Ajax and his friends

Taku and I have tickets to a play that my niece is in this Friday. It appears to be all about a homeless guy in Oakland who thinks he’s Ajax - the ancient Greek warrior, not the bathroom cleaner.

Time for a little review of the Trojan War. And that means a bit of theology.

It all began with the wedding of Peleus, the King of Phtheia, and his wife Thetis. They are the parents of Achilles, of vulnerable heel fame.  Well, not the wedding, exactly, but with Eris, the goddess of discord, who didn’t get an invitation to the wedding. Eris was a spiteful goddess and spread mischief by showing up anyway bearing a golden apple as a wedding present. The apple bore the inscription, “For the fairest in the land” and that set off a bitch-fight among three other goddesses. One of these was Hera, the jealous (with good reason) chief wife of Zeus, who also happened to be his sister, and goddess of women, marriage and the family and protector of women in childbirth. A second was Athena, who was in her mother’s womb when Zeus swallowed her whole, making it necessary for Athena to pop out of Zeus’ forehead at some point, which she did geared up for battle (at least in artistic depictions) in helmet and spear. The third goddess was Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, the goddess of love, war and prostitutes.

To settle the question of which of these, Hera, Athena or Aphrodite, was most worthy of the “fairest beauty" title, they turned to a shepherd named Paris. Well, turns out he was actually a prince of Troy who apparently liked animals and being outside in the fresh air. (Or who was raised by shepherds and was doing what comes naturally, depending on which version of the story you read) All three goddesses offered Paris a bribe. Hera wanted to give him power, Athena, wisdom, and Aphrodite, love. Paris chose love and gave the prize to Aphrodite.

In gratitude, Hera made Helen, the real most beautiful woman in the land, fall in love with Paris. Hera either didn’t think this through very carefully, or didn’t have a very high sense of responsibility, because when Paris left Sparta to return home to Troy, Queen Helen was determined to follow him, to the chagrin of her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta.

There are other versions of this tale, and virtually all of the details are contested, but I’m trying to get back to Ajax, so this version will do, while I try to figure out where Ajax fits in.  Ajax was the son of King Telemon and nephew of Telemon’s brother, Peleus, whose marriage ceremony got this whole ball rolling when Eris messed everything up by creating such discord among the goddesses. That means Ajax is also Achilles’ cousin.

I've never read the Iliad but I understand that Ajax comes across as a superman, or at least as a guy with strength that goes on and on. Hence the name of the toilet cleanser, I think.

But the real story, I think, lies in the Latin phrase I chose to run under my picture in my high school yearbook, something the 15th Century cleric Thomas à Kempis is remembered for observing: Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit, Man proposes, God disposes. I was clearly indoctrinated into the belief that our every move is dictated by a deity. Maybe that’s why I get such a kick out of reading about how the gods mess with us. It absolves us of responsibility. Like making Helen fall in love with Paris so that the Greeks and Trojans slug it out for ten years. In the end, when Achilles gets it in the heel, Ajax claims his armor, but then Athena gives it to Odysseus instead because she likes the way he talks. And that pisses Ajax off so bad that he flies into a rage and wants to go after Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus. Athena channels his rage into killing livestock under the delusion that he is getting his revenge. And when he awakes out of his hallucination he is so ashamed that he kills himself.

Homo proponit, sed deus disponit.

I dip into Greek mythology from time to time and always have a great romp.  It’s lovely to get back to the days when I first discovered Edith Hamilton and was faced with the need to try to explain why the theology I was raised in could arguably be seen to be making more sense than Greek or Chinese theology, say. When somebody first suggested that “virgin birth” was just another way of saying “parthenogenesis.”

Looking forward to Friday night and a story about a man who thinks he’s Ajax.

After some Chinese food.

 

Miserere mei

Somebody asked me the other day how I could identify as a Christian, after all the horror and misery the Christians have inflicted on the world, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the patriarchal abuse and reduction of women to virgins and sluts, the twisting of the healthy human sexual drive into a suicide-provoking homophobia, and on and on.

That should tell you something about the kind of people I hang out with. Lots of LGBT people with a searing laser-beamed loathing of the church, at least the authoritarian wings of it like the traditional Catholic Church, the Mormons, the bible-thumping born-agains and the rest. Lots of professed atheists and agnostics who find Christianity and religion in general somewhere on the spectrum between oppressive and no longer relevant (thank God - pun intended).

I don't defend doctrinal Christianity. I am not a theist and share the view that theology is an eccentric cousin of philosophy, a form of poetry. And like poetry, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes tacky and off-putting, sometimes inspiring. But I usually try to avoid taking on theological issues these days, preferring to identify myself simply as a non-religious Christian. A "cultural" Christian. Someone who grew up surrounded by Christian people with their Christian narratives and ways of structuring a moral universe, but who ultimately found, as one sometimes does with Japanese ways of presenting gifts, that the container can hold greater interest than what is contained within.

I am intimately familiar with the question (and the people who ask it), "Do you believe in God?" Since  "believe" covers the territory of both "think, suppose, trust to be true" and "have a positive opinion of" it strikes me as the wrong question. The question should be, "Do you believe that there is a God" and should immediately be followed by questions probing exactly what that means. Do you have a single unseen identity in mind? Does it have gender and other human characteristics, like an interest in whether one writes with the left or right hand or thinks that race and gender are consequential?

What people usually mean by the question, though, is "Are you a member of my tribe?"  Do you believe in the God that we Lutherans, Calvinists, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses have come up with? Or do you buy into the Roman Catholic or Greek, Russian, Macedonian, Serbian or other of the seventeen autocephalous Eastern Orthodox communities' claims that their pope, patriarch, or other male head has been given the keys to heaven and therefore speaks for this deity?  "Do you believe in God" is not a simple question.

I usually cut through the complexity and answer no. And that tends to put me on the spectrum that runs from hostility to disappointment and sadness among people who are inclined to answer yes.

I wish that were not the case. The Christians of the world are no longer the bad guys they became for a bunch of centuries after climbing onto Constantine's bandwagon and going mainstream. It is a truism that power corrupts.  You know, the way that Americans, similarly, went from good guys to bad guys between the time they wrote that wonderful We The People thing and the time they began the slave trade, blamed the Spanish for the destruction of the Battleship U.S.S. Maine to take Cuba and the Philippines away from Spain and evolved a national morality in which lying and dying for empire became a virtue. And the way the German speaking world went astray after producing Bach and Mozart. And the way Jewish Israelis are systematically trashing the rights of Palestinians who live among them. Humans are so hopelessly corruptible sometimes.  These days, except for those Christians who can't tell the difference between religion and power politics of the authoritarian right, most Christians are lovely people. Kindly. Generous. Charitable. The kind of people you want to find common ground with.

So I enjoy engaging in that pursuit. Tell me you're a Christian and my response will be, "Great." And I will move the conversation, as best I can, to topics like how can we make the world a better place for widows and orphans and the undereducated and the poor. I know somewhere in the Christian heart there is a familiarity with the Sermon on the Mount and Christ's focus on helping the poor. And I know they are proud of the material things of cultural Christianity I too am glad to call part of my cultural heritage. I didn't crow when Notre Dame burned; I cried.

I listen to the debates between Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans over who's reading Luther's Small and Large Catechisms the right way and who needs to be excluded from the communion table, and the assertions by the Sedevacantists that Pope Francis and all the popes since Pius XII are illegitimate popes and I marvel at the fact that the medieval debates over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin continue unabated today. Human folly can be downright entertaining, if you look at it just right. And no one has farther to fall than those with the arrogance to proclaim themselves spokespersons for an unseen Almighty creative force of nature embodied in a historical son of a Galilean carpenter who hung out with his fishermen buddies some twenty centuries back, walked on water (no idea why he needed to) and brought dead people, including himself, back to life.

Christianity has two parents, one Hebrew-speaking, one Greek. But equally important is the fact that it was adopted by European foster parents when the Hebrew parent decided they had gotten too big for their britches and the Greek parent couldn't keep them down on the farm any longer.  Anybody who, like me, sees themselves as a cultural Christian also sees themselves as a lucky inheritor of the cultural spin-offs of this Europeanized Jew - the small mundane stuff like the habit of chopping down fir trees at Christmas and bringing them inside and decorating them with candles and colorful balls, and the loftier stuff like the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, stained glass windows and mighty pipe organs, and the music of Bach and Mozart and Handel.

Have a listen to this lovely boys' choir singing Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei from 1630. Tell me you don't believe in angels when you hear that kid hit the high C.

That's cultural Christianity, and it belongs to all of us, whether or not we were raised in the Christian religious faith. It doesn't even belong exclusively to Europeans anymore, since there are Japanese, Brazilians, Africans and, at least theoretically, sopranos from Pago Pago who can make that exquisite pure sound, two Cs above middle C, with a bit of practice.

Here are the words in Latin, and Elizabethan English, if you want to hum along...

Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.

According unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies remove my transgressions.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquities, and cleanse me from my sin.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.

I knowingly confess my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.

Against Thee only have I sinned, and done evil before Thee: that they may be justified in Thy sayings, and might they overcome when I am judged.

Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.

But behold, I was formed in iniquity: and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi.

Behold, Thou desirest truth in my innermost being: and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly.
Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, make me whiter than snow.
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata.

Open my ears and make me hear of joy and gladness: and my bones that have been humbled shall rejoice.
Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele.

Turn away Thy face from my sins: and remember not all my misdeeds.
Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis.

Create in me a clean heart, O God: and make anew a righteous spirit within my body.
Ne proiicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me.

Do not cast me away from Thy presence: and take not Thy holy spirit from me.
Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.

Restore unto me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.
Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur.

I will teach those that are unjust Thy ways: and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.
Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam.

Deliver me from blood, O God, the God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing of Thy righteousness.
Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam.

O Lord, open my lips: and my mouth shall spring forth Thy praise.
Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis.

For Thou desirest no sacrifice, where others would: with burnt offerings Thou wilt not be delighted.
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies.

Sacrifices of God are broken spirits: dejected and contrite hearts, O God, Thou wilt not despise.
Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Ierusalem.

Deal favorably, O Lord, in Thy good pleasure unto Zion: build Thou the walls of Jerusalem.
Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos.

Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with small and large burnt offerings: then shall they lay calves upon your altar.

Note, if you will, how civilization has progressed since the time when the pope Urban (as opposed to Pope Rural?) of the Catholics could excommunicate anyone for transcribing those words and music, so enamoured was he at the beauty of the piece. He wanted, in hilarious Christian charitable irony, to keep the piece for himself.

Mozart is said to have followed Pope Urban's dictat upon hearing Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, the only place Urban would allow it to be performed. But only until he got home to Austria, whereupon he reproduced the whole thing from memory. And made corrections.

We have inherited this wonderful heritage. My view is that we should treasure it - Allegri's Miserere Mei and the notion of being sprinkled with hyssop and made whiter than snow,  Mozart's phenomenal recall and musical skill, the Lutheran tight-asses from Wisconsin, the boys they used to make eunuchs out of, the whole shebang.

Cultural Christianity belongs to us all.

America: A Land of Prophets

Warning. The world is ending. Don't believe me? Just look up in the sky!

I think it's important to maintain a healthy distance between human beings and their ideas. People are much more than their thoughts. I'm an ardent follower of the Enlightenment Project and its ideological stance expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all thirty articles of it, and particularly the first one, which reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But the fact that I make such a declaration publicly doesn't prove that I put what I say into practice. For that you really need to observe my behavior over time. The important thing isn't me or others who make the same claim; it's the idea which is broadly shared by people of good will.

It is important, I think, that we make such declarations, that people defend democracy even when their voting habits suggest they don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, I think, people listen to themselves and talk themselves into things.

The other side of the coin is that all sorts of stupid things come out of people's mouths, and given some time for reflection, they retract those moments of carelessness. They deserve a chance to retract the occasional slip. And also they should be given the liberty to change their minds.

Consider the evangelical preacher John Hagee, for example, the guy who founded Christians United for Israel. He's a literal fundamentalist. If the Bible tells us Noah put animals in his ark two by two, it bothers John Hagee not a whit that there probably wasn't enough room for lions and tigers and giraffes and deer each to get a separate room or how it was that the pairs were 100% fertile and once the ark let everybody off on Mount Ararat, they were all able to keep their species going.

I think John Hagee's lack of familiarity with even the stuff of elementary school science classes makes him look like an idiot. I'd still shake his hand and offer him coffee or tea should he pass my way. But I'd also want to check out whether his ideas are simple b.s. or whether they actually cause harm. Does he hurt Catholics when he calls their church the "whore of Babylon"? I'd let that one go, but then again, I'm not a Roman Catholic. What about Palestinians, or Israelis who believe the answer to the standoff in the Middle East must be solved by getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together?

Of course, maybe koala bears and polar bears and grizzly bears really did all fit together somehow. Hagee's claim that the Noah's Ark tale was not some kind of exercise of early biblical imagination but a literal historical event doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as his claim that God used Hitler to punish the Jews for not following his commandments. And check out his 1990 sermon where he tells you God had another purpose, as well: he wanted the Jews to have the motivation to found the State of Israel. Which they had to do to before they could all convert and become Christians, and fulfill biblical prophecy. I've decided that was Hagee simply having a dumber-than-shit moment. Let it pass. Maybe.

Whether you take this claim as evidence that Hagee is just another half-witted televangelist making a personal fortune from leading the vulnerable and the clueless to part with their shekels, or whether he's totally sincere, he illustrates this bizarre everyday phenomenon that is American religiosity. The problem is when we gave "faith" a seat at the table along with "reason," we opened the floodgates to the tragedy we live with today, where anybody can come up with the most cockamamie proposition imaginable and defend it with the political argument, "I've got a right to my beliefs!" Yes, of course you do, but that don't make it right!

Because Hagee is a religious leader, nobody can touch him, legally. And that's OK with me. I think the best response to nonsense speech is non-nonsense corrective speech, not censorship. As long as a critical mass of people use their heads, check their facts, and commit to civil and reasonable discourse, we'll make it through such diatribes as John Hagee puts forth from his pulpit. But recently evangelicals - and not just evangelicals but some mainstream Christians as well, the kind who believe Mary was a virgin, her son walked on water and Methuselah married a woman named Edna and lived to the age of 969 - have been working hand-in-glove with politicians to make national policy. Best pay attention here, as women, people of color, Jews, gays and transsexuals can tell you.

Hagee became a strong McCain supporter until McCain got wind of his Holocaust stance and dropped him like a hot potato. But, as Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institute reminds us, this is just Hagee getting started. Hagee also explains Hurricane Sandy as God's punishment for Louisiana's bad behavior. A kind of replay of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's punishment for abortion, homosexuality, feminism and secular public schools.

What gets me about such claims - besides their sheer hilarious nonsense, I mean - is what it says about their concept of their Christian god - that he is ready, willing and able to starve and torture children for their parents' sins. Never could get my mind around that line of thinking.

But back to Hagee. These days, Hagee has gone full speed ahead in his support for Israel. No such thing as the Palestinian people, he says. No concern for how Israel formulates its foreign policy; all that matters is that they fulfill biblical prophecy.

I just came across his 2013 book on another thing that mystifies me about how God apparently works in mysterious ways - through riddles. He sends us signs that require prophets to interpret. Hagee is happy to answer the call. He's been obsessing for years now over another message from heaven, another "Watch out, folks, I'm a-comin' for ye!" 

A little background on the sign. From time to time, the earth lines up perfectly between the sun and the moon, creating a huge shadow on the moon. Eclipses can be partial.  Or total, when a full moon becomes totally dark.  However, some of the sunlight leaks, and when it passes through the earth's atmosphere, the light gets filtered and scattered. Some wavelengths are shorter than others, and the shorter the wavelength, the more likely they are to appear reddish or orange in color. On rare occasions the moon can take on the color of blood; hence the term "blood moon." Also known as the sanguine moon, the travel moon, or the harvest moon. It's the same phenomenon as occurs during sunrise or sunset, when the light is the kind of red that sends poets into a tizzy. 

Where the plot thickens, though, is when these blood moons come in groups of four. Tetrads. If you want to know more, there's a quite useful Norwegian site called timeanddate.com, which has information on the topic. The simplified version is this: every six months or so there is an eclipse season, during which time a lunar eclipse at full moon and a solar eclipse at new moon occur. And, according to timeanddate.com, every so often there are four such eclipses in a row - hence the name tetrad, which may be defined as four blood moons in a row, about six months apart.  For a complete list of up-and-coming eclipses, click here. 

Hagee is apparently done with seeing Hitler as the messenger of God and into a new shtick, interpreting the blood moon phenomenon and citing the Book of Revelation 6:12: 

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

Hagee wasn't the first clever devil to take advantage of the gullible. Christopher Columbus, whose knowledge of the heavens puts Hagee's to shame, told the Arawak Indians shortly before a blood moon was due that God was angry that they weren't feeding his men properly and would turn the moon red. It worked. The Indians couldn't get provisions to the ships fast enough after that.

Hagee obsesses over this tetrad phenomenon in his 2013 book, Four Blood Moons: Something is about to change. He is unconcerned, apparently, about the fact that you don't see the eclipses of the sun and moon everywhere on the planet, and what you experience depends on where you are located. In order to experience the two to five eclipses that occur every year, you'd have to be constantly on the move. The total eclipse of the sun coming up in April 2023, for example, will not be seen by anyone in North America. But when God commanded the sun to "stand still" in the sky so that Joshua could fight the battle of Jericho and make the walls come tumblin' down, he wasn't talking about the sun as viewed in Peoria, Illinois or Bariloche, Argentina.

There once was a time when most people in America simply brushed off the wacko flame-throwing bible thumpers. Considering the evidence that we have all but lost our government to people manipulating the populace by fear and loathing of the "other," I suggest we might oughta give these clowns more serious consideration. Just because you want to defend to the death their right to spew stuff and nonsense doesn't release you from the responsibility of calling out bullshit when you see it.

Shanah Tovah!

One of the great words of wisdom I heard many years ago now, and have tried to live by ever since is, "When the world tells you to choose either/or, see if there is any way you can make it both/and."

I spent most of the years of my life raging at organized religious organizations. I saw them - still do, actually - as the primary source of a very vicious form of bigotry known as homophobia, and I hated them for it. Saw them as Enemy Number One, something I would be committed to fighting against as long as I lived. They were people who misrepresented me and others like me, who turned the way I experienced love and affection and compassion into something dirty and shameful. Every time something came out that put organized religion into a bad light, I exulted - the hypocrisy of TV evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (him more than her - she was just a goofball) and Ted Haggard, the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Good show! I thrilled. Damned hypocrites!

It took me years to recognize that I was doing the same thing to religious people that some religious people were doing to me - painting them with too broad a brush. They were looking at me and other gay people as people selfishly and totally preoccupied with sexual release, and I was looking at all Christians as mean-spirited ignoramuses. It took time for me to talk myself down from such an unworthy black-and-white position, to realize that I had grown up among good Christian people, people who taught me right from wrong, and spread the message of love and forgiveness and compassion.

What was confusing the issue was my failure to buy into the theocratic ideology of people of the Christian faith, the idea that there was a single (male) force who called life into being, created us as sinners whom he then turned around and redeemed by human sacrifice, and commanded us to live by a set of behaviors at the risk of eternal damnation. Just couldn't buy it, and that meant I now had two separate reasons for turning my back on Christianity: the fact that they were homophobic bullies, and the fact that they were living by a set of made-up notions pulled from their left ear.

As the years went by, I learned a lot from watching Jews up close. Many of the Jews I knew could not make sense of the concept of a loving god after experiencing how this god sat back and allowed his "chosen family" to die by the millions under the most miserable of circumstances. But they retained their sense of connection with other Jewish people, many of whom did continue to be believers in the Jewish religion. They lived side by side, these non-religious Jews with religious Jews.

In time I noted something similar was going on in Germany with the many immigrants from places like Turkey, Syria and Egypt who had rejected the Muslim faith of their families as belonging to a pre-modern age. As they became Germans, they took on the modern sectarian cultural values of their countrymen, all the while retaining a sentimental attachment to the language and culture of their original homelands. They became both/and people, as opposed to either/or people.

As I reflected on the many times I have heard political folk, like the commentators on Fox News, speak of "Putting Christ back into Christmas," I came to realize that I had more in common with those Jews and Muslims than I did with religious Christians. I see no need to rewrite Merry Xmas as Merry Christmas, but I love the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. I love Christmas trees. I love the sound of sleigh bells ringing. I am, and will almost certainly always remain, culturally Christian. It's the culture of the people I grew up with and still identify with. I love the idea of kids sitting on the lap of Santa Claus telling him what they want for Christmas, the fantasy land of snow-covered houses on Christmas cards, and the sing-along Messiahs. I've even participated in one of these and hope to again one day.

One of the most memorable and meaningful times in my life was the time that Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco by a disgruntled former cop. I went to his funeral, which was held at that gorgeous synagogue on the corner of Arguello and Lake Street, Temple Emanu-el. Milk was not a religious Jew, but when the cantor came out and sang the prayer for the dead, I was moved like never before. I couldn't stop the tears. I fancied I heard 5000 years of Jewish suffering encapsulated in the chanting, and if somebody had passed around a sign-up list for becoming Jewish, I would have put my name on it then and there. I can't recall now which prayer it was, exactly, but you can get a sense of what I am talking about by listening to Cantor Azi Schwartz at a memorial for the fallen of 9/11.

It mattered tremendously that this Jewish congregation was acknowledging one of their own in this way, despite and over the protests of its chief rabbi, who didn't hide his homophobia. The message that came through was that although diversity can divide us, it just as frequently brings us together - if we let it.

The sun is about to go down on the Pacific Coast today - September 6th - and when it does local Jews will mark the beginning of a new year: Rosh HaShanah, and a time of reflection. A profoundly moving event, one which joins Jews with Buddhists and others who know the value of meditation and the benefits of prayerful devotion to the things that make life worth living. I grew up among Christians initially, but I've also had time now to live among Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and others of religious faith. I have no need to concern myself with doctrinal beliefs in order to embrace the richness of the cultures these faiths have produced over the years.

Let me end with a meditation on that wonderful secular Christmas song, "I'm dreaming of a White Christmas" by the Jew, Irving Berlin. Composer and conductor of the Toronto Symphony, Rob Kapilow, analyzes the popular song and tells us he senses here and there a bit of "Yiddishkeit." A wonderful example of both/and. A cultural Jew contributing to Christian America's cultural heritage, in a way that includes us all, lets us be not either Christian or Muslim or Jew but all of those simultaneously.

And more.

Shanah Tovah!

Faith-based sedition

If you've seen Religulous, or have watched Bill Maher for any length of time, you'll be familiar with the comedian as one of America's leading voices speaking out against religion.

I part ways with his wholesale rejection of all things religious. I think anything that has played - and still plays - as important a role in history, right down to the present day - should not be rejected out-of-hand, but analyzed with nuance. Which is just a fancy way of saying I think there are all kinds of religious impulses in the human race, from inspirational to toxic. Toxic religion is right up there with fascism and genocide as far as I'm concerned, when listing evidence that evil actually does exist. But I see no reason to undermine anyone's search for meaning, provided it reflects good will and genuine human yearning. I follow the simple rule of thumb that if you encounter somebody trying to tell you what God wants you to do, lock your windows and doors and call the cops. If you find somebody listening in hopes of hearing "the still small voice of God," embrace them as a fellow temporary resident of Planet Earth seeking to find meaning in this mystery called life.

A catholic theologian friend of mine and I once got into a Facebook argument over who has inflicted more harm on the planet, atheists or religionists. I maintain that if atheists have done harm, they have not done so under the mantle of atheism.  Stalinists and Maoists were atheists, but their brutality was motivated by their particular take on communist idealism, not by atheism per se. In contrast, there is no escaping the obvious connection between organized religion and some of the most wide-spread abuses ever committed. 

It was not a real argument - I don't think you can have a real argument on Facebook, by the way, so I stopped early on exchanging views on that venue. Where I would take the argument, if we moved to a suitable forum, would be to point out that religionists commonly feel obligated to impose their will on you, but non-theists are by and large quite passive about their beliefs. The so-called "Four Horsemen of Atheism" who have achieved some fame (or notoriety, if you prefer) as public atheists - Christopher Hitchens, now sadly deceased and greatly missed, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, are actively engaged in what they see as disabusing believers of their folly, but they are intellectuals committed to changing minds through reason-based argument, not men with armies like ISIS or others inclined to use force to come out on top.

Their starting and concluding point is the conviction that truth should be defined as the sum total of all knowledge to date, alterable at any point with the introduction of new contradictory evidence. The religionists, in contrast, claim the strength of their convictions is grounded in scriptures they consider holy, or in papal pronouncements, or in the claim that "God told me so." For many, it suffices to say "I just know in my heart it's true."

I've argued before that the downside of the fact that the U.S. is the modern world's most religious nation is that once you convince yourself that "faith" is a positive thing, you've opened the door to all manner of nonsense and removed the guardrails, those guardrails being critical thinking and a "show me" attitude. The difference between the world today where we live to 100, some of us, and the day when people routinely died at 37 of an abscessed tooth is that we live by the conviction that things are not so simply because you desperately want them to be so, but because there is reason to believe they are so, backed up by evidence.

Bill Maher just came out today with his newest and latest volley in the battle for reason, the same argument I was making, but better articulated. "If you accord religious faith the kind of exalted respect we do here in America, you've already lost the argument that mass delusion is bad."

"Magical religious thinking," he says, "is a virus, and QAnon is just its current mutation." 

It's not a coincidence, he points out, that every Senator that objected to certifying the Electoral Vote in Arizona is an Evangelical Christian. 

But let me stop quoting him from the video. Check it out for yourself here.

 

Bye bye, St. Anthony's

St. Anthony's School, Winsted, Connecticut

Winsted, Connecticut, where I started school in September 1946, was like much of the rest of New England, a town with a mixed population. Because I had a Scottish (i.e., “non-foreign-sounding”) surname, I had entrée into the society of WASPish types, some of whom actually went back all the way to colonial days. If you went to my church and took a seat in the cushioned pews the first thing your eye would settle on would be the Pilgrim Hymnal. The youth group which was my social center through my high school years was called the “Pilgrim Fellowship” and there was no mistaking the heritage I was expected to identify with.

My best friend in high school was Tom D’Amore. He lived with his Italian immigrant family, including one maternal and one paternal grandparent, who came down to the table each day and fiercely refused to talk to each other. Tommy and I hung out after school most days together and I was often at their table at mealtimes, marveling at the passion, the cacophony, the broad reaches across the table and the high volume verbal exchanges, and wishing that the atmosphere of my more austere German/Scottish home could be more like theirs. My growing up was all about either/or categories: waspish or immigrant, Italian or Northern European, Catholic or Protestant. The nuances were swept under the rug, the fact that with a German-born mother I too was an immigrant - and, for that matter, my paternal grandfather was born in Kirkconnel, Scotland - and the fact that, with factory workers for parents, I wasn’t really a part of the ruling class of waspish “real New Englanders,” except by racist implication.

In the 1940s and 50s, the term “melting pot” still applied. There were two public elementary schools, one at each end of Main Street. Both fed into a single middle school, so eventually every public school kid could, at least theoretically, get to know every other public school kid in town. The rich kids and the poor kids, the ones with Anglo-Saxon names and the ones with names like Centrella or Martinelli.

Main Street was dotted with stone churches. My own, the First Church (Baptist and Congregational) was at the east end and the Second Congregational Church was at the west end. In between were the Methodist and Episcopal churches and a church that stood on a hill and dominated the entire downtown space, St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church. And St. Joseph Parish supported its own Catholic parochial school. Originally named St. Joseph School, its name was changed to St. Anthony School because William L. Gilbert, when he left money for the formation of the local high school, specified that no children from St. Joseph would be allowed to attend. Or so the story goes. I’ve hunted all morning for confirmation of what may be my first encounter with an urban legend, and cannot find any. If someone can dig out the facts for me and add them to the commentary, I would be grateful.

In any case, just as the kids from the two public elementary schools funneled together into the public middle school, the kids from the middle school funneled together with the kids from St. Anthony's into the high school, and although a second high school was eventually built, in my day, at least, I could say with some justification that the name of every kid in Winsted was familiar to me. Family names, at least.

The rivalries that may have existed among the adults were softened as the kids made friends across these identity barriers. I balked once when looking at the St. Anthony textbooks of the D’Amore kids and noted that they portrayed “Catholic countries” in a better light than “Protestant countries,” but I found it more amusing than offensive. Bizarre, rather than wrong. I sympathized with my friend Camille, who had nothing good to say about the nuns who pushed her around rudely during her first communion at St. Joseph’s because she was a “public school girl” and who resented the way the priests would visit her home to determine how much the family might contribute to church coffers every year. It wasn’t till much later that I came to cultivate a laser-beam loathing for the Roman Catholic Church as a major part of the locus of homophobia that poisoned the self-image of many of my gay friends and led in some cases to suicide.

St. Anthony’s was the model in my imagination for the Catholic school portrayed in one of the wittiest plays of all time, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it all for you, which came out in 1979 (and was later made into a movie starring Diane Keaton in 2001). Sister Mary Ignatius stood in front of the class in her traditional habit, channeled violence into her pointer stick, which she slapped against the blackboard and scared the bejeezus out of her students. The play offended the hell out of traditional Catholics and some tried to have it banned, but most of us who saw the play performed laughed till we cried. Take that, you goddam Catholic indoctrination machine, said the little voice in my head. Die, sucker die. There was some real hatred and resentment developed by the time I grew up and left Winsted for greener pastures.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings at reading the other morning that St. Anthony’s School, after educating/indoctrinating (you choose) kids as the longest functioning parochial school in the Hartford Archdiocese would be going out of business at the end of the current school year. The negative reaction to Roman Catholicism in America, exacerbated, and no doubt primarily brought on, by the disgust over the way it responded to the child abuse crisis in the church, has found its way into my home town. Not only are Catholic churches closing right and left. So are the schools.

I’d need to go into deep meditation to find out how I feel about this. Up here at the surface all I know is that the part of me that once raged at the church as an institution wants to go out and dance in the street. But another part of me, the one that has let go of the rage and has come to sympathize with the good Catholic folk who simply want their kids to be raised with high standards and look to the church to provide them, is washed over with sadness.

Mostly, though, it has little to do with religion. It has much more to do with the fact that I don’t like anybody messing with my historical memories. The older I get, the more I want history, or my childhood construction of it, to remain untouched by the ravages of time.

But the Buddhists are right. The only truth you can ever count on is that everything changes. Nothing ever remains the same.

photo credit: https://winstedphoenix.org/index.php/2020/03/16/st-anthony-school-to-close-after-155-years/

A modern-day filioque

The United Methodist Church is about to split in two over whether to maintain its official stance that there is something wrong with homosexuality.



Currently, there is a ban on same-sex marriage and on accepting LGBT clergy.


But 60% of the church's members would like to lift that ban. That is causing the split.


They plan to meet in a few months to decide whether to remain one church body or two, and possibly more. Since 60% of Methodists are accepting of LGBT people, their group would get to keep the current church title of "United Methodists," but lift the ban. The new group, the homophobes, will be known as "Traditional Methodists."  What is "traditional" is keeping the ban.


I found the labeling here confusing as hell. One has to remember that the "existing church" wants to get rid of its homophobia-colored rules - the ban on gay clergy and same-sex marriage - and the "traditional church" wants to hold onto them.

Apparently they have been struggling over this issue for some time and the existing UMC folk are now willing to pay the "traditionalists" to go. Some $25 million dollars, in fact, no small sum. Methodists from around the world will meet in Minneapolis in May to make the final decision. They're hoping for an amicable divorce. 


Splits among Christians are nothing new. If you know church history, you will remember when church leaders came to blows over what's known as the filioque controversy. You've got your Father, and you've got your Son, and you've got your Holy Ghost. Ah, yes, but does the Holy Ghost come from just the Father or from the Father and the Son?  Filioque = "and the son." May not mean much to you (or much of anybody these days), but at the time, in the 11th Century, the Roman Catholic Church split over it.  The boys in charge of things in Rome decided the Holy Ghost came from both the Father and the Son. But another group, centered to the East in what is now Istanbul, and far enough out of reach of the Roman Catholic bureaucrats to exercise a little independent thinking, decided it came from the Father alone. And voilà, you've got your Eastern Orthodox Church (Greek and Russian).   

There's no escaping the fact that once you organize yourselves into an institution with others who think like you, you find a need for people to run the show. That makes you like any other bureaucratic institution. What starts out as a group of religious believers ends up a political action group.


America is regularly misunderstood to be a democracy. It is not. That would imply majority rule, and everybody knows we don't work that way. We have an electoral college, for example, and representatives in state capitals and in Washington making decisions for us. Democracy is an aspiration, not a reality. It's the destination, not the journey. And what best describes that journey is the painfully slow but hopefully certain progress in extending civil rights to more and more of the population.  Politically, those pushing the extension are called liberals, although that term is fraught with such baggage that increasingly we choose to call them progressives.  Those holding out for the status quo are labeled conservatives. 


In the days of slavery, progressives advocated abolition; conservatives held out for the status quo. In the days of child labor, progressives advocated child-labor laws; conservatives held out for the status quo. When only men could vote, those advocating extending the right to women were the progressives of the day; the conservatives liked things the way they were.


Religious leaders tend to believe they are doing the work of God, and that means the ideas they come up with are God's ideas. Sometimes he puts those ideas in books, sometimes he talks to you directly and you have a revelation.  Once he has made his will known, it tends to get written in stone. You can't have a God who changes his mind all the time. That means religious people are inclined to be conservative. Progressive believers have to make the argument that God's will is ongoing, that he never reveals himself all at once, that you have to go with the flow and change with the times, as God gradually shows you the error of your past ways. Conservatives slap such labels on that method of dealing with doctrine as "cafeteria Catholicism" - picking and choosing doctrinal beliefs that suit you at any given time. 


Go back in history and you find it filled with this same struggle the Methodists are currently struggling with. You need money to build St. Peter's? How about selling indulgences, promises to forgive sins you haven't even committed yet for a few coins. It works. That majestic glorious building gets built and becomes the head church of the Vatican. But progressives, like Luther and others, find the whole idea stinks to heaven and voilà, (a second time) you got your Catholics here and you got your Protestants there.


The problem always centers on the speed of change. Today the "traditionalists" (another name for "conservatives") in the Methodist Church want to hold onto the practice of excluding gay people from the inner workings of the church, even though the majority of its members are pressing for change. You can still call yourself a child of God, but you can't be a leader, and you can't exercise your civil right to marry the partner of your choice unless they are of the opposite sex. That's the "traditional" way, you see.


Remember when the Baptists had this problem? Back in slavery days, the majority of its members decided it was against the will of God and they wanted  the Baptist Church to take an official stand against it. Which they did. And sure as the sun rises in the East, a significant minority of their members broke away. "Traditionalists," you could call them, who wanted to go on holding slaves. And here now we have a third voilà - otherwise known as the Southern Baptist Convention. * 


The Southern Baptists have come a long way since then. They used to be known for their advocacy of allowing each individual congregation to make its own decisions; today they make many more demands on the beliefs of their faithful. But at least they are now open to black people living with not only full civil rights in the larger community, but they allow them to have leadership roles within the church body. Times change. Conservatives too progress.


It would be nice if the Baptists could look back on their history and not find that stain, when "conservatives" held out for what all decent people today recognize as the insidious evil of racism. But there it is. Full-fledged racism is part and parcel of Baptist Church history.


In the Lutheran Church there are three main subdivisions. There is a relatively progressive wing known as the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a more conservative bunch known as The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. Then there's the arch conservatives who call themselves the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The more conservative you get, the more homophobic. Once it was filioque; once it was slavery. Today it is homophobia that divides not just the main Protestant denominations into progressives and conservatives; it's not just the Methodists, although they're in the limelight at the moment.


I was raised a Baptist but became a Lutheran when I reached adulthood. I also had a job as church organist in the Methodist Church in my home town. I have a close connection with all three denominations, in other words. I no longer share any of their doctrinal beliefs, but although I've left the church my respect for these folks remains in tact. They were the good people of my youth. They taught me right from wrong. They modeled, many of them, what I should do with my life, once I went out into the world. I wish I could push a button and make them all progressive overnight. I wish I didn't find myself cracking jokes like I did with friends over dinner last night?


Q: What church do you go to?

A: Methodist
Q: Homophobe Synod?
A: No, United Methodist.


But Rome wasn't built in a day.


And I still haven't got a clue whether the Holy Ghost came from the Father alone, or from the Son, as well.


I just know that we are free to join any of these organizations. And equally free to join none of them.


And that's real progress.




*
Protestants have a habit of naming themselves after meetings: the breakaway Baptists, rather than call themselves the Southern Baptist Church or some such, call themselves the Southern Baptist Convention. Another word for an assembly of clergy, and sometimes lay people as well, is synod, as in Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.]


The photo above is of La Mesa Methodist Church in La Mesa, California, a church chosen at random. I have no idea how its members feel about the upcoming vote. I just wanted a picture of a Methodist Church.













Faith-ism

The other day Elizabeth Warren delighted liberals with her response to a hypothetical question by somebody opposed on religious grounds to the Supreme Court decision that same-sex couples had the same rights to marry that opposite-sex couples do. “I’m old-fashioned,” the putative questioner claims, “and my faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

First off, stop for a minute and consider this curiosity of American discourse. We use the word “faith” as a short-hand stand-in for “dogma espoused by the religious organization I am affiliated with.” It’s not the person’s belief (faith) that Christ died to take away the sins we have allegedly inherited from Adam and Eve that is at stake here, but the right of people to ascribe to a notion not supported by evidence and then claim because it’s a religious notion they somehow have the right, nay the duty, to insist the rest of us are bound by that notion, as well.  Even if the claimant’s fellow church-members do not share their view. Hopefully the days of the special status of religious believers over non-believers are coming to an end.

Warren went straight to the heart of things. Our ultimate legal authority in America is the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and most assuredly not by one of the many conflicting voices within the larger Christian or other religious communities. Warren’s response quite correctly acknowledged the individual’s right to determine for themself who they might marry. Assuming it’s a man speaking, she said, “Then just marry one woman - I’m cool with that!”

A few days later, The Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor, Ruth Marcus, took issue with Warren for being too flippant. We need to show more tolerance of religious beliefs, Ms. Marcus said, evidently failing to realize that a person’s opinions are not the same thing as the person themself, an astonishing error for somebody in Ms. Marcus’s position to make.

Warren did respect the questioner. “Then just marry one woman,” says as much. It’s the same thing as saying, “Go ahead and exercise your rights as a citizen. I will not oppose that.” What she did not respect is the opinion that lesbians and gays’ legal rights should not stand. Nor should she. We have all sorts of wretched opinions held by Americans, that black people should only be allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, that the children of people seeking asylum in this country should be taken from them and put in foster homes, that if you’re rich it means you have worked hard and if you’re poor it means that you haven’t, that global warming is a plot devised by the Chinese, that the world is only 6000 years old, that the moon landing was faked by the government, and on and on. There is no reason on earth an absurd opinion should be shown respect. An opinion that reflects cruel intentions even less so. Warren was well within her rights to poke fun at the question by adding to “just marry one woman” - “if he can find one!”

In my view, civility beats incivility and kindness is way too often underrated as a value. I’m not advocating slapping the label “idiot” on everybody whenever they demonstrate what fools we mortals can be. But I also think progressive-thinking people like Ms. Marcus need to stop bending over backwards to give any poppycock notion credence simply because it can slip into the discussion under the cloak of religion. Religious nonsense is still nonsense. And history is full of evidence that some of the worst idiocy - and cruelty - ever conceived has included religious claims. Rather than give them a lifetime of free passes, we’d do better to stop them at the gate and check for weapons.

No need to look very far for examples. Never mind the religious wars, the Spanish Inquisition or Martin Luther’s urging we burn Jewish homes to the ground. Look to Salt Lake City where just the other day the Mormon Church went back on its word and is now opposing the ban Utah put in place on what the church calls “conversion therapy,” a form of psychological torture which, according to the Trevor Project, nearly three quarters of a million young gay people have been subjected to. Once gays had to endure electric shocks when feeling sexual attraction to others of the same sex. Advocates of conversion therapy will see the glass as half full and tell you we’ve left such barbaric practices behind. But just as segregation is progress when seen against slavery, conversion therapy is an insult to decency that must be stood up to. Arguing its advocates must be allowed to continue because what they advocate stems from their “faith” makes us all enablers.

No, Ms. Marcus. Some ideas must be actively opposed. Not all opinions are of equal value.

Bless you for your faith in the human race, in the belief that people can be talked around if you just take the time to engage with them. I take it that’s where you’re coming from. I trust you had the kind of 3 a.m. discussions I did back in your college dorm or wherever you first debated whether Gandhi’s non-violent approach would have worked with Hitler or Stalin or the Pol Pot Regime. I’m all for debate and persuasion when that avenue is open to us. But I’m not open to the notion that there is something about religion that entitles it to special favors.

Sitting down with Jesus for a Q&A

All my life I’ve marveled over the things religious people come up with. Virgin birth. Walking on water. Raising the dead. 

Not bloody likely.

These days, when I think of religion, I tend to see it as the primary vehicle for dumbing us down. After all, if you can be convinced that Jesus walked on water, you’re primed to believe that Obama is a Muslim, that the climate crisis is a hoax and the Republican tax plan is good for low-income people.

I was raised in a bunch of different Protestant traditions.  And not just any Protestantism, but American Protestantism. You know who I'm talking about: the folks who think of Jesus as their personal friend.

 I was baptized in a Baptist church, where it was important they wait until I had supposedly reached the age of reason before I was allowed to call myself a member. It was not enough that I could spout the words, “I’m a believer;” they had to believe I believed it.

I didn’t know what I believed at that tender age. Like most kids, I went through the ceremony because I could tell it’s what the adults thought was a peachy-keen idea, and I’d get lots of approval. But I love the idea that, in this church at least, there was some recognition that the mind counts. You don’t mumble pre-packaged prayers like the Catholics, I was told, don’t simply perform the rituals, like Muslims and Jews. You go into your religion body and mind. No credit for performance; it only counts if you will it to happen. God help you if you’re not sincere. He reads your mind, knows what you think even before you think it, so don’t try to fool him.

It’s enough to scare the living shit out of you, this responsibility.

In no time, I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do. I was thinking and asking questions. Why do you need to pray, if God knows your mind? Obviously one prays aloud in public to impress one’s neighbors, not God. He’s way ahead of you. And be careful what you pray for. If you pray for something concrete, like a bicycle for your birthday, and he gives it to you, that means you've reduced him to your own personal micro-manager. That kind of faith, that kind of theology, I learned a bit later on, is for kids. When you grow up you learn to pray for peace and understanding, not a new Lamborghini.

You also learn that God answers some people’s prayers only some of the time. Mothers pray their sons who go to war will come home safe. And it’s not at all clear that the mothers whose prayers he does answer are better people than the mothers whose prayers he ignores. Why is that? I wonder. A mystery, we’re told. Better not think too much about it.

Really? You’re supposed to use your mind but you’re not supposed to think too much? Supposed to make sense here, but accept the irrational there? All very confusing.

By the time I discovered anthropology, my connection to religion was pretty much done with. If it hadn't been, anthropology would have finished it off. The more I saw of the world, the more I discovered how many ways there are of being transcendental, the less any particular religious narrative had a hold on me. Why limit yourself to just one story?

In recent years I’ve spent many a Friday evening with Jewish friends lighting candles and reciting the ritual prayers in Hebrew. Not for the religion, but because I saw that my friends wanted to train their kids to feel a part of a community of believers. To feel a sense of belonging. What exactly those beliefs were was far less important than the fact of community. I could go along with that. Besides, there’s something to the notion that lighting the candles and “bringing in the light” is good for the soul. I don’t need for there to be a God for that. I became a touchy-feely Californian in the 1960s. I understand that one prays as a form of meditation – to calm the soul. And I love how the Jews figured out thousands of years ago that it was smart to shut down on a regular basis, stop working, be with loved ones, let in the light, and just be.

Turns out the Baptists got it wrong. “Mumbling” prayers, doing things ritually, is not an empty gesture. It’s not even an insincere act, necessarily. It’s good for the soul because it lowers stress on the mind and the body. OK, so that’s instrumentalizing worship, using it for selfish purposes. I don’t care. The nice thing about chucking out the notion of an all-seeing all-powerful deity is that it frees you up to enjoy the idea of being alive. No need to worry about an afterlife. Assume you only go around once. Better get it right the first time because there’s only the first time.

Because I chose to go down that path and call myself a humanist, not a religious person, I’ve naturally wondered how I made that choice. Was it really a choice? Was it not simply a set of experiences which led me to conclude that was the way to go? Other people, for a whole host of reasons, make different choices. It’s all so damned arbitrary.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back in time and spend a few hours over coffee or a couple glasses of wine with Jesus and get him to clear up these things. But that just begs another question. Would you have to learn Galilean Aramaic to talk with him? Or would he speak modern-day American English? So many questions. Since nobody speaks Galilean Aramaic anymore, I could, of course, spend a couple years living among the Aramaic-speaking Assyrians of Northern Iraq and learn their language, but that door closed when I read somewhere that those still speaking the so-called “language of Jesus” were speaking an Aramaic that was not mutually intelligible with Galilean Aramaic. Damn, they make things hard.

Then I learned that he spoke Greek. And probably some Latin. But probably not enough to debate the finer points of theology. Besides, my Latin is limited to “Fiat Lux” and “E Pluribus Unum” and my Greek is even worse. So that’s pretty much out. Whoever came up with the idea that you could just speak English and Jesus would be cool with it?

What would I ask him? I don’t know much about Galilean etiquette. He never married and I’d love to know if he was gay, but asking him that right out of the blue would probably be as rude in Nazareth as it would be in Peoria. I'm curious about whether he masturbates and if so how often and who he fantasizes over when he does, but it wouldn't really benefit me to know the answer to that, so I probably wouldn't ask. But I’d really like to know if he’s one of the tribe.

How does he keep clean? Do they have soap? Do they soak in a tub after a day on the Mediterranean with his disciples hauling in the fish? Or with his dad, sanding down the dining room chairs? Does he like dogs and cats?

These are not trivial questions. I know it’s a popular notion these days, particularly among Evangelicals, to see Jesus as a personal friend, a guy you can talk to about anything – your desire to get laid, your fear of spiders, your love of opera. If you’re going to be his friend, it’s important to find common ground. I doubt I could take him very seriously if he smells bad, and if he were to suggest it’s OK to eat dogs and cats, I’d throw him down the stairs.

What was his relationship with his step-father, Joseph, like, I wonder. Or his step brothers (same mother, different father). Did he really die and come back to life? Does he still have those holes in his side or have they healed shut?

What’s his take on Brexit? Does he think Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer will ever fill Angela Merkel’s shoes? Does he even care?

Does he care that some Americans are upset that some of us say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” because we don’t want the non-Christians among us to feel left out? And that some Christians find that a sign that the country is going to the dogs? Does he have a take on this?

Headscarves? Abortion? Circumcision?

Does he care that the Walton family controls 1,508,965,874 shares out of 2,952,478,528 total shares outstanding in their family business and earns more than $25,149 a minute while their workers earn only $9.00 an hour? Does that bother him? Or does he have bigger fish to fry?

Does he agree with me that Martin Luther was a great man in history because he created a modern German language to translate the Bible into? Even though he was an anti-Semite? Is it possible to admire a person for their good features while loathing them for the flaws in their character? If so, does he think the Evangelicals are right when they say it’s OK to separate small children from their parents and label Mexicans rapists and murderers, so long as you keep American white people in charge of the show? Is he a Kantian or a utilitarian?

Does he love America more than other countries?

Does he hate me because I find the idea that he is a God absurd?

Does he think I should censor my questioning and stop asking about any damn thing that pops into my mind but ask him only about things like war and the death penalty?

Does he have a sense of humor?

Does he ever get chapped lips?

The questions just keep on coming.

Ever since when I was baptized they told me I needed to love God with all my heart, yes, but with all my mind, as well.

I’ve concluded that there’s no reason to believe in gods and ghosts and demons, but Jesus is a historical figure about whom much has been said. Much of that is bullshit, of course, and I’d really like to clear things up.

Now that I’m retired, I’m free pretty much anytime, for some Q&A.

If he’s got the time.