A New Religion

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM

I’m not certain we’ve rejected the Sermon on the Mount, so I don’t agree completely with the good general. Peace-loving humans of all stations still understand what a fine sermon it is and embrace its timeless call to dignity and compassion. It’s a beautiful piece of work, whoever was responsible for it. Nevertheless, Bradley was on to something.

Much time has passed since the great world religions were founded. Human nature and physical laws may never change, but everything else does and has. What has changed most is the prodigious amount of knowledge we have accumulated about our planet and the universe in which it travels. Our discoveries have been so numerous and rapid-fire as to render it impossible for anyone to catalogue or absorb even a few of them, much less the total, and so profound as to diminish religious fables.

In the face of this onslaught of pure information, our hearts have not been able to catch up to our heads. There is a huge disconnect. Many would seek to respond to this lag by closing their minds and retreating to the safer, more settled world of time-drenched myth.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Historically, eras of great scientific, artistic, and cultural advancement have always been accompanied by an opposing movement, equally vigorous, which seeks to retard discovery and revert back to a simpler era. The Renaissance, that great period of intellectual and aesthetic rebirth in Europe, was accompanied by the horrors of the Inquisition, which saw the full, frightened, and vengeful power of the Catholic Church unleashed on dreamers and discoverers who dared to learn and stand up for what they knew to be true.

Today, for over half a century, a burgeoning technological age initially driven by the Cold War’s space and weapons race, and more recently by computers and wondrous machines of all kinds, has produced a boom in information unlike anything ever before seen. We acquired more data in a matter of a decade, the 1960s, than in the entire previous history of humans on this planet. And while some minds leap to embrace the potential of this amazing web of new technologies literally at their fingertips, there are many others who for whatever reasons are not programmed to accept, understand, or secure it. They seek to retreat back into the comfort of their ancient legends, complete with perfect and powerful parental deities, the personal gods that look out for their interests and their interests alone. And, oddly enough, they also seek to diminish women and their rights.

Back when new Information Age technologies first began appearing in the 1950s, much bustle was devoted to using them to explain, finally and scientifically, the old biblical miracles.

For example, people wondered what created the phenomenon of the Star of Bethlehem, the birth signal of Jesus that supposedly drew three astrologers from the East to worship him in his manger. Was it a comet? A supernova? Maybe it was a few planets lining up. And indeed, there was at the time a brief alignment of Jupiter and Venus that might have appeared as a new and bright star visible in the East. But ancient astrologers surely would have been tracking the two planets and immediately understood the confluence for what it was.

So none of those areas of inquiry having proven fruitful, we’re left with the obvious conclusion that it was simply a fable. Far from supporting religious tomes, modern scientific inquiry has served instead to more firmly determine the considerable extent to which legend and outright fabrication permeate our religious texts.

Often, hundreds of years passed before an account which has come to be taken as pure history was written in a lasting Old Testament text. Word of mouth kept the story alive through many generations. Error and embellishment were the inevitable consequences.

Thus archeological investigations into Joshua’s battle of Jericho, where god allegedly made the enemy city’s walls come tumbling down, reveal those walls had fallen long before Joshua got there, if he ever was there in the first place. They were likely crumbled by earthquake, a common occurrence in that area. The entire book of Joshua may be a fabrication, a legend, a way of trying to lay claim to the Promised Land of Canaan, that elusive land of milk and honey, by Old Testament Hebrews who were simply playing politics.

Moreover, biblical narratives were subject to the perspective, style, and prejudices of each individual chronicler. Those with axes to grind – and most every writer who has ever lived has had a point of view – skewed reality to fit their take on things. Increasingly, collections of pure data have proven the texts inaccurate, an ongoing reality check that’s been burning large holes in belief systems for centuries.

As a result, where religion used to hold enormous sway, nowadays it just holds. It holds on, holds out, holds back. Sometimes its numbers surge with adherents, sometimes they shrink. People will always search for answers to life’s impossible questions in all sorts of different places. Some places are valid, some inconsequential, some hopeless, and some even criminal.

It’s not surprising that people keep returning to religion, for it carries such irresistible promise. After a few years, however, many drift away from the core constituency of lifelong believers because religion simply cannot deliver on its promises. It never could. People become disillusioned, sick of it, tired. Other avenues and endeavors compete for their time and interest, there being many options in this complex modernity of ours. Fresh faces are always giving religion a shot though, and take the places of the disenchanted in an endless cycle.

There may be but a relatively few conservative Christians left in this world who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but like the extreme right-wing members of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, their influence is disproportionately greater than their numbers.

The Presidential campaign of 2000 in the United States – the most powerful and sophisticated economic and military conglomerate the world has ever seen – overflowed with religious issues, each candidate attempting to set himself up as the greater moralist.

Conservative Republican George W. Bush, son of an American President, was in particular a poster child for the sort of problems this book considers, insofar as he was a self-admitted, reformed, hard-drinking carouser, a convicted drunk driver, and a virulent born again Christian. Following his conversion to Jesus, he became Governor of Texas, the capital punishment state. There he enthusiastically oversaw the system wherein the government put to death, in record numbers, people who did not have his advantages of birth.

Bush joined forces with a group of conservative Christians calling itself the Religious Right, which some wags have pointed out was neither. They were a wing of the Republican Party, the first such group of its kind, which shamelessly used Jesus to advance a political agenda advocating what they called family values, including such virtues as crackdowns on crime, a thirst for unlimited gun ownership, the glorious ethic of acquiring great wealth, and strict immigration policies.

Karen Hall, Hollywood television writer and Christian, points out the fallacy of these positions.

Let’s just say that Jesus was running for President. What would the sound bites be like? Jesus on family values: I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. Jesus on crime: If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other one also. Jesus on gun control: He who takes up the sword shall die by the sword. Jesus on capital-gains tax cuts: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on this earth. Jesus on illegal immigration: I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

The Religious Right’s extremely conservative political agenda was hardly supported but instead undercut by Jesus’ teachings, something its advocates didn’t care to notice.

In the Democrat’s camp was an Orthodox Jew, Senator Joseph Lieberman, who made his conservative faith central to his political arguments. And then there was Vice President Al Gore, a liberal, on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, asked what his favorite book was and replying that, well, since he was a candidate for President of the US, he had to say it was the Bible.

George W. Bush won that Presidential election, although it was hotly contested in Florida, where Bush’s brother Jeb had, as governor, ordered swept from the ranks of the electorate tens of thousands of eligible voters who happened to be of minority ethnicity and therefore pretty certain to vote Democratic. Jeb is a good Christian too. A lawsuit launched by the NAACP subsequent to the election resulted in a determination that restitution was in order, and errors were corrected, too late however to place the winning candidate in the White House.

G.W. Bush had famously said on the Primary campaign trail that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, and this as it turned out guaranteed a great groundswell of support for his candidacy from America’s fundamentalist religionists. The results were catastrophic, for they enabled Bush to first gain the White House and then, in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks that collapsed the Twin Towers in New York killing over 3,000 people, to send America’s army first to Afghanistan to root out a group of Muslim fundamentalists called the Taliban, and then to Iraq for the purpose of taking down the government of Saddam Hussein. Shortly after the Iraq invasion, during a visit to Israel, Bush allegedly stated in public that he ordered military action because Jesus told him to do it. Thanks in part to right-wing Americans soaked in a Christian mythology that blinded them to reality, the world is presently flirting with an open religious war pitting the forces of Islam against Christians. Even though the Iraq theater has finally been wound down, from the look of things this conflict between the Koran and the Bible, between East and West, could last for decades if not centuries. In truth, it has been going on since the Middle Ages.

By the time the Presidential campaign of 2012 came around, the Religious Right had morphed into the Evangelicals. That Republican primary election campaign was once again soaked in religious themes. The slate of the GOP candidates was comprised entirely of politicians who had been driven either by circumstance or their own inclinations to extremely conservative positions. The Evangelicals were in full throat; many pundits believed they now ran the Party. Their agenda included a tight adherence to sectarian religious positions such as the drive to make abortion a crime and to roll back the significant gains made by the gay and lesbian segment of the American population.

A novice politician and former CEO named Herman Cain shot to the top of the popularity polls two months before the first caucus of the season in the agrarian state of Iowa. In spite of his African American lineage, he did not especially display a great tolerance and was staunchly against women’s rights issues such as abortion on religious grounds. No sooner had he emerged from the pack than a host of women from his past and present came forward to accuse him of a variety of sexual indiscretions. Two of the women had received five-figure payoffs for their harassment as employees of the company he had been running in the 1990s when the incidents occurred, and another woman spoke of an ongoing decade-long consensual sexual relationship that Cain terminated when he decided to run for President. He had paid her a large sum of money over the years to assist with her rent and such. Even though there were many witnesses, Cain, who had been married through all of this, denied everything except giving money to the woman, claiming that this had been an act of selfless charity. He continued to wax pious, even singing hymns during interviews. Nevertheless, his support collapsed and he withdrew.

An Evangelical candidate, Texas governor Rick Perry, wanted abortion illegal even when the mother’s life was threatened by the pregnancy. However, he refused to interrupt with clemencies the Texas capital punishment industry. A Southern Baptist named Paul, a Texas doctor and legislator, shared Perry’s antipathy for abortion and also sought to undo many decades of social legislation because he deemed it unconstitutional. He wanted to overturn the great civil rights laws from the 1960s and unravel the social safety net which had been carefully woven since the 1930s when FDR’s New Deal first addressed the problems of Americans in need through no fault of their own. Chief among those hard-won entitlements was Social Security. Paul apparently did not feel he was his brother’s keeper.

Two Roman Catholic Republican candidates decried what they considered an assault on marriage by gay and lesbian people, maintaining the strict Catholic doctrine which had determined that marriage was only to be extended to a man and a woman. This struck at the heart of a basic dignity sought by those who claimed they had been born gay, created by god as such, a view increasingly supported by scientific research.

And a Mormon candidate echoed the refrain of those who would impose their conservative religious beliefs and accompanying moral views on pluralistic America at large. Businessman Willard Mitt Romney was the great-grandson of a polygamist who had fled from the American Southwest to Mexico with his family to escape arrest for the religious practice Mormons termed plural marriage. They helped form a community that exists there to this day. Romney’s great-grandfather had five wives. His father George, also an American businessman and politician, had been born down there. George’s parents returned to America when he was young to escape a Mexican war. Since they were American citizens, no one questioned his citizenship. He was elected governor of Michigan.

Congregationalist minister William Edelen writes columns about the truth of the Bible and the errors of our biblical heritage. He notes that no less an authority than The Encyclopedia Britannica states that the first six Presidents of the United States weren’t Christians. He contends they were instead deists – people who believe that an impersonal force, as opposed to a personal god, runs the universe. Edelen notes that George Washington humored Christians and refused to take communion, viewing it as superstition. Historian Thomas Fleming writes that when Thomas Jefferson inveighed against every form of tyranny over the mind of man, he was talking about Christianity. Jefferson in a letter to Adams:

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To … support roguery and error all over the earth.

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by a supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

James Madison, who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights:

A just government instituted to perpetuate liberty, does not need the church or the clergy. During almost 15 centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been on trial. What have been its fruits? In all places: pride and indolence in the clergy…ignorance and servility in the laity…and in both clergy and laity superstition, bigotry and persecution.

John Adams added: The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus has made a convenient cover for absurdity.

According to Edelen, Abraham Lincoln – founder of the Republican party and generally considered America’s greatest President – was never baptized, viewing the practice as superstition. Lincoln insisted:

Christianity is not my religion and the Bible is not my book. I have never united myself with any church because I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine and dogma.

Today, the American Christian establishment trumpets its view of this nation’s religious heritage, fiercely resisting any attempts to roll back its influence. Christians rewrite history, avoiding truths not supporting their claims, in order to hijack not only the American ethic but the nation its rebellious founding fathers established and built. They do this to acquire and maintain power and influence. Those commodities then produce money and a false sense of security.

Some 400 years after the birth of Jesus, Saint Augustine of Hippo, a North African Catholic priest, wrote City of God. His book bears some similarity to this one although, mercifully dear reader, mine is over 1,000 pages shorter. City of God devotes a lot of print attempting to prove that Jesus was a god and that Platonist and Roman mythologies were bankrupt religions which had to be scrapped in favor of the superior new religion, the only true religion, Christianity.

Such an argument was once necessary. Most contemporary Christians – convinced their faith has been simply and divinely dropped into place – probably don’t know or even care that fully four centuries after the death of Jesus, this potent marketing effort on behalf of his legacy remained in full swing. But there was loquacious little Saint Augustine, plugging away at the grim task of driving a stake into the heart of Mediterranean mythology, a religious tradition whose time had come and gone. As we know, the campaign was successful. Ultimately Christianity did replace Greek and Roman mythology as a belief system. And Jesus became a god – but that part wasn’t easy either.

The inaugural official decree of this momentous decision, of grown men deciding another man was a god, came from the First Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE. The Council was the brainchild of Roman Emperor Constantine, who invited bishops from all across his realm to a central location in Turkey now known as Iznik. The story of this Council is a book in itself; here’s the short version…

Constantine was disturbed by a growing religious rift in his Empire caused primarily by Arius, a bishop from Libya, who denied the divinity of Jesus around 318 CE. Arius believed, as did and do most Jews and Christians, that god was without beginning or end. Jesus, he argued, being the son of god, had a definite beginning, was begotten, was not eternal, which disqualified him from being god in the same sense that the father was. The logic of his position, called Arianism, was and remains inescapable.

For his trouble, Arius was branded a heretic and exiled to Illyria, in the Balkan Peninsula. But the firestorm he had started would not go away, and so Constantine decided a full church council needed to weigh in on the matter. Of the nearly 2,000 Bishops in the Roman Empire, scarcely more than 300 were at Nicaea (Iznik) for the conference. Out of it came the Nicene Creed, which states unequivocally that Jesus is a living god. Out of it also came the continued shaping of the New Testament gospels along established lines. Those gospels which emphasized the deity of Jesus gradually came to be accepted into the Bible, those which emphasized the mortal Jesus were cast aside. It was a human decision. And when one thinks about it, it makes a certain sense. After all, the more powerful your god, the better your chances.

Yet even this weighty body did not stop the spread of Arianism. Constantine himself recalled Arius from exile in 334, and his son, Constantine II, embraced the Arian doctrine. By 359, Arianism had prevailed and was the faith of the Empire. But it didn’t last, even though Arius’s influence continued to the 600s. Internal bickering and external pressures led to a final victory of the Nicene Orthodoxy when Emperor Theodosius recognized it in 379. The Nicene Creed remains in place to this day. Just before Theodosius died in 395, he banned all non-Christian activities in the Roman Empire.

In casting aside the human Jesus, the Catholic Church also cast aside any relevance of women in their theology. There are those who think Jesus did in fact have a wife, Mary Magdalene, and even a child by her named Sarah (Hebrew for princess). They say this bloodline is alive and well in the world today but offer no real proof of that claim.

A god having sex with a human was apparently too much for the aggregate chauvinist medieval church mind to handle. In driving out Magdalene, the influence of women was bludgeoned from early Christian thought. There would be no goddesses. Woman was cast to the sidelines, to become a member of the audience, at best a cheerleader. Men made the decisions; men had the power. When the Inquisition hit Europe, this male superiority would have a tragic and devastating effect on the women of the day, as we shall see.

However, armed at the time with such a powerful myth, a god who had lived on this planet in human form and was superior to all other gods, a myth generated out of immense audacity and desperation, Christians would go forth with a great and dangerous certainty that allowed them simultaneously to do marvelous and savage things.

Christianity when fresh and young was more attuned to the times than older religions of the day and addressed issues in a more compelling, contemporary way. As society becomes increasingly sophisticated, so do its religions. The pattern is old and familiar. Religion always maintains a position taken out of sheer fancy and fortified only with tradition, rhetoric, and threat. It defends this belief until evidence of its falsehood or lack of viability is overwhelming, at which point religion dutifully and quietly capitulates, steps back only so far as is necessary, draws a fresh line, and the battle is joined anew. In the past several centuries, we have seen religion grudgingly accept – kicking, screaming, and punishing all the way – the fact that the earth is hardly the center of the universe.

It now must finally, I think, accept the fact that there is no personal god, no great parental figure poised to assist with issues such as war and peace, territory, intimate advice, life plans, parochial shoving matches and such, and this may be the greatest and most difficult sacrifice ever made by religion.

In a way, however, that is what the dissolution of Mediterranean mythology accepted. The population had intellectually outgrown the maneuvering of all those parental Olympian deities and maybe just plain gotten bored with having to keep track of them. In fact, early Christians openly laughed at the humanness of the characters in that mythology, what with their petty, banal, bickering behaviors. The whole deal had begun to seem a little ridiculous.

Sixteen hundred years later, Christianity is losing steam after a long and checkered run. Comparative religionist Joseph Campbell observed that you can see evidence of this change of focus in our buildings. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the tallest building in a community was the church, with its dome or steeple. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was the political headquarters, city hall. Today it is the skyscraper that houses businesses. Economics is ascendent in the Occident, religion in decline.

In City Of God, Saint Augustine also invested great space to patient explanations of the very precise workings of angels, demons, and other mythical creatures he believed to be active agents in the Christian religion. Interesting that he was unable to totally divest himself of the very belief system he was so enthusiastically debunking.

Greek mythology spilled over into Christianity, reinforcing Jewish concepts of seraphim, devils, and whatnot which are, unbelievably, still with us today. The centaur, a mythological creature with the body of a horse and the torso and head of a human, is now considered by all to be a fiction. Yet a creature with the body of a human and the wings of a bird is considered by many to be real, probably because angels are often mentioned in the Bible.

Myths and fantasies die hard. An example of their abiding power is the Star Wars saga, completely driven by myth. Each of the six Star Wars films was the highest grossing movie in the year of its release. The great Hollywood movie director, John Ford, a man with a keen sense of the importance of box office revenue – whose 1939 classic starring John Wayne, Stagecoach, forever defined the American western – suggested that when trying to decide whether to write a story as history or myth, go with myth.

Myth is powerful, a place where imagination runs free and forgiveness rules. In the land of myth, Americans forget or overlook the fact that some of their greatest icons, the faces on the money, had feet of clay. Thomas Jefferson wrote all men are created equal. Myth overlooks his ownership of slaves. He bedded down with at least one, Sally Hemings, many times, spawning a whole line of mulatto offspring who suffered discrimination for centuries only because part of their gene pool was black. DNA technology has proven their Jeffersonian lineage. Overlooked also is the fact that Ben early to bed and early to rise Franklin was egotistically slothful in France, encouraging a cult of personality and usually sleeping well into mornings. Overlooked is Ulysses S. Grant’s hard drinking and Alexander Hamilton’s profiteering from government service, not to