The Last Temptation of Christ: thoughts on Blasphemy Day

I thought I'd take time on Blasphemy Day to remember one particular work of art that has often been declared blasphemous, both as a book and a movie:  The Last Temptation of Christ.

I find it, frankly, a telling indictment of modern Christianity that Scorsese's movie, flawed as it was, was pretty much a box office flop --

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it grossed a bit over 8 million domestic (even by 1988 standards, that's not too hot). The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's snuff porn flick? 370 million.
The Last Temptation, both as a novel and a movie, attempted to show a very human Christ coming to terms with his mission. He's real. He has doubts; he's afraid. He's a guy who farts, and has bad moods, and feels pain. He's called to save humanity, and mostly he just wants to kiss the girl. He rebels, running from his mission for as long as he can, until it catches up and he can't escape. His discussions with his friend and eventual betrayer, the Zealot Judas, alone make the book and the movie worth one's time.

He's intensely human, and that makes the whole story beautiful and moving. Even as an atheist, and even as someone who isn't impressed on some levels with the Jesus myth, the story gets me every time. I feel this guy's agony. And no, Mel, it isn't the agony of whips and chains and the cross. He is human, and knows the pain that can come from that. He is more human than the body that Mel Gibson fantasy-beats to shreds could ever hope to be.

Back when the Last Temptation came out, I had a classmate who simply noted that, if it truly represented what Christianity was, she might be tempted to believe. I didn't quite agree, but I understood the feeling.

The book? Frequently banned for its blasphemy. After all, it shows Jesus having carnal thoughts! It's wicked! It suggests Our Lord might have had a hard-on or two!

The movie? Protested. In fact, the anger against the movie was so intense that it actually led to a terrorist attack -- a molotov cocktail attack on a theater in Paris. The movie is still banned in some countries.

I'm tempted to point to that attack and say, "Thus the price of the idea of blasphemy." But mostly I think about how a beautiful story has been reviled and smashed down, and a far uglier one has succeeded on a huge scale. Blasphemy as a concept, and as a subject of laws, is an ugly, thuggish tactic to silence. It's probably not a coincidence that, so often, it serves to uphold ugly, thuggish ideas.

NonStampCollector reveals the shocking truth about God's Design

*snerk* "Oh, I love being reminded that I exist!"

The Baptists come a'knockin'

For the last year, I've been treated to a sight that was, I admit it, rather sweet to

Not Coronado Baptist Church in Tucson, which is kinda ugly. Image by J. Stephen Conn via Flickr

my atheist eyes:  a For Sale sign on the Baptist church across the street from my apartment complex. It's one of those small jobs, the ones that always seem to have pastors with Ph.D.'s (from what kind of school, one can only shudder to imagine) and promise on their signs to Preach Christ Risen. It even had a school. But bad times hit -- apparently a not uncommon phenomena in Church Land at the moment -- and they went away. And so the building sat, forlorn and empty, with only a little For Sale sign for company.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. A few weeks ago, the sign disappeared, and distressingly churchy activities could be seen, right down to the arrival of one of those old white school buses you only seem to see at churches. What, did the Christians go and buy up every old white school bus in the country?

Yesterday was, I guess, their coming out party. Which meant that Saturday, I was treated to a visit from some Baptists lookin' for butts to fill the pews.

First, let me say this: they were perfectly polite and friendly, left quickly when I told them I wasn't interested, didn't even press literature into my hands, and it wasn't heinously early. But.

I just don't know how to deal with this stuff anymore. Or, rather, I guess I should say, I don't know, exactly, how I feel about it. I mean, on one hand, just get out of my face, right? I don't go knocking on your door to tell you the Good News of the Godless Universe. It seems a bit rude. I think that may have to do with the fact that it is in this kind of evangelism -- the door to door, out in the streets talking to strangers kind of thing -- that we are confronted with the fact that, however nice these people are, they are doing this because they think I'm going to hell. And yeah, there's part of me, especially on a Saturday morning, that's pretty much "Right back at ya, buddy!"

But then again, they honestly care about complete strangers. They may be deluded, but they think other folks are in danger from Big Bad Consequences, and they try to reach out to help. And I think Penn Jillette is right about this kind of thing -- if you honestly think that, say, people are doomed to Hell unless they convert, you had damn well better evangelize, or else you're a bit of a hypocrite.

All in all, I'm glad I wasn't mean and left it at "I'm not interested." Because they do mean well. But I admit -- I miss that For Sale sign.

Robert Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice

Funny thing about Gregory the SF fanatic:  it wasn't until a few years ago that I

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really started reading a lot of Robert Heinlein (other than some short stories, and Stranger in a Strange Land in high school, because it was one of those books that all the cool geeks read). And until now I haven't read any of his later stuff. So it was new territory when I sat down with Job: A Comedy of Justice. It was one of his last works, and I've got to say that it was pretty darn nifty. It's definitely something that all godless folk will want to take a gander at.

I have a love-hate relationship with Heinlein's work. On the one hand, he can be highly entertaining and thought-provoking as all get out -- he was never afraid to ask any question in his work, and you always come away with Cool Thoughts when you read him. The other hand is his sexism -- and it's a weird sexism, because he'll write about sexual liberation and women as equals even as he revels in those same women being submissive and dominated. The dude had some issues, let me tell you. Job has some of that -- there's moments where you want to scream or shake your head in disbelief. But the rest, oh the rest..

A quick plot summary:  fundamentalist minister Alec Hergensheimer, a member of a particularly fire and brimstone sect in an alternate America/Earth, is on a Polynesian cruise and goes fire-walking. After the walk, people are calling him Alec Graham, his ship -- and indeed, the whole world -- has changed, and everything he knows is gone. It also turns out Alec Graham has been shacking up with his stewardess, Margrethe, whom our Alec quickly falls for, despite being married.

Then things get weird. A iceberg hits the ship, he and Margrethe find themselves in still another world, and they are off on a journey to America and Kansas through a stream of Earths that keep changing faster and faster. Alec thinks the End Times are on, and worries that Margrethe -- a dedicated heathen -- is doomed to hellfire. By the end of the book, we have seen the Rapture, Heaven (it is pretty but boring, and angels are assholes), Hell, and met Saint Peter, Yahweh, Lucifer, Loki and Odin -- oh, and their boss, too.

It's not a book that will make the deeply religious very happy. This is Heinlein, after all, the man who once said, "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." And this book is very definitely critiquing the Judeo-Christian world view. It's gentle -- Heinlein knew very well how silly all people are to be too bitchy towards one particular brand of human silliness -- but pointed nonetheless. There's some good one liners that will make the godless chuckle ("Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything."). But it's the heart of the book that interests me most -- the use of the Job story.

Alec, needless to say, is our Job. Lucifer is, however, the good guy, greatly regretting his role in the earlier Job affair. Yahweh is a dick, really, and you really see that when we finally see Heaven, a place where Rank Hath its Privileges, as the angels constantly remind the "creatures."  It's through Lucifer that we get to the core idea of the book, namely that the whole basis of the Judeo-Christian system is based on injustice:

"Alec, Justice is not a divine concept: it is a human illusion. The very basis of the Judeo-Christian code is injustice, the scapegoat system. The scapegoat sacrifice runs all through the Old Testament, then it reaches its height in the New Testament with the notion of the Martyred Redeemer. How can justice possibly be served by loading your sins on another? Whether it be the lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and 'dying for your sins.'"

(I think Richard Dawkins would love that bit) And Lucifer notes how the Lord's Prayer gives up the game:

"Stop. Stop right there. 'Thy will be done--' no Muslim claiming to be a 'slave of God' ever gave a more sweeping consent than that. In that prayer you invite Him to do His worst. The perfect masochist. That's the test of Job, boy. Job was treated unjustly in every way day after day for years -- I know, I know, I was there, I did it -- and My dear Brother stood by and let Me do it. Let Me? He urged Me, He connived it, accessory ahead of the fact."

It's a very Heinlein moment, with Lucifer challenging Alec:  will he be a lickspittle and take Yahweh's abuse, or will he stand up for himself?

Alec does stand up against the ill-treatment, with the help of Lucifer. Lucifer's reasons for helping him are wonderful -- sure, there's the desire to stick it to Yahweh, his brother, but there's something more. Earlier in the book, in the midst of his endless tribulations, Alec had encountered Lucifer in disguise -- and worried that this nice man was hell-bound, tried to save him. It doesn't matter to Lucifer that Alec was deluded in his ideas -- he's only interested in the fact that, despite his own very real and huge troubles, Alec thought of him and his family and tried to save them from the danger he thought they were in.

It's a sweet and thoughtful moment, and serves to note that the basic keys to human happiness -- freedom, love, kindness -- can get obscured by the silliness and arbitrariness of religion. But Heinlein is an optimist -- even Alec, as perfect a follower of the biblical Yahweh as you can imagine, comes through in the end.

A good read, over all, funny and sweet and wise. With, you know, the occasional Heinleinism. But this is definitely a book where I can forgive him that.

Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 2: Prophecy

Before the Great Death Plague '09 hit me, you may recall that I had a post on Thomas Paine's discussion of the three tools that organized religion uses to bamboozle people: Mystery, Miracles and Prophecy. Mystery he dispensed with quick contempt; Miracles he spent a bit more time on. He finishes his discussion with the notion of Prophecy.

Paine basically has two points to make about Prophecy:

First, if God did choose to communicate future events to chosen "prophets," one would expect that those communications would be a lot clearer than the ones we see in the Bible. Instead of clarity, we have confusion; instead of easily comprehensible meaning, we have obscure statements that can be twisted to fit most anything. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty," Paine says, "to suppose he would deal in this jesting manner with mankind; yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description."

But secondly, and more devastatingly, Paine simply notes this:  it ain't no never mind, kids. It's exactly the same situation as with Miracles -- say you get a Prophecy from God. Fine. How do the rest of us know you did? We don't. We can't. We can't tell if you are lying, or telling the truth. Imagine if Isiah, say, was in fact given important facts about the life of Jesus -- none of the people around him would have any ability to tell whether he was telling the truth or not, because those events lay far in the future. And even if he were to speak of things in the near future and get them right, how do we know he did so because God spoke to him? We can't. He could be a savvy observer of events; he could've guessed and gotten lucky. He could've read something from a savvy observer. Prophecy is personal experience, and thus can't be considered in any kind of rational thought process. It's like expecting other people to believe you saw a ghost just because you're sure you did.


What I find most interesting, though, is the attitude that Paine shows in all of this. It's contained in that quote I used above. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty..." Paine is a believer. He believed in God. He believed God to be powerful, an Beneficent Creator who had showered mankind with gifts. When push comes to shove, Paine's beef is simply this:  Christianity, and indeed all organized religion, spits in the face of God, hacks away at Him until he is a small and puny thing fit to sit in the confines of weak human imagination. A God who would use such tricks as Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy is worse than a clown, and simply not something worthy of worship.

As an atheist, I sympathize with Paine here. My biggest complaint with religion

Image by adamrice via Flickr

has always been just that -- it is so small, so limited, putting up images that don't challenge our small imaginations in any way. It's easy to laugh at people who, say, see Jesus in a tortilla or a dog's butt -- but really, that's pretty much what organized religion does. It creates small, tiny plays, with small, tiny actors, played out on small, tiny stages. The "religious imagination" is so easily pleased! The vaguest statement can be accepted as a stirring Prophecy. The silliest, flimsiest events can be declared a Miracle. And when in doubt, simply declare something to be a Mystery. Paine, as you may recall from the last post, titled this chapter "Of the Means Employed in All Time, and Almost Universally, to Deceive the Peoples." He forgot, perhaps, to note that they are as much the ways that "the Peoples" deceive themselves. This priestly tricks work because people are so willing to let them work.