is only two weeks away, and none of the plans has been finalized yet. The florist caused her most recent ulcer flare-up. Why should she suffer just because there was a killer frost in some godforsaken backwater? She wanted the orchids and roses to be an exact shade of pink, and she knew that's why hothouses were invented. So what was the problem?
Now she slams her phone closed while the caterer is still trying to explain about some sort of warm spell in Minnesota that made the orange caviar unavailable this season. Warm, cold, this wedding was going to be the death of her. She takes two Valium and begins to calm down.
The calm is short-lived, however, as she watches the maid's futile attempts on the hall carpet. She paid $2,000 for that damn rug! Too late to buy another one before the wedding. She has her firing speech all prepared, but decides to postpone it. She needs the maid for the wedding. Afterward, she will fire her, deducting carpet cleaning charges from the severance pay. There will be no references, of course.
At last, though, the glorious wedding day arrives, sunny and beautiful. As she watches her lovely daughter affirming her marriage vows, she closes her tear-glistened eyes briefly and offers a silent prayer of thanks. Her twenty-year-old daughter has her whole life in front of her, with her handsome, pre-law bridegroom. A flicker of a smile crosses her face as she adds an addendum to her short prayer. She thanks God that the stain had been removed from her precious carpet after all—and for only $250. There is no doubt in her mind at all. God has truly blessed her.
Halfway around the world, in a gloomy, airless room, a ten-year-old boy squats in front of a carpet loom, tying knots. He will stay in this position for twelve to thirteen hours daily, six days a week. He will earn about two dollars for a week's work, the results of which will be an exquisite carpet that will sell for $2,000 in the United States. He is coughing and hacking as his lungs fill up with carpet lint. His spine is becoming deformed from his perpetual squat. Like many of the boys around him, he will not live to see his twentieth birthday.
O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good;
for his mercy endureth for ever.
1 Chronicles 16:34
This verse in 1 Chronicles is one of the most widely quoted from the Bible. People believe it. Never mind the death, starvation, and misery all around us; God's mercy endureth forever. I have yet to see evidence of that mercy, though I once believed it myself. That's because we usually believe what we're taught in our youth. I believed in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and ... Hell. Boy, did I believe in Hell. It terrified me. I no longer worry about it, but plenty of other people do. The biggest, baddest Bogeyman of them all still commands respect among otherwise intelligent adults. They do indeed believe in Hell.
On Sunday, April 21, 1996, the Lakeland, Florida, Ledger ran a feature in its "Life" section (read: irony) titled "Visions of Hell." It ran exactly two weeks after Easter, which may or may not have been a snide reminder of what awaits those of us who foolishly fail to heed God's warnings.
The only problem is that no one can agree on exactly what Hell is. There are many detailed descriptions available, of course, but they are all contradictory and therefore mutually exclusive. This poses the usual problem, which by now has become my battle cry. All right. Let's say that there is a Hell. Fine. But which one?
According to the seven religious leaders quoted in the Ledger piece, Hell can be a place where you are simply separated from God, a supposedly horrible fate, or it can be a place of unbelievable agony. For example, it is said to be a place where your skin will be boiled off, only to grow back so that it can be boiled off again. This goes on for all eternity. Or it is a place where you will have a hot metal stake pierced through your tongue. Or you will freeze to death (aren't you already dead?) then thaw, then freeze again, over and over. Or Hell is just a place of darkness, flames, and screaming—your basic, no-frills Hell. Or Hell is merely symbolic, not an actual place. Or, finally, Hell doesn't exist at all.
The Muslim Hell (boiling, freezing, tongue piercing) seems most unappealing, a very nasty place all the way around. And apparently the Prophet Muhammad's vision of Hell included more women than men. Why? Because the women had been ungrateful to their husbands. This makes sense since Islamic women have been notoriously ungrateful for having their genitalia sliced off and/or sewn shut, for being bartered like beads in a bazaar, and for being forced into harems. They pretty much define ingratitude, so Hell seems like their just deserts.
The Catholic Hell sounds more generic, with general torment meted out more or less evenly in the form of darkness, flames, and screaming. While it doesn't sound like a day at the beach, it seems that the Catholic Church has toned down its Hell in recent decades. I distinctly recall, as a young child, "borrowing" parts of Hell from my Catholic friends to complement my own Lutheran one. We put our heads together in the earnest endeavor of youth, fully convinced that Hell existed, and determined to unravel every one of its mysteries. As young children are prone to do, my Catholic friends cheerfully and explicitly provided me with many horrifying details, and they did so with ghoulish glee. I know I was impressed. These details included boiling tar (like on roofs) and a devil constantly piercing your flesh with a pitchfork so as to let in the boiling pitch. To this day I can see those pitchforks and smell that tar.
O give thanks?!
The Unitarian Hell is symbolic, although a spokesperson for the Unitarian position played a linguistic shell game. While claiming that the language of religion is mythology, he nevertheless insisted, in the same breath, that religion is not fantasy or fiction. Perhaps being unfamiliar with dictionaries, he wanted it both ways.
Some Jewish sects and all Baptists teach Hell. For Jews it is a punishment for violating Jewish Law, and for Baptists Hell is for anyone rejecting Jesus Christ. (Doesn't that include the Jews?)
Finally, Hell doesn't exist at all for traditional Creek Indians. Your reward for a good life is—a good life.
The subtitle for "Visions of Hell" was "Religions vary on their views about the afterlife." I think that is a whopping understatement. "Vary" doesn't get the job done. "Positively contradict each other" is more like it. But what does it all mean? The lesson would seem to be that we should all be Creek Indians. However, the real lesson here is that while some claim that religion brings out the best in people (a most questionable proposition) it definitely brings out the worst in us. Nothing could demonstrate that more clearly than our conceptions of Hell.
You have to wonder who sat down, quill pen in hand, and dreamed up these ugly, venomous torments. Whoever they were, were they drooling with salacious pleasure as they did so? It seems likely, since descriptions of Hell are unambiguous examples of pure sadism. Those of us who wish this kind of pain on others are sadistic, plain and simple. Such descriptions also validate my theory that Christians (and Muslims, for that matter) aren't merely excited at the prospect of spending eternity with God; they are thrilled at the prospect of their enemies, real or imagined, spending eternity in Hell. Judging by some of the unabashedly violent sermons preached about Hell, this appears to be the case. It reflects an ugly aspect of human nature.
The word Hell itself is identified with the Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades, both referring to an underworld, the abode of the dead. It is also related to a real place south of Jerusalem that was a pit where garbage was burned in the first century. Perhaps we can see mythology in the making here. There, for all to see, was a real pit of fire, one that was foul, odious, and generally disgusting. It would be quite an allegory in trying to frighten your children (or your congregation) into behaving. "Do you want to spend all of eternity in Hell, you fool?" The fool might ask, "But what is Hell?" The answer might be, "Well, it would be like living in, uh, that burning pit there. Forever!" It would be an attention getter, especially if it came from a voice of authority.
Is this what we want to be preaching today? How can we still believe in such obvious myths? And if we do believe in Hell, why aren't we demanding that our religious leaders get together with all other religious leaders, in some sort of worldwide conference, and hammer out a definitive agreement as to the exact nature of Hell and who is in danger of ending up there? Until such a unanimous pronouncement is made, the prudent seeker of spiritual truth is in a hell of a predicament. Do we get to choose which Hell we believe in, like a multiple-choice question? May we shop for Hell? Or is it a matter of having the luck to be born into the right family? If so, that certainly isn't fair. It means that Hell awaits the unlucky.
The religious denomination known as Religious Science teaches that we all create our own good and bad. People create their own Hell, they tell us, when they get themselves into bad situations and frames of mind. So, then, the RN who is beaten and raped as she heads for her car after her evening shift is putting herself into a bad situation. With several broken ribs and internal hemorrhaging, she becomes addicted to the needed pain medication, and ends up an unemployed addict, hating all men and fearing all people. She certainly has put herself into a very bad frame of mind as well. Hell should await anyone witless enough to fall into such a predicament, right?
Islam teaches that in addition to Hell, there is also a fair amount of suffering that takes place in the grave prior to Judgment Day. A demon will continuously crush the head of the sinner with a sledgehammer until the day of resurrection. Moreover, the sinner's body will be slowly crushed by the narrowing of the grave. (I am not making this up.) Aside from the obvious biochemical factors overlooked here—decomposition, the omission of which reflects a childlike, primitive worldview—there is also a childish nature to the type of punishment being described. Sledgehammers? Any creative 9-year-old could come up with something more imaginative than that.
Of course the torments of Hell are not all that True Believers believe in. There are also miracles, guardian angels helping us find things like our car keys, apparitions, ecstatic visions, and all manner of supernatural phenomena. We especially like the apparitions.
VICTUAL VIRGINS
FRESNO, August 14—An image of the Virgin Mary appeared on the face of a waffle, to the astonishment of diners at the International House of Pancakes just off of Highway 99 in Fresno, California. On a Tuesday morning at 8:30 A.M., a miracle was served up with the maple syrup, according to Louise Crowder of Bakersfield. "I was reaching for the butter, because I like a lot of melted butter on my waffles, you know, instead of just drowning them in syrup, like most people do," explained Crowder, "when I saw the face of the Blessed Virgin right there, on my waffle! Just imagine! She was on my waffle."
Crowder's cry of surprise brought many diners as well as IHOP employees to her table. People crowded around and gazed in awe at the image of the Virgin Mary, which was marred only slightly by a crease in her forehead caused by a butter knife. Alan Snyder, manager of the IHOP, gasped, "It is the Blessed Virgin!" as several people fell to their knees, knocking over a cart that held raspberry syrup and marmalade. "Damn!" muttered an onlooker as she tried to wipe the raspberry syrup from the knees of her white slacks. "Well, who cares about syrup anyway?" she cried. "This is the Virgin Mary!" Everyone murmured reverent agreement as all eyes were momentarily drawn to the bright purple knees.
"No doubt about it," said Dean Fowler, a truck driver who had been enjoying a short stack and a side of hash browns, "it was the Virgin Mary. I'd know her anywhere." Fowler had only stopped at this particular IHOP because he had to wait while a flat tire was being repaired. He considers the flat to be a miracle itself. "If I hadn't had that flat," he mused solemnly, "I never would have come into this place and I never would have seen the Virgin on the waffle. Also, my tire was fixed in record time, and they only charged me half of what it usually costs. Coincidence?" he asked knowingly. "I don't think so."
When asked what he thought of the appearance, Patrick O'Donnell, bishop of the local diocese, answered, "It is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Truly a miracle. How often do you see Waffle Virgins?"
So far, at this IHOP, in the two weeks since the appearance, there have been reports of a dozen healings, brought about just by ordering the waffles; four confirmed gastrointestinal cures ("strawberry waffles don't give me gas any more!"); and hundreds of reports of flat tires that healed themselves by not happening in the first place. Since the appearance, business has been booming for this previously near-bankrupt IHOP, and owner Snyder feels he was truly blessed. He summed it up by saying, "This is the real miracle—the Virgin Mary helping a flapjack flipper find his way back to solvency."
* * *
PINK HILL, N.C., September 14—Way down yonder and far to the south, in a town called Pink Hill, North Carolina, a sawmill worker noticed the Virgin Mary in his plate of grits. "She was just there," Albert Grimes explained emotionally, his eyes brimming with tears. "The Virgin Mary was in my grits." Family members confirmed the sighting.
Grimes's aunt, Thelma Mae, elaborated. "We was all just sitting around the table, passing the black-eyed peas and the red-eye gravy, when all of a sudden Mary Belle—she's my half-sister, Albert's mother, but that still makes me his aunt, even though Mary Belle and I have different fathers—well, actually all seven of us have different fathers, but none of us puts up with no trash talk about Mama, and don't you forget it. So anyway, Mary Belle just plopped a mess of grits on Albert's plate and there she was! The Virgin Mary! Then two of them black-eyed peas slid right into place and Bingo! The Virgin had eyes! It was the damnedest thing you ever did see. Mind you, I don't really think that the Blessed Virgin was cross-eyed, but that ain't no never mind. Thing is, it was the actual Virgin herself, plain as day, surrounded by a halo of red-eye gravy." Thelma Mae paused to spit a wad of tobacco juice across the room, missing the spittoon by mere inches, which prompted an encouraging, "Gettin' closer, Grandma!" from one of the many Grimes cousins. "And just think," she concluded humbly, wiping her chin with the back of her hand, "the Virgin chose our own little bitty cabin for her visitation."
The cabin isn't quite so humble any more after the donations from the hundreds of visitors to the Grits Shrine. And those donations have been put to good use. The outhouse is long gone, replaced by indoor plumbing that includes one of those shiny, pearly colored toilet seats, making the Grimes's dwelling a neighborhood showplace. But the family makes it clear that money is not the issue.
"If we turn a deal on a pickup out of this, ain't no harm," offered Elmo Grimes, Albert's father, "but that ain't what this is all about. It's about the look of rapture on the sweet faces of them visitors when they view the grits for the first time—we had the grits freeze-dried so's everything would stay in place—and everyone leaves here with true peace in their hearts. Well, 'ceptin for some of the young'uns who giggle at a cross-eyed Virgin Mary—and they oughta be whupped if you ask me. But everyone else finds that inner peace." Elmo repeated the phrase as he emptied the donation box for the third time that day, "Yessir, inner peace."
* * *
ROCK RIDGE, N.D., October 5—"You coulda knocked me over with a feather," were the words of Edna Muldoon from Rock Ridge, North Dakota, as she explained seeing the Virgin Mary clearly outlined on her kitchen floor in Carter's Little Liver Pills. "I spilled the whole darn bottle on the linoleum," she explained, "and it made such a godawful clatter it set my teeth on edge. Of course they ain't my own teeth any more!" she added with a slap of her thigh and a huge cackle that revealed no teeth at all in the Muldoon mouth at the moment. "But there's no doubt about it—those liver pills spread out and formed an image of the Virgin, and here's the pitchers to prove it!"
As the reporters gathered around the photographs they saw the liver pills, in the shape of the Virgin Mary, strewn across Muldoon's kitchen floor. One reporter whispered, "Jesus! It looks like the chalk outlines the cops do after a murder!" "Hey, knock it off!" someone growled. "Don't be sacrilegious!" The reporter was silenced and dutifully studied the Virgin/liver pill photos.
As Muldoon passed around the photos, she explained why they didn't look exactly like the outline that was currently on her floor. "Damn cat ate a couple of those pills just before you got here." Another raucous cackle and then, "Say, fellas, any of you ever play sail-cat? That's one tabby won't be back for a while!"
Invited into the house where the kitchen had been roped off for several days with some clothesline, one reporter noticed that all of the pills were oriented, lengthwise, in a north-south direction. When he asked Muldoon how so many pills could have scattered randomly yet ended up aligned so precisely, she snapped, "Who are you to question how God works his miracles? What do you think happened here, anyway? You think I got down on my hands and knees, throwing out my back again, and arranged the pills so's they'd look like the Virgin? And then called ol' Jake down at the Dispatch and asked him to come take a look? Only Jake was at the bar again, as usual, so I had to leave a message with that no-count Delbert? And while I was waiting I straightened out all the pills so's they'd be just so? Is that what you think happened, Smarty Britches?!"
At that the reporters rolled their eyes and began drifting away. They were nearly trampled by the first busload of pilgrims who had just arrived to view the Liver Pill Virgin.
There may be a lesson in this for all of us. We would all do well to look carefully before rolling up that next tortilla, or plunging a fork into that piece of lemon meringue pie, or tearing into that pizza. Examine those victuals closely. You might be just a Pop-Tart away from a Victual Virgin Visitation.
[C] The Heretical News
TWO DOWN AND FOUR TO GO
Some things you just can't laugh at, however. Some things are just heartbreaking. It is difficult to be tolerant of religious "freedom" when that freedom inflicts suffering on children.
An AP story that ran on April 22, 1996, featured the photo of a very happy woman in Beirut. She was overcome with joy as she flashed a huge smile and a thumbs-up sign. You see, she was attending the funeral of her twenty-three-year-old son, and there was simply no containing her excitement. She was obviously glorying in the moment. This was the second son she had buried this way, so she was truly doubly blessed. Allah be praised.
Her ecstasy is easy enough to understand, of course, when you consider how her son died. Like his brother before him, he died killing Jews. Can there be a more noble death? What Muslim mother could ask for more? "I'm happy," she beamed. "My sons will enter paradise because they're fighting the Zionist enemy. I have four more [sons] and they, too, are ready to join in the fight." Well, I guess it's two down and four to go.
So pack them some sandwiches, lady, and send them on their way. With any luck they'll all be dead by next Tuesday. Kind of brings a lump to a mother's throat, doesn't it? A pile of dead sons. Like cord wood. Surely this is cause for maternal rejoicing.
Whenever religionists or humanists bristle at my antireligious statements (such as the above) calling them negative and counterproductive, I direct their attention to insane obscenities (such as the above). Religious killing has been big business since religions began, and it is sickening.
Every Sunday nice little Christians sit in their nice little pews and listen to nice little sermons about being nice little Christians. At first glance, bloodletting and ruthless murder would seem to have no possible connection to this peaceful, pastoral, postcardlike image. Yet at the very core of the Christian religion is, first of all, a bloody, gruesome death by crucifixion. This was followed shortly by the bloody deaths of Christian "martyrs" who died because of religion. Then, as soon as Christians achieved dominance, they promptly began to persecute other religions. They killed backsliders, heretics, and "witches." They killed each other when they felt that their fellow Christians (Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics, Calvinists, take your pick) were worshipping incorrectly. And, of course, Jews were always fair game.
The Roman Catholic Inquisition, which was inaugurated to ferret out backsliders, added torture to the rather mundane business of just killing people. The Catholics came up with some truly impressive forms of torture that would have been the envy of any jackbooted Nazi storm trooper.
When it was time for the Crusades to begin, in those earliest double-digit centuries, Christians became less fussy about who they killed. When the pope launched the Crusades, Christian soldiers just hopped on the ships headed for the Holy Land, and killed anyone "wearing a sheet." Often these were fellow Christians who were simply dressing sensibly for the climate. However, since the prevailing Christian wisdom of the times was that the only good turban wearer was a dead one, the killing continued.
The Crusades were an unmitigated disaster for Christians, but there was never a shortage of volunteers to try to pry the Holy Land out of the hands of the Muslim "Infidels." Why? Because those Christians believed that if they died killing Muslims, they would go straight to heaven. No waiting period. No Purgatory, no possibility of Hell, no detours of any kind. It made no difference how many women and children they raped and tortured and killed during their forays. No act was too heinous to preclude heaven. And, as an added bonus, they didn't even have to offer confession or receive absolution before they died. As long as they were in the process of killing Muslims when they died, they would go straight to heaven. The pope had so decreed. God be praised.
As the Crusades fizzled, European Christians had to content themselves with killing each other. The Thirty Years' War, the Massacre of the Huguenots, and so on, which pitted Protestants against Catholics, had to satisfy the religious bloodlust. If that didn't pan out, of course, you could always kill some Jews. Pogroms at least gave Christians a chance to kill someone in the name of God. The Jews were, according to Christians, "Christ killers," so they really did deserve to be killed. It made perfect Christian sense.
There must be something deeply soul-satisfying about killing people in the name of God, since history is so filled with it. It has been said that religion is divisive. That is a colossal understatement. From the Aztecs to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin to the fanatically religious terrorists that still plague us, religion has been deadly.
Why dredge all this up? you may ask. It's all ancient history anyway, right? Well, let's see. The Catholic/Protestant clashes are still echoing in the bomb blasts of Northern Ireland. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Muslims, the Israelis, and our own General Schwarzkopf all expressed a humble gratitude that God was on their side. (My constant battle cry, so to speak: Which God are they talking about? They couldn't all be thanking the same God, now, could they?) The Serbs (read: Orthodox Eastern Church) and the Croatians (read: Roman Catholic) and the Bosnians (read: Muslim) all killing each other is a fairly recent phenomenon. And remember Jonestown in Guyana, the World Trade Center bombing, and David Koresh in Waco, Texas? Hardly ancient history.
The Muslim mother in the newspaper photo, ecstatically burying her son, is no fluky aberration. Muslims have been known to rush headlong into a certain death joyously crying, "Tonight in Paradise!" Apparently Allah, like the Christian God of the Crusades, offers the same kind of "no waiting period" paradise for soldiers who die while killing their religious foes. A Muslim mother envisions her son in paradise with Allah. The Christian mother envisions her son in heaven with Jesus. I wonder who's right.
Such enthusiasm for death would be equally appropriate for Christians, but strangely it is not. However, if Christians really believe what they say they believe, then ear-to-ear grins should be all that you ever see at Christian funerals. A Christian's death should be cause for celebration. What could be more wonderful than to know that your loved one is now in heaven with Jesus? Your own piddling little loneliness pales into absolute insignificance when compared to the rapturous joys of heaven. So why do any Christians ever cry over a death? It's a very interesting question.
It would be different if a Christian worded that someone was going to hell. That would indeed be worth some tears. But heaven? Isn't there some hypocrisy, or at least some real uncertainty, being exposed when Christians cry at funerals? Is there some genuine fear, lurking just beneath the surface, that death is really the end for all of us? If not, bereaved Christian tears are inexplicable.
Moreover, if you carry the theory of salvation and heaven to its logical end, the most wonderful act any Christian could perform would be to take every newborn baby, baptize it, and then kill it. Christians will argue that killing is against God's law (with scores of exceptions, but that's another story) and so killing babies would be wrong. Well, okay, let's say it's wrong. It still would be a wonderful thing to do, since you would be safeguarding all of those souls from any possibility of missing out on heaven and ending up in hell. What could be more noble? If the Christian doing the killing should end up being damned, can you think of a more glorious way to sacrifice yourself—for the everlasting salvation of thousands and thousands of souls? And anyway, why would God be angry with you for simply furthering his own plans? Supposedly, God wants all of his "children" to end up in heaven with him, and this certainly seems like the foolproof solution.
All this talk of death and funerals and killing is, of course, to make a special point: Most religions are obsessed with death and dying. They seize on it, preach about it, sing hymns about it, and frighten the wits out of their children about it. It's almost like sharks in a feeding frenzy, or a dog with a bone. They just can't leave it alone.
Instead of enjoying our five minutes in the sun, we allow our religions to hobble us with fears and shame and pangs of guilt. Guilt for what? For being human. Religions put a sick spin on the human experience, making death the primary focus of life. Most religions are nothing more than continuous reminders of the Grim Reaper. Imagine the impact this has on young children. Having been there myself, I can tell you the death thing is powerful, consuming, and frightening. Such beliefs do not frighten the death out of children. It frightens death into them. Death becomes an obsession.
But there should be joy in life—not in waiting to die. We should be savoring the fragrance of the roses, not planning how we want them arranged on our coffins. "They are not long, the days of wine and roses...." We must treasure them and our children, while we may.
JEHOVAH'S JUVENILE WITNESS
On a personal level, I know a woman who sacrificed her son—but in a different way. Someone I'll call "Barbara" loved her three children. She worked two jobs to support them, since her ex-husband could never seem to manage to come up with the child support. So it was nothing less than a shock when we all heard that this very ex-husband was suing for custody of their oldest child, a thirteen-year-old boy. Shock turned to disbelief when we learned that the boy, "Eric," who loved his two little sisters unreservedly, wanted to go live with his father. Why? Well, it was all about God.
Child custody battles are invariably ugly, and emotions run high, but the children invariably come out the losers. In this case Barbara was a friend of mine. I knew she was a Jehovah's Witness, she knew I was an atheist, so needless to say we didn't discuss religion. She did make one plucky attempt to introduce me to Jehovah's benevolence. I calmly responded by directing her attention to the results of that benevolence—wars, starvation, the Holocaust—and she let it go. But I never dreamed that her stalwart faith would be the reason she lost her son—legally and emotionally.
Eric was around nine years old when his parents divorced, and it was perhaps no coincidence that shortly thereafter his mother was converted from a vague, nominal Protestant to a passionately enthusiastic Jehovah's Witness. Those doorbell ringers found an ardently receptive recruit in Barbara. It was like a duck to water. At the time, her daughters, "Jamie" and "Denise," were only three and one, respectively, and didn't know God from the Tooth Fairy. But Eric, though he initially accepted the new God, soon decided he wanted no part of this stern, demanding Jehovah. He became a nine-year-old backslider.
With the fervor found only in new converts, Barbara kept after the poor child, relentless in her efforts to "get some Jehovah" into him. The more she pushed, the more he resisted—a fairly predictable outcome. So her spiritual leaders concluded, unbelievably, that since Eric had initially been receptive (at age nine) but was now "renouncing," he was a sinner. And sinners had to be punished. Accordingly, when Barbara and her bewildered little girls ("Why isn't Eric coming with us, Mommy?") went to their twice-weekly Jehovah's Witness meetings, Eric was taken along, against his will, but left in the car alone. At night. For two hours or more. Twice a week.
This went on for almost two years until Eric finally complained to his father about it. I had no idea it was going on. However, I was most unhappily aware of other aspects of Barbara's religious activities. Once, stopping at my house after work, she called her home to tell the sitter she'd be a bit late. Jamie, around six now, was excited to get on the phone and tell Mommy how she had been "strong for Jehovah." Jamie had refused to participate in her kindergarten class project of making Christmas decorations—snowmen and snowflakes. Not a hint of religion. But since Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in observing Christmas, cutting out snowmen was somehow sinful. So here we have a sweet little six-year-old girl, self-ostracized over some glitter and glue decorations, and a mother beaming joyously because her daughter had been "strong for Jehovah." It was poignant and depressing. Little Jamie was carrying a burden far too large for such small shoulders.
When I finally heard about Eric's car-imprisonment evenings, I was appalled. The image of that little boy, almost thirteen now, all alone, shivering in his parka jacket while locked in a parked car, was sickening. I didn't hear about these little adventures until the custody suit was well under way. I can understand Barbara's reluctance to talk about it, but I could not understand her actions. I asked her how she could possibly treat a child that way. Defensively, she offered the Jehovah/sinner thing, and abruptly ended the conversation. She also abruptly ended our friendship, assuming, I can only suppose, that I was in league with the devil.
The tragic part of all of this is that Barbara truly loved her children. I can't imagine the conflicts she experienced in treating her son that way. She was heartbroken when the court took Eric away from her, but I don't see how she could have expected anything else.
Is there a lesson to be learned from this dreadful narrative? Well, aside from never answering your doorbell, perhaps there is. For all the bickering that goes on between us freethinkers/humanists/atheists/et ceteras, we can all agree on one thing: None of our groups would ever demand that a parent leave a young child unattended in a car at night! Humanism's goal is ambitious but worthy—the best life possible for everyone on earth. And that could never include a shivering, frightened little boy being forsaken because he would not bow down correctly to the right God.
EXPLAINING THE UNEXPLAINABLE
In the years I have been writing about religion, I've asked many unambiguous, straightforward questions. Many True Believers have written or e-mailed me claiming to have the answers. But all they have done is preach their brand of religion, describing the glory and truth to be found there. They simply tiptoed around my questions. They would dodge, weave, and avoid like crazy.
An excellent example of that would be Wayne Jackson, editor of the Christian publications Christian Courier and Reason & Revelation (oxymoron?). He was apparently rattled by my book, In God We Trust: But Which One? Had he not been, he would not have devoted, to me alone, one full page of the three-and-a-half-page issue of the March 1997 CC and almost half of an essay in R&R. I obviously touched a nerve.
Wayne and I had previously exchanged a few letters wherein he proposed public debates. I had to decline, since public speaking is no more a part of my repertoire than are rodeo riding, skydiving, or marine biology. I would approach them all with about the same amount of confidence. Repeatedly, I have been urged to speak at various functions, while being reassured that public speaking can be learned. Well, so can marine biology. I am a writer. I write. But when I suggested to Jackson, also a writer, that we enter a written debate, he flatly refused. Now I know why.
In my book I challenged the concept of God in general and Christian fundamentalism in particular. I posed the age-old questions: Does the One True God speak though the pope? If God wanted perfect people, why didn't he create them? Who created evil? I also posed some original questions (well, at least I hadn't heard them before) such as: Why would Jesus have prayed to be released from his imminent, sacrificial death, which literally defined his only reason for existence? And why would Jesus' disciples all have scoffered, abandoning him just before the crucial moment of his supreme sacrifice, if they really believed in his mission?
There are scores of other challenges like this throughout my book. Yet Wayne Jackson, Christian apologist, chose to focus his entire critique of my book on my brief assertion that Jesus' historicity may be in doubt. It is almost an aside, since my main concern was the whole "create sinners/curse the sinners/demand a bloody sacrifice because they are sinners" scenario. But Jackson ferociously, tediously, and disingenuously defends Jesus' historicity as if it were the whole point of my book. Far from it, it doesn't matter one way or the other if a Jesus ever existed. It is the entire barbaric, sadistic, sin/hell/blood-atonement concept that concerned me. And it is this that I unmasked for the primitive impossibility that it is. These salient points are scrupulously avoided by Jackson as he drones on about the historicity of Jesus.
This, of course, is a favorite tactic of Christian apologists. Since they cannot defend the crucifixion and resurrection story, riddled as it is with contradictions and cruelty on a cosmic scale, they will instead pounce on side issues. However, once Jackson had decided to defend Jesus as a real person, he could at least have avoided the overworked, specious arguments that (1) Jesus' resurrection must have been real because martyrs would never have sacrificed their lives for a myth, and (2) the scarcity of early documents referring to Jesus does not point to his nonexistence, since there is a scarcity of documents about almost everything in those early centuries.
(1) Muhammad must have been inspired by God himself because Muslim martyrs would never sacrifice their lives for a myth. Would Christians agree with this statement? Why can't they see that this "martyrdom for a myth" argument can be applied to any belief system ever known? David Koresh must have been Jesus because his martyrs would never.... Jim Jones must have been.... It's almost too easy to destroy this argument. Humans have been dying for (and murdering for) countless gods throughout recorded history. This may speak to the overall cruelty and foolishness of humans, but certainly does not argue for the actual existence of any gods. This embarrassing argument should be abandoned.
(2) The scarcity of early documents about other topics means
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | 9 |
| Introduction | 11 |
| Chapter 1. Faith Is a Wish Your Heart Makes | 15 |
| O Give Thanks | 16 |
| Victual Virgins | 23 |
| Two Down and Four to Go | 27 |
| Jehovah's Juvenile Witness | 31 |
| Explaining the Unexplainable | 34 |
| The Power of Penguins | 42 |
| Chapter 2. The Real Roman Empire | 53 |
| The Wearing O' the Green | 53 |
| Pope Shoots Self in Foot | 56 |
| A Scientist and a Saint | 62 |
| Defending Mother Teresa | 66 |
| Suffer the Little Children | 70 |
| Human Litter | 71 |
| Pope Announces That Gravity Exists! | 75 |
| Taking Those Vows | 77 |
| Chapter 3. The Human in Humanism | 91 |
| On the Other Hand | 94 |
| What Is a Humanist? | 97 |
| This Is Humanism | 99 |
| HumanistTolerance | 105 |
| Chapter 4. The Entire Bible—Condensed | 117 |
| Old Testament | 117 |
| New Testament | 148 |
| Chapter 5. Gods and Governments | 163 |
| Onward Christian Soldiers | 173 |
| The Crucifixion of Clinton | 177 |
| KansOz | 191 |
| Chapter 6. Dear Judith | 195 |
| Chapter 7. Twenty Questions | 213 |
| Conclusion | 251 |
| Bibliography | 257 |
| Index | 261 |