The Happy Heretic

From Heaven Above

2012-03-01T01:00:00.002-08:00

I can still remember singing a hymn that begins with the words, “From heaven above to earth I come.” It was about announcing the birth of Jesus. The problem with it (though there are many) is that there is no “above” in this universe. Nor is there any “below.” We now know that the world is not flat, and that billions of stars and planets exist in all directions around us; so there is no “up” or “down” in this universe.

But people still do it. They point at the sky when they say, “heaven” and heaven is consistently referred to as “above.” People speak of The Man Upstairs and we all know it means God. In biblical stories angels always “descend” to Earth. Regarding God and heaven, whether in comedy skits (“Why me, God?”) or serious prayers, everyone always looks — up. Prayers and hymns frequently ask for “guidance from above” and again we all know what that means. Jesus and Elijah are taken up to heaven. And a folksy reference to reuniting with loved ones after death is, “We’ll meet up yonder.” The list is long and the point has been made: heaven is up.

However, the most that anyone could accurately say if they want to describe heaven’s whereabouts is, “Out there somewhere.” Can’t even point. Doesn’t quite have the same effect, though, does it? It’s so vague and therefore so unsatisfying. And the reason is that “out there” makes our puny little planet Earth, which is all the Bible concerns itself with, quite unimportant. The Bible was written when humans knew nothing about our planet, let alone our solar system, let alone our galaxy, let alone the billions of other galaxies. In other words, they knew almost nothing. To those ancient writers, all the little lights in the sky were stars, created for us humans to enjoy. Today any fourth-grader knows that’s not true. Yet we cling to our ancient beliefs to maintain our importance, even though those beliefs are completely false. Our egos want us to be important, but we aren’t even a pimple of the backside of the cosmos.

It wouldn’t even make sense, when bellowing about sin and damnation and describing the resulting hell, to say “out there somewhere.” Since the Hubble Telescope and other space-faring probes have provided us with such an astonishing glimpse of the size of our universe, up, down, here, there or anywhere are almost meaningless terms. We still don’t know what all is out there. Black holes, dark matter, who knows?

And that of course reminds us of heaven’s paradoxical sister: hell. Hell has the same problem as heaven, aside from the fact that there’s no proof that either one exists, and that problem is, naturally, one of direction. When people say “hell” they point down. Here we go again. If you were standing somewhere in Middle America, railing about the tortures of hell, and pointed downward while doing so, you would be pointing at either (a) the Earth’s core or (b) some point in the Indian Ocean. What sense does that make?

Looking Down on You

I had often wondered why a certain platitude bothered me so much. I could never quite put my finger on it. The well-intentioned but often gratuitous words, addressed to someone in mourning, go like this: “He/she wouldn’t want you to give up on life — to be so depressed.” Or, “He/she would want you to move on with your life.” (For convenience let’s just say the deceased is a she.) There are scores of variations on this theme, some including, “She is probably looking down at you now . . . .”

No insult or offense is ever intended with these words and none is ever taken. But such condolences always bothered me and I never knew why. Now I know. I finally figured out what has always annoyed me. Whatever words are used, there is an enormously important omission in them: “ . . . if she were alive.” “She would hate to see you crying so much if she were alive.” That omission is crucial because it changes everything. Of course the deceased would hate to see the survivor in misery if she knew about it. But she can’t know about it because she is dead. She is gone. She is removed from all things earthly. So unless you believe in the God/heaven thing and further believe that the deceased is, as they always say, “looking down” on the survivor, the whole thing makes no sense.

There is of course a certain logic in understanding that someone who loved you dearly would never want to see you suffer. But this logic breaks down with simple grammar. You must use the past tense in describing what is supposedly going on. That is, it would make no sense to say, “She loves you dearly and doesn’t want to see you suffer.” You must say, “She loved you dearly and wouldn’t want to see you suffer.” This simple grammatical detail makes the whole concept of the dead watching over the living rather creepy. There’s a huge difference between loves and loved. Beyond that, just who is looking down on you? Everyone you ever knew? Your enemies as well as your loved ones? That is beyond creepy.

On the other side of things, so to speak, how many people are the dead supposedly looking down on? Everyone they ever knew? Friend and foe alike? It’s all confusing and illogical. It’s childish wishful thinking that is not very well thought out. It is understandable as we try to console those who are so clearly bereaved as to be almost suicidal; but it’s also kind of silly if you think it through.

For example, consider a grieving widower. Someone comforts him with those familiar words, “She’d be so proud that you’re moving on with your life. She’d be happy that you’ve found a new wife. Your happiness is all she would care about.” Hmmm. Really? As the late Mrs. Whatever “looks down from above” is she honestly happy watching her husband having hot sex with his new wife? I wonder why I doubt that. But such earthy situations must be considered if the “looking down from above” stuff is true. It puts a little damper on the whole thing, though, doesn’t it?

Implied in this looking down scenario is also the idea that there is a place to look down from. And now we’re back to our old friend, heaven above. Some apologists, knowing how weak the heaven-up/hell-down theory is, offer the lame excuse that the “up” means spiritually up and the same goes for down. That will not fly. The nonstop pointing to the sky indicates nothing spiritual. The images in all the drawings and paintings of heaven clearly show clouds, which are clearly in the Earth’s atmosphere, and have nothing to do with some vague spiritual essence. The “spiritual” explanation falls embarrassingly short of common sense.

The origins of this whole up/down thing are so easy to see today that I do wonder why more people don’t talk about it. Early humans had no idea how enormous the Earth was. They only knew their tiny part of it. The sky (up) brought sunlight and rain to nourish growing things and quench thirst. Therefore “up” was a Good Thing. Most of the time. But up could also bring floods and droughts and thunder and lightning. So someone (the gods?) must live up there and control those things. Maybe we humans made the gods angry occasionally, bringing floods and such. Hmmm. This was worth some thought. Perhaps we should adapt our behavior to the temperament of those gods. And, maybe, if we did it well enough we would end up there with the gods after we died, since death could not be a permanent thing for important creatures such as ourselves. And we now know that’s exactly what all early human communities did. They all tried to appease their various gods in life in order to attain paradise after death.

The “down” thing however was a different story. It was always bad. It brought fire and brimstone belching out of volcanoes, and earthquakes that took enormous death tolls and tsunamis that engulfed whole communities. So those gods had to be appeased like nobody’s business. And all of this made some sense — thousands of years ago. We’ve learned so much since then, though, that you have to wonder why fundamentalists act as if we hadn’t. We know what causes all of the bad things and all of the good things, but it has nothing to do with gods. We may not be able to predict all these things (yet) but we’re learning more in leaps and bounds. So why do fundies put blinders on and continue to harangue about heaven above and hell below? That’s easy to answer. Without those “Acts of God” the coffers of those churches would soon be empty. Donations would be going instead into things like searching for asteroids and comets with Earth-crossing orbits. Stuff like that. Stuff that makes sense.

The Pope’s silly frocks and ridiculous hats; the screaming about how we sinful humans bring tornadoes on ourselves; the hollering about hell and the promise of eternal life; all these things bring money into the hands of the (mostly) greedy clergy who embrace such nonsense. It’s as simple and avaricious as that.

There is no heaven “above” and no hell “below” and the strong desire to believe that those places exist represents our strong desire to deny death. To this day we cannot bring ourselves to accept that death is truly the end. Forever. Hence religions, almost all of which contain afterlives of some sort. I have no idea when we will move past this Stone-Age thinking.

Going up, anyone?

Christmas Crazies

2012-02-01T01:00:00.001-08:00

Okay. Enough time has passed now that we can look back on the Christmas Crazies with a sigh of relief. Sort of. What are the Christmas Crazies? Just think back six weeks or so and it will all come rushing back to you. Oh, yeah! Those Crazies. We all have them. For example, running out of Scotch tape at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Or receiving clothing gifts that you sincerely loathe but will be expected to be seen wearing in the new year. Or finding that every single clothing gift that you gave doesn’t fit anyone you so carefully shopped for.

Then of course there is the Family Problem. We all have those pesky relatives who make things so difficult. You spent last Christmas Eve with your in-laws, so this year . . . no, wait a minute. You spent last Christmas Day with your in-laws. Didn’t you? This is important because whichever set of grandparents ends up with Christmas Eve feels slightly cheated because they don’t get to share the excitement of their grandchildren’s Santa presents. Better call your spouse. This could be a problem. It’s crazy.

Or maybe you are doing Christmas Day this year for your whole family, but Aunt Rachael and Aunt Emma aren’t speaking to each other so you can’t invite both of them. And Uncle Henry is furious with your cousin Tony because he just got a DUI so they can’t sit anywhere near each other and you hope no one mentions the DUI. What a shame for all that tension, too, because you just bought a lovely new lace tablecloth for your Christmas table no one will even notice. Damn! It’s crazy.

The possible permutations of these family squabbles approach infinity. All families have them. Let’s say you’re fourteen and you get the same video game from three different people. And you already have it! How can adults be so lame? Don’t they talk to each other? Damn! It’s crazy.

Then there are so many decisions to make. A biggie is should you go with a real tree this year or a fake one? Support tree-farm owners or buy the nice-looking imitations? Real trees no longer smell like trees any more anyway. Hmmm. Tough call. Also, should you bitch-slap the next Santa that rings a bell in your face? Probably not. Do you want to? Hell, yes! But it is Christmas. On the other hand, if you have to hear one more Christmas carol you will in fact bitch-slap someone the moment they play “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Who wrote that stupid thing anyway? What would a partridge be doing in a pear tree? And even if such a thing happened, how could someone “give it” to you? It’s crazy.

Or let’s say it’s two weeks before Christmas and you haven’t even started your shopping! How did that happen? Just yesterday you finally put away the good silver from Thanksgiving. Well, the economy is slow, so you figure you’ll head out to the mall on Tuesday, right at dinnertime. Maybe then you’ll find a parking space that’s at least in the same zip code as Wal-Mart. But no such luck. You end up on the third level, aisle G7. Okay. G7. That’s easy enough to remember. No time to write it down and besides, you don’t have a pen in your purse. Never mind. G7. So you gird your loins and plunge straight into the crowd of shoppers. Slow economy? Ha! Coulda fooled you! Everyone and his cousin is here this Tuesday. Well, no stopping now. It’s on!

Later, as you head back to your car you feel pretty good. You got almost everything done in one trip. Not bad. Just a few last-minute gifts to get later, and . . . wait a minute. Was it C7? No, G7. No, C7. Yes, C7. Boy, do your feet hurt. Well, damn! It was G7. Crazy. And speaking of crazy, who the hell waits until Christmas Eve to do Christmas shopping?! The store is swamped! You only have a couple things to pick up; but some of these people have bags and bags of stuff. Crazy.

Now might be a good time, since we’re pondering the imponderables, to pause and consider some of the other kind of Christmas Crazies. These are the more serious kind and deserve some real thought. They’re certainly as important as, well, G7. For example, Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus. Fine. But when was that birth? Since the Gospels have discrepancies, scholars disagree on that date. It could have been anywhere from 17 B.C. to 7 A.D. There are numerous discrepancies between the Gospels but right now we’re just talking about Christmas. So when was that birth? No one can say for sure. Isn’t that a true Christmas Crazy?

Then there’s the problem of Jesus’ parents. The Virgin Mary was said to be the mother and the “father” was supposedly the Holy Ghost — God. But the first verse of the first chapter of the first book (Matthew) of the New Testament opens by tracing Jesus' lineage back to King David and Abraham, which is important in fulfilling Old Testament prophesies. Jesus is always described as being “of the House of David.” Here’s the problem. From “Abraham begat Isaac” right down to Jesus, every generation is accounted for. However, all the “begats” lead to . . . Joseph, Mary’s husband! This can’t be. Mary was said to be a virgin, so how could Jesus be related to David through his step-father, Joseph? Well, he can’t. This is a clumsy mistake on the part of the writer(s) of Matthew. It’s a real Christmas Crazy. Doesn’t work at all.

And of course we have the famous Star of Bethlehem. Supposedly it led the Three Wise Men to a specific dwelling (a stable) and not just a town. In order for something in the sky to do that it would have to be low enough to exist within the Earth’s atmosphere. And, since gravity works, any bright light that was that low would have to be a meteor, and if it landed on the Earth’s surface it would be a meteorite. But it could never have remained motionless (remember gravity?) long enough to guide anyone anywhere. And if it was a real star it would also have been unable to guide anyone anywhere. Stars are just too far away except to offer general guidance occasionally (northward, for example) but never specific enough to lead anyone to a structure. This mistake is not just another Christmas Crazy, but it reflects a primitive view of the skies and all things dealing with astronomy. It’s very silly, actually.

We must also consider the only recorded witnesses to the most amazing event in the history of humankind — the birth of the Savior. That of course would be the shepherds and the Three Wise Men. They all recognize a miracle, worship the Savior, and then disappear from the pages of the Bible forever. What sense does that make? Who were these people? Where did they go? And what about the billions of people who lived before this miraculous birth and/or in other parts of the world during this miraculous birth? They had no way of hearing about any of it. So where does that leave those people? Will they go to heaven or hell? This is an extremely important subject, but it’s never discussed. More Christmas Crazies.

Ironically, too, since Jesus was an observant Jew, it was the Jewish people who never accepted him, then or now. They never recognized him as any king or ruler or lord of anything or anybody. So why do all the carols and sermons refer to Jesus as King of Kings and Lord of Lords and all of that? He never ruled anything. Nor was his name Immanuel, as is mentioned so often in those same carols and sermons. I think we’re moving past Crazies and into the Twilight Zone.

But undoubtedly the most devious Crazy is what is not described in the telling of the nativity story. That would be from the most quoted account, the one in the book of Luke. When read or paraphrased or sung about, the story always ends with the shepherds praising God. However, immediately following the praising shepherds are four short verses that contain a whole lot of stuff going on there. (“Him” always refers to Jesus.) Luke 2:21-24 — “And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb. And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.”

So they cut off the tip of Jesus’ penis, named him Jesus (not Immanuel) after the angel he had been before being inserted in Mary’s uterus, and then Mary had to wait out her days of “purification.” Menstruation and childbirth make a woman dirty, so purifications rites are only natural. The baby was presented to the Lord and deemed “holy” since the first baby out of a woman’s body is considered holy (if it’s a male — now there’s a surprise!). And, finally, two birds are sacrificed to mark the occasion. You can see why these four short verses never appear in the glorious retelling of the glorious birth of the glorious Savior of the World. They represent embarrassingly primitive Bronze-Age thinking; but of course that’s when all of this supposedly happened — during the Bronze Age. I think it all fits quite nicely into any grouping of Christmas Crazies. Or the Twilight Zone.

And yet we modern humans have nevertheless managed to add our own Crazies to this now very long list. In addition to the ones already mentioned above, there are many more. We occasionally set our houses on fire by leaving dry Christmas trees in the living room too long with scented candles nearby. We allow our children to run wild on their enormous intake of sugar in the cookies and fudge and candies. You find yourself stressed out when you draw names at the office for gift-exchange and find that although you have purchased a very nice $20 scarf for someone, she gave you a $45 bottle of perfume. Guilt! And on and on it goes.

But at least it’s over and you survived, more or less, although Aunt Rachael isn’t speaking to you now either. Another Christmas casualty. After this, though, Valentine’s Day is going to be a snap. And next year you’re going to write down your parking space if you have to scrawl it on your forehead in lipstick and ask a stranger to read it to you.

Ah, yes, the Christmas Crazies for one and all. We go through it every year and swear it will never happen again. But it will. And just think. In nine months it starts all over again!

There MUST Be a God

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

I recently had a long conversation with a man who considered himself a True Believer. He brought up God and the afterlife when he learned I was a widow so I asked my timeless question, “Which God?” I’m used to those stunned looks by now, and I just waited for him to reply. I’m also used to the most common replies to my question. He said, “Huh?” I quietly, calmly repeated my question followed by, “There are an awful lot of gods to choose from.” Looking puzzled he began to backtrack by saying that they aren’t actually different gods; people just worshipped Him differently. Again calmly, I contradicted him, pointing out that, for example, God either does or does not speak through the Pope in Rome. Which is it? He can’t do both. The conversation went nowhere after that. But I could see the wheels turning as I watched him look at the ground for a moment. He ended by saying that it’s true that we humans have made up all the religions, but there was a Supreme Being of some kind who started the universe. I finished by asking which book(s) I should consult to find that out. He could only shrug and change the subject. Fine with me. But I know I got him thinking.

And this is my only goal in writing: Getting people to think. Tragedies like the one I’m still going through, the death of my husband Pat, also get me to thinking. Where are Pat’s thoughts, memories, goals, hopes, dreams, loves—all the things that made him Pat? Where are they? My brain tells me nowhere. All that was Pat is gone. What a depressing thought! I can’t get my mind around it. Naturally I have thought about such things when writing about religion, but it has never been so very personal. It is now. But when viewed from a distance, when viewed as theory, I have never wavered from my belief that The End is well and truly The End. When you are gone, you’re gone. Now, though, it hurts so much to be thinking that about my Pat that I feel it as a physical pain. Nevertheless, I cannot escape my own blasted, logical mind. He’s gone. That’s it. And when I’m gone, the same will hold true for me. Some of my writing may survive after my demise but my own thoughts, memories, goals, dreams, hopes and loves will be gone forever. Seems a waste, doesn’t it? But there is no other answer to the problem. When you’re gone, you’re gone.

If I sound a bit lost, as if I’m floundering, it’s because I am. My beliefs haven’t changed, but my perception of life, and just how fleeting and fragile it is, is suddenly more keen than I could ever have imagined. This is it. There ain’t no more. It’s a sobering, humbling thought. We feel so important to ourselves and then suddenly POOF! We’re gone. All those things we thought were so important are now not only not important, but nonexistent. It’s scary, really. Pat and I were so close that I can’t understand how he can Be No More. There is no Pat now. He simply does not exist. It’s a horrible, lonely, dismal concept. But it unquestionably explains the origins of religions. We abhor the idea of nothingness after death, so we created some intriguing destinations. But they don’t answer the “before” question.

Way back in 1997 I wrote a piece titled “Where Were You Before You Were You?” It’s a pretty good piece. It emphasizes the elaborate, almost inexhaustible extents we have gone to in trying to describe what happens after we die, but we’ve given very little thought at all to what happens to us (if there is an us) before we are born. The two things should be equally important. But they are certainly not treated that way in the vast majority of the world’s religions, reincarnation being an exception, however lame. The last sentence in my 1997 piece is, “If I had to guess what I was doing before I existed, I would hazard that I was probably writing an essay about what it was like to be nonexistent.”

Cute I guess, but I’m no closer to understanding existence any more than anyone else is. I make no apologies for it, since no one knows why we’re here or how we got here, but I’m furious that I have enough smarts to think of such questions but not enough to answer them! Damn! If you run the expanding universe backwards, you still run into that brick wall: Where did that first hydrogen atom come from? I want to know these things. Alas, I don’t and never will. But if you are forced to think long and hard about death, you will go through these mental gymnastics and give yourself a migraine in doing so. Pat’s death is unacceptable to me, yet I must accept it. His existence was the most important thing in my life, but I must accept the fact that it sure as hell wasn’t important to this universe of ours. Death sucks.

So what is this rambling piece all about anyway? It’s just that death can be a bucket of ice water in your face, and it hurts. That’s why there must be a God! As pragmatic as I’ve always considered myself to be, Pat’s death threw me into a tailspin and I know I will never really pull out of it. Life is fleeting and unimportant. We are all unimportant in the larger view of things. I try not to bristle when people say (of Pat) “He’s in a better place now.” They are trying to be kind, and I know that. But, no, he is not in a better place now. He is nowhere. He is gone. Forever. And this stark truth hurts like nothing I’ve ever known before. I was never this devastated when my parents died. Hurt and sad, yes. But this? Well, this is why I wish, oh, how I wish, I could still believe in some kind of God and some kind of heaven. But I can’t. If only………

It’s ego-shattering to think that we humans are no more important than an earwig or a three-toed sloth. And yet, when viewed from a cosmic perspective, we are not. So our egos simply demand it: There must be a God! With God pulling the strings, our position is suddenly catapulted to the top of the heap. And the top of the food chain, thank you very much. Every Creation myth goes to great lengths establishing this seemingly apparent fact. The Bible’s book of Genesis has humans created in the image of God. Not bad, huh? We were also given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Well, that pretty well covers it. Ha! We do beat out the earwigs and the sloths after all. Thank God. That was a close one there for a while what with all that cosmic perspective and all. Whew! Dodged a bullet.

It’s easy to see how the human need to be on top of things, so to speak, is so blatantly transparent in the Genesis story. It’s actually embarrassing. But being unimportant will not do, so there must be a God to put us on top, like an angel on a Christmas tree. So there. Over the ages hundreds of gods have been invented to ensure our all-important position on this planet. True, some of the gods are nothing more than genuinely impressive nonsense, but we’ll believe almost anything to protect our importance.

Sadly lost in all this blather, however, is our very real importance when dealing with our fellow humans. We truly are important to each other. We are all in need of human love, and more often than not we provide this for each other. Tragically, for some as yet unexplainable evolutionary reason we also kill each other. Ironically, it is often because of our gods. That is true irony. But generally we do love others, especially our children, and this human-to-human love is so important in our lives that it should not be overshadowed by any wishful thinking, pie-in-the-sky love for unknowable, unseen gods.

Two of the most rewarding human emotions are love and humor. We can joyously offer both of these to each other, so why don’t we do more of that and less of the chest-beating, depressing muck that encompasses most religions? The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said that life is nasty, brutish and short. It is definitely short, but it need not be nasty and brutish. Sadly it often is, but if we spent our energies on helping each other, instead of figuring out more effective ways to kill each other, life would not have to be nasty or brutish for anyone. If all the time, energy and money that has been spent on religions and wars had instead been spent on enjoying life and helping others to do the same, just imagine what a world we would have! It’s almost impossible to imagine, but try anyway. It’s a lovely thought.

So, must there be a God? Of course not. Would it be nice if there were a God? Maybe. But hey, people, we’re all we’ve got — each other. So let us take all the comfort we can from each other. Let us treasure that and be grateful that we can do so.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

My Pat

2011-12-01T19:35:00.000-08:00

Pat Hayes, on Our 20th Wedding Anniversary

First, before I go on, I want to thank all of you who sent me such thoughtful, considerate condolences. I appreciated every message. Even with a broken heart, a person can still feel grateful. So for all of you who wrote to me, thank you!

When I first began reading about religions, and then writing about them, a common theme jumped out at me from the get go. Religions were first and foremost a way to “defeat” death and secondarily a way to make life here on earth a little easier. It didn’t take me long to realize that heaven, reincarnation, the elaborate afterlife preparations made by the ancient Egyptians and all the rest were all a way of denying death. We might die—sort of—but it wasn’t really dying because there was more to come. Most people still believe that. Never in my life have I wished that something that fantastic and unbelievable were really true. But I can’t make myself believe it and I know I never will.

I had never seen a dead body in my whole life except for two brief viewings at open-casket funerals. But those viewings occur only after someone had taken great pains to prepare the bodies for viewing—to remove some of the shock. What I found on the morning of December 2, 2010, was my loving husband sprawled on the floor, obviously lifeless. He was cold. I called 911 anyway and tried to do what they said—get him on his back and raise his chin. My efforts were of course fruitless, but I hurt the hell out of my back trying anyway. Why? Why do we do these things? I kept slapping his face and telling him to “wake up” and roll over. As my hysteria rose I nevertheless kept trying. What I should have done was cradle his head and kiss his cheek and say my private good-bye. But I realize now I was in that same sort of denial that created religion—this can’t be the end of this person I love.

The denial lasts quite a while and sends you into shock, which is probably a good thing, because the screaming and whatever else I might have done, like bang my head against a wall or whatever, could easily have killed me, and I’m certain evolution favored that shock to immobilize you for a while. I was a robot. The tears came immediately, but the emotions did not. I was numb. When the emotions finally kicked in, late that night, I was awakened from a restless, exhausted catnap, by my own voice. I was yelling, “Wake up! Wake up! WAKE UP!” It was horrible. The reality had set in and I have yet to erase that first image I had of Pat lying motionless on the floor. I doubt I ever will. I know it will stay with me forever. Pat had just turned 66, and we had been married for 37 years.

His full name was Mercer Parrott Hayes, Jr. Can you imagine what a nightmare the second grade was for him?! He heard, “Polly want a cracker?” more often than any human should have to endure! The Parrott part was to honor some country doctor in North Carolina, where he was born. Barrel-chested and strong, he played linebacker in high school football. Just like me, he married too young and had an unhappy divorce after having two children. Again, just like me. We had a lot in common.

I feel as though I had two marriages to Pat. The first took place in the SF Bay Area in 1973. It was a second marriage for both of us. Though we were passionately in love, we were also bedeviled by the nightmares that come with blended families and by that I mean too many in-laws and ex-spouses. We each had two children and that created most of the troubles. While I wish no harm on them now, I wish I had never had any children. I would rather have had a life. Pat and I relished the times we could get away from them all and visit our precious Monterey Bay for some much-needed privacy and our round the clock lovemaking. I will always treasure those moments. But those treasured moments inevitably had to lead back home, to the never-ending bickering and door-slamming fights that dominated those first years of our marriage. We had a rocky beginning. Anyone who has ever been through a bitter divorce and/or custody battle knows exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t had those experiences yet, I have one piece of advice: unless you are wealthy enough to take long, luxurious vacations, sans children (or better yet a nanny) then don’t have children.

Anyway, we had both grown tired of the Bay Area, with the dirty air and the traffic jams, and so we began a sojourn that I consider our second and real marriage. We bought 18 gorgeous acres of land on top of a beautiful hill, with a view of the Sierra mountains and Lake New Hogan as well as Lake Camanche. It was and is breathtaking. Long story short: we built our dream house on that hilltop and had 20 wonderful years of peace, beauty, love and no frigging in-laws! The only in-laws we saw were by choice and careful invitation, either by them to us or us to them, and Pat and I learned how lovely marriage can be. There are too many wonderful memories to share here, but there is one in particular that I want to share.
It happened often, and could truly be described as a many-splendored thing.

Whether on our large back patio, feeding “our” wild birds, or on the large wrap-around front porch, watching and listening to the birds, we had something so special that few people will ever know it: the incredible beauty of our views, a feast for the eyes, and true peace and quiet, a welcome relief for our ears. All we could hear was birdsong, front or back. We could view two different lakes, one front and one back. If the weather wasn’t being agreeable, we had two floor-to-ceiling, raised hearth, wood-burning fireplaces (one upstairs in the master bedroom and one downstairs in the living room) to choose from for our special moments. People would pay good money on vacation just to see either of our spectacular views, front or back, but all we had to do was walk outside. If music was desired, we had speakers to treat our auditory senses to Sinatra or any of a hundred other DVDs. Clean, fresh country air, a horizon that stretched forever, and peace. Add a glass of wine and we’re talking the height of perfection.

After living in cities all of our lives, this was a wonderful, new, almost alien environment. We talked a great deal of course; but often we just sat quietly and took pleasure in who and where we were. It was always enchanting and never lost its charm. More often than not, dinner was either behind us or patiently gurgling in the crock pot, available whenever we were ready to partake. If the weather permitted, and the kitchen windows were open, we could enjoy the aroma, tempting another of the senses. Does this sound wonderful or what?

Romance was bound to be a part of these lovely times. Sex can be wildly overrated or terribly undervalued in a marriage. Fortunately for us it was a powerful bond and I hold those memories as dear as any. Pat was smart, funny, sexy and a whiz at computers. He was just fun to be around. But now he’s gone. When I’m occasionally asked what I miss most about him my answer always surprises: I miss the hugs. Some people hug and some don’t. Pat was a hugger, just like I am. Hugs can mean so many different things! They can comfort, calm, excite, relax and on and on. We did a lot of hugging. I miss having his arms around me. I shall always miss that.

February 16th, 2011, would have been our 38th anniversary. Good-bye, my love.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Deck the Halls with Peals of Laughter!

2010-12-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

One of my all-time favorite lines: “If I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself.” I love that line. And I think it’s time we all took a breath, stepped back, and thought silly things. As we watch our paralyzed government seemingly crumble all around us; and we see Religious Right whackadoodles wishing our president dead; and wonder why the hell we bothered to vote in 2008; I say, screw it all! Let’s party for a bit!

Years ago I engaged in an author chat on a secular forum and while I enjoyed it overall, there was just too much of that, what should I call it, um, oh, what’s the term? Oh, yeah, pompous bullshit. The posted forum comments were bad enough; but you should have seen my personal emails that resulted. You’d need a five-yard front-loader to shovel all that shit.

Now. I love words. I like using them, experimenting with them, reading them when they’re put together beautifully, and constantly retraining myself on how to spell pejorative and malleability. However, there are wordsmiths and then there are hot air dispensers, and I think there are just too many of the latter in our ranks.

There does seem to be a big difference between atheists in general and atheist leaders. Your emails prove that. So many of you are positively brimming with wit and warmth. Of course I get my share (fortunately a very small share) of grandiose bombast. But if some secular humanists in general are a bit contentious, some are often just obnoxious.

When I first became involved in the freethought community I was excited and enthusiastic because I had finally found a group of people who, like me, had no use for religions. But my enchantment turned to disillusionment early on at one of my first freethought conferences. Sheesh! Walking around any of the conference rooms was like listening to people auditioning for a role in King Lear. Never in my life had I heard so many seven-syllable words, all spoken not just with intensity, but with a certain hostile, challenging rudeness. You’d pick up scraps of conversations such as, “Are you making an assertion or presenting argumentation, which, by definition, must include the offering of proof for and/or against a concept or theory or, in the case of abstracts, a conjoining of various schemes of perception……”

Not that I can’t hold my own. For example, what do we mean when we say mean? What exactly is the meaning of meaning? What does the word mean mean? Can we say meaning without meaning meaning? Must all meaningful things be meaningful to all other things, whether meaningful or not? If you are mean does it mean that you mean to be mean? Or can you be mean without meaning it? Have you ever meant something without meaning it?

See. I can do it too. Remember this one? “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” I have a better question: What is the sound of one pretentious twit? It’s all enough to give you a headache. And it reminds me of another great stand-up line: “I just got my degree in philosophy, and I plan to get a good job with a philosophy company.” And an old, old comedy routine from a supposed University of Chicago graduate: “This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water? And in the meantime the guy dies of thirst.”

Mental exercises can be fun. I engage in them often. But a little bit of that goes a long way, and, if you’re not careful, it can lead to the death of your sense of humor. Now, I am the first to acknowledge that I do indeed hold forth about the evils of religion. I think religion sucks. The pope is definitely on my hit list. And the Virgin Mary can take a flying leap. And so on. However, this represents only a portion of my life. I do not live and breathe humanism. I actually have other interests.

I have often been asked (thank you for the thoughts!) to write more often than just monthly. Good grief! I think a lot of people think writing is simply typing. Wrong. It is a great deal of often thankless and usually unpaid work. If you read my writing résumé in the bio section here, you will find a lot of publications mentioned. Not one has ever paid me a single dime for one word. I was paid in copies. Okay. Fair enough. I knew what I was getting into at the outset. However, it’s a hell of a lot of work for nothing. Heck, even burger-flippers at McDonald’s at least make something. Yes, I do enjoy writing, but only so much of it! I cannot and will not exist solely for secular humanism.

The same cannot necessarily be said about a lot of us.

Example: A man who lives close by, and who liked my writing, emailed me, and when we discovered we were practically neighbors, I invited him for a visit. He was delighted and initially so was I. When you live in a rural area, as I’m sure many of you know, God is the mayor of every town. So to find another atheist here in the boonies was great. At first. But then the visit turned into one long, bitchy harangue about atheism and religion. My husband and I wanted to move on, you know? Talk about football. The weather. How to get rid of soapdish jelly. Anything. But it was not to be.

The same thing happened when an atheist reader from Canada made a huge detour to come visit me. I was really looking forward to that. However, even by the second day of a three-day visit, my Canadian visitor would discuss nothing except atheism. We couldn’t get away from it. It was actually exhausting. My husband and I had sincere smiles on our faces as we waved good-bye!

I know these are just two people. But my point is that at the conferences we have attended the rooms always seemed to be teeming with precisely this type of person. After a couple of days of freethought talk, shouldn’t other topics pop up now and again? Well, they do of course, but it’s too rare for my tastes.

I like laughter and laughing. I like almost all kinds of humor except slapstick. Even when I was a tiny tot I never found the Three Stooges funny. Laurel and Hardy were often funny, but there was a hint of finesse in their foolishness, especially Stan Laurel. But watching the Three Stooges punch, slap, kick, smack, swat and just generally beat the crap out of each other never made me laugh. Ever. But the Marx Brothers? Yes! Even when I was too young to understand their often hilarious wisecracks, they could still make me laugh (except for Harpo, who to me was just another Stooge). But I digress.

My husband and I have got into the rather bad habit of saying, about anyone who is as dull as a demonstration of shoelace-tying, “Oh. Another typical humanist.” This is very bad. We’re using a pretty wonderful word, humanist, as a pejorative. (Spelled it right!) But, in fairness to us, we have been to enough humanist conferences to know whereof we speak. Why is this true, though? Is it because our challenging, ready-to-question-anything attitudes are what got us here in the first place? Maybe we have more intellectual inclinations than average. Maybe we are so used to fighting the religious majority that arguing becomes a way of life. Or maybe we’re just a bunch of grousing, nit-picking assholes. I don’t know.

One person actually wrote to me and said, “Finally! There’s something we disagree on. Terrific! Now we can debate!” Well, debating merely for the sake of debating rates, on my scale of pleasurable things to do, somewhere down there close to giving birth to a flaming porcupine. And while I engage in a great many debates, I wouldn’t go out of my way to start one. People approach me, to inform me of the error of my ways, and if they’re reasonable about it I do respond. But I don’t live to fight! What I’m trying to do here, on this site, is inform. I’m trying to get people to think about religious beliefs, rather than just accept them at face value.

My target audience has always been fence-sitters and closet atheists, since I have been both and hated every minute of it. Over the years I’ve heard from so many people who are grateful just to know they are not alone in their heretical thoughts. And I am delighted to hear from them. But I also occasionally hear from whining complainers, and they are not always from True Believers. They’re from in-your-face atheists.

It is this contentiousness, found in too many of us, that is our undoing. We spend half our time fighting with each other. My writing nostalgically about missing the music and the candlelight from church services, which I still do miss, makes some of you see red and feel the need to send me some smack-downs. But why so much anger? Jesus! You’d think I was announcing that I was being Born Again. So, I think we could all do with a little more malleability. (Spelled it right!)

The Christians have Dial-a-Prayer. Based on some of my experiences, I’m sorry to report that I believe many of us seem to want the secular equivalent: Dial-a-Fight. But I think there’s enough fighting already, everywhere, and we should all lighten up a bit. If some atheist wants to put up a Christmas tree, who cares? That should be our biggest worry! The Christmas tree, by the way, is just a holdover from “pagan” celebrations such as the ancient Roman seven-day festival of Saturn, Saturnalia, which began on December 17. Any evergreen was a reminder to our ancestors that the sun was going to return from its dip on the horizon, and that life would go on. And don’t forget, the ancient Persian god, Mithra, celebrates his birthday on December 25.

So instead of arguing about whether or not to capitalize the word “humanist” why not make some eggnog? Let’s celebrate the Winter Solstice, as our remote ancestors did, and look forward to longer, sunnier days, and an end to the cold. Throw a party! The hell with the crèches and the insecure people who feel the need to flaunt them! Call an old friend and chat. Buy whatever presents you can afford for those you love. Tell jokes and play your DVDs of the old but still brilliant Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Just get silly.

Merry Mithramas!

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

A Reader Asks About Heaven

2010-11-01T12:40:00.000-07:00

A long-time reader named Jackov contacted me with a wide range of questions about heaven. I gladly answered them and here are the results:

Q: Are we sure there is a heaven?

Of course there is a heaven! And the whole thing has recently been wallpapered—in a divine shade of sapphire blue.

Q: If I die today (and go to heaven), will I spend eternity at my current age?

You’re a wee bit of an SOB who in all likelihood won’t make it, but let’s say you do. You will spend eternity at the most perfect age you ever were, which in your case was 8, with all things going downhill from there. I’ve seen the photos.

Q: Will I maybe be allowed to pick which age I want to be?

Only God can pick The Age. It’s like making a tree. Only God can do it. Same sort of thing.

Q: Do dogs go to heaven? As puppies? Do they poop on the grass?

Depending on your denomination, yes, you will be accompanied or no, sorry, Fido won’t make it. But there is no poop in heaven, ergo no need for pooper-scoopers. Cool, huh?

Q: What about the old and lame—do they romp again?

All will be well! They will romp and use hula hoops and unicycles and limbo sticks and trapezes........

Q: What do we DO in heaven? Debate? Float entranced?

Aside from romping, we bask in the glory that is God’s light and know the meaning of His great love and grace. That’s about it.

Q: Do we mature as time marches on?

We’ve been over this. Please try to keep up. You will be 8 and not a day older.

Q: Can we run for political offices?

Well, God doesn’t care for politicians. Like poop. Same sort of thing.

Q: Can we follow our favorite baseball teams?

God used to be a Yankees fan, but there was that unpleasant madness in the 2000s having to do with the Boston Red Sox so He’s off that game now, at least for the 21^st century.

Q: Are we able to go visit people like Lincoln or Jefferson or Aristotle? Are visits limited?

Can we visit? Can we visit? Hey, this isn’t the Lonely Hearts Club, buddy. It’s freaking Heaven. You are in God’s grace. That should be enough. Sheesh!

Q: Do we eat?

Duh. Yes, we eat heavenly manna, though we never have to pee or poop. Everything in, nothing out. Kind of like a Pyramid Scheme.

Q: Do we require shelter?

Shelter? Now you’re asking about shelter? You’re in Heaven, dipstick, so why would you need shelter? You don’t seem to be getting the gist of this at all, Jackov . . . .

Q: Do we go by calendar dates? Are there holidays?

Every day is Christmas in Heaven. You may get tired of Perry Como and Alvin and the Chipmunks....

Q: Are there lawns to mow?

Of course not. You’ll be floating on clouds and they pretty much take care of themselves. Maybe an occasional trim with a touch of mousse for volume.

Q: Do we have any duties?

Of course. We shall worship and glorify God. Forever. I know that seems like a long time, so knee-pads are recommended.

Q: Can we self-improve?

You can only be as good as you were in life, which in your case is not too promising, but rules are rules. Live with it.

Q: Does it rain?

No rain, no floods, no tsunamis. Just the eternal glow of God’s pure light. And no need for those tedious, always incorrect weather reports!

Q: Are there dues? Unions?

Dues? Yes. Your undying love. There had been talk of the AFL-CIO organizing some cherubim, but that died away centuries ago.

Q: Are there Condos?

Condos? You’re asking about Condos? You don’t get out much, do you? It’s clouds! Just clouds! If you’re having trouble remembering the cloud thing, just think of yourself as reclining on cotton balls. Imagine—an eternity of resting on your balls.

Q: Can we see the future?

God is timeless. From the book of Amos, Chapter 6, Verse 12 through 19: “Thus saith the LORD; what troubles thee, Amos? And Amos answered, How long is a million years to you O LORD? And the LORD answered; It is but a minute. And Amos asked, How much is a million dollars to you O LORD? And the LORD answered; It is but a penny. And Amos beseeched the LORD, asking, May I have a penny O LORD? And the LORD answered; Yes, Amos, in a minute.” (KJV)

Q: Are there newspapers?

Only the Fire and Brimstone Tribune. It publishes constant warnings that permission for you to enter into Heaven can be revoked at any time! And you’re not looking so secure right now, I must say.

Q: Are there computers? Ink cartridges for printers? Are there stores? Do they make a profit? Is there money? Is smoking allowed? Is sex allowed? And is it all safe? Are there trees? Can we bring lawsuits?

Yes, no, yes, of course, yes, (dumb-ass question, Jackov), yes, then no to everything else.

Q: Is there pollution? Do people get sick? Take medicine? Is competition allowed? Is there mental illness? Do we pay taxes? Are there mosquitoes? Horse flies? Are there odors? Do we ever get gas or indigestion? Must we take the garbage out? Brush our teeth? Shower? Shave?

No to all the above and you’re getting pretty close to blasphemy with the horse flies and garbage stuff. Better watch that.

Q: Does God have barbecues? Will I be invited?

Don’t see your name on the list, Jackov, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

If you need any further biblical instruction, feel free to ask! I’ve been a biblical expert since I was a zygote!

Yours in Christ,

Sister Judith

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Atheists in Foxholes

2010-10-01T12:34:00.000-07:00

That annoying, incorrect saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes” is a bunch of bull. There always have been and always will be atheists who serve their country in the military, and will find themselves in “foxholes” fighting for their lives like everyone else. But they probably won’t stand out because most atheists in the military, actually everywhere else as well, keep their lack of religious beliefs to themselves. You can cause your own social death simply by saying, “I’m an atheist.” You will be greeted with condescending looks and remarks, and probably shunned in general. It is as if we atheists are serial killers. Or used car salesmen. But we are just like everyone else, spanning the huge political spectrum. Some of us are nudists, some are vegans and some even like lima beans! (Ugh!) But we’re just people, like everyone else. If only we were treated that way.

If someone tells me they’re Catholic I don’t ask them to leave my house or shun them. However, the opposite is quite true, and I have been shunned big time just for not believing in something. People don’t even care how dumb your beliefs are as long as you have them. “I belong to The Church of the Everlasting Good” is quite fine with True Believers, and by saying that you will be invited to the next party. I will not. (Unless I lie, which I did for years, and hated every minute of it.) But why should that be? Seems to me that tolerance runs in only one direction: True Believers will accept any other believers, no matter how goofy, but they will not tolerate atheists. Atheists tolerate anyone. Food for thought there. Which group is more kind, the believers or the nonbelievers?

Here’s a challenging thought experiment. Try to imagine that religions all disappeared. Almost impossible, isn’t it? And yet there are times when that is precisely what happens. Religions disappear. We’re just not aware of it because of all the other commotion going on. Those special moments, when religion falls by the wayside and our basic humanity takes over are frequent. I’m speaking of course about those times when there are hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and so on. Our TV screens are filled with images of people desperately trying to help other people. Trying to pull debris off them. Listening for the cries of trapped survivors. Applying bandages to the injured. This is all familiar, isn’t it? It’s also shows the wonderful side of our humanity. Often people risk their own lives to save someone else’s. And atheists are right in there with everyone else, trying to help. They also stand in line to donate blood, like everyone else.

But wait. Something is wrong with this picture. Something is missing here. Where are the religions that supposedly make all this happen? Here we have atheists desperately trying to help other people, just like everyone else; but we’re told atheists have no motivation to “do good” because they have no God to guide them. But they do good, don’t they? Hmmm. We have a problem here. We have to try to explain this seeming impossibility.

Well, there is really no contradiction at all. When our backs are against the wall, we are human beings first, and religionists second. It’s that simple. When push comes to shove, our innate, natural compassion as humans takes over and the truly unnatural practices of man-made religions get shoved aside. Are you True Believers squirming just a bit? I know where my money is.

I know, I know, there are serial killers and rapists among us. But they represent such a tiny percentage of us they do not bear discussion. (Although I do find it interesting, as I saw on a very recent science show, that genetics seems to play some part in creating these monsters, and that these monsters begin to show signs at a very early age, like torturing small animals at the age of five, for example, thus ruling out the idea that a deprived childhood is at fault.) But let’s move on. Let’s remember those unforgettable scenes of strangers taking risks to help others during crises, and let’s explain it as a human affair, not a religious one.

If atheists were the evil creatures they are portrayed to be, then the following scenario would be quite understandable: Picture it. Everywhere you look, homes are completely destroyed. Inexplicably, some homes are perfectly intact, but they are definitely in the minority. A tornado has just struck. A dazed couple, we’ll call them Sharon and Richard, emerge from their underground shelter and look around in horror and disbelief. Like zombies, they begin walking through the rubble. Suddenly they both freeze. They hear something.

Sharon: “Do you hear that?”

Richard: “Yes! It’s a woman crying for help!”

Sharon: “Isn’t it coming from what’s left of the Walker’s house?”

Richard: “Yes, it is!”

Sharon: “The Walkers? They’re the atheists!”

Richard: “I know. So the hell with it. Let the bitch die.”

And the two walk on, continuing their search. Do you find that hard to believe? Well, you shouldn’t. That’s the way televangelists and thousands of Christian fundamentalists talk about atheists. We’re evil incarnate. We’re in league with the Devil. We caused 9/11. We worship Satan. We are doomed to an eternity of fire and brimstone, and we deserve all the pain that entails. We are EVIL.

Don’t give me any of that “There’s still a chance that she might come to know Jesus” crap because it really is a load of crap. You believers don’t believe that. You talk that way, but you don’t believe it. I should know. Been there, believed it. Any adult who is still an atheist (all babies are born atheists) will go to hell. Period. And I must say an awful lot of you True Believers take a great deal of joy in contemplating the agonies of hell that await atheists. You sure talk about it enough!

Will religions ever disappear? Not in my lifetime certainly, and possibly never. But the Internet is forcing a lot of changes in the dogmatic, I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong attitudes that dominated all religions in passed eras, when communication was slow, and most people were born, lived and died in the same village, never knowing anything about the outside world. So their beliefs remained strong, since they didn’t even know there were any other beliefs. Today, communication is at the speed of light, and eyes are being opened that in times past would have remained closed.

As for those oft-referred to foxholes: This is where you hope your comrades are atheists because you can be certain they will not be wasting precious time and energy bowing their heads in prayer. You want them to be shooting fast and straight, like all the atheists will be doing. Foxholes, in fact, when the action is fast and furious, are a place where religions should disappear. At such times, if managed properly, those foxholes belong to atheism.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Karma

2010-09-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of my writing career discussing Christianity first, Judaism second, and Islam third for a simple reason: They are the religions I have read the most about. Being raised as a fundamentalist Christian, naturally I focus on that mostly. But there’s a lot else going on in the world of spirituality, and somehow they have become regarded as more ethereal, and closer to Nature as Intended. I am speaking of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Eastern religions are considered somehow more pious, mysterious, mystical and generally spiritual than Western religions. That’s only because most Westerners know so little about them. They are associated with Tibet, transcendental meditation, yogis, gurus and other misunderstood people who wear odd-looking robes. And that’s the key word: people. They are just ordinary people looking for the meaning of life and like the rest of us, they’ll never find it. If a meaning exists, it remains hidden from all of us, to this day.

Actually, both Hinduism and Buddhism are more egotistical than many of the other religions because the others rely on gods to do something to help you, to ease your way into heaven or whatever. With Karma, it’s a do-it-yourself belief system. Do it right or you’re screwed. Of course most think they are doing it right, which is quite arrogant. It’s a similar version of that hackneyed expression, “What goes around, comes around.” Meaning you’ll get yours one of these days, you SOB! Well, it doesn’t work that way. Millions of people live selfish, cruel, sometimes violent lives and also live in the lap of comfort. They never get “theirs” at least not in this life. Which assumes there is something other than this life, which has never come close to being proven.

[All bracketed words amid the following quotes are mine alone. Like you couldn’t tell.]
Dim-Witted Westerners

http://www.essortment.com/all/differencesbetw_rrax.htm

This site begins with an offhanded but totally off the mark insult to all Americans, since Easterners don’t agree on anything either. The opening states, “Your average American doesn’t even understand the differences between Lutheranism and Catholicism, so expecting him to comprehend the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism may be asking too much of his ability or knowledge.”

Well, I can beat that. The average Eastern religionists don’t even agree on reincarnation, so expecting him to comprehend Western religions may be asking too much of his ability or knowledge. Game over. Please get off your high-horses, Hindus and Buddhists, because you sound just as confused and dim-witted as any banjo-picking, barefooted, inbred redneck ever could. From that same site:

“Despite their many similarities, there are two defining characteristics of Buddhism, which distinguish it from Hinduism. Although the Buddha, himself, never addressed these issues, Buddhism as a religion refutes the ideas of eternal self (Atman) and eternity in nature (Brahman); this refutation distinguishes it from Hinduism.”

First of all, why did the Buddha never address these all-important issues? Aren’t they rather important as we move through life? Will we experience another life after we leave this one? Isn’t that kind of important to know? Sounds like he didn’t know himself, doesn’t it? If he did know, surely he would have talked about it!

Reincarnation may be one of the most important aspects of any religion. If we live again after we die, will we be the same person? Will we be a non-human? If human, will we need to “work off” any bad karma from past lives? How long does this go on, this reincarnation? Forever? The lame explanations for the existence of reincarnation include “memories” from past lives. Well, if it weren’t for so-called therapists in need of big fees, the idea of remembering past lives wouldn’t ever have come up at all. Keep in mind these therapists who help people “remember” past lives are the same ones who help people “remember” being abducted by aliens who want to examine their human private parts (tee-hee! I blush). Let’s keep some perspective on all this “remembering.”

Another supposed explanation for reincarnation is that it gives people in general a chance for social justice. So if they were a slave in one lifetime, the next time they’ll be a king or something. Which reminds me. Have you noticed that almost all the people who claim past lives turn out to have been kings and queens and famous explorers and, well, just very important people. I have yet to read about a past life that consisted of being a chimney sweep or scrub woman, living in London in the 1900s and dying early of tuberculosis, although a huge majority of people who have ever lived in the so-called civilized world had miserable lives like that.

The truly desperate supporters of reincarnation actually turn to the Bible. The Bible. Here are their embarrassing examples of “proof” of reincarnation:

Matthew 17: 12-13, concerning the identity of John the Baptist; John 9:2, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”; John 3: 3, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again”; James 3: 6, “the wheel of nature”; Galatians 6:7, “A man reaps what he sows”; Matthew 26:52, “all who draw the sword will die by the sword”; Revelation 13:10, “If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity he will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword he will be killed.”

If that mish-mash of verses can be construed as proof of reincarnation, then I can prove absolutely anything using only biblical verses. That “born again” reference is particularly disingenuous since it clearly means be born again by beginning a belief in Jesus. It’s all rubbish. And The Buddha never even bothered to mention reincarnation. I think lack of existence pretty well describes reincarnation.

[Continuing with the rrax.htm site] “The major aspects of Hinduism are maya, karma and dharma. The concepts also play major roles in Buddhism. Maya is the belief that everything, which one sees in this world is illusion, a product of the individual’s own failed interpretation and self-delusion. It is one of the foundations of the Hindu faith. Hinayana Buddhists also believe in maya. It cannot be said, however, that Buddhist doctrine (as a whole) either supports or denies maya.”

Clear as a bell, right? Hardly. It makes the Catholic Catechism seem like a cakewalk. Buddhists either support or deny maya. Clear as a bell. That’s like saying “Jesus did exist or Jesus did not exist. Whatever.” Can you imagine a Christian saying that? The description of Hinduism says that “everything which one sees in this world is illusion, a product of the individual’s own failed interpretation and self-delusion.” Now what the hell does that mean? If I see a bull running toward me, why should I try to get out the way of that “illusion?” If I see blood spurting out of my neck, why should I seek medical attention for that illusion? These questions are endless. The whole assertion of illusions and delusions are so foolish they are barely worthy of consideration, except for the fact that the arrogant site makes such a big point of it all.

So we are dealing with maya, karma and dharma. Is that like Huey, Dewey and Louie? Or is it more like Larry, Moe & Curly? Or the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Well, they all sound equally stupid to me. Except for Larry, Moe & Curly. They’re on film. But they’re still stupid.

It is quite often the case that we find people misunderstanding the idea of karma. This is particularly true in our daily, casual use of the term. We find people saying that one cannot change one’s situation because of one’s karma. In this sense, karma becomes a sort of escape. We can’t help what we do because it is our karma to do it. It becomes similar to predestination or fatalism. This is emphatically not the only understanding of karma. No, there are many to choose from. But this particular understanding has become popular because of our ideas about luck and fate. It may be for this reason that our idea of karma has become overlaid in popular thought with the notion of predestination. Karma is not fate or predestination.

But don’t take my word for it. The following are actual quotes from apparent experts on karma. Except for the above quote about how stupid all we Westerners are, all quotes below are immediately followed, not preceded, by their sources.

According to Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism as taught in America, there are three kinds of karma: (1) objective conditions; (2) personal karma and (3) Buddha’s karma. Other experts, including Prof. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, say there are only two: (1) passive and (2) active. So who’s right?

Summarizing just these five positions (there are more) karma based on objective conditions would include cancer. Positive karma leads to positive results. Buddha’s karma means that we foolish humans are not able to practice positive karma. O’Flaherty’s passive karma means “passively received fate” and active karma means “actively pursued human action.” She says that the passive interpretation is emphasized in Hindu texts, while the active is emphasized in Buddhist tests. These ideas are from a book: Tanaka, Kenneth K. Ocean: An Introduction to Jodo-Shinshu Buddism in America: WisdomOcean Publications, 1998.

“In its most basic sense, the Law of Karma in the moral sphere teaches that similar actions will lead to similar results. Let us take an example. If we plant a mango seed, the plant that springs up will be a mango tree, and eventually it will bear a mango fruit. Alternatively, if we plant a Pong Pong [ a Pong Pong tree?!] seed, the tree that will spring up will be a Pong Pong tree and the fruit a Pong Pong. As one sows, so shall one reap. According to one’s action, so shall be the fruit. Similarly, in the Law of Karma, if we do a wholesome action, eventually we will get a wholesome fruit, and if we do an unwholesome action eventually we will get an unwholesome, painful result. This is what we mean when we say that causes bring about effects that are similar to the causes. This we will see very clearly when we come to specific examples of wholesome and unwholesome actions.

“One may ask how does one know whether an action that is wholesome or unwholesome will produce happiness or unhappiness. The answer is time will tell. The Buddha Himself answered the question. He has explained that so long as an unwholesome action does not bear its fruit of suffering, for so long a foolish person will consider that action good. But when that unwholesome action bears its fruit of suffering then he will realize that the action is unwholesome. Similarly, so long as a wholesome action does not bear its fruit of happiness, a good person may consider that action unwholesome. When it bears its fruit of happiness, then he will realize that the action is good. So one needs to judge wholesome and unwholesome action from the point of view of long-term effect. Very simply, whole-some actions result in eventual happiness for oneself and others, while unwholesome actions have the opposite result, they result in suffering for oneself and others.”

http://www.buddhanet.net/fundbud9.htm

[So a baby born with encephalitis to two loving parents, is the result of some very unwholesome judgment. Wonder what it could have been?]

“Some traditions (i.e., the Vedanta), believe that a Supreme Being plays some kind of role, for example, as the dispenser of the ‘fruits’ of karma—or as exercising the option to change one’s karma in rare instances. In general, followers of the Buddhism and many followers of Hinduism traditions consider the natural laws of causation sufficient to explain the effects of karma. Another view holds that a Sadguru, acting on a god’s behalf, can mitigate or work out some of the karma of the disciple. And according to the Jainism perspective, neither a god nor a guru have any role in a person’s karma—the individual is considered to be the sole doer and enjoyer of his karmas and their ‘fruits’.

“Karma in Hinduism is also considered to be a spiritually originated law. Many Hindus see God’s direct involvement in this process, while others consider the natural laws of causation sufficient to explain the effects of karma. However, followers of Vedanta, the leading extant school of Hinduism today, consider Ishvara, a personal supreme God, as playing a role in the delivery of karma. Theistic schools of Hinduism such as Vedanta thus disagree with the Buddhist and Jain views and other Hindu views that karma is merely a law of cause and effect but rather is also dependent on the will of a personal supreme God. Examples of a personal supreme God include Shiva in Shaivism or Vishnu in Vaishnavism. A good summary of this theistic view of karma is expressed by the following: ‘God does not make one suffer for no reason nor does He make one happy for no reason. God is very fair and gives you exactly what you deserve. ”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma

[Many see this, others see that. I personally see squat. But then these "definitions" are all over the place. Hindus, please agree on just one, will you?]

“Only if it is your intent to do a bad act then there will not be a negative consequence in your future. . . . . Buddhists believe there are no private actions. Since actions foretell your future, all actions have consequences. The Buddha says that wholesome actions should only be performed and that unwholesome actions should be avoided. The intention for karma in Buddhism is to guide and show you your present life and that self-effort is needed to improve your future. Karma aims to help you achieve perfection and self-conquest, Buddhism’s ultimate goal (‘Karma in Buddhism’) . . . . One way that karma is used in Hinduism is through karma yoga. Hinduism says there are yogas that an individual should practice to bring their spirit together with God. Karma yoga is the path to God through work. A person is born with so many karmas and actions (such as work) need to be performed to get rid of these karmas (‘Karma and Yoga’). Its goal is to shrink the finite ego by taking away its nourishment or in other words, the consequences of actions. This can be achieved through jnana (path to God through knowledge) or bhakti (path to God through love/devoted service). In either approach, work can bring you to self-transcendence. . . . . All actions that you perform for the outside world will bring you farther away from God. An act such as pouring tar on a gravel road to make it easier to drive on would be the pleasure only for yourself and therefore would create more distance between you and God’”

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/302340/the_use_of_karma_in_hinduism_and_buddhism_pg3.html?cat=9

I guess then highway workers had best throw down those shovels or hell awaits. And what is meant by “Since actions foretell your future, all actions have consequences.” All actions? Does that include tying your shoelaces?

I couldn’t make this stuff up if my life depended on it. As I said in the beginning, Eastern religions have no upper hand when it comes to morality or eternal truths. They fill their beliefs with as much incomprehensible (and often contradictory) nonsense as everyone else. If you think you understand any of them, my hat’s off to you; but I guarantee you’ll find some “expert” to disagree vehemently with your understanding of those beliefs. I’ve already got a headache trying to figure it out; but suddenly Lutherans and Catholics seem like blood-brothers, compared to this mayhem, agreed?

If anyone can give me one, clear definition of karma, that all Eastern religions agree on, addressing reincarnation of course, I'll buy you dinner in a restaurant of your choice. It'll be your karma!

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

“A Packet of Gravel”

2010-08-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

What the hell is wrong with you men? An instant caveat is in order. As I wrote about recently when talking about war and men, I do not mean all men. If all men were like this the species Homo sapiens would have gone extinct long ago. Fortunately there are men like my husband, Pat, and Alan Alda and the late Carl Sagan and on and on. There are loving, nurturing, sensible men on this planet. But I ask again, what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?

This rant is brought to you by a recent article in the magazine The Week (Volume 10, Issue 474). The piece that got my blood boiling was titled “Death by Stoning.” Apparently a 43-year-old woman named Ashtiani was charged with the murder of her husband. She was however cleared of the murder at trial. Well, okay. So far, so good. BUT three of the five male judges in the Islamic court found her guilty of adultery, and as a result she was sentenced to death by stoning for the adultery.

It is difficult to merge the 21st century with death by stoning, isn’t it? But men, and it’s always men, are still doing it. Many of them have college degrees, although I would guess, and it’s only a guess, that most of them can’t write their names in the ground with a stick. Well, it doesn’t really matter because Stone Age thinking is Stone Age thinking. And women suffer the most for it. Duh.

Stoning people to death is by no means unique to Islam. The Jews of the Old Testament pelted each other by the thousands. A Monty Python sketch featured a good old fashioned Jewish stoning, with one of the stoners looking over an array of stones. He pointed at several, saying, “I’ll have that one, and that, and that over there…and a packet of gravel.” Now “packet of gravel” is funny. And you can’t help but laugh at the guy’s order. But truly stoning people is not funny and I cannot believe men are still doing it. The most common (if only) reason for stoning people is because of the most important component in the entire universe—the female vagina.

When are you guys going to get over the idea that a woman’s vagina, and the hymen that usually comes with it, is worth killing people for? Are you nuts? While children starve to death every day and die of malaria every day, all you care about is that the female you get to call your wife is not damaged goods. That hymen better be there, Godammit! Have you ever heard of the word “prioritize?” How about we worry about hymens when true peace on earth has been achieved. Of course I am a woman and can’t think like men. Too many men seem to think with their dicks. And women just don’t get it.

A classic example of dick-thinking is the story of Camelot. King Arthur’s queen, Guenevere, fell in love with the handsome Sir Lancelot, and the Lancelot penis was allowed entry into the Guenevere vagina. Result? Time for a war and for 10,000 soldiers to die. Hello?? Women don’t think like that. Why does anyone? Work it out! Talk it over! Killing each other is stupid. If you don’t agree, then of course stop reading and leave the room, and try not to get carpet burns on your knuckles as you do so.

Whether King Arthur ever existed may never be known. He is lost in the mists of time. But a monarch who most definitely existed, King Henry VIII, is known well, and is a victim of dick-thinking. We all know about his many wives and how desperate he was to marry Anne Boleyn. She did not want to be just another mistress, as was her sister, so she held out. Make me Queen or you will not freely stick that penis into my vagina. Same theme, huh? What has been tragically warped about this history of Henry VIII is that he supposedly disposed of his wives because he wanted some new pussy. WRONG. He had access to almost every female in England, if he wanted it. Sleeping with the king usually came with some reward—perhaps a promotion for your father. Whatever. The point is, what Henry wanted was a legitimate, male heir, hopefully more than one, to take over when he died. He knew that without such a successor England would be attacked immediately upon his death. He was right. He had all the pussy he wanted! At a moment’s notice! Stop with that! Everyone gets that wrong. Henry wanted England to stay strong after his death.

For whatever reason, Henry’s male children were mostly stillborn, and the one that survived, for a while, was sickly and died early. (Perhaps too many years of inbreeding??) Bessie Blount, a mistress of Henry’s, supposedly “proved” that Henry was capable of producing a healthy, male child. Are you women laughing with me? Ten minutes in the dead of night with the gardener could indeed give Bessie a healthy, male baby. Oh, for a DNA test on that! But Henry believed it was his. I do not. He had a serious problem of some kind.

What has all this to do with stonings? Just everything. It’s RELIGION that made sex “dirty.” Sex is the most natural thing in the world. It isn’t dirty. It’s necessary to keep a species going, and for the most part we all enjoy it greatly. Please tell me what’s wrong with that. I’d really like to know.

The Iranian captive, Ashtiani, which this piece began with, has an unknown fate. Stone her, don’t stone her, her country’s leader’s don’t care. She killed her husband. Okay. But allowing the wrong penis to enter her vagina could mean the end of civilization as we know it. You know what, Islam Law? You are still knuckle-draggers and embarrass those of us who have learned how to love and learn. What are you so afraid of? Are you afraid that some woman will tell another woman that your dick is micro-small? And even if it were, who gives a damn? Are we all in danger of global annihilation because of men like you and your dick-think?

Let’s hope not.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

For Us? Jail. For Priests? A Retreat!

2010-07-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

A man creeps out from the bushes, grabs a young boy, pulls the child back to the concealment of the bushes, slaps a piece of duct tape across the child’s mouth for silence, throws the terrified boy into a waiting van, and drives off. All in less than 30 seconds. That boy is his for as long as he wants him. He drives to a pre-planned, secluded place in the woods somewhere. He sexually abuses the boy for as long as he wants, in any way he wants. Unless there are witnesses, he will never be caught. When he’s through with the child, he tosses him into a remote leafy ravine and gets on with his life. Finishing off his bottle of bourbon, which he also tosses into the ravine, he looks forward to examining the many Polaroids of his abuse of the little boy. He won’t keep the photos too long of course. He will burn them eventually. He is not stupid. He is just evil. There will be more children and more photos in his future.

If this monster is unlucky enough to be discovered and prosecuted, he will be tried, convicted and thrown into prison for a very long time. However, only a tiny percentage of these perverts are ever caught, and there are still psychologists who think that with “talk therapy” such men can be cured. Bull. You cannot “fix” pedophiles or serial rapists. Their brains are wired wrong from the start, and all you can hope to do is keep them away from any future victims.

Remove those ugly thoughts from your mind and think of something beautiful and serene, like a lovely church. With stained glass windows, and perhaps some chanting in the distance, peace reigns supreme on gorgeous grounds, meticulously groomed. This is true beauty.

Imagine now a priest asking one young altar boy to stay behind after the others have left. The boy feels honored. Very special. “Yes, Father?” the boy asks sweetly.

The priest leads the little boy into his private quarters, and offers to watch some videos with him. Popcorn, cola—this is heaven! The priest of course knows that the child is one of seven to a single mother who has to work two jobs just to put food on her meager table. The little boy appreciates the attention—and the popcorn! This is a treat he never sees at home. The stage is set.

These “special” get-togethers become more frequent and the boy’s mother couldn’t be happier or more proud. Her little one is special! The priest said so! She prays to God and to the Blessed Virgin, thanking them for this honor. Life is not easy, but this helps to make all her hard work seem more meaningful. “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art Thou . . . .”

As the priest and the boy become closer, the priest will often put his arm around the child and sometimes stroke his thighs. The boy doesn’t even notice. He’s eating his ice cream cone! But when the stroking involves the boy’s genitals he is uncomfortable. His ice cream cone isn’t as good. He’s distracted by the priests two hands, now fondling his genitals and his backside. Something is wrong, and as young as he is he knows that. But what to do?

As these “special” sessions become more frequent, the boy notices that the videos have changed. No longer generic cartoons and cowboy movies, they show men fondling little boys, first in clothes and then naked! This is completely new to the child and he looks away at first. The priest fondles more firmly and the boy now knows he’s in trouble. He can’t just leave. This is his priest! Eventually, as he feared, his clothes are removed and his naked body is now being caressed. There is no need to go into any more detail as the progression is so predictable. Clothes come off of both of them, and the priest does things with his mouth and then asks the boy to do the same to him. Then there is more. When the child finally gets to go home, he is vaguely ashamed and thoroughly confused. Why was this priest doing this to him?

If this monster is unlucky enough to be discovered, he will not be prosecuted. Nooooooooooo. No, this monster will be sent to a retreat somewhere, with lovely gardens and water fountains, where he will try to “talk” through his “problem.” Or he will simply be sent to a different diocese where he will have a fresh batch of boys to prey on. Why should this be so? How is the priest any different from the man with the van in the bushes?

The simple answer: he isn’t. He’s a pedophile, just like the van man. Zero difference—except the priest has the protection of the largest and most influential church on earth. They all did. Being a Catholic priest was a pedophile’s heaven. So to speak. Tsk, tsk. Naughty priest? Well, let’s quietly relocate him. And that is precisely what has been going on for over a thousand years.

In a 1970 Oakland, California case, a particularly brutal case of abuse was reported quite differently in two different publications. In The Catholic Voice, Fr. Kiesle was accused of “lewd conduct with minors.” In the Contra Costa Times, a secular newspaper, Kiesle was reported “tying up and molesting two preteen boys in the rectory of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Union City.” Don’t quite sound like the same stories, do they?

The current pope, Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratziner at the time, did everything possible to delay, conceal and evade the whole mess, and he tried mightily to make the whole thing go away. It didn’t.

It’s a Freaking Felony!

Now would be a good time to take a breath and examine this whole thing more carefully. In all the articles about priest abuse you read words like laicization and defrocking and removed from active duty and sent on extended leave and counseling and on and on as if they had committed some minor infractions. They are felons! It is a felony to rape children, but here again we see the Catholic Church’s enormous power, even over the secular press.

But even in the regular news we hear about “sex offenders.” What the hell is a sex offender? Is that someone who engages in sex even though he has extreme body odor? The wording makes it seem that innocuous. A child rapist is not an “offender.” He’s a violent criminal. Or molester. There’s another euphemism. Molest? If a boy pulls really hard on a girl’s pony tail, he’s molesting her. If a priest rapes a boy he is committing a heinous, violent crime. Let’s change our terminology, shall we?

But terminology aside, let’s change our laws, shall we? It’s bad enough that they pay no property taxes, even on their clearly money-making, secular condominiums, but why should the Roman Catholic Church be exempt from secular laws when they commit felonious crimes? Why? Even though the animal Kiesle was arrested for his crimes in 1978, nothing happened to him for three years, and even at that all that happened was that a letter was sent to Rome for guidance. The letter was ignored and it wasn’t until 1987 that the bastard was defrocked. Rape some boys, lose your vestments. Jeez. Tough rules. And while the Church can afford to pay billions in lawsuits for its priests’ crimes, how many lives were forever ruined? We will never know, but what we do know is that drugs and alcohol and totally undeserved guilt and shame and suicides and all manner of horrible things have happened to victims of these rotten priests. I wish there were a hell for them to burn in.

God's Representatives on Earth

The most enormous difference, however, between the van man and the priests is that children are told, firmly and decisively, at a very early age, that priests are God’s Representatives on Earth. Give that a think. What could ever be more important than that? Who could ever be more important than that? Well, no one. That’s why over the ages priests have been given such respect and treated with such deference. God’s Representative on Earth—with a hard-on. Hmmm. Something doesn’t sound right about that, does it? But that perception of representing God gives them unbridled, thoroughly unlimited power over young children. It’s complete, unhindered power and control. They enjoy that part of the obscenities as well. For many it may be all they ever wanted in the first place. But as God’s Representatives on Earth, when they talk, you listen. That’s how it’s always been. Until very, very recently.

How could a child not be hopelessly confused about what God’s Representative on Earth orders him to do, and what he has been taught at home and school about Good Touch and Bad Touch? The experience must be terrifyingly confusing to a young mind. “Grab your ankles, Timmy!” Disgusting? Of course! But nowhere near as disgusting as what those priests are doing to those boys. We’ll never know how many millions of children like Timmy have suffered over the centuries at the hands of the “Holy” Roman Catholic Church. It all just makes you want to puke. “God’s representative” my aching ass.

“Celibacy” is the current, popular culprit in the worldwide frenzy of the horrific extent of Roman Catholic priests raping altar boys, but that seems unlikely. If it were just celibacy causing all the trouble, then young girls and boys would be raped equally. They are not. These pedophile priests seem to prefer boys. I personally don’t give a damn why that is. I just want to see them all tried and convicted in secular courts and sent to prison like all other pedophiles.

Interesting proof of the boy-thing is that boys are not permitted to begin serving at the Altar after reaching their teens. Why? The official reason is that by then the young men are no longer innocent enough to serve at the altar. The real reason is that if the boys began their altar boy duties when they had already reached their teens, they’d never put up with any of that sex crap. Never. They’d punch out the priests before allowing anything like that to even start. And that’s why all altar boys have always begun their duties in their very young years. They can be cajoled into being raped. Disgusting.

Heil Benedict!

All hell broke lose in Europe this past April when country after country burst forth with their own Roman Catholic priest sex abuse scandals, identical to the American scandals. Ireland was particularly pissed off about the whole thing. It only took more than a thousand years to finally bring some of the scum into the light, but it finally happened.

Pope Benedict XVI perhaps should not be blamed for having been a Nazi. He joined the Hitler Youth when he was 14, which is a very ambiguous, impressionable age. However, you have to wonder what the Cardinals were thinking when they chose him to be pope. Weren’t there any other worthy candidates who had not been youthful Nazis by choice? This colossal faux pas highlights the archaic, obsolete, moth-eaten nature of the whole stupid Catholic Church in the 21st century. It was stupid enough in the first few centuries, but today? Give it a rest! It’s time to end it all. No more priests, bishops, cardinals or popes. And for heaven’s sake, get rid of those idiotic clothes with the cutesy slippers and pointy hats that are disturbingly reminiscent of the KKK’s outfits, and make them all look like idiots.

I am against all religions for reasons stated elsewhere, the main reason being that religions all begin from the premise that humans are filthy scum from the moment of birth. What bullshit. What hurtful, stultifying bullshit. Religions, for the most part, are just money-grubbing control freaks and always have been. They want power. Sadly, for most of human history they have had it. I wish I could live long enough to see them all fade into nothingness. But of course I won’t.

However, it is some small comfort that the child-destroying Catholic priests can never overcome the disdain and contempt they deserve. They have finally been smoked out of their filthy foxholes. I’m grateful enough for that!

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Best source for all this and more:

http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/a01Pedophilia_crisis.htm#crisis

When You Wish Upon a Star

2010-05-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

When you wish upon a star, makes no diff-rence who you are,

Anything your heart desires will come to you.

If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme,

When you wish upon a star as dreamers do.

Fate is kind, she brings to those who love,

The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.

Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you thru,

When you wish upon a star your dream comes true.

Okay. I know it is a children’s song written for a children’s Disney movie, Pinocchio. And I know it was sung by a cricket. But it is nevertheless a bunch of rubbish. It couldn’t be further from the truth, and just why it was written at all was, I guess, to give children a sense of hope and optimism. I don’t know. I didn’t write it. Nor would I ever. Why do I care one way or another? I’ll bet you already know where this is headed.

I believe that filling children’s heads with hopeless, unattainable goals is not only foolish, but cruel. “You can do anything you set your mind to.” Wrong. I hate that preposterous, overused cliché. If you are already two grades behind in fourth grade math, and never manage to catch up with everybody else, you will never be a nuclear physicist. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with not being a nuclear physicist.

What is wrong though is that those platitudes about accomplishing anything you set out to accomplish is that some children actually believe it, and when they fail, they feel that they are true failures. They didn’t try hard enough. They failed. Well, if they tried their best, they are not failures. They just didn’t have the ability to fulfill their dreams. Most of us don’t. So don’t fill children’s heads with unrealistic poppycock. Set realistic goals and let them feel the sense of accomplishment they deserve when they achieve what they are able to achieve with their best efforts.

Jiminy Cricket’s “Wish Upon a Star” song in Disney’s movie Pinocchio is referring to life in general and specifically to the puppet-maker, Geppetto, who wishes on a star that his newly made little wooden puppet could be a real boy. With the help of a blue fairy and other Disney magic, Pinocchio in fact becomes a real boy. It’s a cute story, with great animation and terrific music, but it is not real life. Almost all children can differentiate between cartoons and real life, but when their parents or teachers or religious leaders begin to echo the same unrealistic themes found in cartoons, confusion can set in and you are setting a child up for major disappointments.

It could be argued that childhood is mostly a long series of disillusionments, but why add to that list? I’m all for optimism, but it must be realistic to do a child any good. Enter religion.

No one has ever demonstrated that a heaven or a hell or any kind of god exists, and until someone does, let’s acknowledge the intelligence and common sense our children are born with. Let them read and learn and develop their minds. Don’t shut their intellects down with stifling, frightening, often stupid rules and unproved ideas. Once they are adults, if they choose to believe in invisible gods and angels and devils and Dante’s Inferno, well, that’s their choice. But telling young children that if they pray hard enough (to your particular god) their prayers will be answered is no different from Jiminy Cricket’s assurance that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. No, they won’t. In either instance. Wish, pray—there’s no difference.

A Sad, True Story
Many years ago I had a very brief encounter with a Pentecostal family. Very brief. I happened to be living in the same apartment complex as this family and got to know the couple and their two children, both girls. One girl, Sarah, was twelve, and the other, Rebecca, was six. Rebecca had leukemia. I was already a full-blown closet atheist, so their constant references to the Lord got on my nerves. But Sarah, the twelve-year-old, seemed to enjoy talking to me, although I never brought up religion. Ever. Sarah, however, never stopped bringing it up.

It seems that Sarah knew how sick her little sister was and she had been told by her parents and everyone at her church that if her faith was strong enough and she prayed hard enough, her little sister would get better. Simple! (Sounds kind of like Jiminy Cricket’s advice, doesn’t it? “If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.”) Long story short, Rebecca died. Sarah was devastated and blamed herself for the death. She knew, she just knew, that if she had prayed more often and prayed harder, that Rebecca would have lived. Her guilt knew no bounds. She gave away all of her toys, telling me they had kept her from praying. She sought me out often to talk about it, but I was struggling mightily to fight off the urge to beat the crap out of her parents.

Why? When I once tried to approach Sarah’s mother about the child’s terrible, misplaced guilt, the mother took offense and told me that Sarah’s problem was Sarah’s problem, and none of my business. I quickly distanced myself from this family, unable to listen to any more of poor Sarah’s heart-rending sadness or her mother’s bullshit. I’ll never know if guilt-ridden Sarah ever got over her trauma. They moved shortly after the death. But I know that I will never get over my disgust for such child abuse. To my mind, it is nothing less than that.

Two for One

Religions of course are based on the twin concepts of failure and guilt. One example is the ridiculous burden placed on little boys when they discover that they have penises that enjoy being touched. Mother Nature provided this special pleasure so that the species would continue to survive. But many religions, the Roman Catholic Church being a prime example, tells young boys that if they fail to resist the temptation of masturbation, they are guilty of a sin. Failure, guilt and sin rolled into one neat package. But you might as well tell children to never feel hunger or pain. Erections are as natural as the sunrise, and often happen then. If you awake with a penis that is rigid enough to support a circus tent, what else can you do but touch it? You will not go blind if you give it the attention it is begging for, and to teach such frightening lies about it is another form of religious child abuse.

If you are constantly being told that you are a guilty failure, and that’s what Catholic Confession is all about, your reliance on those prayers (given to you as punishments) become essential to your peace of mind. Okay. I’ll say 50 “Our Fathers” and 25 “Hail Marys” and my conscience will be clear. More or less. How can this not be considered asinine? Mutter some words by rote, as fast as you can, and suddenly you’re all clear with God for beating up little Michael O’Rourke, who is two grades behind you. Well, no. The hell with your meaningless recitations. What you should be told is to go to Michael and apologize to him and his parents. But the church wants to keep you bound and chained to it, so it decides how to treat your bad behavior. Nonsense. All of it nonsense. Unless of course….

You, as a church, want to keep your flock in line, which means keeping those collection plates full. Too cynical? I think not. The Vatican alone could feed half the world if it sold a tiny portion of its art collections. The growing number of Megachurches, with more than 20,000 members each, could do the same, but they’d rather keep their money and build fabulous glass palaces and fund rock bands and so on. Keep the money close to your vest, don’t you know.

All the while preachers are pleading for donations “to the Lord” they are scolding their parishioners to pray for forgiveness for all their sins. Try to picture this. You put your hard-earned money into the collection plate and then pray for forgiveness. There’s something wrong with this image.

And of course no church service would be complete without those concluding prayers for people in trouble. “And Lord, please help Sister Edna survive her tragic car accident. And help little Johnny Jackson fight off the dreaded cancer that has invaded his body.” Well, she won’t and neither will he, but why? The Bible tells you to be faithful and to pray to God. But why? Why doesn’t prayer work? It’s like tossing a coin. If you pray or not, bad things will happen. Your Pinocchio will never turn into real little boy.

I’m not alone in finding all this bizarre and way over the top. It’s wishful thinking and nothing more. I just wish all of them could be exposed for the frauds that they are, and start paying taxes like the rest of us poor folk. If you have bilked your flock out of the millions of dollars necessary to build these monstrous altars to your egos, but remain tax exempt, then don’t expect the taxpayer-supported fire department to come to your rescue when you’re on fire. Organize your own fire department and pay for it yourself. Oh, if only.

I do wish that someday all this religious fraud and folderol would come to an end. Oh, how I wish. Maybe if I wish on a star….

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

The Resurrection of Elvis

2010-04-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter! Time for those Easter bunnies and colored eggs and chocolate goodies…though what any of that has to do with the supposed death and resurrection of Jesus is truly puzzling. Actually bunnies and birds’ eggs and all things young and new were a signal to the ancients that the sun was “coming back” after its frightening near-disappearance during the long, bleak winter. Springtime celebrations were a natural response to this natural occurrence for our primitive ancestors. The sun had risen! But trying to connect all that to a theology about human sin and heaven and hell and a savior is quite impossible. So we’ll skip over that part for now since it defies explanation.

But the votes are all in, and it’s final. It is an unchallenged fact that there have been more sightings of Elvis, after his death, than were ever claimed for Jesus after his. According to the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus was seen, after his death, by a handful of women, and/or ten or twelve disciples. That’s it. Elvis Presley, on the other hand, has been seen, after his death, by thousands of people. So right off the bat we have a huge problem here with eyewitness testimony. It would seem that Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, would have received far more fanfare after his death than the King of Rock and Roll, but that’s obviously not true, so on this one the King of Rock beats the King of the Jews hands down.

Actually “King of the Jews” is a meaningless title since Jesus was never king of anything. He was never even elected mayor of anything. From the skimpy details offered about his life, all he ever did was argue with other Jews about technical minutiae in the law of Moses. So we’ll have to skip over that “king” part too since it defies explanation.

“If Jesus was a carpenter, I wonder what he charged for bookshelves.” Woody Allen was a genius with those one-liners, wasn’t he? Still, it’s a valid question. Was Jesus a carpenter? Did he earn money? Did he have to spend money for food? Did he have a home of his own? Where did he sleep when it rained? Where was he living when he was 27, for example?

Aside from being born, and even that year is in dispute (but once again we’ll have to skip over that part for now since it defies explanation), we know nothing at all about Jesus’ childhood and youth except for one visit to one temple around the age he would have been bar mitzvahed. Other than that, we know utterly nothing about his life until he was baptized at age 30. Isn’t that beyond bizarre? Here he is, the Savior of Humankind, sent from God the Father, but it’s none of our business how he spent his time during the twenty-odd most important formative years of his life. Did he have any siblings? Did he go through a rebellious period like all teenagers? Did he ever steal from anyone? Smoke weed? Have any girlfriends? Was he gay? Did he swear? Why have we been kept in the dark about this hugely important subject? For a hilarious explanation of this monumental silence, and there are many, here is just one, supposedly explaining this inexplicable gap in the story of Jesus:

From this incident to His baptism at age 30, all we know of Jesus’ youth was that He left Jerusalem and returned to Nazareth with His parents and “was obedient to them” Luke 2:51. He fulfilled His duty to His earthly parents in submission to the 5th commandment, an essential part of the perfect obedience to the law of Moses which He rendered on our behalf. Beyond that, all we know is that “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52).

Evidently, this is all God determined that we needed to know. There are some extra-Biblical writings which contain stories of Jesus’ youth (the Gospel of Thomas, for example). But we have no way of knowing whether any of these stories are true and reliable. God chose not to tell us much about Jesus’ childhood—so we have to just trust Him that nothing occurred which we need to know about. -- http://www.gotquestions.org/Jesus-childhood.html

Nothing occurred which we need to know about? Hey, wait a minute! This is the supposed Savior of the World! Why is it none of our business what he did with his life? What?! We know all about the Buddha (who predated Jesus by five centuries) and Confucius (who predated Jesus by over a century) but the far more recent Jesus has a life shrouded in inexcusable mystery. Apparently it’s none of our damn business. What the hell kind of sense does that make?

However, when it comes to the King from Memphis, the man who changed music forever, now we’re talking. We know that Elvis Aaron Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935, and that he had a twin who died at birth and that he went to Humes High School where he bravely wore Vaseline on his hair and competed in and won a musical talent competition and that his real break, after only one lukewarm reception at the Grand Ole Opry, was on the Louisiana Hayride, where his fame began to grow. And he was only twenty by then. Which brings us back to…………..

Say, Jesus, what were you doing when you were twenty? Anything? Nothing? Were you homeless? A beggar? Making bookshelves with your step-father? What the hell were you doing then? Well, we’ll never know, which makes the whole story of the life of Jesus highly suspect. No, not just suspect. Totally unbelievable. In a desperate attempt to unseat the centuries-long, very popular Mediterranean God, Mithra, some Jews cobbled together a story that stole unabashedly from Mithra’s life, and tried to relate some of it to Old Testament prophesies, quite unsuccessfully, I might add. If it hadn’t been for Constantine and his superstitious belief about seeing some cross in the stars before a battle, Christianity would have remained what it had been for its first 300 years—a silly cult, like so many others. How people can still believe this nonsense today is a mystery for the ages. Trying to figure that out is trickier than trying to remember the name of the Lone Ranger’s nephew’s horse. But why in the world do people still believe this “goofy shit” as George Carlin would have called it? Well, we’ll skip over this part too since it defies explanation. (Seems like we’re forced to skip over a lot of stuff, doesn’t it?)

Still, if you’re going to make up a Jewish Savior, why not at least make him a Rabbi? Or a cantor? Or a janitor in a temple? Something. But no, he came out of nowhere and did nothing. Leaving out most of Jesus’ life from the Bible can be compared to writing the life story of Elvis Presley while leaving out everything that happened to him between 1954 and 1974. If that makes no sense to you, congratulations! You’re thinking! Elvis, Jesus, Elvis, Jesus………….who should be more important?

If logic can still be applied to all this folderol, naturally it would be Jesus. And yet, according to the acknowledged biographers of both Elvis and Jesus, Elvis wins by a landslide! He is unquestionably the King of not just Rock and Roll, but the whole resurrection thing! Sorry, Jesus, but numbers don’t lie. The number of people who have seen Elvis since his death so outnumbers the pathetic handful that supposedly saw you is, well, an embarrassment, both to you and your followers.

So there you have it. When it comes to resurrections, it’s Elvis by a landslide, with Jesus running a dismal second, and Lazarus bringing up the rear. As resurrections go, it wasn’t even a contest, and even the line in Vegas wasn’t putting any faith in the Jesus thing. It was Elvis all the way. How this could happen in a country that supposedly still believes this Jesus story is yet another mystery that must be skipped over since it defies any explanation, rational or otherwise. All in all, there’s an awful lot we’re required to “skip over” and/or flat out ignore in order to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus, isn’t there?

Well, happy Easter egg hunting anyway. And please, be fair—do not steal your little brother’s marshmallow bunnies! Or his chocolate guitars!

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Death and Dying

2010-03-01T01:47:00.000-08:00

I began writing, and almost finished this article about a year and a half ago. It was shortly after a dearly loved friend died. We still miss him. As often happens, other issues grabbed my attention and I set this article aside. It has been on the proverbial back burner ever since. But two weeks ago we heard that my best friend on the planet has been told she has breast cancer. I’m still in shock. I have no idea what the future holds of course but the news brought to mind this forgotten article. It will be shorter than my usual columns. My heart isn’t really in it. But as I read it I realized how relevant it is. So, here it is.

__________________________

It’s amazing how many ways we have created to avoid using the word “dead.” We can’t handle it. Even though we learn at an early age that death is a part of life (maybe from a pet goldfish or a dog) when it comes to humans we avoid that word like the plague. Those lesser creatures may die, but we don’t die. Here’s what we do. We “go to a better place.” Like Paris? No, we have died. “Aunt Helen is no longer with us.” What? Did she go on vacation? No. “He has passed away.” “She has passed on.” “Uncle Henry has been taken from us.” Taken? Has he been kidnapped? No. We just refuse to use the simple, obvious, correct word: died.

The ridiculous euphemisms are truly impressive in number. You can probably add a lot more to this list: passed, passed away, crossed over, no longer with us, called by God, with Jesus now, in heaven now, at peace now, have met their Maker, moved to the next world, perished, expired, joined the choir invisible, gave up the ghost, breathed his last, is deceased, departed this life, gone to his reward, or joined the angels. If you’re a little bit more earthy with your language there is also: kicked the bucket, bought the farm, bit the dust, or is pushing up daisies.

Why is this important? Because it positively explains the religions that humans have created. Religions go to extremes, some of them quite bizarre, to avoid the obvious: that death is the end of a person. It’s no different from that goldfish floating at the top of the water, although we don’t usually flush dead humans down the toilet. But we strenuously avoid saying simply, “I’m sorry. Aunt Barbara died.” No, it’s usually passed on or passed away. Those are the favorites.

These strange euphemisms tell us a great deal about how religions began to begin with. They are meant to cheat death. No, we tell ourselves, we don’t die, at least not like the other animals. True, our bodies begin to decompose right from the start, just like the other animals, but, and here’s the all-important difference, we have something they don’t have. We have those invisible, undetectable, supernatural things called souls. Not only that, but there are “places” for those souls to go to after death. Of course now we get to the tricky part. No religion agrees with the others about just what those “afterlives” are, but we put on our blinders and thank our various gods that at lease we know the truth. We believe in the right god. Whew! Good luck for us, huh? And, basically, we just ignore the other two-thirds of the world and figure, well, if they won’t believe what I believe, the hell with them. Literally.

The arrogant and illogical thinking that goes into these sorts of beliefs are breathtaking. When you throw the possibility of reincarnation into the mix, you have a real mess. And yet it’s just another version of trying to avoid the inevitable: death means the end. Death is a generally unpleasant event for all concerned and I do not mean to dismiss it lightly. But we need no threats of hell or promise of heaven to be decent to each other. Nor is that ridiculous computer game stuff needed. “Prisoner’s Dilemma” is a good example of one of those games. It assumes that the only reason one human helps another is that someday that other will help back. Tit for tat or whatever. Play your games all you like, but RA (reciprocal altruism) is all bullshit. The only reason we humans cooperate with each other is because if we did not, we wouldn’t be here. Our infants take such a long time to become independent that if we did not have cooperation in our communities, all the babies would die. Extinction would embrace us quickly. Anthropologist are always forgetting about the babies and the enormous amount of help they need from everyone.

Anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere, this idea of helping others was powerfully demonstrated to me years ago when I was in a supermarket. A woman was struggling with a cantankerous infant as she tried to keep him in the seat of the shopping cart. The whole store could hear the baby’s defiant cries. (Perhaps the whole city.) All of a sudden there was a woman’s scream as she and the shopping cart and the infant all crashed to the floor. Every single person in my vision rushed to the crash scene. There were so many of us we got in each other’s way. Everyone wanted to help, and gradually some calm was restored, and the store manager phoned for paramedics to look at mother and child, to make sure they were okay. My point? We were all total strangers, with no expectations whatsoever of ever receiving some favor from anyone later on. We just cared. Our reactions were instant and identical: Can we help you?

This lengthy example is to show how we do care about each other, with no thoughts of getting a payback someday. The tragic news coverage of earthquakes and floods and so on all reveal the same thing: strangers helping strangers. People use their bare hands to try to rescue trapped victims. They have no time to think about heaven or hell or vengeful gods or any of the rest of that crap. In emergencies we show the essence of human kindness. Atheists are in there digging frantically with all the others. No gods required.

I mean no disrespect to those who are going through this process of dying or grieving for a loved one. But if common sense is allowed into the consideration of death, life takes on a whole new meaning. This is all there is, people, so make the most of it! Life is not just a waiting place for some unknowable paradise after death! It is what it is—life! It has a beginning and it has an end. So make the most of every moment and help others to do the same.

We can love and help and encourage and praise each other without gods. And we can face death without gods. Actually we should face death without gods—it makes life all the more precious. And when death is threatening, as with my friend, I will do everything in my power to help her. Do her shopping, her laundry, keep her company, play cards with her, anything that might help. What I will not be doing is saying a prayer to an invisible god to make her well. Those sorts of prayers are, as far I’m concerned, a lazy cop-out. The praying may make you feel better, but what your friend needs at the moment is clean sheets.

This is way secular humanists look at life and death. And I am happy to be one of those people.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Agnostic Unicorns

2010-02-01T00:48:00.000-08:00

Back in 2001 I wrote two articles about agnosticism. I said there is no such thing as an agnostic. That’s because there isn’t. But now, today, for reasons unknown, there is a firestorm out there about those articles and I’m stunned. My site receives a lot of visitors, yes, but in just one week last month I received over 6,000 hits. Just one week. What the heck is going on?

My husband Pat, who is my Web Master, checked into the stats and found that not only was my site really being bombarded, but that the subject of agnosticism was the main focus. Blogs were filled with it and arguing rather vehemently about it. I’m fascinated but baffled. Why this topic? Why now? My only disappointment about the whole thing is that I obviously did not make my points clearly enough from the start.

Pat tells me that most of the ISPs have addresses ending with .edu so we are not talking about a bunch of young kids. These were all colleges and universities. I am fully aware that many of my columns are lifted en masse for term papers. The only reason that bothers me is that it reflects a lot of lazy minds. But serious, thoughtful debate is always a healthy and stimulating thing.

In looking back on those articles I wrote I can see some weak spots in some of my arguments. (See There Is No Such Thing As an Agnostic and Pistols at Dawn? Agnosticism Revisited for a refresher course.) Well, I’m going to give it another try now and hopefully my points will be more crisp and concise. I’ll try to be more explicit about the whole thing. Please forgive some of the necessary repetition from my 2001 articles. So then. Let’s begin, yet again, at the beginning.

I can believe in agnosticism. I can believe in unicorns. I can believe in agnostic unicorns. What I may not do is claim that agnostic unicorns exist. I may believe it, but I may not claim to know it. Why? Because to believe something and to know something are different things. They often coincide, but are not synonymous. And this is where the arguments derail. In all the arguing there are two entirely different questions being dealt with as if they were one. They are not. They are two and they are as different as night and day.

First question: Is there a God?

Second question: Do you believe in a God?

How can anyone say that those two questions are the same question? The existence of a God is open for discussion. However, the question of whether or not you, personally, believe in a God is not open for question. You know whether you do or you do not worship a deity. It is a simple yes or no proposition. The people I refer to as “fence-sitters” are those who have doubts about the existence of any gods of any kind. That doubt means they do not have faith in a deity. They may be considering the possibility. Fair enough. Consider away. However, while you’re considering you are not worshipping. You are thinking, comparing, doubting, perhaps wishing. But you do not possess theistic beliefs. You’re sort of window-shopping. Which is also fair enough. But until you truly believe in some sort of deity, and believe it with no doubts, you are without theistic belief. A person without theistic belief is simply and logically (!) identified as an atheist—one without theistic beliefs.

It sounds simple enough, but the sticking point, the snag, the trap we all fall into lies in the simple but wholly important meanings of two small words: beliefs and truths. There are truths and there are beliefs and often they do not coincide. Unicorns are a good example. Do they exist? I may certainly believe that they do but I may not claim that they do. Why? Because unicorns cannot be detected in any way. They cannot be seen, touched, heard, or in any way detected by the human senses. They also cannot be detected by any non-human means such as X-rays, CT-scans, MRIs (Magnetic resonance imaging), sonograms, infrared sensors or anything else known to science.

You can ask hundreds of thousands of questions that can be answered with an unequivocal yes. Is there such a thing as water? Is there such a thing as a rainbow? Does the Earth have a moon? Is there an aurora borealis? Does snow exist? The reason these questions can be answered so positively is that they can be proven. There is no need for faith or hope to believe that they exist. They can all be proved to be true.

However, when we enter the realm of the “supernatural” we have a whole new ballgame. By definition, anything supernatural exists outside the natural world—therefore, super-natural. Unlike the previous questions about snow and rainbows, which are part of our natural world and easily proven, supernatural entities are not part of our natural world and most definitely can not be proven. Therefore faith and hope are required to believe in them. But that’s all that supports the “existence” of those things—faith and hope. Do leprechauns exist? Are there mermaids? Are there unicorns? Is there a God? Is there a Loch Ness monster? Since no one has verifiably seen any of those things, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know.” And this is what self-identified agnostics are trying to do. They are trying to slip God into this group of unverifiable beings, but with a lot more fanfare.

No one gives a flip if there is a Loch Ness monster or not. However, if there were a God who could explain the beginning of the universe, and be prayed to and listen to us and our dire needs, and perform much needed miracles………..and on and on and on. Well, then, the world would be a much more understandable place, at least to our remote ancestors who created the idea of deities in the first place. And those deities would need to be placated and worshipped and obeyed in order to keep things running smoothly—like making sure the sun comes up in the morning. No one ever seriously thought leprechauns or unicorns created the universe and needed to be worshipped to keep things running smoothly. They were simply rather cute fantasies and the source of stories for the little ones at bedtime. But an almighty God? Time to start praying.

This is how things stood for century after century, as gods came and went, some staying around for many centuries, like Mithra, who was said to have been the Savior of humankind and born of a virgin, and competed with Christianity for 300 years. And it’s probably a safe guess to say that almost all humans, taking no chances, believed in whatever the locally accepted gods were. Probably the most famous (and most brilliant) rebel along those lines was Socrates (469-399 BC) who was sentenced to death for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges.”

This common state of affairs meant that if you asked any average human whether they believed a god or gods existed, you’d get a definite YES! If you found an occasional heretic who said no, and who would probably be burned at the stake for saying it, it would be a rarity. Aside from imbeciles, you would never hear, “I don’t know.” It was then, like it is now, a simple yes or no question. Do you believe in God?

Then, in 1825, along came a man named Thomas Henry Huxley. Born in England, he became a biologist. While most would say that his most notable claim to fame was that he became known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his fierce advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution, I claim otherwise. I will state with a fair amount of certainty, that the most notable and infamous action he ever undertook was to decide to coin a new word: agnostic. He just made it up out of whole cloth. It had never been used before. But Huxley began using it in 1869 and the fur has been flying since. It is a weasel word. It is not only meaningless, it is quite stupid. To say that you don’t know whether or not there is a God is quite reasonable. No one knows the answer to that. To say that you don’t know whether or not you believe in a God is ridiculous. Of course you know! Either you do or you don’t, and you know which it is.

No one, not you nor I nor Thomas Henry Huxley could ever say with certainty that there is or is not a God. Only someone with infinite knowledge of the universe could confirm or deny that proposition and I’ve never heard anyone claim to have infinite knowledge of the universe. However, most of us fall into the bad habit of using a shorthand version of a lengthy idea. We atheists will scoff and say, “There is no God!” The true, longhand version of that is, “I do not believe in any gods that have thus far been offered for consideration.” And there are hundreds to choose from. But we atheists have no idea if there’s a god or not, any more than anyone else does. That’s part of the problem too, and part of the reason there is so much argumentation over the meaningless word “agnostic.”

Pollsters don’t help by asking the kind of questions they ask. They push us into a corner, more or less forcing a yes or no. If you say “I don’t know” then the non-word agnostic is thrown into the poll. But they are asking the wrong question, just like the rest of us usually do. They ask if you believe in God as if that were the same as asking if there is a God. Sorry, Charlie, those are not the same questions. But they treat them as if the two of them are the same.

Faith must be 100% solid or it is not true faith. It’s like pregnancy. It’s a yes or a no. There is no in between. There is no point in saying a prayer “hoping” that someone will hear it. If you are not certain that someone will hear it, then you are not certain that a god exists. If you are not certain that a god exists then you are not a true believer. You do not possess a clear, unambiguous faith in a deity. You are therefore an atheist until you acquire that unambiguous faith. Hoping has nothing to do with it. True belief makes you a true theist. Hoping makes you a true atheist. It is so simple.

Keep in mind that hundreds of well-respected philosophers debated the existence of God, the nature of God, the need for a god and so on, for centuries; yet they never felt the need for the word “agnostic.” It wasn’t until a strong-willed biologist, trying to separate the new scientific theory of evolution from the dreaded, hated word “atheism” that the silly word, agnosticism, was made up in 1869. And we’ve been battling over it since.

So the next time someone asks you if you believe in God, a first good response (my favorite) is which God? But you also might want to throw in, “Are you asking if I believe in God or are you asking if there is a God? Because on that second part, I haven’t a clue. And neither do you.”

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. (Delos McKown)

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Church and State: An Unholy Alliance

2010-01-01T20:19:00.000-08:00

Why did he have to say it? Why did President Barack Obama, at the sorrowful, stirring memorial service for the victims of the Ft. Hood shootings, feel the need to make reference to some sort of divine retribution? Obviously referring to the suspected killer, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Obama crossed a line. He said, “This much we do know—no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world, and the next.” If only he had left out those last six words.

Which “next” world was Obama speaking about? The Muslim afterlife, with Paradise or Hell as promised by Hasan’s God, Allah? Or the Christian versions of those without the virgins? Or was it some other afterlife altogether? The president unwisely coupled religion with secular law and in doing so he made a lot of us squirm. Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, stated outright that he believed Obama had crossed a line with those six words, and most of his guests agreed.

The “murderous and craven acts” of course refer to the tragic killings at Ft. Hood, Texas. In the early afternoon on November 5, 2009, thirteen people were killed and dozens more wounded by gunfire on that military base. Shot but not killed was the obvious murderer, Maj. Nidal Hasan. We will probably never know all the details about what happened and why. But one thing we do know is that Maj. Hasan, a self-proclaimed, ardent Muslim, had very conflicted feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since American soldiers were killing Muslims. As early as 2007 Hasan delivered a lecture at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that was supposed to be about a medical topic of his choosing. Instead he talked about Islam and suicide bombers and the difficulty Muslims encountered when trying to morally justify the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why weren’t red flags flapping wildly at that point? Did no one find that out of place? It’s painfully clear that Hasan could not separate his feelings of obligation toward church and state. His secular military duties and his religious obligations clashed irreconcilably. Nor can he possibly be the only individual in our military with the same conflicts of interest. Makes you feel real safe, huh? Way to go, Homeland Security!

It’s time to stop this asinine PC crap and call a spade a spade. This is no time to be grasping for “politically correct” solutions to nutcases like Hasan. He should have been weeded out and put in a straight jacket long ago. Likewise, it’s time we stopped the PC nonsense of talking about tribal rivalries and culture clashes and the rest of that BS. It’s religion. Nothing more and nothing less. Religion. That attempted bombing of the Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day (get the symbolism?? huh??) was a purely religious act. I’m tired of watching the frantic tap-dancing of the spin doctors in trying to avoid the glaringly obvious. It’s religion, people!

Osama bin Forgotten

Try to remember what 9/11 was all about. If “decadence” and freedoms were truly the motivations for the attacks, then the obscenely decadent indoor ski resort in Dubai should have been at the top of bin Laden’s hit list. With 22,500 square meters of indoor ski area, Dubai also boasts an 85-meter indoor mountain for skiing. Yes, indoor mountain. Shopping malls, restaurants, theaters, shooting galleries, the list is endless. Strictly Muslim, of course (a wink and a nudge on that one) you can find all the sex, drugs and decadence your wallet can afford. Bush’s lame explanation of how bin Laden envied our freedoms was a lot of crap. Bin Laden was instead fuming over the fact that American troops, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, had desecrated the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia with their presence there. Don’t forget that both Mecca and Medina, holy cities for Muslims, are in Saudi Arabia. We defiled their Holy Land and bin Laden never got over that. It was all about religion.

A Utopian Dream

Try to imagine today’s world with no religion in it. I’m serious. Try it. It’s not easy. Of course there have always been wars of greed and there always will be probably, but I ask you again to picture today’s world with no religion. For the moment don’t think back into ancient history as well. Your head might explode.

In this particular thought experiment, focus specifically on certain cities and regions of the world: Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, Rome, Ireland, Indonesia, all the Southern states in the USA, and, who’s kidding who, the entire Middle East—all of it, especially Israel. It’s a tall order, I know, but at least try to imagine all those areas with no religions.

Now. What is everybody fighting about? Border disputes? Of course. Mineral resources? Of course. Whose penis is bigger than whose? Of course. However, can you imagine the same chaos we’re experiencing now with no religion mixed in at all? Can you imagine the intensity of the hatred bristling everywhere with no religion involved? If you say yes, you are lying.

Atheists can be bastards too, but we never feel the religious fervor, the zealous hatred that True Believers know so well. And exploit so well. If you think your head won’t actually explode, let’s look back. The problems of religious warfare reach far back into our human history. In the year of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, 632 AD, the Shia and Sunni factions split immediately and have been warring ever since. In the 11th century the state-sponsored Crusades into the “holy land” to be fought against the Muslims, were launched by the Catholic pope and continued, on and off, for two hundred years. The Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century was just an extension of the overall medieval inquisitions begun in the 12th century, all of which were state-sponsored purges of religious “heretics.” The combination of the nobles and the priests of the Aztecs resulted in human sacrifices to their many gods during the 13th and 14th centuries. Politics and religion were indistinguishable during Europe’s Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, which wrought devastation to the countries (mostly Germany) involved. In our own budding nation, during the 17th century, the Salem witch trials made their ugly appearance. And so on.

If we do not learn from history we are destined to repeat it; but our record in that area is not very good. For whatever reason (hubris? hope?) we act as if what has happened before, over and over again, will not necessarily happen again. Well, given the same conditions, yes, it will. We need to remind ourselves of what can (and usually does) happen when religion and politics are united.

We often hear about the “clash of cultures” we are experiencing but never about the clash of religions. Everyone sidesteps that one, fearing the incendiary nature of any discussions that might result from that observation. Well, it’s time to stop sidestepping. We Americans value democracy and freedom, which are only sustainable when church and state are separated. In countries where that separation is blurred or nonexistent, there can be no freedom. We find ourselves at a loss in dealing with such countries. The harsh reality of that fact was highlighted when, shortly after the horror of 9/11, the diplomacy-challenged George W. Bush foolishly (or maliciously) used the word “crusade” to describe our proposed war on terrorism. The backlash against that word was immediate and violent among Muslims. Anyone who understands history will understand that backlash.

But our foray into Iraq in 2003 demonstrated the depths of our ignorance in relating to Islam. When confronted with the warring factions of the Sunni Muslims and the Shia Muslims, we were caught in the crossfire of religious warfare and were clearly unprepared to deal with any of it. The killings were horrific and only occurred because there was no dependable secular government to deal with. It is all about religion. We are finding the same problems in Afghanistan.

But even after all of that, even after recognizing the disastrous results of church/state fusions in ancient history as well as recent history, far too many American groups are still hell-bent on forcing fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity into our public forums and into our government. Why? Why are they doing that? Why is this happening in a country that already offers such generous freedoms for religions? Listening to some of the grandstanding political speeches coming from our own Congress, you sometimes think you are listening to an old-fashioned tent revival. God is constantly invoked to make political points. This has to stop. This is moving toward theocracy. God does not belong on C-SPAN.

All we have to do is look around the world, which is now so easy to do on the Internet, to understand the dangers of providing tax dollars for religions, uniting church and state. We must learn, finally, the lessons of such unhealthy unions. And we should all cherish the freedom of and from religion that our Constitution so wisely created.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Sources:

Hardball, Chris Matthews, MSNBC, 11/11/09

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120138496 (11/6/09)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR2009111117825.html (11/9/09)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-memorial-service-fort-hood (11/10/09)

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/Fort+Hood+shooting+suspect+charged+with+murder/2214996/story.html (11/12/09)

http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/documents/nidal_hasan/Hasan_2007.pdf

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/12/30/2009-12-30_somali_.html

"Let His Days Be Few"

2009-12-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

Probably the most popular holiday movie ever made was It’s a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. The 1946 movie, released in early January of 1947, features a hardworking small businessman, George Bailey, who runs a small building and loan association which caters to disadvantaged borrowers. His nemesis is a greedy, cruel, nasty banker, Mr. Potter, who tries to run him out of business and almost succeeds. Potter enjoys throwing regular middle-class people out of their homes. Saving the day is an oddball angel named Clarence. The film is an emotional roller-coaster, with good, of course, winning out over evil. It ends beautifully.

For two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, the movie ran on almost every TV channel that existed, during the Christmas holiday season. Because of copyright issues in the 1990s, the movie no longer permeates the holiday season. But I always enjoyed it, despite the angel business. However, I won’t be watching it even if it airs this year. Why? Because this year, 2009, in the good ol’ USA, Mr. Potter has won. Decent, regular middle-class people are losing their homes and their jobs, in droves. For most Americans, life is anything but wonderful, and for many it is hellish.

I wanted to lighten up this month and have a few giggles, but that’s a tricky business right now. Some people can’t even afford to buy presents this year. How do you explain that to a 6-year-old at Christmas?

“Sorry, Timmy, but Santa can’t bring you any toys this year because his portfolio was heavily leveraged in mortgage-backed securities. We tried re-capitalization, Timmy, but there are too many toxic assets on the balance sheets. If Santa doesn’t start laying off elves the whole workshop’s got to shut down.”

I am staggered by what is happening in this country. And all of it is bad. They’re calling it a recession, but with over 10% unemployment (almost 20% if you consider underemployment) and those numbers still going up rapidly, I call it a Depression. They call the plan to send another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to join the 60,000 already there, a “troop augmentation to get the job done.” I call it Vietnam. It’s déja vu all over again. They call it a whopping Democratic majority in the House and Senate. I call it a continuation of the Bush administration. Bail out Wall Street and the hell with the middle class.

And, to top it all off, we have a return of the virulently racist underbelly of this country. It is a part of us that I thought was mostly fading away. I was wrong. The presidential campaigning throughout 2008 offered some warning of what might follow, but it seemed that things might settle down after the November election. They did not. They became progressively worse to the point that by August of this year I could only stare at the TV in disbelief. In 1950? Yes. That might have been the USA. But in 2009?

The Ku Klux Klan Throws a Tea Party

This past summer we witnessed insanity on a level I’ve never seen in this country. I was too young to remember the race riots of the 1950s and early 1960s, so this is new territory for me. I do know that as I look around today I realize this is not the country I grew up in. This is new, alien and awful. The so-called “tea parties” in August were supposedly “grass-roots” movements by regular Americans to protest President Barack Obama’s policies—oh, and also the fact that Obama was not born in the United States. They challenged his birth certificate. They say he was not born in America.

However, considering the average intelligence of the people I heard interviewed, and the misspelled protest signs they were carrying, it is quite possible that these people don’t realize that Hawaii is a state. After all, it’s only been a state since 1959, so maybe they haven’t heard about it yet. Here are a few examples of their signs:

All spelling and capitalization errors were on the posters. And I guess these people have never heard of the 1936 Olympics in Germany, where Hitler stomped out and refused to present any medals to Jesse Owens, an American black man. But what, you may ask, does all this have to do with religion? Well, with no exceptions, these 2009 people were self-proclaimed Christians. They loudly and proudly called themselves Christians. They were 100% white for the first couple of weeks; but many news analysts commented on that and ultimately there were a few blacks here and there. But only a few, and they looked uncomfortable. (I wonder if they were paid to be there?)

The first Ku Kux Klan, formed in 1866 to terrorize black people, slowly gave way to the second KKK, formed in 1915. This newer Klan still terrorized blacks, but now they also hated Jews, Catholics (????) and “nativists.” They called themselves Christian fundamentalists and made proud appearances in anti-civil rights parades. They still exist, but have toned down their public presence and rhetoric. That is, until the Tea Parties. This brought them out of the woodwork.

A lot of these Christians held their loud protests during town hall meetings, shouting down any real discourse between legislators and their constituents. They booed and flailed their protest signs, proudly wearing tea bags stapled to their ridiculous hats. The tea bag was supposed to represent, somehow, the original Boston Tea Party, which was an honest complaint about taxation without representation. These new protesters called themselves “teabaggers,” completely unaware of the slang meaning of that word. (Look it up in urbandictionary.com.) These so-called “tea parties” were hawked and promoted extensively by Fox News. I guess that calls for a “Duh!”

Anyway, the bogus complaints about Big Government and high taxes were Republican talking points, repeated often. But the people parroting those thoughts were too dense to realize that the Bush administration had cut taxes for the rich as soon as they were in power. And the ill-planned, illegal, immoral Iraq war did and will continue to cost billions every month. We’ve been in Afghanistan now for eight years, and accomplished nothing. All of this was done by Bush, but the hate-filled, hatemongering teabaggers were oblivious. They went on screaming about Obama’s policies as if he were responsible for the Bush Era.

Soon the posters featured drawings of swastikas and Hitler mustaches on Obama’s face. One of these uneducated idiots actually said, into a microphone, that “We don’t want a communist like Hitler!” Hello? Hitler was a communist? That’s news to anyone who knows even the barest minimum about history. Another “Duh!” The most over the top protest sign, however, was a billboard, a highway billboard, showing Obama with a bone through his nose and covered with feathers and beads. Witchdoctor, don’t you know. Some TV channels showed it once but said they never would again. But they all showed, with some misgivings, images of these protesters with guns strapped on. Loaded guns. These appeared only where Obama himself was making an appearance. Naturally, the Secret Service kept these gun-toting Americans out of the halls and banquet rooms where the president appeared. Still . . . .

These people might as well wear their white hoods. They’re no longer fooling anyone about birth certificates or anything else. This is racial hatred. And the bottom line: They simply refuse to accept a black president. Never mind that his mother was white and only his father was black. Obama looks like “one of them” and they won’t have it. I learned a shocking lesson about that, on a personal level, after all of this madness took place this past summer. I had been corresponding with a woman in North Carolina for a couple of years. She was very smart, very fun to “talk” to and we agreed, I thought, on most things. Then, when the Tea Party Lunacy hit, I mentioned my scorn and she said, quite defensively I thought, that the North has a warped vision of the South. She told me that racial prejudice was no longer more prominent in the South than anywhere else. I responded that from the time I was twelve years old my schools were fully integrated and that I had never seen a “White Only” sign in my life. I also mentioned the Ted Koppel broadcast, “The Last Lynching” which was a beautifully produced documentary about a terrible subject—a random KKK lynching of a black man that occurred in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. I was an adult in 1981 but I remembered nothing about the tragic, sickening event, and felt I should have remembered it as a news story. I also said that lynching seemed to be a southern thing, and was not as far back in history as we would like to think. I never heard back from her again. Ouch! I hadn’t accused her of anything, but I obviously said the wrong thing about her precious South.

Well, in spite of all the protest rallies, Obama’s ratings showed that he was still very popular, all across the county (in districts where people were literate for the most part) and it was then that something new showed up. It was hate on a new scale, and they used our old friend, the Bible, to display that hatred. This was beyond the pale.

“Let His Days Be Few”

Since most of these Minnie Pearl teabaggers often had biblical verses on their protest signs, they nevertheless seemed irrelevant to me. But in the past month there appeared a new verse. It suddenly showed up on posters, and the link to a product line with that verse on it flew around the Internet. News shows talked about it, nervously it seemed. Why? Well, here are the words on the posters:

Pray for Obama

Ps 109:8

You could also receive those words on aprons, coffee mugs, towels—everything you could think of. Seem innocent enough? It isn’t. Why?

Now might be a good time to remind you that until I was in my early 20s I was an ardent Christian. I was just beginning to read those forbidden books about astronomy and evolution and so on. My world began to open up for me then, but up until then I was one of them. But even I couldn’t have told you offhand what that Psalm said, so, as a good Christian, I would have look it up in my Bible. And here’s what I would have found:

8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

The lines are that close together. The lines do not wrap. There is no break in the thought. Obviously referring to some other ruler, they nevertheless convey one clear-cut idea: kill him. One of the sites offering such products, http://www.zazzle.com/ soon removed them. Someone, I don’t know who, obviously put pressure on them. But before they were removed I saw all those products, gloriously displayed, and it sickened me. Have these Christian zealots never heard of the word “impeach?” George W. Bush was the worst president this country has ever had, and if he died I wouldn’t give a rosy red rat’s rear. But I would never have called for his murder. This is KKK talk. Lynch the bastard. I can’t believe this country has devolved in this way. My husband Pat assures me, though, that we haven’t devolved at all. We were always that way and we haven’t changed. The Klan just went underground, sort of. Bye the way, Pat was born in North Carolina and most of his family still lives there, and he knows whereof he speaks. I know what he says is true. I just have trouble thinking about it.

Too Elite!

What they mean is too uppity. When Obama’s zealous critics say he’s “too elite” what they really mean is he’s too uppity for a black man. Of course it is true that we are experiencing an educated, eloquent, articulate president who is such a contrast to the stumblebum idiot that preceded him. Bush couldn’t string together an English sentence without screwing up big time. So the change is dramatic, to be sure.

However, this ugly, dark side of America, the filthy, revolting underbelly of our country has pushed its way to the surface and I’m fed up with all of it. The psalm quote is disgusting. Way to go, Christians! You have shown your true colors. I have lost all respect for a huge mass of Americans and I can only hope this country will grow up someday.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

...................................................

The Christian Science Monitor

Biblical anti-Obama slogan: Use of Psalm 109:8 funny or sinister?

By Tracey D. Samuelson | Contributor/ November 16, 2009 edition

Psalms 109:8 says, 'Let his days be few; and let another take his office.' The citation is being passed around the Internet as a rallying cry against President Obama.

A nice sentiment? Maybe not. The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office. But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

The slogan comes at a time of heightened concern about antigovernment anger. Earlier this year, the president’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said that Tea Parties could lead to something unhealthy. In September, authorities shut down a poll on Facebook asking if President Obama should be killed.

Still, that doesn’t push the Psalms citation into the realm of hate speech, says Chris Hansen, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The use of Psalm 109:8 is ambiguous as to whether its users are calling for the President to serve “only one term, or less than one term,” he says. Deborah Lauter, director of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League agrees that the bumper sticker falls within acceptable political discourse. For it to be considered hate speech, it “would advocate actual violence or cite scripture that was more clear in its message.”

But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely innocent. "Are we concerned about real hostility towards [President Obama]? Absolutely,” says Ms. Lauter. “Is this a part of that movement? It may be, but in terms of this message itself, we would not criticize it.”

“The problem is you don’t know if people who are donning that message in a shirt or on a bumper sticker are fully aware of the quote or what follows. Obviously that message makes the ambiguity disappear. If they’re just referring to him being out of office, that’s one thing. If they’re referring to him being dead, that’s so offensive. It’s protected speech, but it’s clearly offensive.”

For many, the slogan is just a humorous way express disapproval for President Obama. It’s been tweeted and retweeted by Obama critics with messages like “too funny” and “an excellent prayer for America.” Twitter user Cheri Douglas felt compelled to share the psalm with others. Reached by phone, she said she found it on website while searching for Bible passages relating to leadership – a topic on which she writes, speaks, and consults for a living.

Ms. Douglas was unaware of the verses that followed the ones she referenced and doesn’t think that those who shared the psalm wish the President harm.

“I don’t believe there’s Christians who wish him ill will,” she says.

But Douglas does say she’s unhappy with the president and used the psalm to convey that she’d like him to serve only one term.

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/11/16/biblical-anti-obama-slogan-use-of-psalm-1098-funny-or-sinister/

“Make English America ‘s offical Language”

“GET A BRAIN! MORANS”

“WHO NEEDS OIL? I RIDE THE BUS”

“Would we have allowed NAZI GERMANY TO HOST THE OLYMPICS?”

When God Was a Woman

2009-11-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

It’s true, you know. There was a time when God was a woman. I’m not talking about the almost universally misunderstood concept of “pagan fertility cults.” In fact, those three words are all derogatory, incorrect depictions created by the totally male-dominated fields of archaeology, anthropology and theology, from their inception to the 20th century. And then, in 1976, a woman named Merlin Stone came along and wrote a book.

I have stolen her title, When God Was a Woman. However, my motive springs purely from admiration. I cannot think of a better title! If you have not read her book yet, please do so. It is marvelous. It will explain so much about how we got to where we are today, with men running (and ruining) the world while we women are still trying to slowly clamber into positions of power. In most parts of the world that clambering has been rewarded with very little success. And, where such success has been found, it has usually only been achieved by women who behave like men. Our wretched struggles can of course be laid at the altar of our old friend—religion. Surprise, surprise.

(I have never met Merlin Stone and have nothing to gain by the sale of her book except for the joy of sharing knowledge. Her book is still available on Amazon.)

Early on in her book Stone adopts a most interesting approach to the simple act of the capitalization of words. It affects your entire perception of the subjects at hand. And I will do the same. Then there is the problem of translations. As I’ve talked about many times, the Bible suffers a great deal from obviously intentional mistranslations. There are two blatant examples. First, the Hebrew word for “young woman” was translated to “virgin” in order to elevate the status of the Virgin Mary. Second, the word “slave” was incorrectly translated as “servant” in order to lessen the harshness of life in Jesus’ world of the New Testament. There are similar problems, as we shall see, in discussions of the Goddess and how She was worshipped.

The Birth of the Goddess

Discovering the relationship between sex and babies was not as easy as it would seem. The two seem to have nothing to do with each other. The act of sexual intercourse is so far removed from any signs of pregnancy that figuring out the connection took humans a very long time. A female could have sex only once and then become pregnant. But she could also engage in sexual intercourse numerous times and never become pregnant. It did not seem to be a cause and effect arrangement.

Every now and again a woman would become fat and then a tiny, fully formed human being would emerge from her body. This must have been viewed as a miraculous event! And the fact that only females could do this astonishing thing would naturally have made females appear to be miracle-workers themselves. Women made other human beings! It would have been a small step indeed to then perceive any deities that might exist as being female. A small step indeed. And that appears to be what happened with early humans. The Goddess was born.

From the Upper Paleolithic Period (around 25,000 bc) many Venus figurines have been found which obviously emphasize the female form. (Figure 1.) Already there was something special about just being female. Lightly dismissed by 19th-century, male scholars as some sort of representation of “fertility cults,” these extremely early figures are far more than that. There are just too many of them to write off so easily. Nor have any matching male figures been found from that era that feature exaggerated penises. These Venus figures have been found in areas as far apart as Spain, France, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Russia. The sites and figures span a period of at least ten thousand years.

Trying to discover the origins of Goddess worship is very difficult for many reasons. For one thing Goddess figurines are found in so many places, covering such enormous time periods, that a “beginning” may never be found. Another problem is that Goddess worship is known by so many names that uncertainty is bound to follow. Here is a partial list of some of the names the Goddess was known by:

Al Lat, Al Uzza, Anahita, Anaitis, Anat, Anath, Aphrodite, Sun Goddess of Arinna, Artemis, Aruru, Asherah, Ashtart, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Ate, Athar, Athena, Attar, Attoret, Au Set, Baalat, Brigit, Cerridwen, Cybele, Danu, Demeter, Devi, Diana, Elat, Ereshkigal, Gaia, HannaHanna, Hat-Hor, Hathor, Hepat, Hera, Inanna, Inara, Ininni, Innin, Ishara, Ishtar, Isis, Istar, Kupapa, Lato, Lilwanis, Maat, Mami, Mawu, Nammu, Nashe of Lagash, Neith, Nekhebt, Nidaba, Nikkal, Nina, Ningal, Ninhursag, Ninlil, Ninmah, Ninsikil, Nut, Rhea, Sarasvati, Shala, Sybella, Tiamat, Ua Zit, Utu and Wurusemu.

It’s clear that many of these names are derivatives of each other. The Goddess was also worshipped by Her more generic names such as Queen of Heaven, The Divine Ancestress, The Mother of All Deities, The Great Goddess and so on. But by far the largest problem with identification has to do with the violent, determined, centuries-long demolition of statues (i.e. “pagan” idols) and sanctuaries belonging to the Goddess. Many of those destructions were recorded carefully (gleefully?) in the Bible: “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.” (Deut 12:2-3—KJV) Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all violently opposed to the ancient Goddess-worship and did their best to destroy all they could. Yet so may remnants survived that there is no doubt about the widespread worship of the Goddess in those ancient centuries.

The practice of matrilineal descent would be a natural offshoot of Goddess worship. Of course you’d inherit land, property and titles from your only known parent—your mother. (This practice continued all the way to the reign of Cleopatra, a woman more well known to us.) Though it appears that the Goddess originally reigned alone, at some period (different in different places) She acquired a son or brother who was also Her lover and consort. Known in various languages as Damuzi, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Osiris or Baal, this consort died in his youth, causing an annual period of grief for those who worshipped the Goddess.

Just one example of this would be in Babylon of the eighteenth to the sixth centuries bc. The Goddess was known as Ishtar and Her dying son/lover was called Tammuz. As late as 620 (or so) bc, the Bible’s book of Ezekiel speaks of this practice of “weeping for Tammuz.” (Ezek 8:14) “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” The dying son/lover played a role much later as new religious cults were formed, as we shall see.

I’m Pregnant!

We’ll probably never know for sure, but it seems likely that women would have been the first to discover the connection between sex and pregnancy, since they dealt with their monthly menstrual periods and would have finally figured it out. However, when it was eventually understood, the idea of paternity suddenly entered into human thought, and the world was changed forever.

Once sex and babies were finally connected, the act of sexual intercourse was considered sacred in the temples of the Goddess. Women who made love in the Goddess’ temples were known as “sacred women” for obvious reasons—they were making babies. What could be more sacred or important?

Unfortunately, although the earliest known examples of written language are from 3000 bc, they were almost exclusively for the purpose of keeping monetary accounts of temple activities. Thus, any histories of Goddess worship were written after the invaders with their male gods had long ago begun destroying the Goddess temples and artifacts. One example of this comes from Mesopotamia from about 3000 bc to the beginning of the ad period. During that time the language used was Akkadian. In that language the word qadishtu means literally “sacred women” or “holy women.” These were the Goddess worshippers who engaged in the rather important business of creating new life. But the male historians of the past two centuries have translated that word, qadishtu, to mean “prostitute” or “temple prostitute.” Doesn’t quite seem the same, does it?

Anyway, there is no doubt that the written records only tell us how the Goddess and Her Priestesses and temples were destroyed, not the details of how She was revered. But why were these things destroyed and who did it?

They Came from the North

Variously referred to as Indo-Europeans, the Sea Peoples or just the northern invaders, the arrival of these invaders had definitely occurred by 2400 bc, but may have occurred even earlier, in a series of invasions. Whatever brought the northern invaders into the Near and Middle East (possibly weather?) they brought their male warrior god and/or supreme father god with them. Facing the ancient Goddess-worshipping people, the battle was on.

These new gods brought with them many references to mountains of fire and earthquakes and thunder and smoke and so on, all obvious references to volcanoes, and those references run riot throughout the Old Testament in describing Yahweh. It would appear that the northerners were originally volcano-worshippers. In any event, their gods were male. And they made it their business to install their male god in the lands they conquered. It wasn’t easy. But the Bible makes countless references to the “pagan” religions they tried to stamp out.

In the Beginning

In the Beginning there was the Goddess. In the beginning of the Bible, however, there are two utterly different, contradictory stories of how life began, but they have one thing in common: they both go to extreme lengths to emphasize the subordination of women to men. In the first biblical account, Chapter 1 of Genesis, God creates a male and a female simultaneously. In the second account, Chapter 2 of Genesis, God makes a female out of one of the male’s ribs. Is that silly or what? It is quite similar to the equally silly Greek story of Athena (female) being born straight from the head of Zeus (male) and makes the same point: not only are males superior to females, but females are not even required to make a new human being. Preposterous propaganda!

Enter the Serpent

Long ago, in the Near and Middle East, the serpent was regarded as a source of wisdom and prophetic counsel. The reasons are unclear; but the practice of speaking strangely and “prophetically” after a snakebite was (and still is) a very common occurrence. Hallucinations are also produced from snake venom, and if death does not occur such visions and pronouncements may be considered divine.

In the Sumerian town of Dir the Goddess was worshipped as the Divine Serpent Lady. Sculptures unmistakably reveal the divine nature of serpents. (Figures 2, 3.) In both Hebrew and Arabic the terms for magic are derived from the words meaning serpent.

A “snake tube” dated to about the thirteenth century B.C. was believed to hold food for the sacred snakes. (Figure 4.) There can be no doubt about the connection between serpents and Goddess worship.

Yet another clear connection appears in a Seal Stone of the Goddess Athena, dated around the fifth century B.C. It unambiguously features Athena with a very large serpent. (Figure 5.) You can probably already see where this is headed—Goddess worship, serpents, the new male god trying to take over. It all fits. The Garden of Eden fable suddenly makes some sense. Eve, obviously inferior to Adam, allowed a serpent to talk her into sinning. Thus she brought about the downfall of all humankind. It was a female and a serpent who screwed everything up for everybody. Sound familiar?

The Fall of the Goddess

In the Bible the Hebrews are so busy trying to stamp out Goddess worship that they won’t even dignify Her by name. They only refer to “other gods.” The best example of this is in the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” What other gods? Well, they really meant the Goddess, who had been worshipped as far back as memory served. It wasn’t easy to stamp out thousands of years of Goddess worship. Centuries of suppression still could not separate the people from their ancient ways and there were so many “idols” to destroy that the task was impossible. So one way the Hebrews thought they could at least destroy the power of the idols was to knock off their ears or noses. This would account for the missing noses of so many ancient statues. (And, centuries later, with the invention of the airplane, it might even explain the missing nose of the Sphinx.)

As the invaders marched through the lands of the Goddess, their conquests were referred to as overcoming “the orgiastic nature worship.” It was replaced, so one historian claimed, by “Israel with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism and its severe code of ethics.” Those words are thoroughly contradicted by the dozens of Hebrew massacres described throughout the Old Testament. Just one of those descriptions of the “ethical” behavior of the conquering Hebrews: (Hosea 13:16) “Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” Lofty?

It took a long time, but slowly the Goddess was demonized, often to the point of ridiculousness. One example: As late as the sixteenth century ad, Hebrew scholars compiled a text known as the Kabbalah. In it the name of Lilith, once described in a Sumerian table as “the hand of Inanna” who brought men into the temple of the Goddess, was now presented as the symbol of evil, the female devil. Supposedly Lilith and her fellow female demons did their best to “provoke men to sexual acts without benefit of a woman, their aim being to make themselves bodies from the lost seed.”

Hello? Are you having as much trouble imagining this as I am? The fable warns against Lilith who might be hovering about, just waiting for available sperm from which she could create demons and illegitimate children. I am not making this up. Not only was the almighty sperm provided with preposterous significance, but the nearly impossible task of gathering up “lost seed” and somehow inserting it into your own vagina, is truly laughable. Lost seed? Was it found on the ground? Did women hold out their hands, asking for semen? It’s just one example of how desperately men wanted to subdue women, and how difficult that undertaking was. And, even compared with so much foolishness in religious fables, the stolen seed fable is remarkably stupid.

Christianity was just a tiny, unimportant cult when it began and it really didn’t amount to much until the Emperor Constantine embraced it around ad 300. But from that point on, Goddess temples, such as the temples of Isis, were converted into Christian churches. The Goddess was doomed.

By the time St. Paul was writing about Christ, around ad 60, he went so far as to claim, outright, that “man is not of the woman but the woman of the man.” (1 Corinthians 11:8) More male desperation. If anyone out there has ever seen a male give birth, please let me know about it. Paul continued to rail against the still-popular Goddess worship: (Acts 19:27) “So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.”

The new rules about the new male god also, not coincidentally, changed all the laws about inheritance and titles. Now it was the male who conferred these things, and this is why the genealogy of Jesus, as recorded in the book of Matthew, is so preposterous. Jesus is supposedly “descended” from King David; yet the line of descent is traced, unabashedly, from David to Joseph, Jesus’ step-father! Women had to be so unimportant as to be eliminated altogether in conferring kinship.

So trying to eliminate Goddess worship was an uphill battle all the way. Christians had as much trouble as the Hebrews in this. But as the gospels of the New Testament created the story of Jesus, some very familiar themes appeared that might have helped. For example, instead of the son/lover of the Goddess dying, the son of Mary, Jesus, was said to have died. The women, instead of “weeping for Tammuz” every year, could now mourn the death of Jesus annually. To make it even more palatable, and what probably won the day, was the elevation of the Virgin Mary to such an extant that she was comparable to the Goddess. Mary is still highly venerated to this day and is often called “the mother of God” which is uncannily similar to one of the names of the Goddess—the Mother of All Deities.

Life without the Goddess

So today we are left with the legacy of the ultimate victory of gods over the Goddess. From the early witch-hunts, which left thousands (perhaps millions) of women murdered for being witches, to the actual ownership of women by their husbands, the males won. Harems came into being and wife-beating was/is accepted in large parts of the world. Female circumcision was invented. Even in today’s world, in 2009, endless wars are still being fought over lands supposedly “given” to men by their male gods. In many parts of the world women are forced by men to cover their shameful, sinful bodies from head to toe, no matter what the weather, and they look ridiculous in the process. They must also be very uncomfortable. It has been an ugly fall for the Queen of Heaven, who was ruthlessly demoted to the “evil temptress,” and women are still paying for it.

We’ll never know what it might have been like to live in a world dominated by the Goddess. We can never go back. But we can close our eyes and try to imagine what life was like when women were revered, and babies were tiny miracles, and the estrogen-driven nurturing instinct had not yet been replaced with testosterone-driven aggression. We can only imagine what life might have been like—when God was a woman.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Source (including images) : Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. New York: Dorset Press, 1976.

The Quick and the Dead

2009-10-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Life presents us with important choices. For example, anchovies or no anchovies? This is a very important question and it can only be answered with an emphatic yes or no. Similarly, do you want to have children? Do you want to change jobs? Do you want to move out of the city you’re in? On and on, there are important choices to be made. So, when it comes to life and death, especially after-death questions, shouldn’t they be rather important? Shouldn’t such powerful convictions about eternity be backed up with some facts to support your beliefs? Shouldn’t you know just what it is you believe? If so, well, Christians, we have a problem here.

The New Testament is clear on what will happen with Jesus’ Second Coming. He will “judge the quick and the dead.” (1 Peter 4:5; 2 Timothy 4:1) And what does “quick” mean? You can still find it in most dictionaries. It will say archaic, of course, but it means alive. That seems very clear. Jesus will return to judge those who are alive and those already dead. So, you may ask, what’s the problem? The problem is that Christians do not talk that way. Even ministers, during eulogies, refer to the deceased as “being in heaven” with the Lord.

How often have you heard people say, “He’s in a better place now.” Hmmm? Or “She’s with her mother now.” Hmmm? Or “He’s with Jesus now.” Well? I’m not making this up, am I? No. I’m not. In real life, in the movies and TV dramas, in novels . . . it’s everywhere. But can’t you see the problem? Either you will be judged and sent to heaven when Jesus returns, or you will be judged immediately upon death and, if worthy, sent to heaven then. You cannot have it both ways. Either you’re judged now or you’re judged later. Which is it?

Like so many contradictions and fuzzy-thinking doctrines associated with Christianity, this one is rarely, if ever, discussed. If it is, I’ve never read about it, and I’ve read a lot. Quick or dead. Which is it? You have to be one or the other. You can’t be both at the same time. How could there be anything in between? There can’t, unless there’s something like a freeze-dried option, although come to think of it isn’t that what Purgatory is? No, on second thought that is not what Purgatory is. That’s what Limbo is, isn’t it? But no, that isn’t it either. I think it’s time to get these terms straightened out, agreed?

Okay. Let’s start with the easy ones. First, heaven. It’s some kind of blissful paradise, lasting forever. (You probably do pass Go and collect $200, but just how much that will buy in heavenly Cheese Whiz or box wine is an open question.) OK. Now hell. It is fire and brimstone all the way, an eternal source of agony. (And you do not pass Go or collect $200, and you can forget about the wine and the Whiz.) But what about the other, highly controversial and complicated places, Purgatory and Limbo? Most people have a vague idea of what heaven and hell would be like, but these other two destinations are a whole different story.

Purgatory is described as a state in which souls must wait and “expiate” their sins. So if you die, but you have a lot of sins that you have not received absolution for, you go there, to Purgatory, to wait it out. I guess it’s like a waiting room in an HMO—it could take hours or years. Apparently God is not sure what to do to you or for how long. At least he didn’t bother to write that in his Bible or post it online or anything.

You can watch the Catholics on one of their sites http://purgatoryisreal.blogspot.com/ and Protestants http://www.gotquestions.org/Purgatory.html fight it out and decide for yourself. But they can’t both be right. On the other hand, they can both be wrong. Easily. And Limbo, which borders on hell but is not actually hell, is, according to Catholics but not Protestants, the supposed abode of unbaptized infants or others who haven’t earned heaven. You can watch Catholics themselves fight about this one anywhere online. No one agrees on the precise definition of Limbo, and that certainly includes me.

Well, wine, Whiz or not, the glaring problem of when you are sent anywhere remains. What mucks it all up is that inconvenient thing we call time. Anything as important as eternal salvation must begin in a timeframe that we understand. Otherwise it’s a vague idea with no substance. But True Believers not only claim that it is a substantial fact, but that it’s easy to prove. Just read the Bible. However, as I pointed out, that judging part is not supposed to take place until Jesus comes back. Has Jesus come back? No. So how can your late Aunt Helen be in heaven now? And if she’s not in heaven, where the hell is she?

This is not a trivial question. It is a very important puzzle that requires an understandable explanation. I’ll ask the question again because it’s so important: When does Judgment Day occur—with a person’s death or with Jesus’ Second Coming? You may only choose one or the other. I have put this question to many Christians over the years and their answers are, not surprisingly, baffling. The “God works in mysterious ways” thing has been worked to death and means nothing anyway. It answers no questions. This “when are you judged” question should be important, and answerable, by all True Believers. Not only that, but Believers should be able to answer the related question, “What happens to all the billions of people who lived before Jesus was born?” No one has answered that one either, though I would certainly like to hear an answer. (If you are a Christian reading this, please answer that. If you are not a Christian but know some Christians, would you politely pass that very important question to them and get back to me? Thank you. An awful lot of people lived before the supposed birth of Jesus. Where are they now?)

Even the rabid, hate-filled Christians who were disgusting enough to carry pickets signs at funerals, for chrissake, seem a tad confused on the issue. The bigots that carried signs at Matthew Shepard’s funeral reading ”God hates fags” and “He’s in hell now” are confused on that issue, aren’t they? Same goes for those hateful Christians who carried signs during Dr. George Tiller’s funeral. They read “The baby-killer is dead and he’s in hell now!” and similar crap. But they, too, had best check Scripture and get that “quick and the dead” thing worked out. Heaven, hell—when does either become actuality?

I remember asking my parents about that. My mother’s response was, “Ach, nonsense!” Well, that closed the subject certainly but I wasn’t better off for that answer, was I? On the other hand I guess it made her life easier. Avoid the tough questions. My father’s response was about God knowing what he was doing. But that’s no answer! I remember the conversation because he changed the subject (a much-used tactic by Christians) by telling me I would make a good attorney since I liked to argue so much. No, I don’t like to argue, but I do value the truth. I have always had a questioning mind, which as an adult I realized is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I think it’s fair to say that the above discussions could be described as chaotic, if not just pure nonsense. Even so, with all the millions of words that been thrown at the topics of heaven and hell, still, no one can answer the simple question, when does Judgment Day take place? Do we have to wait for Jesus’ Second Coming before Aunt Helen can be directed to her eternal resting place, yes or no? It is a simple yes or no question. And I sincerely wish someone would answer it.

The Creeds

If you think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, think again. The complicated contradictions that infect all religions are clearly highlighted in discussions about heaven, hell, Judgment Day and all the rest. How many Christian church services include the recitation of the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed? There are two Apostles’ Creeds, one original and one reformed. The reformed version uses “sits” while the original uses “sitteth.” (Jeez. Is this silly or what?) Anyway, the Apostles’ Creed is considered to be the oldest, coming supposedly from the original apostles. We Lutherans recited the Apostle’s Creed during regular services (which I still know by heart) and it says:

“I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell: the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Christian church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.” [Emphasis mine.]

That emphatic change, “Christian,” was needed because the original Creed said “the holy catholic church” and as good Lutherans the word catholic was a dirty word. Even though catholic actually meant “universal” because originally there was only one Christian church, the Catholic Church, to say the word catholic in a Lutheran church would be like pissing on the altar cloth.

The Nicene Creed is a different thing altogether. First adopted in 325 A.D. it has many changes and we Lutherans recited it on Communion Day only, which occurred once a month. I have no idea why we used two different creeds. But the Nicene Creed includes a few phrases not in the other creed. In one of those you declare that you believe in “all things visible and invisible.” Invisible? Well, that would mean leprechauns and unicorns and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and honest politicians and………..well, it’s a long list. Here’s the

Nicene Creed:

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets. And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

Once again, this Nicene Creed comes in both regular English or Olde English. The Olde version would include “spake by the prophets” instead of “spoke.” But that’s trivial. What is not so trivial is the subtle but perhaps meaningful differences. The invisible part is striking, as I said, because it seems to be slightly defensive. Declaring that you believe in “all things invisible” seems to be saying that you’re not crazy to believe in what you can’t see. Since they didn’t know about atoms and radar and gamma rays and so on, this would have to mean spirits or ghosts.

Also different is the very repetitious descriptions of “God the Father” and it again seems defensive. “God of God, Light of Light” and so on. And “begotten, not made” means……..what? That you didn’t “make up” your God? Who said you did? Well, since there were so many competing gods and goddesses in the area during the early centuries, perhaps someone was claiming just that.

Whatever the reasons for the differences, there is one thing that remains firm: They both say that Jesus will return to “judge the quick and the dead.” There’s no getting around it. This “now or later” problem is a real one. And to complicate the issue, consider the following two verses, one from the Old Testament (OT) and one from the New (NT):

“Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.” (Psalms 55:15) That’s the OT.

“And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead.” (Acts 10:42) That’s the NT.

Why is that important? Because Jesus was not even on the horizon when the OT was compiled, yet the cursing in Psalms clearly states that someone may “go down quick into hell.” Before Judgment Day arrives? How could that happen? The OT was written centuries before the NT.

So, once and for all, just as all the peoples of the world must get their act together and describe, in detail, which God is the One True God, so must Christians explain when the Afterlife begins. Is it at death or does it have to wait for Jesus’ Second Coming? Unlike a Chinese menu, you may not choose different items from different columns. It’s one or the other. So which is it?

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Sources:

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2028721620070420

http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/history/creed.apost.proofs.html

http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/apostles_creed.html

Bible Study in Texas Schools

2009-09-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

It’s funny. You think things are getting better, slowly to be sure, and then a story like this breaks. I had to read it twice. I know that’s an old cliché. But I truly had to read it twice. I did not believe it at first. Was I having a small stroke? What the hell was I reading? Well, here it is. What story, you ask?

The state of Texas, the state with dreams of secession, passed a law in 2007 that will go into effect this autumn. (See the full news story below.) The law requires that “all public schools must offer information relating to the Bible in their curriculum.” Isn’t that special? How very unconstitutional of them. Okay. Fine. Flaunt your Bible in your Lone Star State. But if you’re going to do that, why don’t you take the time to learn your Bible first? Most Texans, along with most Christians everywhere, have never read the entire Bible. It’s clear that they have never really thought about what all is in that Bible. And, since everyone knows that creationism will be a centerpiece of these so-called Bible “studies” I would like to address that topic.

Actually, I already did address it. In my first book, In God We Trust: But Which One? I tackled the very real problems in the book of Genesis, which supposedly tells the story of “creation.” That story supposedly explains how the Earth came into being and how humans were created. Setting aside for the moment the seriously flawed ideas about what stars are and so on, let’s concentrate on the main themes in the creation story. The book of Genesis is at the center of the many disputes that science has with religion. So let’s get at it.

If the biblical story of creation is presented in any public classrooms, then the Creation Story must be told in its entirety. No tactical editing should be allowed. The biblical story of scientific creationism would therefore have to include all of the following:

(1) The fact that the Bible states clearly that there were three days and three nights before the sun had been created. This must be explained in a scientific way.

(2) The fact that there are two contradictory accounts in Genesis about the creation of Adam and Eve. One version has Adam and Eve being created simultaneously. A mere eleven verses later, Adam is described as being created alone, then ultimately put to sleep, during which time God removes one of his ribs and makes a woman, Eve, out of that rib. Both stories about the creation of Adam and Eve, as told in the book of Genesis, must be presented in detail, even though each version positively contradicts the other. And the contradictions must be explained.

(3) In scientific terms, the creation of a woman from a man’s rib must be explained.

(4) Whether or not Adam was created with testicles must be addressed. If he was created alone, with no human female anywhere on earth, why would he have been created with testicles? If it was because God knew he was soon going to create Eve, then why not create them simultaneously in the first place? Other than trying to prove that men are more important than women, separate creations make no sense. Creationists must explain this glaring problem.

(5) If an all-powerful God did not want Adam and Eve to be such wicked sinners, it must be explained why they turned out that way anyway.

(6) Exactly where did Cain find a wife to help propagate the human species? The abrupt appearance of Cain’s wife, literally out of nowhere, must be explained, assuming he didn’t marry his own sister or his own mother. Cain’s wife must be explained in a way that eliminates incest. If God was creating people elsewhere at that time, why doesn’t Genesis record such an important event?

(7) The Flood and Noah’s supposed Ark must be presented in any creation story, since all of us alive today, with our wildly divergent racial and ethnic differences, are supposedly descended from this one man’s family. In addition, it must be explained how we traveled to every part of the globe, filling the world with people, in only a couple of thousand years. Noah’s prolific offspring must also be explained in a way that eliminates incest.

(8) Since creationism, denying evolution, is intended to explain the origin of life on earth, some explanation must be offered as to how life rejuvenated itself on the newly flood-damaged, totally barren land that would have been all that remained after the Flood.

(9) The origins of languages must be explained.

Well, Christians, as Ricky used to say to Lucy, “You got some ‘splainin’ to do.” And there really is a lot of explaining to do. The Flood, as described in Genesis, is a real thorn in the side of Christian fundamentalists. Aside from the monumental problem of just where Noah found penguins and polar bears in Palestine, not to mention kangaroos and three-toed sloths, there is the problem of dropping all of these creatures off at their native lands after the flood was over.

Gathering up a male and female of each of the tens of thousands of species of butterflies, to mention only one insect, must have been a tricky business. There are well over a million known species of insects in all, and supposedly, male and female collected he them. Somehow, he had to find a way to feed all these creatures, and then he had to figure out how to keep them from eating each other. Or him. Koalas, for one example of a fussy eater, will only eat fresh Eucalyptus leaves. And lions, of course, will only eat other animals. How many tons of feed would be required and how much space would be required to store it all?

The enormous amounts of dung that would necessarily have been produced would have had to be dealt with somehow. How did they dispose of all that dung without making everyone seriously ill? Consider, too, that the earth was supposedly flooded to a height of nearly five miles with rainwater. Marine life could not possibly survive if that tremendous amount of fresh rainwater were added to the earth’s oceans. So how did they survive? And what did the animals eat after they were let out on land again, land that no longer supported living plants due to the inundation?

These practical, unanswerable questions abound by the dozens. But the larger, philosophical question is even more unsettling. How could a loving, all-merciful God send a flood to destroy his own creations? The image of all of the world’s babies, toddlers and pregnant women treading water until they drown is not a pleasant one.

This grisly, impossible scenario of the entire earth being flooded is supposed to be a truthful, actual event in spite of the uninterrupted histories of China and Egypt. These cultures recorded events that took place during the same time period in which the supposed Flood took place. Yet they make no reference to any such flood. You’d think they would have noticed.

Equally bizarre and totally contrary to the laws of nature is the purported creation of the rainbow at this time. Following the Flood, God supposedly put the rainbow “in the clouds” as a “covenant” between himself and humans, and to remind him of the temper tantrum he had just thrown. And killing every woman, man, child and animal on the planet earth, except for a scanty handful, certainly remains unchallenged as the Blue-Ribbon, All-Around Champion of temper tantrums. The beauty of this newly created rainbow was supposed to help prevent God from committing a similar wholesale slaughter in the future, such massacres by this loving God apparently resting on a hair-trigger.

In the real world, a rainbow is a simple matter of the right combination of light and water, and rainbows came into existence as soon as there was light and water. The story of its creation after the Flood confirms the extremely primitive nature of this story, even as an allegory. This supposed flood causes much mischief among today’s fundamentalists who are desperately trying to present the impossible as possible without sounding ridiculous.

But if creationists want to tell their religious story to our schoolchildren as science, then they must tell all of it. Anything less would be mere proselytizing rather than educating. And of course all of us, believers as well as nonbelievers, agree that our classrooms should be intended solely to educate. Correct?

If you know anyone in Texas who is pleased with the idea of the Bible being taught in public schools, would you please forward this to them and ask what they think of it? I would enjoy any feedback that is not, well, ridiculous!

Judith Hayeshttp://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Source:

Texas Public Schools Required To Teach Bible This Year

Posted: Aug 14, 2009 03:48 PM PDT

Updated: Aug 17, 2009 09:59 AM PDT

By Sara Story

Posted by Michael Hetrick

WHITEHOUSE, TX (KLTV) - The school year is almost here, and if literature of the Bible is not already offered in your child's school, it will be this fall.

Books are a common sight in classrooms around the nation, but the Bible is one book that is not. Come this fall, a Texas law says all public schools must offer information relating to the Bible in their curriculum.

“By the end of the year, what they begin to realize is that it is pervasive. You can't get away from it. The kids came back and were like 'It's everywhere,'“ said John Keeling, the social studies chair at Whitehouse High School. Whitehouse already offers a Bible elective. “The purpose of a course like this isn't even really to get kids to believe it, per se, it is just to appreciate the profound impact that it has had on our history and on our government.”

The law actually passed in 2007, but this will be the first school year it is enforced because the bill says, “The provisions of this act pertaining to a school district do not take effect until the 2009-2010 school year.”

This has gained mixed reactions from East Texans.

“I think it is a good thing because a lot of kids don't have that experience, and they already want to take prayer out of school as it is, and you see where our kids are ending up!” said Tyler resident Laura Tucker.

Tyler resident, Havis Tatum, disagrees with Tucker.

“I don't want anybody teaching their religious beliefs to my child unless they want to send their child to my house and let me teach them my religious views,” said Tatum. “There is no difference.”

School officials said schools have not enforced the law because of confusion over the bill's wording and lack of state funding.

For now, each school district must find a way to fill the requirement before the seats are filled with students.

http://www.kltv.com/global/story.asp?S=10933571

My Personal Christian Journey through Racism

2009-08-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

[Warning: Some of the language in this article may be upsetting or offensive to many people. Reader discretion is advised.]

The euphoria of the November 2008 election certainly wore off fast. Only six months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the most historical presidency in our country’s history, and it seems like we’re back in the 1950s again. Bring out the dogs and hoses. The niggers are getting uppity.

Before you bury me in outraged email, I will repeat my warning once more, and only once more. These are my very personal feelings and it will soon be apparent why I am talking the way I am. The following language is offensive—at least is should be; but it represents my anger and frustration after decades of anger and frustration. I thought we had put most of that racial crap behind us. I was remarkably wrong.

I have often written about my personal experiences during my youth, and how religion affected me then. I was too young to remember much of the Martin Luther King, Jr. years, but I long ago educated myself on the subject. I do have some recollections of seeing, on our black and white TV, images of cops using enormous (to me) fire hoses on black people, and I distinctly remember wondering why. I do clearly remember my father’s answer when I asked him about that. He said, “Wherever that man King goes there is trouble.” Red flags, anyone?

I was raised in an upper-class white neighborhood. By the time I hit the fifth grade I had never seen a black person except for the cleaning lady, Viola, who came in every Tuesday. But I was in school during most of her hours in our home, so she was something of a ghostly figure to me. Other than that, though, I had never seen a black person. Not in school, certainly not in our neighborhood, not in church, not in the grocery store—nowhere. My grammar school, Crocker Highlands, was rather fancy, though I was too young to realize it at the time. However, I do remember it was all white. Fancy, small class sizes, orderly. You simply did not run in the hallways.

Then one day something spectacular happened. In the fifth grade a black girl showed up in my classroom. Rudely I stared at her, like everyone else. It was like meeting a new kind of animal in a zoo. My, such dark skin! And such kinky hair! I’d never seen anything like it and of course reported this extraordinary event to my parents. They were not pleased. I didn’t know then why they were unhappy about it, but I know they were. I can’t even remember the girl’s name, although Althea comes to mind, but I don’t trust my memory on that. What I do remember is that there was no interaction of any kind with this new girl. Either she kept to herself, or we all ignored her, or both. Poor kid. She cannot have been happy there.

I have much more clear memories of life in the sixth grade. My teacher’s name was Mrs. O’Brien. The black girl was not in my class, but now there were two black boys, one of them named James. For some reason, probably alphabetical, my desk was directly across the aisle from the new kid, James. Our desks were all in neat rows and columns. I grew to like James a lot. He was smart and funny. He would often whisper something to make me laugh, which he knew would get me in trouble, and I was successful only part of the time in resisting the laughter. (This was back in the Pleistocene, when students followed rules and obeyed the teacher. And laughing at an inappropriate moment was not allowed.) Anyway, James and I became pals.

The Invitation

When it arrived, that threatening invitation to a birthday party, I grew up suddenly. I finally got it. James was having a birthday party. I really wanted to go, but my mother had to explain why I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. It would be setting a bad example. Those were her words. I still remember my bewilderment. James was cool. James was my friend. James made me laugh in class. But James was black. I got it. It wouldn’t be right. But I didn’t really understand it.

I couldn’t find the song on Google or Yahoo, but I still remember many of the lyrics of a song I was taught in grammar school. Those words are, “I’m little black Sambo, little black Sambo, dressed in the prettiest clothes; my jacket is red, my trousers are blue, with green umbrella and purple shoes, I’m little black Sambo, etc.” I know the melody dead on, but can’t remember all the lyrics. (If any of you know what I’m talking about, I’d like to hear about it.)

To quickly summarize my home life: I was one of three children in a Lutheran home in a totally (at that point) white neighborhood. I was raised as a strict fundamental German Missouri Synod Lutheran. My parents were well known at church, Grand Lake Lutheran Church, because my father was the church organist, often taught Bible classes, and my mother sang in the choir. My father’s father and grandfather had been Lutheran ministers. We were good, solid citizens with religious family values. My father was what used to be called a “gentleman” and he stood up when a woman entered the room and so on. My parents were truly nice people. They were funny and generous (my parents actually tithed) and were, well, just good people. And then James happened.

For reasons unknown, I had always been a maverick in that family. I was forever asking awkward questions, like how can there be starving children in the world while we’re eating turkey at Thanksgiving? Looking back, I must have been a royal pain in the ass. I was always asking questions like that, while my older sister and younger brother never did. Who knows why. Anyway, since I was already a potential threat to my family’s religious armor, now there was this new thing. James. A black boy. But blacks weren’t called blacks then. They were called Negroes or colored people by polite white people and they were called niggers by those not so polite. In our pious Christian household I never heard the word “nigger” even once. It was verboten.

However, as our neighborhood began to change, and colored people moved in, the For Sale signs sprouted like dandelions after a rain. Everyone was leaving in a hurry. By now I was a young teen and aware of such things, and continued asking my awkward questions. Why is everyone leaving, I asked? The words my father used still ring in my ears. People were leaving, he explained, because the “jigaboos” were moving in. Jigaboo? What the hell was a jigaboo? Well, it turns out, it was the same, my father made clear, as a “jungle bunny.” Jungle bunny? What the hell was a jungle bunny? James was a jungle bunny? I slowly caught on. James was a jigaboo. A jungle bunny. Oh, and one more: dark cloud. The “dark clouds” were moving in.

I suppose it was with pride that my parents never uttered the word “nigger.” Wasn’t that Christian of them? Jungle bunny was just fine with Jesus I guess. But not nigger. To this day that bigotry and hypocrisy make me cringe. I, in my usual maverick stance, thought it sucked eggs. I kept it to myself, because I was tired of being chastised for my questions about the Holy Lutheran Church. But I thought it all sucked eggs.

In Junior High I met a Japanese girl, who is still a close friend. Susan and I hit it off right away and can still pick up the phone any old time and carry on as if we had just talked the day before. My parents were okay with my Japanese friend. But what they didn’t know was that James and I, who ended up attending the same schools until the end of high school, were still friends. Good friends. We had crushes on each other. We both sang in a Madrigal Group, as well as regular choir, and, because we lived only a couple of blocks from each other, we would often walk home from school together. This my parents did not know about. Choir? Well, okay. Walking together? Not okay. But they never knew. That is, until one of our neighbors phoned my mother one day to expose this forbidden activity.

You see, since I had to climb this very steep hill before reaching my own street, James would often carry my books up that hill for me, even though he would then have to walk back down the hill and then walk a long block until he reached his own house. Sounds evil, doesn’t it? Well, on this particular day, James and I stopped at the top of the hill, both a bit winded, and he handed me my books. I thanked him and we began talking. This was my sin. This was my undoing. I had fallen into Mrs. Abrams’s trap.

Mrs. Abrams was a bored, rich housewife, who used to sit at her window and watch life go by. On this momentous day, James and I apparently talked too long for her fastidious sensibilities. She made The Phone Call to my mother, and when I walked in the door you’d have thought I shot someone. “What were you doing talking on that corner with that boy?!” I must have said something smart-ass, like, “Planning to get married” but I don’t remember. My good, Christian mother was livid. I was yelled at for quite a while and ended up in my room, fuming and not at all bewildered anymore. I now understood, with abundant clarity, what a nigger was. It was my friend James.

Junior High and High School were a whole different thing. Both were fully integrated—black, white, Asian, Latino, everyone. Racism was not evident, and I probably wouldn’t have thought about it at all except for James. Through the years we remained friends. By high school we were flirting with each other. We sang in choir together, had some classes together, talked in the hallways between classes, often walked home together and so on. There was always James. 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade—there was always James. Then one day, quite abruptly, everything changed.

Suddenly James avoided me in the hallways and no longer sat next to me on the choir bus. He would avoid me when walking home from school, and I can still picture him looking over his shoulder, noticing me, and immediately picking up his pace so we definitely would not be walking home together. It was a long walk for both of us, and I sadly remember his isolation. And mine. There he was, my friend James, walking quickly about two blocks ahead of me. I was hurt and baffled. But as I thought it through I guessed that by then his parents had told him what I was: dangerous. Stay clear.

As I grew up I educated myself about Things Verboten in the home of my youth, and what I learned sickened me. The slavery was beyond horrific, but when I realized that while I was attending Crocker Highlands Grammar School, there were still “White Only” and “Colored Only” places, mostly in the south, I was shaken. While James was making me giggle in the sixth grade, there were still questions about segregation? What? I had a terrible time-warp shake-up as I learned these things, just as I had a shocking wake-up call as I learned how bad religions could be. It was all bogus, selfish, bigoted, greedy bullshit. I know why they say ignorance is bliss. Someone once told me I read too many books. Is there such a thing?!

Anyway, why is any of this relevant to anything or anyone else today? Well, let’s take a look at today’s “enlightened” political landscape and see what we can find, shall we? We have the first ever black president, so things should be much better, right? Hmmm…………

Barack Hussein Obama

During the presidential primaries there were hints of racial trouble, but I wrongly dismissed them as belonging to a tiny fringe element. I was remarkably wrong again. The first hints about how Obama was not even born in this country made me feel uncomfortable, but when he actually won the election on November 4, 2008, I forgot about that nonsense and basked in what I thought was the glory of a new America. How many times can one person be so wrong about the same subject?!

Today, unbelievably, with two wars going on, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and the North Koreans threatening nuclear warfare, and Iran (run by religious whackos) doing the same thing, and the whole Middle East just bristling and ready to explode, what is our House of Representatives deliberating? Why, they want The Boy in the White House to apologize for saying that arresting a man in his own house for trespass was a stupid thing. And stupid it was.

A Cambridge Professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., arriving home after a summer of documentary filming, was locked out of his house. The door was stuck. So he and his driver put their shoulders into it to force the stubborn door open. A neighbor woman (hey! Like Mrs. Abrams!) phoned the police to report the suspicious activity. I guess it never occurred to her that burglars rarely try to enter a house carrying luggage. No, as a rule, they want to carry stuff out of the house. Anyway, cops arrived and Gates was arrested. (By the way, Gates is black and the cop is white. Just a coincidence.) Gates was rather peeved at being arrested at his own address, and expressed his anger in words unknown, but as I would say in words well-known, who gives a shit? For crying out loud, he provided his identification proving he lived there, but the cop arrested him anyway for disorderly conduct. I believe that if that had happened to my own husband Pat, he also would have been arrested, but it would be for striking an officer. However, since Pat is white, I doubt any kind of ugly words would have been exchanged at all.

Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan plans to introduce a resolution in the House asking President Obama to formally apologize to the Cambridge Police Department for his remarks about the arrest (not the cop) being stupid. The whole thing is insane. The popular talk-radio crazy man, Rush Limbaugh, loudly proclaimed that he hoped Obama fails. Terrific, Rush! Maybe we’ll sink in to the deepest depression ever, and that will teach us our lesson about electing niggers! You betcha!

In addition to that madness, there are The Birthers. They claim Obama was born in Kenya and demand to see his birth certificate, which is easily viewed online. What is so absurd about this is the number of people who have climbed onto that looney-tunes wagon. Have you ever seen Ronald Reagan’s birth certificate? Or that of either of the Bushes? Or Jimmy Carter? Or any frigging president? No, and neither have I. Cut the crap, people, this has nothing to do with birth certificates. The South has risen again. And they will not be governed by a nigger. It’s as simple and ugly as that.

I wonder what James thinks of all this.

Governor Perry of Texas not only said he wanted none of the stimulus money offered by the federal government, he also began prattling about seceding from the Union. Suddenly federal money wasn’t good enough for him. The $555 million in stimulus money would only help his own unemployed citizens, but, no, he didn’t want it. And if his precious Texas and any other goofball states plan to secede, I hope they’ll be able to create their own armies, air forces, navies and marines. And Emergency Management Agencies and…and…and…it’s total crap. All of it. It’s pure crazy-racist talk. Those who even discuss it are really saying they will not be governed by that boy in the White House.

To think that there was even talk of a House Resolution forcing our elected president to provide his birth certificate (which he’s already done online) is a very, very thinly veiled racist effort. I am ashamed and disheartened. This is not going to end. My post-election glow is gone.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in one of the most electrifying speeches ever, claimed that he had a dream. It was a lovely dream. I had that dream too. But, sadly, 45 years later, King’s dream seems quite out of reach. I am weary. I have all but abandoned hope. I hope my pessimism on this subject is misplaced. If only.

James, wherever you are, I wish you well.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

The Sanctity of Life

2009-07-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

Pro-life. What does that mean? Other than serial killers and mass murderers, who is not pro-life? The fact that anti-choice groups have confiscated that label is meaningless. I’ll rephrase. It should be meaningless. However, to quote Vladimir Lenin who was something of an expert on propaganda, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” That’s what has happened in the current, furious debate over abortion rights. The totally misleading label, “pro-life” has been accepted by almost all of us so right off the bat reality has taken a back seat to propaganda. Just by accepting that misleading label we are saying that those of us who are pro-choice are against life. What a crock.

Those of us who are pro-choice understand the sorrow involved in any abortion. It is not a fun thing to do. It should never be used as birth control. With so many other options available, that should never happen. Paradoxically, though, the people who scream about the “sanctity of life” and oppose all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, almost always support war and capital punishment. At the same time they rant about the evils of all forms of birth control. “The Pill Kills” is one of their favorite posters.

On the other hand, those of us who support pro-choice almost always oppose war and capital punishment, and firmly believe in birth-control. What is wrong with this picture?

This is a zygote. It is one cell, not two, as many believe. When a sperm enters an ovum, they form a single cell. According to the anti-choice position, this cell is a human being. It is as human as I am, and has all the rights that I have. It is too small to be seen with the naked eye. But supposedly, as a fully human being, it must have opinions. I wonder what they are. Is it a Democrat?

Thou Shalt Not Kill

It is religion that is causing all this chaos. Visit any anti-choice site and you will find it filled with biblical verses. As just one typical example, “The Army of God” opened this way on June 12, 2009: “The lives of innocent babies scheduled to be murdered by George Tiller are spared by the action of American hero Scott Roeder. George Tiller the Babykiller reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell. Psalm 55:15 ‘Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.’ ”

So Scott Roeder, who murdered an adult male human being, is pro-life. The murder, on May 31, took place in the Lutheran church where the victim was worshipping. The murderer, though, is pro-life. Why am I having a problem getting my mind around that concept? Then there is the Baptist pastor, Wiley Drake, who prayed for Dr. Tiller’s death and is now praying for the death of Barack Obama.

Aside from being inane, this kind of thinking is so filled with hate that it is shocking. Where does all this hate come from in the “pro-life” community? How can such hate come from people calling themselves Christian? At Dr. Tiller’s funeral there were picketers outside the church with signs that said, “GOD SENT THE KILLER” and “ABORTION IS BLOODY MURDER”. So God sent a murderer, but shooting an adult in cold blood is not bloody murder? I hope you are sharing my confusion here.

This is a 1-month embryo. According to the anti-choice position, it is a human being. It is as human as I am, and has all the rights that I have. I don’t know how it will manage to vote or get a driver’s license, but supposedly it has those rights.

The Truth Slips Out

Those who spout anti-abortion rhetoric are hiding behind their real feelings. What they actually want is to keep women in their place and they view pregnancy as a punishment for sex. It’s tragically simple. In the mid-1980s I was talking to my father, a fundamentalist Lutheran. We were discussing abortion and the laws about it and so on, and he was livid on the subject. Abortion is murder, he insisted through clenched jaws. I responded that when a 12-year-old girl is raped by her own father, she should not have to give birth to her own brother. He dismissed that with a grudging agreement but insisted that’s not what very many abortions are about. (He was completely wrong about that.)

I then changed directions and mentioned a female friend of mine who had been trying for years to become pregnant. She wanted a baby more than anything. However, if it turned out that she got pregnant but the amniocentesis showed that the child would be born with Down’s syndrome, meaning it would be severely retarded and not live past the age of 35, then she would abort the pregnancy. As much as she wanted to get pregnant, she did not want to inflict that on her own child. What did my father think of that? Well, he pulled in his chin, as he often did when impatient and/or angry, and finally sputtered through pursed lips, “Well, should they be allowed to get away with it?!” He was righteously angry. I knew of course who “they” were. “They” were young black girls who, he felt, were using abortion as a means of birth control. Yes, my father was a racist. But when I asked him what he meant by “getting away with it” he abruptly turned away and changed the subject. Case closed.

This is a 3-month embryo. Look how it’s grown! Probably riding a tricycle by now. Looks more like the mother than the father. This fully human being probably has a sense of humor! Think so?

But he had let slip the fundamentalist “Christian” position on abortion. Pregnancy is a punishment for sex, since all sex is sinful, and women have to get used to it. Birth control is still forbidden by the Catholic Church, which is utterly amazing in this over-crowded world with so many starving children. It is utterly callous as well. And just plain insane.

I hadn’t meant to start a fight with my father, who was a kind man at heart, which I know sounds contradictory. But I had strong feelings on the matter just as he did and I think he wasn’t used to such cogent arguments about it. Dad and I moved past that awkward moment, but it was indeed awkward. His other two children never posed such challenges. I had always been the odd one out in my family. I am the only atheist in a solidly Christian family.

THIS IS WAR

Those who vehemently oppose abortion just as vehemently support war, like the obscenity we initiated in Iraq in 2003. How can this be? War kills humans, including innocent babies and children, while capital punishment requires no definition. So what is it? Is pro-life only pro-life when it involves embryos?

An Atheist’s View on the Sanctity of Life

First and foremost, secular humanists consider murdering doctors a major crime and those who do it should be locked up for life, unlike those Christian positions which hold that those doctors deserve what they get. And as the term implies, secular humanism focuses on the value and welfare of humans. The word “secular” obviously excludes gods of any kind. So a secular humanist is someone who truly values human life and works toward improving the condition of people everywhere, with no religion necessary.

Humanists try to do good deeds just for the sake of goodness (and things like peace and harmony) and not for some after-death reward. That reward thing kind of takes the goodness out of good deeds, doesn’t it?

When does a human life begin? What precise moment? I have no idea but I believe reasonable people should be able to come to a reasonable agreement on that issue. What is fascinating though about the ardent Christian position is that the Bible never mentions it. Not once. With so many silly commandments in the Bible, such as not making any “graven images” (whatever the hell that means) there is not the slightest hint that abortion might not be a good thing. Not a word about it. How can Christians explain that one?

Why can’t we get our priorities straight? There are millions of starving and abused children in this world right now, as I write this. So how about this: First, let’s take care of all the babies and children who are sick, starving, dying or abused, all over the planet. Let’s make them all well. It’s an enormous task, but isn’t it about as worthy an undertaking as can be imagined? Once that’s done, then let’s have a serious talk about the rights of embryos. It seems like loving logic to me—the atheist.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

SOURCES
http://www.armyofgod.com/

http://www.examiner.com/x-4317-Denver-Roman-Catholic-Examiner~y2009m6d9-Pastor-who-prayed-for-Tillers-death-now-prays-for-death-of-the-president

Hello, Gun-Lovers, Whoever You Are

2009-05-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

Guns and Gods. In far too many countries they seem to go together, don’t they? Guns and Gods. It seems an unlikely partnership, but if you give it a moment’s thought you’ll see the relationship. During the 2008 presidential primaries Barack Obama was denounced for observing that during hard times people “cling to guns or religion” and it took a while for that scandalous remark to fade from the headlines. In that same sentence he had also mentioned three other things that people “cling to” but those things got lost in the shuffle. He was dead right though. Guns and Gods have always hung out together.

In 1839 the British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote that “The pen is mightier than the sword.” I say, “Not if you’re the one with the sword.” A bullet in the head speaks louder than any Op-Ed piece ever written. And no one knows this better than Americans. We do like our guns. And, from this point on, when I say “gun” I am referring to handguns. Hunting rifles and legal shotguns are a whole different thing, and generally do not threaten us. Unless, of course, you go hunting with Dick Cheney. But the God-gun union is ubiquitous in this country. The number of gun shows we sponsor is shameful and ridiculous. If you think I’m exaggerating, just check this out:

http://www.gunshows-usa.com/

I can’t, though I wish I could, remember the name of a documentary I watched a few years ago. It was about gun control. Someone with a camera and microphone walked through a gun show and politely asked people if they were Christians. 99% proudly said yes, of course. When asked how they reconciled the violence of guns with their Christian beliefs, every single person, no exceptions, quoted the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Every person who was asked that question responded that way and they queried a whole lot of people.

From My Cold, Dead Hands

As president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the late Charlton Heston made those words famous: “I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands.” Sadly, too many police officers end up doing just that after a spell of gang warfare. Our streets are overflowing with semi-automatic and automatic weapons. The bad guys usually have more firepower than the cops. Many urban areas often resemble war zones. This is a preposterous state of affairs and why we continue to allow it is something that amazes me, as well as most of the civilized world. I know, I know. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Well, we must either amend the amendment or change our laws.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That’s it. That is the entire Second Amendment. But here is my question: Why is half of it completely ignored and the other half sanctified? The first half, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State….” is a dependent clause, and modifies the rest of the sentence. This clause cannot stand alone and does not form a sentence. The second half, “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” could indeed stand alone and therefore form a complete sentence. It would have been a simple, clear-cut instruction were it not for that pesky clause that precedes it. So why is that clause there? And why is it consistently ignored?

Look up the word “militia” and think about it. In no way does that word refer to a single individual. It cannot be interpreted that way, and it was never intended to be interpreted that way. Our Founding Fathers were in the process of separating themselves from an oppressive monarchy, and felt it necessary to proudly claim their right to bear arms against “the king” which of course meant George III. If current judges want to interpret the amendment as referring to individuals, then we must amend the amendment. “Militia” does not mean “any individual” but that is how we are interpreting it today. And it is absurd.

A Farewell to “Arms”

Aside from those long, gangly things growing out from our shoulders, what is the definitions of arms? For the Founding Fathers it meant muskets with attached bayonets. They also had cannons, but the musket was the mainstay. To load a muzzleloading flintlock musket, a soldier opened his cartridge box, grabbed a cartridge, bit off the end to expose the powder, and poured a small amount into the pan of the lock, closed the pan, dropped the cartridge (powder first) into the barrel, removed his rammer, rammed it home, returned his rammer, and then made ready to shoot by cocking his lock, and pointed his piece at the enemy. There were no sights attached. Soldiers were expected to be able to fire a shot every 15 seconds for at least 4 minutes before needing to slow down because of the fouling in the barrel. It had a maximum range of 75 yards.

One manner in which they used these muskets was to form two lines of men, one line kneeling and the other line standing right behind them. As the kneeling soldiers fiddled around with their muskets, the standing men shot theirs. Then the standing men kneeled down, the kneeling men stood up and began firing, and so on, switching back and forth to keep the firing continuous. As human inventions go, it was a fairly efficient way of killing each other. At that time.

Okay. Let’s see. How does this overall description compare to, say, a 9 mm Glock pistol, which can shoot bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger? If you alter it slightly (and easily) it can become fully automatic, firing non-stop as long as you hold your finger down. Apparently I can buy a Smith & Wesson Model 22A .22LR 5-1/2” Black Barrel and Slide, Grey Frame 9 mm Glock for only $225.57 on the Internet:

http://www.rrarms.com/handguns.html

I think I’ll pass, but I think I’ve made my point. The “arms” of our Founding Fathers no more resemble the guns on the street today than they resemble a nuclear missile. It’s night and day. Apples and oranges. There are “arms” and then there are “arms” and to lump them all together is asinine. If handguns are considered OK for regular citizens, then why not hand grenades? I would appreciate an answer to that question from anyone in the NRA. I don’t want to hear any crap about “protection” or “self-defense” because you can damn well “protect” yourself with a hand grenade. Of course there may be collateral damage, but then drive-by shootings with handguns produce collateral damage too, don’t they?

Some Statistics

If we look around us we see that other countries have some control of their guns. In 2004, handguns murdered:

5 people in New Zealand

37 people in Sweden

56 people in Australia

184 people in Canada

19 people in Japan

73 people in the UK

11,344 people in the United States

Even adjusting for population, these numbers are horrifying. Japan has almost half as many people as the United States. So how can these numbers be so dreadfully lopsided? Last I heard, Japan was considered civilized, modern and “open” compared to, say, Cuba. So why are those numbers so wildly out of proportion? Gun control. Pretty simple.

Among 26 of the industrialized nations, 86% of gun deaths among children under age 15 occurred in the United States. As of 2008 the city of Philadelphia alone had in storage 65,000 (yes, thousand) confiscated semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons. Every year one-half million violent crimes are committed with firearms in the USA. On average, each hour of every day, one person is murdered with a gun. There are an estimated 250 million guns in the USA. One in four Americans owns a gun. In 2004, semi-automatic assault weapons were again legal after a 10-year ban. Over 20 states have “Castle Laws” wherein you can shoot to kill any armed or unarmed person who poses a threat to your property, not just your life.

According to the NRA, this is all as it should be. According to me, ARE WE NUTS?!

Canada seems to think guns are a privilege, not a right. They demand safety courses, background checks and spousal approval signatures. Most people think of Canadians as civilized and living in a free society. How do they get along without our gun-toting freedoms? From 1989-95, the average handgun homicide rate was 4.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., compared to 0.3 per 100,000 for Canada. Handguns were involved in more than half (52%) of the homicides in the U.S., compared to 14% in Canada.

One of my friends in the UK told me that if guns were as free and loose there as they are here in the States, he would never leave his house. When he visits here his fear level is always elevated. I can’t blame him.

Pistols and Preachers

How can there be so many Christians, let alone Christian ministers, in favor of guns? Especially in the South, there is widespread enthusiasm for gun ownership. With a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, Christians often defend guns. But why? What about the Prince of Peace? Where is that Christian message of kindness and forgiveness and goodwill toward all? There is a disconnect there that I do not understand.

Early in the 2008 presidential primaries, when Republican Mike Huckabee was still considered a contender, Chris Matthew interviewed him on MSNBC’s Hardball. Discussing handguns and the dreadful violence in Chris’s beloved Philadelphia, Huckabee was asked what he thought should be done about it. Keep in mind that Huckabee was/is a Baptist minister. His answer? Exercise your Second Amendment rights! Chris’s mouth fell open, certain he had misunderstood, and he asked Huckabee if he meant that everyone in Philly should be carrying guns. Huckabee’s answer? If that’s what it takes to defend yourself! The inevitable comparison to the OK Corral was made, but Pastor Huckabee remained firm. To stay safe you pack heat. I just don’t get it. And it is not only ludicrous. It is stupid.

If you own a handgun you are 22 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. Picture it. It is 3:30 a.m. You are sound asleep. Suddenly you are startled into semi-awareness by a sound. Licking your lips and blinking your eyes, you try to gather your wits about you, and finally realize there is a stranger in your house. Immediately you begin to grope for the nightstand to get your handgun, which is intended for just such purposes. As you fumble for your gun, ready to shoot to kill, it’s too late. Your intruder is already in your room with either a knife or his own gun at your head. If he had not possessed a gun originally, he does now. He has yours. You have armed your intruder.

Here’s a slightly different scenario. It is 3:30 a.m., etc. Your house alarm suddenly goes off, scaring the hell out of you and informing the police that there is a break-in. You’re startled into a more abrupt semi-awareness, but you’re still a bit foggy. By the time your head has cleared, and you are fumbling for your gun, the same scenario plays out except that the police (hopefully) are on their way. Can they arrive before your intruder slits your throat?

And here is a tragically common scenario: a child finds a loaded gun, plays with it, and either shoots himself or a friend. Here in my own subdivision a 6-year-old child shot and killed herself with a loaded gun. When her mother was asked how this could have happened, she replied, “I don’t know. We told her not to touch it.” You know, there are a lot of things we can fix in this world, but as one comedian pointed out, “You can’t fix stupid.”

If you keep a gun for protection but it is not loaded, just how will you protect yourself? Will you ask your intruder to please wait while you load up so that you can have a duel? If you keep your gun loaded, how will you keep your children from finding it? If you place it clearly out of reach of your children, won’t it be clearly out of your reach in the middle of the night?

These practical considerations are never discussed when gun-lovers talk about defending their homes. So, here’s a warning: In case you didn’t already know this, very few intruders send out formal notices about the date and time they plan to break into your house. Very few ever do this. I have it on the best authority. So. Are you planning never to sleep again? Of course not. Will you and your spouse or roommate take turns standing guard, every night, 365 days a year? Of course not. So I put it to you: How is that gun in your nightstand going to protect you?

As the hilarious Stephen Colbert noted in his book, when describing the role of a father in a typical American household, one of the most important jobs Dad has is to protect his little family. Therefore, he should sleep with a 9mm under his pillow, loaded with hollow points. At the least sign of movement in his castle in the middle of the night, he should wake up firing. This tongue-in-cheek observation is immediately followed by a facetious “publisher’s disclaimer” which states that you should not sleep with a 9mm under your pillow and shoot at shadows immediately upon waking. Well, duh!

Okay. Some things are not funny. But Wyatt Earp is.

The Wyatt Earp Syndrome

We Americans are still so mesmerized by the scores of John Wayne, Wild West movies and TV shows which have permeated our culture, that few of us know the real history involved. Western, frontier towns were hot, dusty and dirty in the summer and cold, muddy and dirty in the winter. Cattle drives were dusty and boring. Life was hard and often short. If we could clear our minds of the dumb-ass, totally fictionalized images of gunfights in the Old West, and it isn’t easy, perhaps we can look at guns more clearly.

For starters, the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral was not a gunfight at all. It was a street brawl brought on by political tensions and total confusion. Wyatt Earp was never a sheriff or a marshal in Wichita, Dodge City, Tombstone or anywhere else. For five or six years he was a first-rate peace officer, serving as assistant or deputy, and earned respect because he managed to keep peace while avoiding violent confrontations. Earp was a farmer, a stage coach driver, buffalo hunter, body guard, horse breeder, saloon keeper, faro dealer, prospector, and on and on and on. Only a tiny portion of his life was spent as a lawman. (Read, people, read!)

All the towns of the Old West had some sort of lawmen, and they all had the same rule: Check your gun with the local police official when you first arrive in town. You would then be given your guns back when you left. Guns were mostly carried by cowhands on cattle drives to keep snakes away from their livestock. It’s not as exciting as shootouts at high noon. But then few things in life are.

Peace Be Unto You

Where are the Christian calls for ridding ourselves of guns? Where are the Christian calls for peace? Huckabee clearly loves guns, but why? Guns are not glamorous and they do not confer masculinity or courage. They are too easily obtained and too easily used accidentally. At the same time, they are almost useless for protection unless you carry a loaded gun with you at all times, including while you sleep. Does that make any sense?

Women, consider this: You have a loaded gun in your purse for protection. You are walking to your car at night and someone jumps out at you from behind the bushes. That’s another thing people do without announcing it in advance. (“Lady! I’m going to attack you! Get ready!”) Anyway, ladies, how do you get your gun out of your purse, remove the safety, aim and shoot before he has you by the throat? How are you going to do that? The same goes for men. You’re carrying your car keys and walking along and, without announcing himself (!) an attacker pounces on you from the shadows. How are you going to get your gun out of your pocket or holster, remove the safety, aim and shoot before he has you by the throat? It’s all nonsense.

The USA of course is not alone in its gun-mania, though we pretty much hold the record in Western countries. But the world is awash with weapons.

I don’t know when we will grow out of this Neanderthal thinking—the idea that by being armed to the teeth we are somehow safer than if we were not. Haven’t all the wars and suicide bombings and robbery-murders and so on convinced us yet that this is not the best way to live? And if I should be shot and killed on the street or in my own home, it will not be because I was not protected by a handgun. It will be because some maniac used an easily-obtained gun to kill me. I love my husband dearly, but he sleeps like he’s comatose and snores and snorts like a steam engine. I swear there are times when it would take something as loud as the sound of an actual gunshot to wake him. He does not need to be fiddling with guns in the middle of the night. And neither do I.

Peace.

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

SOURCES:

NTGEO (National Geographic) satellite channel documentary, “Guns in America” which aired on Tuesday, 12/09/08 at 7 p.m. PT

Colbert, Stephen. I Am America (And So Can You!). New York: Grand Central Publishing Book Group, Spartina Productions, Inc., 2007.

http://www.ichv.org/Statistics.htm

http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa030500a.htm

http://www.guncontrol.ca/Content/international.html

http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/res-rec/comp-eng.htm

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2245918,00.html

http://www.gunsworld.com/law/laws_france_us.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2131677.stm

Happy Easter, Mithra!

2009-04-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter to you all! Have fun with your bunny-rabbits and fuzzy little yellow chicks and colored eggs. Hard-boiled preferably. It all symbolizes the coming of spring, of things new and young and fresh. The world is waking from its cruel, cold winter, so it’s time to celebrate. Nothing wrong with any of that.

However, what on earth does this stuff have to do with the death, burial and supposed “resurrection” of a Jew who died around the year 33 A.D. in Jerusalem? I don’t believe there ever was an historical Jesus, and if you want to begin your own investigation, just Google Mithra and you will be amazed. However, let’s deal first with the story in the New Testament of the Bible about Jesus and his death and burial. After all, that’s all Christians have to rely on in making their incredible claims about their incredible beliefs. There are no independent sources.

So, according to Scripture, Jesus makes his grand entry into Jerusalem on an ass, knowing he is going to die there. It is his mission. To die. He is supposed to die for the sins of everyone else, although if people sin and don’t ask for forgiveness in the right way, they will still go to hell. I know, I know, it makes no sense, but we’re dealing with the Bible here so try to stay with me on this.

Jesus is found guilty by the Jewish priests and scribes of claiming to be the Son of God and, thereby, failing to give proper tribute to Caesar, which of course is treason and thereby naturally a capital offense. They dumped their petty Jewish squabble into Pontius Pilate’s lap, who could have cared less. Still, because Jewish riots were always a threat, and occasionally serious ones (look up Maccabees) these scuffles had to be quelled as soon as possible. Fearing a serious Jewish rebellion, Pilate had Jesus whipped and questioned, and when it was over Pilate’s reaction is one of the most difficult “facts” to believe in the Bible. Pontius Pilate found no guilt at all in the man and, therefore, ordered him to be crucified.

You have to read that twice, don’t you? It makes no sense at all, in any way, and must have been cobbled together to fulfill those incessant, relentless Old Testament prophesies. Anyway, the Jewish Elders still screamed for Jesus’ blood, charging sedition, so Pilate then sent Jesus to Herod, a Jewish ruler. Herod mocked Jesus but, again, found no serious fault, so he sent him back to Pilate. Pilate’s actual words about this tomfoolery are recorded in the Bible. Pilate “Said unto them, Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and, behold, I, having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him: No, nor yet Herod: for I sent you to him; and, lo, nothing worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore chastise him, and release him.” (Luke 23:14-16) [All biblical references from the King James Version.]

Are you following this? It’s not easy. Just begin reading at Luke 23, plow through it and try to grasp the logic. Pontius Pilate repeatedly says he can find no fault with Jesus. “Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find no fault in this man.” (Luke 23:4) But the throng continues to call for his death, while Pilate continues to claim Jesus’ innocence: “And he said unto them the third time, Why, what evil hath he done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will therefore chastise him, and let him go.” (Luke 23:22) Apparently tired of their haranguing, Pilate finally says, in essence, “Okay. Go kill the guy.”

Now wait a minute. First off, no Roman procurator would be dictated to by a bunch of rowdy Jews. Pilate might have ordered the crowd to be disbanded, very roughly, but never would have allowed them to manipulate such a powerful Roman. Second, Pilate wouldn’t give a rat’s rear what Herod thought or did, as long as he kept the Jews in line. Keep in mind however that the Gentiles who wrote the New Testament had to blame the Jews somehow, even though they knew perfectly well that crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one. Jews stoned or strangled or beheaded, but they did not crucify. So that alone might explain this bizarre story about Pilate and the Jews, but you’d think someone could have made it at least slightly convincing.

On the Third Day...

Well, moving on, we now have a dead body to deal with. The Bible is repetitive in its insistence that Jesus’ body will rise from the dead on the third day. Why the third day? Why not the second? The fourth? “For he taught his disciples, and said unto them, The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day.” (Mark 9:31) And again: “And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again.” (Mark 10:34) And again: “And they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again.” (Luke 18:33) Well, enough. We get it, okay? It’s gonna happen on the third day. But no one ever asks the obvious question: Why the third day?

The answer is rather ghoulish, but understandable. Ancient Jewish burial rites were strict and complex. Dr. Kenneth V. Iserson, author of the book Death to Dust, offered an expert yet easy to understand explanation. The three day wait was to prevent premature burials, which did happen. Dr. Iserson appeared on a documentary titled “Crypts, Coffins and Corpses.” Produced in 2001, the documentary was very informative. On that show the narrator opened with: “Around the time of Christ bodies in the Roman Empire began to be wrapped in shrouds and buried in caves. Fears of being buried alive forced religious leaders to change the Jewish burial rites. From Iserson on Jewish burial rules:

“People wrapped up the bodies, put them in the cave, wouldn’t seal the cave for at least three days. And the family was required to go and visit the body every day for three days. Why was that? ‘Cuz they may have made a mistake. The body may not have been dead. And in fact that happened. Because they did not have any of the modern tools to diagnose death. If after three days there was evidence of putrefaction, body breaking down, or clearly the body was dead, they’d seal the cave until the next burial.” All of a sudden the “third day” stuff makes sense. You’ll notice the family was required to visit the body every day for three days. So much for the stone and the Roman soldiers supposedly guarding the stone in front of the tomb of an unknown Jew. The stone stuff never happened. The daily visits would have happened, as required by Jewish Law, and that makes sense. Finally! Something in this idiotic story that makes sense!

Aside from making sense, it emphasizes the primitive nature of medicine at the time in question. Not being able to distinguish coma from death can definitely be considered primitive. But there is another complicating factor, for Christians anyway, in this story. Jewish Law demanded that any Jew killed as a criminal could not be buried in a private tomb, according to the Mishnah (the first section of the Talmud) so Jesus would have had to be buried in a non-private tomb with other criminals. He was killed for sedition, remember? This criminal-burial thing totally contradicts the Gospels. But, like so many other contradictions in the Gospels, this one is completely ignored. It may be ignored, but it may not be eliminated.

Enter Mithra

What, you may rightly ask, does any of this have to do with Mithra, the Persian God who was worshipped five centuries before, and two centuries after, the supposed birth of Christ? Well, for you fence-sitters and closet atheists in need of ammunition, consider the following “coincidences” and then try to claim that Jesus was separate and unique from any other Gods of his time.

Jesus and Mithra shared the following characteristics:

· Both were born of virgins

· Both had shepherds adoring them at birth

· Both had twelve followers

· Both had ritual baptisms

· Both had ritual communion and used wafers in their rituals

· Both claimed Sunday to be a Holy Day

· Both believed in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead

· Both performed miracles

· Both were considered mankind's savior

· Both were known as “The Light of the world” AND…GET READY FOR THE BIGGEE……

· Both were born on December 25!

If you can believe in all those coincidences, well, I guess you’ll believe anything. Never forget that Mithra predated Jesus by centuries and competed with the new Christian religion for two more centuries. I’m not a gambler, but if I were I’d bet that Mithra was the original, Jesus was the copycat, and neither one ever existed in real life.

I know many of you are probably asking why I go into such detail about a pretend book, the Bible, and pretend events. It’s simple. When I was going through my own crisis of faith, reading everything I could get my hands on to learn the real truth about those Bible stories, I would have loved to have had something like this very article I am writing, and also my other biblical criticisms, close at hand. I didn’t have such resources (there wasn’t even an Internet yet) but I wish I had. Why? It would have helped me two ways. First, it would have helped me think these things though clearly and would have validated my doubts much sooner than they were in fact validated. Second, they would have been extremely handy when I was occasionally cornered by an earnest Christian proselytizer. As I’ve said many times, I am writing for fence-sitters and closet atheists, both of which I was myself once, and this sort of ammunition would have shut them up. I know it does now! If they bring it up first (I never do) they also soon scurry for cover, changing the subject abruptly, when it becomes apparent that I am well versed in biblical hogwash. They are so very used to ignorance.

So, again, I wish you all a Happy Easter. Enjoy your chocolate-covered bunnies, and your Easter Eggs and your Mithra Mints!

Judith Hayes

http://www.thehappyheretic.com/

jhayes@goldrush.com

Sources:

Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D.

Book: Death to Dust

Published 2001

“Crypts, Coffins and Corpses”

History International Channel, 121,

Air date: Friday, 10/31/08, 2008 @ 3:00 PM PT

Produced in 2001

http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa122397b.htm

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/godsreligion/a/mithraismxmas.htm

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578314/Mithraism.html