Tom Quinn has recently published a delightful book What Do You Do With A Chocolate Jesus? which thoroughly and lightheartedly skewers the New Testament and its proselytizers through history. He ties the silliness of the Dominion movement's version of the Founding Fathers to a general propensity for silliness in the generations before us. His writing is incisive and funny.
As I was contemplating one of Tom's zingers, I happened to see a CNN interview with Christopher Hitchins. The unfunny, almost ghoulish, ambience of that interview was haunting -- and a strange contrast to the prose I had been reading in Tom's book. The combination has led to this musing on questions raised often here, but which have deep and serious implications for our future as a nation.
Full disclosure: Tom is a long-time friend of mine. I am an avid and enthusiastic supporter of his effort to get a book out there in a confusing and infosmoged world, and to engage in a real discussion of why God is so mixed up in our politics without being relevant to the problems we face as citizens together.
<h2 align=center>Synopsis</h2>
Tom Quinn exudes a delight in playing the skeptic and touching serious themes. The interview with Hitchins was a serious moment captured on tape. What Tom and Christopher share, to a certain extent, is a determination to debunk the seductive ideas of religion based on myth and superstition more than historical fact or reason. Tom's deliberate approach and Christopher's accidental one in that interview are two angles of attack on a very dangerous undertow in our political culture right now.
All of us can help defuse this bomb before it leads to violence and turmoil -- a state of chaos on the verge of real progressive change which must be made to literally save the planet for our children. A state of chaos we can ill afford, especially now at the nascient opening of the real 21st century. A state of chaos being stoked and guided by a very determined and increasingly media-saavy political insurgency fighting to salvage the wreck of the Reagan Revolution by establishing a theocracy.
This synopsis is for Kossacks who do not have time to read an essay -- a position I fully understand and appreciate. You can skip the essay portion and go directly to the comments if you wish at this point.
<h2 align=center>Musings</h2>
In What Do You Do With A Chocolate Jesus, Tom Quinn starts at the beginning of the New Testament and, with relish and wit, debunks it: demonstrates its inconsistency, questions its historical value and turns up the comic twists laying within the stories themselves if you step back and really look at what they say.
Always present are the popular myths now "in the air" as Sarah Palin and her fellow Dominionists break free from their uneasy alliance with business Republicans Reagan forged (actually, Lee Atwater and Jerry Falwell) to win his election as President in 1980. The marriage of convenience forged in 1977 has never been an easy one. The Dominionists -- especially those pouring billions of dollars into building their own Universities, old-boy networks in business and political captains in every precinct through local "Bible-based" churches -- have held the "trilateralists" at arm's length. Negotiating with Islamic governments? Are you kidding me? Leaving judges in place who rule against prayer in schools? What are you thinking?
Unlike most other citizens, this insurgency within the Republican Party does not accept humanism as a reasonable way for unlike people to live in peace -- they regard all attempts at being "broad-minded" to be making the United States "just like Europe". Europe, where church attendence is dismal. Europe where social democracy and green parties have forged ahead on many progressive fronts while Reagan's Curse has stunted our foreward progress. Europe where rich people historically put their money and went to be free to be arrogant and indulgent in ways they couldn't afford to be picked up in the press in the United States.
The Puritan streak in America is still there. It is still wanting to sweep the country and burn away all idolotry, like it did in England and the mid-1600s (no wonder the English were glad to see them take off for America). It wants all media to be "safe". It wants to have America lead by a theocratic leader in which all citizens give their allegence. I am constantly amazed at the naive Tea Baggers even snuggling up to these people who are not "believers". Non-believers are cannon fodder when Helter Skelter breaks out.
When I read Helter Skelter, I was struck by Manson's swallowing of the whole Puritan mythos and then reversing it like a Black Magician turning the cross upside down. When the White Dominionists revolt and take over the government, he seemed to surmise, the pickings will be great for those willing to live like vultures and consume anything without guilt. What an acid trip that must have been!
Tom's book is a call to rationality, at best, and tolerance at least. Wrapped in humor, he is serious about challenging anyone to refute him seriously. The research behind the irony and satire is taut and obvious. We need these kinds of debates right now. We need to lance this boil. As a nation, we have to work together, with a demand for reason and honesty of each other such a time of risk and promise requires. How are we going to engage this debate in time and without getting out the pitchforks? Tom, at least, is trying to find a way.
Christopher Hitchens, in contrast, has taken the tack of no humor. In his book God Is Not Great he contends this Puritan folly is a threat to humanity which is dead serious. I turned off his interviews as often as I watched them. What arrogance, even when I agreed with him. But I knew he was there and he made me ponder, damn him. I respected his honesty. I wondered at his brinksmanship, always trying to find the edge of the interview or group discussion and smash over it. Why be so damn strident and insulting and deaf to the others in the room?
So when I saw this interview on CNN with Anderson Cooper last August, I was struck by his strength and resolve facing the very real prospect of his imminent death:
Apocalypse For Blood And Treasure
I was raised on the Second Coming. My father was a determined scholar of the Bible and especially the glorious mythos of the Rapture Theory. Under his tutalige, I learned to see the whole book we call the Bible as a encoded mystery text and stitching together allusions and references from Revelations to Daniel to Isaiah as absorbing and rewarding as solving crossword puzzles -- only on an overwhelming scale which would take a lifetime to even have a shot at solving.
Back in the day, Salem Kirban's book 666 was a hit among Christian youth. A forerunner of the Left Behind series, it was a novelization of how the political events in the world circa 1970 would turn out to follow the Rapture Theory to a tee. The undertones of racism and nationalism and intolerance were muted. Each generation of Rapturists reapplies the same formula. Now they are tarring President Obama with the same paint reserved for the Pope before. A possible World Leader for the first time in human history. That turn of the mythos hides a gruging respect for Barack Obama's emergence as a sign his generation wants a world at peace, at home and abroad. He obviously believes in humanism as the operating principle of foreign policy. He is cautious enough to not give any quarter to the "nuke 'em all" insurgency of Cheney and Rumsfeld -- and the Domonionists. He is, in this mythos, all the more dangerous for being benign and, outside the "believers", obviously logically right.
Reagan didn't treat his Dominionists very well, from their perspective. He put all kinds of "experts" who went to those dens of evil -- "universities". Universities where Philosophy professors zeroed in on unsuspecting Bible-believing youth and tie them up in logical knots trying to defend their faith. Being raised in the Bible belt, I was warned often my high school senior year to beware going to a secular school. The legend of those vicious professors just lying in wait to strip good, solid Christians of their faith by the razors of reason was recanted to me endlessly the whole year. Fundamentalist preachers in town riffed off Paul's admonition:
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes... Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Ephesians 6:10-11, 14-17
But the word "God" rolled off Reagan's tongue without wincing, and often, so the Dominionists minded their manners and formed political alliances with heathens and elitists and opportunists. Even with Catholics -- after using youth group study series like What If The Catholics Took Over America? in the early 60s. They found themselves in the market for a new Antichrist.
Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia.
Quoted in "Religion, Politics a Potent Mix for Jerry Falwell"
by Steve Inskeep in Morning Edition on NPR (30 June 2006)
Now the Puritan thirst for blood and glory and their search for Rapture turn to other convenient targets.
While initial attempts of tagging Barack Obama as the Antichrist were dismissed as outright misinformation, recent events seem to tilt the balance in favor of the Antichrist tag.
Is Obama The Antichrist?
Last Rites
It is an article of faith among fundamentalists that we are all latent Christians willing to believe the literalness of the Bible as the only book we need to credit to justify ourselves that imminent death brings most of us to making our peace with God. We just need to be put under the right conditions and the "inner Christian" will be allowed to come forth.
As you once knew so well, there are no atheists in foxholes. In times of extremity, we plead for and put our trust in a power mightier than ourselves.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Exhortation to a gathering of Mormons in 1996
Discussed in Atheism & Foxholes: There Are No Atheists in Foxholes
Danger Causes Atheists to Cry Out to God, Find Jesus
Mythbuster article by Austin Cline
About.com Guide
Hitchens noted many web sites are clamoring to predict he will recant his skepticism at the end. He even noted that September 20th is designated as a day to pray for his redemption.
HITCHENS: There are people who are praying for me to suffer and die. They have lavish Web sites relishing my --
COOPER: Really?
HITCHENS: Oh, yes. And then there are people, much more numerous, I must say, and nicer, who are praying either that I get better or that I redeem myself, that I make peace with the Almighty; that my soul gets saved, even if my wretched carcass does not. And some pray for both.
And, in fact, the 20th of September has been designated Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day on one Web site in case you want to mark your calendar for that. I shall not be taking part in that.
COOPER: So you don't pray at all?
HITCHENS: No, no. That's all (INAUDIBLE) -- I don't think that souls or bodies can be changed by incantation or anything else, by the way.
COOPER: So do you tell people not to do it?
HITCHENS: No. I say if it makes you feel better, then you have my blessing.
CNN interview
Anderson Cooper 360
August 5, 2010
His fear is that he will become a trophy for their movement when he is "not himself" in the final throes of modern cancer treatment.
COOPER: In a moment of doubt, isn't there -- I don't know. I find it -- I just find it fascinating that, even when you're alone and, you know, no one else is watching, that there might be a moment where you, you know, want to hedge your bets.
HITCHENS: If that comes, it will be when I'm very ill, when I'm half demented, either by drugs or pain where I wouldn't have control over what I say.
I mention this in case you ever hear a rumor later on because these things happen, and the faithful love to spread these rumors. On his death bed he finally -- I can't say that the entity that by then wouldn't be me wouldn't do such a pathetic thing, but I can tell you that not while I'm lucid, no. I could be quite sure of that.
COOPER: So if there is some story that on your death bed --
HITCHENS: Don't believe it.
COOPER: Don't believe it?
HITCHENS: Don't credit it, no.
CNN interview
Anderson Cooper 360
August 5, 2010
When the interview was done, I went for a walk. Tom and Christopher, along with a long line of skeptics and rationalists and humanists, want to stand in the company of Laplace and Galileo.
When presented with a copy of some of the initial volumes, Napoleon is said to have remarked, "I see no mention of God in this work". Laplace is said to have replied, "Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis." (In an addition to the story, the tale was related to Lagrange, who added "Ah, but it is such a beautiful hypothesis; it explains a great many things!"
Entry on mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace
Jeff Suzuki's blog
But the earth is still round.
Galileo, while signing his renunciation during the Inquisition
They want to believe, but fear it not to be true, that in the 21st century humanity will come to honor and value reason in the public square, no matter what they believe in private. In our common weal, we should all have an interest. The prospect of citizens who want to be taken up in the clouds so they can watch their fellow human beings suffer and die condemned to hell "because they didn't listen to me" is ghastly. Their current effort to set the expectation that Hitchens will recant his unbelief on his death bed is ghoulishly saavy, given the state of mass media today. Hitchens knows it. He knows he cannot do anything about it. He wants to stand tall to the very end, but knows his human condition may betray him.
Are we condemned to Helter Skelter? Are the Dominionists, the Mansons, the unsane and insane ghouls reveling in the encroaching chaos of their End Times as sign and signal of advancing their own agendas, fomenting a self-fulfilling prophesy? Not the big prophesy, but the craven hunger to sweep across the world and burn away the idols they see where others see the underpinning of civilization itself? Their Puritan forebears did it once. As Tom points out, their forebears have done it many times.
That the risk of Helter Skelter is rising again is obvious. Our military is being proselytized. Christian youth can go through their whole education safe from those nasty professors with Occam razors wanting to ambush them. ChristianTM training camps prepare this generation to slaughter their neighbors, Rwanda style, when the signal goes out. Left Behind video games prepare them to kill without mercy when survival is at stake. Their media empires (including Fox News) can keep them from getting their news from those elitists who, to their mind, have persecuted them for so long.
That the promise of a Star Trek future lies before us is also obvious. In the 1960s in the Bible belt, the first Star Trek series was controversial. A Russian on the crew? One-world government for Earth? Women on the crew? Advanced technologies always behind anything "god-like" or magical the crew encountered. In the movie The Undiscovered Country, director William Shatner played on this motif:
What does God need with a starship?
Captain Kirk
The Undiscovered Country Star Trek movie
In the dorms in the early 70s, the whole floor watched Star Trek and cartoons in the lounge. The space program wasn't dead yet, and the promise of technology and a future of peace and prosperity was a powerful mythology. Humankind was making progress. The future made sense.
Now we stand at the end of the first decade of the 21st century (or at the cusp of it, depending on your definition) and the future looks much more threatening. Global warming looms as a tidal wave from Nature which can sweep whole civilizations away.
Rising From The Dead
When Lee Atwater and Jerry Falwell met in 1977, the Republican party was in crisis. Watergate had smashed the party into the ground and banished them to the back benches of politics. Lee and Jerry's unholy alliance was one of the turning points which culminated in the Reagan RevolutionTM. The Lee Atwater side of the alliance brought Madison Avenue talent and corporate clout. The Jerry Falwell brought the frustration of those who wanted to disarm those Occam-razor-wielding elitist professors in those damned universities. The combination was potent, and its rise sideswiped our generation.
In a few short years, this alliance raised the Republican Party from the dead. In the ensuing years, they have managed to move Overton windows on a thousand fronts. The last Bush Administation was the last gasp of that alliance. Moderate Republicans unestimated the historical power of Puritanism. Puritanism brokes no slack for unbelievers. Wedded now to Catholic fundamentalists, they have had to update their mythos. Palin's Momma GrizzliesTM are an attempt to define Obama as the Antichrist because he wants to return America's standing in the world to an advocate for reason and tolerance in the interest of peace. Perfect cover for Satan's master plan to their minds.
On this site, much weeping and gnashing of teeth has been going on. At first, it was "will the Democrats defeat themselves again?". When the elections of 2006 and 2008 seemed to herald the dawn of a new Democratic and progressive cycle in our national politics, the gnashing turned on specific issues in which progress isn't happening fast enough. Now we want to depose the Blue Dogs and force Red States to face up to the economic and geopolitical realities that global warming and other injuries to the planet our waging of war and the pestulance of capitalism has wrought.
Are we rising from the dead? Or will we lay down again and let the Puritan insurgency advance? Are our neighbors ready to watch the rest of us burn or will we pull together as fellow citizens to make the changes we need to make to meet the challenges ahead of us with determination and innovation? Is Helter Skelter a myth of an addled mind or an insight into where a civilization which has wrought so much violence on people and planet will inevitably fall?
Tom is eagerly trying to start the debate. He is not alone. In the Kossack community, many have worked to educate and edify us. Unlike Tom, I am still a Christian. Yet I see the danger of the Puritan insurgency. I grew up in the Bible Belt, which is the remnants of the Puritan insurgency in our body politic. Those remnants are organizing. They have tasted power and, like vampires, will not let the cup be taken away from their lips without a fight. They have billionaires pouring money into their coffers and they are making billionaires of those who cater to their need to seal themselves away from challenges from those Occam-razor-wielding elitists. (BTW, that's us in the progressive movement).
I want Tom to succeed in engaging the debate. I hope he gets a chance to be one of the talking heads called in for "balance" in the weird media methodology of today -- a twisted echo of the Fairness Doctrine. I hope people read his book and see his documentaries. His odds are not good, I know. But his heart is true and he has been preparing for the debate for thirty years now. He has seen the ardent believers in all kinds of mythologies and he has learned to do the research to debunk those mythologies, but gently enough to get his shows on cable TV. He is ready.
The Wayback Machine
When Tom and I were in college, the Navigators and the Campus Crusade For Christ were just getting started. I was a "Jesus Freak" against the war and a hippie. One of their student leaders was a friend of Tom's whom I will call The Navigator. The Navigator was trying to save Tom. Tom brought The Navigator and I together to debate the doubts Tom had about what The Navigator had been telling him. Tom was from New Jersey and had a more urbane air about him than those he met at Iowa State in the early 70s. I had grown up south of I-80, the part of Iowa we affectionately call "North Mississippi" -- the edge of the Bible Belt. I had grown up with splinter sects emerging and dying -- but raising hell with the other churches in the process -- all around me. The Navigator was slicker than that, and he won the day. Tom "went to the altar" and became "saved". It was during a Jesus Festival in a park, with The Navigator, that Tom saw the chocolate Jesuses for sale and, witty soul that he is, quipped, "Is it sacreligious to eat a chocolate Jesus?".
After he came down from the high a couple years later, he decided to debunk Christianity in all its flavors. Now, thirty years later, he has written one book criticizing the New Testament and another, still in progress (but the one he started with) about the Old Testament. Along the way, he has turned his critical eye on mythologies begging for skepticism like The Da Vinci Code, The Templars and other forms in his documentaries for Discovery, the History Channel and National Geographic. He has travelled the world many times over with a pen and a camera crew looking for the mundane behind any mysteries. If we have a Star Trek future, people like Tom will lead the way.
I live on the north side of I-80 now, but after living in Seattle for nine years, I feel the presence of the Dominionists always. When I first moved back from Seattle to my home state, I went to see another friend of ours from college. He became a Seventh Day Adventist and had found happiness in that fundamentalist community. I was standing near the counter in his Farm 'N Home store in a small town waiting to see him when two farmers nearby started a conversation. They talked about how many times a day they looked to the sky thinking that at the moment, Jesus could burst through the clouds and this miserable existance would be over. "He'd nuke them librals down in Des Moines" one said ominously, the other nodding his head in agreement.
I knew I was back in Iowa. While friends like Tom were safely living in urbane places like LA, I had moved back close to the honest's nest behind Helter Skelter. I had hoped the state would have come along further in the nine years I had been gone.
Growing Up South Of I-80
Love your Neighbour; yet don't pull down your Hedge.
Benjamin Franklin
Years before, south of I-80, when two black men came into our county to do some work, they found themselves up against the courthouse surrounded by an angry mob of several hundred people. That was the town I went to high school in. It happened when I was in junior high.
One sect near our farm had split due to an argument over "eternal security" (a particularly explosive division among fundamentalists and penecostals in which once you have been saved you will go to heaven no matter whether you backslide later or not). One of the factions came back in the middle of the night and poured tar all over the altar and sundered the pulpit with an axe -- in their own church. Apparently they believed in eternal security and that it was a license to raise hell without guilt. It was par for the course south of I-80 in the Sixties.
So The Navigator and his literalism, and even Tom and his determination to debunk literalist interpretations of the Bible, don't pull me one way or another. I'm not a literalist. Never have been. I've studied religion, rhetoric and mathematics my whole life, and I still can't figure out what "literal" actually means to any camp.
Korzybski wrote that only in a shared moment like watching a sunset together can we get as close to truly sharing thoughts as humanly possible. Tom is my friend because we have had many such moments. My friends who are now fundamentalists are my friends because we have had many such moments. Writing it down abstracts it -- colors, edits, fits into our personal mythos and battles with both our logic and ethos to become part of us. This battle is one every human being fights, every day.
"Deny or die" is a survival necessity if we don't want our souls sucked out and replaced with infosmog. We have to filter out most of the information around us, real and virtual, to live our lives with any kind of meaning at all. Written ideas are even more filtered and refracted and limited. As McLuhan wrote, the very medium in which ideas are written itself becomes a metamessage. Reading McLuhan, I remember thinking about treating the Bible as a huge multidimensional crossword puzzle to stitch together the verses to "prove" a doctrinal point back in my early years as a Christian. Just because those words were in a book, numbered chapter and verse, they became available for new meanings just through combinatorics.
In an ultimate affirmation of McLuhan's conjecture, the Dominionists are now editing the Bible themselves to remove intrusions from liberal translators. The metamessage has trumped the message. What is literal about God's word in that book?
What an amazing ability we have. All of us. For insight or mischief, usually both. We can change the context of the debate and render arguments against us in the debate as if they are moot. Palin's handlers trained her to do that in the Vice Presidential debates -- a tactic much lampooned by Tina Fey. Written words having a "literal" meaning is just a silly idea. But that is a discussion for a different diary.
This diary started out to be about seeing my friend Tom engaging a debate vital to our future as a free nation. I like to think that that strange meeting between The Navigator and Tom and I grew into Tom's understanding of what he wished he could have said then, now that he has thoroughly and fairly researched the topic. I was a poor surrogate for Tom's doubts that he couldn't articulate then to The Navigator directly. Thus to read the results of that research and understanding, and the wit and charm in which he phrases it now, is a special pleasure for me.
His touch is light and playful, and it could reach many more people than Christopher Hitchens' dour and dogmatic manner. But it is the same fight. It's a fight for understanding the United States is a secular state, and wisely so. It's a fight that sees danger in mixing religion and power and seeks to call the logic and practice of those who crave it out for all to see and decide without themselves passing final judgement. It is the power of the critic, the Trickster, the Anamoly. Without it, civilization would have foundered centuries ago. Without it, our civilizaton could founder at any time, even now.
I know what the fundamentalists and penecostals, properly riled up, are capable of. I have seen a small town on the brink of Helter Skelter. Thankfully, the contractor who hired those black workers called the State Police and they got the men out of town safely. Thankfully, rational people were around to enforce tolerance when the people could not muster the moral courage themselves.
Tom and Christopher and Bill Mahr and George Carlin and... many progressives are fighting this battle, and want to get people to talk about the threat of the depravity that religion not tempered by tolerance can drive us to enact. Skeptics are our rational guardians against seductive mythologies in which fellow citizens become collateral damage in a greater cause. Rwanda, and so many other outbreaks of Helter Skelter in our time, shows us how large an impact such a meme can have and how ghastly and ghoulish impulses can be unleashed upon neighbors, family and friends.
Trying to remind Dominionists that Jesus taught that the Number One Rule was to love your god and your neighbor as you love yourself is folly at this point. Apparently they have learned to hate themselves a great deal. They want to fight. They want to "win". The Momma Grizzlies want to defend their cubs. They want to secede from the Union. They want to be proven right while everyone who dissed them burns and suffers. The mythos of the Rapture Theory is the ultimate vengence fantasy for those afflicted by it.
Praying Through To Victory
I pray Christopher succumbs to his death without losing his dignity. I pray Tom finds forums in which to engage the debate and to enable him to finish the second half of the story. I pray the Puritans will fail in their gambit for power -- both for fear of what evil they would wreak on the rest of us and of them losing their own souls in an orgy of power and the madness that comes with it. I have many friends who are listening to the Dominionists. One of them told me that during the altar call sometimes he thinks of the rest of us not saved yet and weeps to think he will not see us in heaven. He's not kidding. He's grieving.
Human beings are the most complex puzzle to the literalists and their skeptics alike. For all arts and sciences. Join the mystery tour. We don't need to solve that puzzle to live together as a nation and as a planet. Good thing, since we never will "solve" something like that. There are always going to be mysteries in life. Each of us, and all of us, are such a mystery. That the United States is still a nation after two hundred years is such a mystery. We don't need to "fix" others before we rely on them as fellow citizens. We don't need to "fix" our nation to make it better. We need a common future in which most of us (as many as practical and possible) will have a little more freedom and a little more opportunity than our fearbears -- and in which our children have the chance to advance (dare I way "progress"?) in their own time and their own way.
Most of all, I pray we make it through this cusp in our common history, together. I enjoy going to a Bible-thumpin' service with one of my friends, and going to a modern Chautauqua at a skeptic's society in LA to hear another. They're my friends. If there is a heaven, I expect to see all of them there or I don't want to be there. If there isn't, I want to listen to them and have great conversations with them while we're still here. I want to watch some more sunsets, in silence and communion, with them.
Tom is fighting for that commonality and inciting common sensibility to combat yet another Puritan insurgency.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin
Go for it, Tom. I've always been your biggest fan, and now we need you and Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins and Bill Mahr and all the skeptics to throw cold water on the mob and let the innocient go home unscathed.
When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin
God help us if someone doesn't do it.