My counter-point teacher in music school once explained that by learning to move freely in the tight strictures of the contrapuntal form, one gained a dexterity. He likened it to a straight-jacket; it was not a complimentary comparison nor did it engender confidence in a promising outcome. My straight-jacket in the ‘god’ sense – the ‘atheist drift’ sense - was my parochial school education; the elementary, high school and tertiary phases. It was like a very prolonged boot-camp for faith through which I learned to navigate.
Onward Christian soldiers!
Priests and nuns were like camp guards (to complete the heavy-handed analogy) and very little in the way of discrepancy or divergence was tolerated. There was no lingering in the grey zone. One committed or was consigned to the rubbish bin; ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’. That sort of mentality, anyway; beatings were largely unnecessary. There were many other ways of milking the rat, as it were. (Recall the stern upbraiding that awaited the wag who’d chirped up linking Holy Communion to ‘cannibalism’.)
Stories about young girls with roses growing from the chests as they floated down the river were not to be scoffed at. They were not to be questioned. Questioning the sense of any story relating miracles or martyrdom was NOT to be tolerated. In fact, the questioner or quipster was subject to being anathemized. In previous times, taking tales of miracles or prophesy lightly was frowned upon. A persistent insistence to broaching such questions would have resulted in torture and possibly death by burning at the stake, in former times.
Learning to deal with the straight-jacket of fear was a lesson learned from parochial school. Face the fear; look it right in the face and sneer. If it doesn’t sneer back and double-down, you’ve won the stand-off. Facing down the nuns was not to be taken as a metaphysical challenge, however; another lesson learned, but by proxy.
Which reminds me of another bit of ‘ancient wisdom’ which ‘Believers’ aren’t allowed to ask about seriously; an age-old saw for directing one to find the straight-and-narrow. It is said; ‘Fear of the ‘Lord’ is the beginning of wisdom.’ (There’s that feudal word, again…) In California, I once asked a guy who was a nascent preacher, a deacon or ‘presbyter’ or some such; someone who was revered in a small circle of ‘Believers’ as a Christian religious leader.
As I was in the company of ‘Believers’ – a couple of the ‘adepts’ from Nashville were among that company - I sincerely posed this question to him for explanation; ‘What does ‘Fear of the etc’ mean?’ I don’t recall what he said in response because what he said, quite honestly, made no sense whatsoever. It was something along the lines of ‘Fear is a motivator and god is fearsome but loving… yadda-yadda. It was gibberish. I had expected little more, to be honest; word salad with the garlic croutons of ‘our lord’ as condiment. It was the kind of gibberish that is called ‘deepities’ by Dan Dennett. What the ‘deacon/presbyter’ told me was meant to sound profound but wasn’t. Not in the least.
‘A deepity involves saying something with two meanings—one trivially true, the other profound sounding but false or nonsensical. Dennett illustrates this with the expression “Love is just a word.”
The ‘deacon/presbyter’s’ answer had droned on about submission to the ‘Lord’ (that word, again) and obedience – blind obedience to a ‘power’ that was beyond my knowledge and beyond my comprehension. Halleluiah? Isn’t it odd that an all-knowing, all-wise god would make us humans in ‘his’ image but make us so dumb that we fail to comprehend the mystery of ‘him/it’? Right? The ‘Lord’ gave me an intellect but denied me an intellect robust enough to understand what ‘he/it’ was up to at all.
Huh?
But ‘Believers’ insist that ‘belief (aka Faith)’ is all that’s necessary to get that golden ticket to eternal life. ‘You can’t use your intellect to ‘know’ god’, they’ll say. ‘You have to meet ‘him/it half way’, they’ll insist. Why the fuck on earth would that be? Is god so insecure that he/it needs to be coaxed into revealing him/itself to satisfy his/its ego? He/it purportedly explicitly told folks in the Old Testament that he/it is a jealous god. That sounds like a mighty weighty deific insecurity to me.
Are we all meant to be psychological support animals for an insecure god/thing? No, thanks. I gave up my ‘security blank-y’ years ago. ‘god’ should as well.
Was Zeus ever wracked with angst? Was Odin All-Father clenched in the grip of insecurity? And they both had sons who vied for their godly thrones. They, furthermore, certainly had other gods before them; pantheons of celestial characters with powers and tales of their own. Didn’t seem to cause them to act all murderous and blood-thirsty like the borrowed Hebrew god. The Egyptian god, Osiris, was killed – hacked to pieces - and resurrected and he didn’t appear to be skittish about anyone making golden idols of other gods. He never said much on the subject. Heck, Osiris was even married to a god and had one for a son. Gods everywhere and few of them were as jealous and fearful as that Yahweh dude.
Must have been a Judean thing.
Another early puzzlement that niggled at me was the ‘three days in the tomb and then rose from the dead’. How does anyone get three days out that story?
(I know; the idea of a man coming back from the dead should have been the tip-off to this bit of bunkum but questioning the foundation of the Christian religion was strictly verboten. I mean, this is the resurrection; the Christ’s victory over death. He’s the Pascal Lamb sacrificed to ease the sins of the world and guarantee salvation for mankind. Halleluiah!)
Back to my math-geek insight, however. Perhaps, I’d best recap the story of the Passion first; Good Friday was a no good, very bad day for Jesus; trials, scourging, crown of thorns, lugging the cross to Calvary, being crucified.
(Not what you’d call a day at the beach…)
Then, the Man from Galilee died on the cross (at about 3pm according to my Catholic teachers). The curtain in the Temple was ‘rent’; the sky turned black and the dead rose from their graves (!). Mary Magdalene was the one who had him taken him down and who arranged for him to be laid him in the tomb; a tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea - who serendipitously appeared, then disappeared from the story.
(Question (one of many); this was all prophesied and foreseen, foreordained by god, the Father, supposedly but where to put the corpse of the crucified man/god wasn’t considered or arranged beforehand? And during Passover? Mysterious ways, again?)
Anyway, all that funereal rigmarole amounts to 7 or 8 hours following his ‘Eli! Eli! moment’, depending on lots of factors; lowering the cross, removing the corpse, preparing it for burial, transportation, avoiding all the zombies which rose from their graves when Jesus died, etc.
(See Matthew 27:46-54 for grins.
Why is there no accounting of this event of a Jewish zombie jamboree apart from this single passage? Why didn't historians like Josephus or Tacitus or Philo ever mention anyone else telling crazy stories about dead Jews breezing through town in their burial shrouds)?
Anyway, into the borrowed tomb Jesus goes, to chill for all of Saturday. Then – Pop! Weigh! Hey! And up he rises early Sunday morning, 5, 6am?
So, 8 hours on Friday after dying, 24 hours chilling in the tomb on Saturday, then 6 hours from midnight Sat to Sun morning. That’s not even 2 fricking days in the tomb. Apologists fidget and tap-dance to make the story fit some prophesy or other, but time is time, an hour is an hour and a day is a day. It wasn’t three days in the tomb; it wasn’t even 2 days by my reckoning. Like I said, ‘picking at nits’ but…come on! Get the stupid story straight at least.
Oh, and another thing – besides the clear and obvious fact that NO ONE comes back from the dead – why were there were guys ‘guarding the tomb’? WTF? From what? Grave-robbers looking for riches from an itinerant carpenter-cum-rabbi crucified as a criminal and interred in a borrowed tomb? Was this normal SOP back then? During Passover? To think that this makes sense to millions of people should give one pause for thought.
Ugh…
Granted this math conundrum was a minor one but, like the crack in the dike, it eventually brought down the wall.
More Adventures in Religiosity
I recall playing a gig with a show-band at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The university was founded on the principles of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and with money from the Beatles, no doubt. The university offered advanced courses in levitation. Open only to graduate students. Really…
Classes were held in a padded room where advanced candidates sat lotus position and bounced themselves higher and higher. Supposedly, graduates of the course could actually hold themselves above the padded mat for a brief moment. No one could offer proof or even anecdotal evidence of any success. I have to assume that photography was disallowed.
A-hem
Did I mention I lived in California? I have had countless encounters with ‘seekers’; people who vouched for the efficacy of Eckankar, soul travel, astral projection, telekinesis, crystals, pyramid power, Scientology, and on and on. All the seekers sought ‘enlightenment’ and ‘transcendent whatever’. All the various paths to a ‘higher state of being’ were couched in spiritual twaddle and esoterica.
IMHO.
For much of my early adulthood, it seemed that all the ‘seekers’ were looking everywhere for something to plug the absence of Christianity and formal religion from their lives. ‘Ancient wisdom’ was a popular by-word and marketing ploy. Mysteries revealed! ESP, Lost Atlantis, Mu or Lemuria; Edgar Cayce, L. Ron Hubbard, pyramid power, soul travel, interdimensional beings, crystals, etc. Many got lost in the intricate maze of deception, manipulation, falsehoods and confusing spiritual non-sequitur.
After transferring to a secular high school from the diocesan, parochial high school, Bishop Mac , I attended ‘catechism classes’. (Roman Catholics don’t refer to these as ‘Sunday school’ or ‘Bible study’. Recall that Catholics are sternly dissuaded from reading the Bible unaccompanied by a priest.)
Bored to tears hearing the nonsensical story of Noah or the Garden of Eden or other Biblical drivel for the umpteenth time, I suggested that perhaps we might study comparative Christianity in our catechism class.
‘What do other Christian religions believe?’
I recall that the teacher (a local auto dealer) got a terror stricken look on his face; aghast at the thought. He said that he’d ask the priest about the request before continuing with the biblical fairy tale of the week. Needless to say, discussion of Lutheranism or the Methodist or Episcopalians never happened or was ever mentioned. I took my leave of the class and preferred driving the country roads listening to rock and pop music on the car radio.
Far more enjoyable and edifying.
I also had an encounter or two with a pastor of the local Church of Christ, Scientist; the family of my high school girlfriend were member of that Faith. The pastor, a spritely, oddly mustachioed fellow, felt it his duty to proselytize. He voiced fear that what he said did not fall ‘on fallow ground’. I assured him that I was sincerely interested. Seeing me as a possible convert and tithe-giver, I learned a bit about Mary Baker Eddy, the sect’s founder. I was introduced to the precepts which I found to be less than compelling; ‘Biblical Christ’ and all but devoid of science.
It was about this time that I determined that if I couldn’t make sense of the palaver; it was bogus. There were caveats, of course – higher math, advanced science, etc. – but otherwise, if I was confounded and had no recourse to learning, then that topic was set aside, labeled ‘twaddle’.
Much later in life, I took to practicing a mind experiment in which I imagined myself peering into the ‘abyss’; a black, endless, void. It was a form of meditation, now that I think of it. I did it in order to get accustomed to confronting the inevitable ‘abyss’ of nothingness death.
No comments:
Post a Comment