My dad is a worship leader. He proposed to my mom with the “God told me you’re supposed to be my wife” pitch. He gave me names from the bible—“Aaron” and “Jacob”—and he said God showed him some bible verses that applied to me prophetically, to the effect that I as his son was meant to have a greater impact in the world than even he. (No pressure, right?) I was raised in one of those churches that claims to be non-denominational but proved it was simply a new denomination with different labels. I played violin and mandolin in a couple Christian rock bands. I ended up a worship leader in my own right and even secretary of the board. I had a patriarchal upbringing, and for the longest time, I believed the Bible supported this. You can imagine my surprise when I got married and my wife refused to do the dishes or the laundry. It was a huge shock to my worldview.
I think I first noticed something was wrong with our religion when I saw an episode of 60 Minutes about the remnants of the Branch Davidians in Waco. Yes, they’re still there. In the video, the new leader’s daughter was playing a Taylor and singing a Tim Hughes song. After that I could never sing that song again. Branch Davidians are a cult. If our way of worshiping isn’t particularly uniquely Christian then what are we even doing?
I registered Democrat for the first time in two decades of voting. Then I ended up as simply a liberal mainline protestant, coming up with frameworks to explain why Genesis was never intended to be taken literally, ceremonial and civil laws were meant for a certain time and certain place, etc. But it seemed like the vast majority of Christians were the crackpot kind. Jesus said there would be wheat among the tares but he also said to judge a tree by its fruit. Sorry to mix metaphors.
The last church I had a leadership role in, I noticed some things were a bit off about their statement of faith. I did a ton of research and prepared a 12-page document explaining my position. But then I realized there was no way these home-schooling fundies would keep me around if I told them I accepted the scientific validity of evolution and the Big Bang.
Then people who went to the church I had helped plant killed one of their kids by beating them to death with a plumbing supply line. They read a book about how to raise kids god’s way and a huge portion of it was about beating them. They went to prison, and the rest of their kids are now being raised by healthy parents, going to real schools, prom, etc.
This event had a huge impact on me. It was the first time I saw people close to me use scripture as a justification for evil. It occurred to me that there were probably more Christian terrorists than there were Muslim. All those us-versus-them arguments about whose religion was the more violent went out the window. But the reaction of most of my Christian friends on the various social networks was “oh great, now they’re going to paint all us Christians who spank our kids as crazy people.” My reaction was “people, it’s not about you!” In the same way, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, my right-wing friends were much more concerned about preserving their right to pack heat than they were about making this country a safer place for children.
John Piper took part in protests in the 1980s against abortion clinics which got him arrested. And I once heard him say in a sermon that he would again take up such illegal resistance if it became the law of the land to not spank your children. That is: if he were ordered by the courts not to spank his daughter, he would do it anyway.
Piper is also on the forefront of the misleadingly-named “complementarian” movement, which claims to be honoring to women but in fact requires then to stay at home and take care of children, and prevents them from taking leadership positions in the church. While blogging about the Schatz tragedy I found that most of the likeminded bloggers were also feminists. So this was a sort of epiphany for me, and I came to realize that feminism and children’s rights go hand-in-hand. I knew this was the equality that Jesus was trying to teach, and which Paul was getting at when he said “in Christ there is neither male nor female.”
Christ enthroned vs. Jesus the man
Chris Hitchens points out that the Christian religion attracts the uneducated. And recent studies have shown that conservatism attracts people with a certain brain structure that makes them selfish individualists, while liberalism attracts people with another structure that make them altruistic. Ironically, altruism is the thing which Jesus of Nazareth preached in the Sermon on the Mount, but these days Christians are all about just signing up for their “get out of hell free card” instead of actually becoming the kind of loving people Jesus told them to be. The worst thing about Christians is when they emphasize “gospel” over “law” but live like devils, or forget their neighbors and oppress the poor, thinking that at least they “believe” the right things so nothing else matters. James said faith without good works is dead.
So many today, especially in conservative Reformed circles, tend to emphasize Christus Victor over the real Jesus. That is, Christ glorified, the King of heaven, who will come back to judge the quick and the dead. As such they value the theological teachings of the new Testament—which were written decades after his death—rather than the actual words of Christ, which were passed from Cephas and James the brother of Jesus straight to Paul and recorded by Q and Mark within their lifetimes—before the christological developments of later years.
Christ enthroned condemns the world and inspires wars. The actual human Jesus was a man of compassion.
The heavenly Jesus inspires the GOP to promote an American theocracy and stir up Israeli wars in Palestine in order to hasten the return of Christ. The living Jesus said “the kingdom is among you”.
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
“Turn the other cheek.”
Jesus, the bathwater baby
The Bible was such a huge part of my upbringing. But the more I looked, the worse it looked. It’s wrong about origins. The Bible condones slavery, the ownership of women as property, and the execution of rebellious teenagers. The story of the Exodus, in which God performed his own “slaughter of the innocents” in the final plague, was particularly problematic for me. I eventually realized I had to either become a Marcionite heretic or drop the whole thing. That is, science and reason tell me that Yahweh, even if he existed, was a murderous tyrant, and so if Christians teach that Jesus was the son of Yahweh, or that Jesus believed he was doing the will of Yahweh, or that Yahweh raised Jesus from the dead, that these claims must be false.
However, inasmuch as we can verify that Jesus was an anti-establishment revolutionary who preached social justice, healed the sick, condemned the rich, and promoted the Golden Rule like Buddha and Isocrates before him, then this is a man who inspires me.
Thomas Jefferson took a razor and glue to the gospels and cut and pasted together his own bible, leaving out miracles and supernatural stuff like the resurrection. He had a point, I think. So now I’m going to pull a Jefferson and do some picking and choosing of my own.
The first half of Genesis is out because science disproved it. Yahweh’s genocidal ways are out. So basically half the Bible is out, right? The apocalypse is out. Oh, and hell is out, too.
The Psalms are beautiful. Skip the imprecatory ones, though.
Jesus’ moral teachings are still incredibly relevant. At least I think so. Of course, then you have critics pointing out that “He who is without sin cast the first stone” wasn’t in the oldest manuscripts. That sucks, because it seems right on.
Keep James, with his condemnation of the evils of the rich. Dude is awesome.
Saul of Tarsus: “In Christ, there is no Jew, nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.”
Southern fundamentalists rejected this outright because they wanted to keep their slaves. Modern fundamentalists reject it because they don’t want to give women equal status. Modern eschatological wackos reject it because they think Jews still have an elevated status; they side with Israel at all cost, even against the Palestinian Muslims and Christians whom they continually oppress.
In Christ, there is no Jew, nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. The verse is obviously morally right. You don’t have to balance it out with the verse that says women shouldn’t teach or have authority over men, because it’s obvious which verse is moral and which one is religious. (Besides, according to New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, those sections were pseudepigraphal.)
The idea is there is a true morality, and we as moral beings can sit in judgment of scripture and reject it as needed, rather than letting scripture judge us.
I hope to be a more moral and gracious and kinder person as an atheist than I ever was as a believer. I think I just need to be a good husband and a good and loving father, and let this higher morality guide me instead of the oppressive mysogyny of scripture.