DO EVANGELICALS HATE JESUS?

In recent years, the evangelical right wing has embraced attitudes and behaviors 180 degrees antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Where Jesus taught people to ‘love their neighbor’, evangelicals hate blacks, Hispanics, Jews, LGBTQs, immigrants, and anyone who does not look or think exactly like them. This behavior is pointed out and condemned a lot in the media, but I’m not hearing any cogent explanations as to WHY this is happening.

Let’s start by citing study after study showing that religious people do not behave more or less morally than non-religious people. This is quite startling, since religion is all about morality. We can only conclude that religion has little or no relationship with actual behavior, but somehow is closely tied to perceived goodness and morality.

Let’s also rule out the Bible as a source of morality. People cherry-pick the Bible to justify or to mean anything they want. This is especially true because of the black-and-white difference between the eye-for-an-eye morality of the Old Testament and the love-thy-neighbor morality of the New Testament. Even Jesus’ saying, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” is twisted by Christian theologians as meaning the precise opposite, i.e. it really means he came to bring peace.

I see several possibilities for Christians and other religious people:

  1. God forgives our sins. Jesus died to save me. I may commit all sorts of evil deeds, but God will forgive me and everything will be just fine. This thinking is related to the doctrine of original sin; we are all born sinners, so I commit sins all the time, but God always forgives me. (This possibility applies to Christians but not to most other religions.
  2. I am religious; I pray and go to church; therefore, I am a good person; therefore what I do is good.

Let me explore this second option in more historical detail. Consider the Inquisition, in which thousands of normal people were tortured on the rack or burned at the stake. The perpetrators of this atrocities were often cardinals and bishops. By destroying these heretics, they were doing God’s will. After all, cardinals and bishops are men of God, so in their own minds they must be doing good. (This possibility applies to all religions.)

There is a possibility that the pedophile priest understands that he is doing wrong, but that his other priestly acts more than compensate for his bad behavior. On the whole, he is good: “I’m helping so many people in good ways, that I can be allowed this slip-up in morality.”

3. There is a third category of perceived moral/immoral behavior — tribal thinking. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim saw religion as the embodiment of the tribe. He saw morality as the collective adherence to tribal values. In today’s world, ‘tribe’ can apply not just to ethnic groups, but to groups who share a common ideology or social status. Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, saw the various sects of American religion as reflective of social class values. Thus, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, reflected the class thinking of lower, middle, and upper classes of society.

In Durkheim’s view, ‘God’ is just a symbol of the tribe. Idols and totem poles are just symbols of the tribal values. For Christians, the Cross is just a totem of Christian society.

In this view, moral behavior is simply behavior that reflects the tribal values of some group, be it an ethnic group or a social class. The phrase “God tells me that homosexuality is wrong” translates to, “My tribe tells me that homosexuality is wrong.”

A totem is the symbol or embodiment of solidarity of a clan or social group.

It is only a small jump from this view to a hatred of other tribes, whose gods tell them something else. Almost by definition, other tribes’ differences can be seen as the work of the devil, and must therefore be eliminated. God not only gives me permission to kill members of other tribes, but He (i.e. my tribe) proclaims the obligation for me to kill them.

Donald Trump recently put this tribal morality into understandable language. While describing Hispanic immigrants as rapists and murderers, he said that he welcomed immigrants from ‘nice’ countries. Of course, we know what that means.

In fact, Trump understands this very well. That scene where he crossed the street of rioters and held up an upside-down Bible was symbolic of the tribe, even though Trump has never read the Bible, nor does he have any idea what it says. Similarly, his sale of patriotic Bibles is a clear link of the religious symbol of the Bible to the tribal values of white superiority.

In the biblical Battle of Jericho, Jahweh commanded His Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the city, as well as every animal they found. How’s that for tribalism?

So Christian values like loving your neighbor apply only to your own tribe. The old phrase ‘Southern hospitality’ applies to hospitality to white people of your tribe, but not to non-white outsiders.  One of my favorite stories is about American missionaries in Africa who set up a mission school several decades ago. One African student at their school was so intelligent, that the missionaries got him a scholarship to a prestigious American university. When in America, he went to visit the Southern church that had provided his education, but he was denied entry because he was black.

When you look at American Evangelism through this tribal lens, it all starts to make sense and hang together. It explains, for example, the close relationship between Evangelicals and Politics, in which one’s political positions are simply those of the tribe, and are not to be questioned. Even ‘the facts’ are subject to tribal ‘relative truth’.

To the Evangelicals, Jesus and the Bible are just symbols of the tribe. It doesn’t really matter what Jesus said or what the Bible says. They don’t exactly hate Jesus; rather, Jesus’ teachings are irrelevant to the current tribal values.

Some Thoughts on Good and Evil

In 1987, in Detroit, an airplane crashed, killing some 148 passengers and six crew. However, in the wreckage, a lone infant was found alive. Overnight, the world media were filled with expressions of “God is Great!”, “God is all-merciful,”, “Praise God.”  

Wait a minute! Almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God just murdered 154 people in cold blood. I’m not hearing any criticisms of God. It must be part of his all-loving plan for us. “God is good — all the time.”

I think that even religious people don’t really believe this malarky. Rather, people see an overwhelming background of evil and suffering as the default condition. Once in a while, God creates a miracle and does something good. The existence of any small good at all is cause for praise and celebration. One good amidst a hundred evils is proof of God’s existence.

This psychology of a default evil is not too far from the Buddhist doctrine that “All life is suffering.”

I had a daughter who died of cancer at the age of seven. Family members prayed for her survival, to no avail. She might have survived if God had answered their prayers, but He chose not to intervene, so she died. Again, suffering was the default condition, so the family were not unduly shaken by God’s inaction. Their faith was not changed, and they continued to pray for an array of other divine interventions. God was still good, all the time.

Incidentally, there have been a host of scientific studies on the effects of prayer on healing. Some have been positive, while most have shown no effect. Some even demonstrate that patients who know they are being prayed for suffer even adverse outcomes. Never mind, miracle healings do occur, and with no other rational explanations, people naturally ascribe them to divine interventions.

A long time ago, I saw a movie called something like “The Debate”, about two Jews — maybe brothers — who somehow escaped the Nazi concentration camps and met years later. One had renounced his fate, after seeing the horrors that God had permitted. [Remember that old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer line, “Why did He lose, six million Jews?”?] The other had become a devout rabbi. When the apostate brother asked him how he could have become a rabbi after witnessing and escaping the horrors, he replied, “The Holocaust proved that there is right and wrong in this world.” In some Hegelian way, the existence of evil implies the existence of good.

The bottom line is, “God chooses.” A soldier who gets ‘foxhole religion’ sees the guy next to him have his head blown off while he remains alive. Why does God choose for one soldier to live while the other dies?

If I pray to God to help me be admitted to University X, that means someone else will be denied admission. Does God believe in affirmative action?

I’m often amused by high school football games, where before the game, team A huddles for the ‘team prayer’, basically asking God to help them beat the shit out of team B. Simultaneously (and known to team A), team B across the field is asking God to help them beat the shit out of team A. Does each team think that they can out-pray the competition?

The football prayer illustrates not only that we believe God can take sides, but that we can influence that choice by praying fervently enough. This leads to a slippery slope, as follows:

Suppose I pray to God to help me win a tennis match. This is equivalent to asking God to help my opponent lose the match. That is asking God for a negative outcome, or ‘evil’, if you will. Once you start asking God for negatives: “God, make my opponent lose this match”, you might as well ask for specifics: “God, make my opponent break his leg.” From there it is only a short step to issuing curses on people. Just as we ask God, before our meal, to ‘bless’ our food (whatever the heck that means), we might as well ask him to curse the food of our political opponents.

No, the arrogance of trying to manipulate God into choosing our side doesn’t make much sense to me. As Jim Morrison (The Doors, Soft Parade) put it: “YOU CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” If God, once in a while, performs some unsolicited miracle (seemingly either bad or good in our eyes), that is His business, not ours to question.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH AFRICA?

I love Africa. I spent 12 years there, living in 5 very different countries — Nigeria, Lesotho, Ivory Coast, Mozambique, and Uganda — and travelling in most of the rest. In each case, I left, disillusioned at the lack of progress, at how African countries seemed to be working against their own interests. But each time I left, I went back, longing for the continent I loved.

I went to Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide of some 2 million people. This had to be the lowest point of humanity in all of history. And yet, 29 years after I went to that basket case, the country has risen to the point of being classified a ‘lower middle-class’ country. It has surpassed almost all, if not all, African countries. So what’s wrong with Africa?

This question is not answered in the media, because most answers would be attacked as racist. “What’s wrong with Africans?” is pretty demeaning. But in my view, even to generalize the people as ‘Africans’ is racist, or at least ill-informed. On that huge continent, the people are as different as night and day.

I learned this when I first went to Nigeria, or more precisely, Maiduguri in Bornu — far north-east Nigeria near Lake Chad. Yes, that’s the place where the Boko Haram kidnapped those girls and have committed all sorts of atrocities. I was there to set up a new university, still existing as the University of Maiduguri. The people there are Kanuri: tall and thin, very dark-skinned, Muslim, and islamic-educated. We had several Ibo and other lecturers at our new university. They are short, stocky, and mostly Christian-educated, from Southeast Nigeria. They felt as foreign and out-of-place in Bornu as I did. I did most of my socializing with the ‘foreign’ Ibos, since we had so much more in common. Certainly these two groups of people could not be lumped together in any generalized ‘African’ rubric.

The Ibos and the Kanuris hated each other. Northern Nigeria had been instrumental in the starvation of thousands of Ibos back in the Biafra days. And therein lies, in my opinion, the crux of Africa’s problems. In a word: tribalism.

Just a few days ago was the 30th anniversary of the Rwanda massacre, where some 800,000 people were slaughtered. Then the West foisted ‘democracy’ on the country. Do you think that any Tutsi would vote for a Hutu? Not a chance. They vote for their own tribe, no matter how corrupt of criminal the candidate. That is the case all over Africa. ‘Democratic’ voting is by tribe, not by policy, intelligence, or philosophy.

Democracy is only a facade in Africa, as the parties are tribal factions, not real political parties. Are there any relative successes in Africa? True, you only hear about the horror stories in the media, but I’m not hearing about successes, except those silly happy-news Africa programs on CNN, which tell me nothing.

Sadly, it seems that the relative successes are countries where a strongman, who controls the army, keeps the tribes from killing each other. I lived in the Ivory Coast under President Houphouet-Boigny, who kept the Baoulé and the Bété from each others’  throats. It was the most developed country in Africa, and a real joy to live in. But when Houphouet left the scene, the country descended into chaos. One could also point to similar strongmen like Hastings Banda in Malawi, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and others, where the strongman kept the country together, but where chaos ensued after their departure.

Of course, there were other leaders who stayed in power simply by killing off the opposition tribe(s): Idi Amin in Uganda, Sekou Toure in Guinea, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

I also blame the colonial powers for drawing arbitrary lines on a map to form the newly independent countries. This process lumped together tribes who had hated each other and who had been killing and enslaving each other for centuries. They put the Hutus and the Tutsis together in the same ‘nation’. What did they expect? There again, it would be nonsensical to brand the tall, thin Tutsis, and the shorter Hutus with the same epithet of ‘Africans’.

I guess you can understand from the above why the media won’t touch this subject. I’m sure I will be attacked, but so be it.

What I’m not hearing about Targeting

The word ‘targeting’ is being tossed around a lot lately, especially in light of the ‘targeted’ killing of the aid convoy in Gaza.

The IDF apparently used AI to inform them that the convoy had Hamas fighters in it. They therefore ‘targeted’ the convoy, in the sense that they hit the convoy they were aiming at. It was no accidental or stray fire that hit the aid workers; it was clearly intentional.

(Aside: these days, AI is generally praised as God’s answer to everything. I find it surprisingly ironic that the IDF is condemned for using AI. “How dare they use AI in their decision making.”)

Now the media, especially CNN, are twisting the word ‘target’ to claim that the IDF was specifically trying to kill aid workers. I don’t see any reason for the IDF to whip up international wrath in this way.

The same way that Russia and Israel ‘target’ hospitals. Yes, they were aiming at the hospitals, in the belief that the enemy were operating there (e.g. Al Shifa in Gaza). That is targeting in one sense of the word. But intentionally trying to kill civilians is a different meaning of the word.

So be sure which meaning you are referring to.

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