What WOULD Jesus Do?

(Via Rich Black)

My parents never attended church, to my knowledge. They certainly never went while I was living under their roof. My Mother, I suppose due to her upbringing in North Carolina, had some screwy notions about Sunday, however. She had a standing rule, in fact, that we could not go out and play on Sunday unless we attended church. Otherwise, please don't ask me to explain the logic behind it, we would be committing some kind of sacrilege. So, if I woke up on Sunday morning and it was raining, in which case I knew I wasn't going to be allowed to go outside anyway, I just rolled over and went back to sleep. Otherwise, I hopped out of bed, dug out what passed for my Sunday-Go-To-Meetings and trundled off to whatever church we were directed to attend at the time. Usually a Protestant or Reformed Baptist of some sort or another. Definitely not EVER a Catholic or so influenced one. Again, something sinister there, to be avoided at all costs.

Anyway...

I was not cut out for religion. Just didn't work, one with the other. They were forever trying to force feed me all these bullshit stories and ideologues and I was just as consistently asking them to please explain the unexplainable.

Your average conversation would go something like this:

"Okay, so where did his wife come from..?"
"The Land of Nod."
"Okay, but I thought you just said that him, his now dead brother and his parents were the only human beings on the planet at the time."
"Well, yes, but.."
"Okay, then who was this woman he married..? His sister?"
"Of course not, son. That would be a sin."
"I understand, but that doesn't really answer my question."
"Some things you just have to take on faith, young man. It is not for you to question the wisdom of your elders, in any event."

Etcetera.

Or..

"Really.. and how did they get all those animals on that boat? What did they feed them, anyway?"

And don't even get me started on the Holy Trinity. Or angels. Or the Jews in bondage. (Amazing how the Egyptians, as a matter of fact, have no record anywhere of them ever being there. I mean, we're talking about people who were so anal about keeping records that people who were actually expunged from history still somehow managed to get logged in. And, come on.. how many hundred thousand souls wandering in the desert for forty years and no-one noticed them passing by? Where's their trash, for chrissake?) I mean, I went round and round with these people on these subjects, for years, with the same result each and every time. It was either something I was supposed to accept on faith or that which I, as a child/teenager/young adult had no business questioning in the first place.

And do not, for a single moment think that I didn't look long and hard at this. Yes, I lived with Jesus Freaks in California, but it wasn't just because it seemed like a kick to hang out with them for a month plus. I really did want to know what it was they were so enthused about. I really wanted to know if they actually had found an answer to all this. But, in the end, I came away, as I always came away, whether it be from a Baptist church, a Pentecostal Revival, Latter Day Saint or Jehovah Witness gathering, or any of a number of other attempts to understand this thing, with the same exact feeling. It was all bullshit. It IS all bullshit.

And, of course, in the intervening years, I have dug even deeper and found truths that none of them want anyone to be aware of. That all of it, every last syllable in fact, has been, in one way or another, borrowed from some other, far older, belief system, that, in most cases, it has supplanted. Jesus Christ, whether or not such a man even existed, is but an amalgam of several other like figures, right down to the day of his birth and the fashion of his death and resurrection.

But still they persist in their spurious claims that all of this crap is not only the true word of their myopic, angry and jealous god, but that their linear notions of time, space and humanity's place in the Universe should take precedence over even clearly defined scientific realities. As if, for all continents and porpoises, knowable reality does not actually exist. (See: Creationism; aka Intelligent Design)