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.

No Gods, No Masters vs. Submission to the Will of God

A morning thought, or at least a morning ponder over coffee, induced by remembering a line from U2: "If you wanna touch the sky better learn how to kneel/ on your knees boy!":

There's ways, when talking religion, that you come up against fundamental differences in thought. For instance, atheists often hear the charge that we are rebellious -- that our beef with God is that we don't want to bow our heads and submit ourselves to His Will.  We're prideful, and Pride Goeth Before the Fall and all that.

Which is one of those true/not true kind of things. I mean, it's not true because really, our beef with "God" is that we honestly don't think "God" exists. It's really nothing more than that, at least for the vast majority of us. But it's also true, because you know what? Damn straight we don't want to submit. We hold that Freedom is the most important thing, that to bow your head is to open yourself up to the chance someone will take it off. No Gods, No Masters.

This isn't just an atheist thing, either. It's a rationalist position, one that holds that we should stand on our own two feet and get to work. Paine, as sure a believer as any Christian, didn't believe in a God who demanded or needed submission. Paine would've grumbled at the "No Gods" part of the famous slogan, but he would've been right there with the "No Masters" part. His God was no Master, but a Creator looking for new creators, beings who'd dare to unravel the mysteries of His Creation and stand proud...

So on one side we have atheists, agnostics and some believers who think that humans should stand on our own two feet and trust in our own abilities; and on the other side we have those who believe that humans should submit totally to the Will of God. It's a divide between those who choose Freedom versus those who choose Slavery. It's hard to imagine how to bridge that divide.

Fidelity vs. Faith, or Nonbelievers at the holidays

The Guardian has a short article about The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, a book coming out about, well, atheists and Christmas. It served to remind me that soon we will be mired in another dismal round of the ol' War Against Christmas nonsense.

I mean, sure, there's atheists who don't do Christmas. People, after all, vary in their tastes. For some, it just isn't their thing. Maybe they were Christian once and now feel weird about the holiday. Maybe they have family-induced issues that turn them off from the holiday. Maybe -- gadzooks! -- they come from a background where Christmas wasn't really a part.

Whatever. Fact is, though, that most atheists and other nonbelievers continue to celebrate the holiday, often with great gusto. And some Christians choose to get mad, because after all Jesus is the Reason for the Season, and the secularization of Christmas has led to consumerism and selfishness and gay marriage and who knows what other horrors.

Of course, Jesus isn't the Reason for the Season, and never was. As we nonbelievers like to point out, over and over, our words falling on largely deaf ears, Christmas is way older than the particular body of myths that adhered to the Man from Judea. People playing the Evil Secularist Misappropriation of Christmas card might want to pull out those huge planks of wood stuck in their eyes, first. To rework a line from Bono, Christians stole Christmas from the pagans, and we're stealing it back.

But all that, really, misses the point. The point, actually, as to do with something from the last post -- the things people hear when they hear words. Many people hear "atheist" and they don't just hear "person who doesn't believe in a god or gods." They hear, instead, something like "someone who utterly rejects every thing that is good and decent, like kindness and ordered society and puppies."

Comte-Sponville makes, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, a distinction between Faith and Fidelity. Faith is, well, faith -- a blind, unreasoned acceptance of something as being true. Fidelity is a adherence to a tradition or set of traditions -- think of it as membership in a culture. You agree to certain principles, values, you name it. You have fidelity towards them. It isn't faith, because of course it can be a reasoned thing -- heck, the American Revolution was founded on the notion that people could withdraw fidelity, in a fashion, and bestow it on something else. They rejected the King -- they didn't reject society. Their values, and the values of the English back home, were pretty similar. They didn't reject any of that, just one little piece.

For many people, they hear "atheist" and they don't just hear a rejection of Faith -- they hear a rejection of Fidelity to the culture as a whole. The two are conflated, and in most cultures, have long been so in popular thinking. To question God was to question the King. Heck, in ancient cultures they often made it more direct, and made the King a god! But it is conflation -- the two don't have to go hand in hand. Fidelity can exist without Faith (and vis versa -- Comte-Sponville notes that Faith without Fidelity is a very, very scary thing. But that's another post).

Why do so many atheists celebrate Christmas with such gusto and cheer? Or, for

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that matter, celebrate other holidays like, say, Halloween, or Thanksgiving in the U.S.? Because we may not have Faith, but we do have Fidelity. We like our culture. We grew up in it, we're attached to it. Celebrating Christmas is one of the ways that we celebrate that fact. Christmas is part of who we are -- the carols, the food, the pretty lights and the Christmas trees. So we celebrate, and have fun. We may have thrown out the baby Jesus -- except for the carols, many of us love those -- but we haven't thrown out the bath water.

A better wager than Pascal's

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
-- Thomas Jefferson

=-=-=


Let's make a wager!

We're all familiar with Pascal's Wager, I

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assume. Atheists surely are, since there's always that Certain Kind of Theist who likes to trot it out, always with something of an "Aha! I got ya now, you atheist!" air. The poor fools never know, I think, why we laugh.
Many theists, of course, do know why we laugh, and they laugh right along with us. Pascal was a brilliant man, but the Wager was his great Moment of Monumental Stupidity. It's an argument that appeals to fear rather than reason, that makes our conscience nothing more than chips on the table, and makes God a chump to boot. There's nothing likeable about Pascal's Wager -- it's just sad. The fact that many people still reference it in all apparent seriousness -- and think it's such a slam dunk argument -- is even sadder.

Now, I think it can be safely said that most atheists, like me, admit to the possibility that we are, in fact, wrong. We may not think it very likely, but we can admit that -- there's so much we humans don't know, after all, that in the end knowledge is always a matter of certainties that can never really be 100%. Modern Atheism, in short, tends to use a scientific definition of the word "truth." And that means there's always the possibility of being wrong. We believe the evidence makes the existence of God highly unlikely, and so we don't believe. We are willing to change if, and only if, real evidence comes to light.

So, like Pascal, we make a wager. Only ours is different from the one he proposes. Ours is, well -- that God isn't a dick. That this God would prefer that we explore and learn and question and think and challenge. That this God isn't the sorry bugger seen in so much of the Abrahamic tradition -- needy, abusive, insecure, violent, a sullen bully needing to be constantly placated by supplication, praise, and obedience to arbitrary and cruel commands. We're betting, in short, that if we're wrong, it's more likely that God would be something like Paine's God -- the loving, nurturing parent who says, "Grow, baby, grow, dazzle and shine and show me what you can do." Who laughs with delight when we question yes, even His/Her/Its existence, because we're questioning and thinking, which is why He/She/It gave us these brains in the first place. Who doesn't consign people to Hell simply because they didn't play the lick spittle well enough.

It's a better bet, I think. And, oddly, it's a bet that shows more respect for the Hypothetical Creator than Pascal, a believer, showed with his.

It's a Mystery

Life, that is. Being. Existence.

I'm rereading Andre Comté-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. There's so much in that little book, it's going to take a few careful readings, I think, to fully engage with it. Which, really, is a wonderful thing. I don't go all the way with this guy's thinking, but I'm finding it challenging and inspiring.

When he lays out his reasons that he doesn't believe in God, one of them is one familiar to many atheists:  the idea that as an explanation, God is incomprehensible. That is, if we take a fairly standard definition of God, God is literally supposed to be beyond human understanding, and thus is useless as an explanation -- but gets used as one anyway. God made Man, God made the Universe. God has a Plan for us, and this is it! This is the meaning of your life. Etc, etc, etc.

For something that is supposed to be beyond human understanding, lots of folks seem to have a pretty clear idea in their head of what the dude is about.

What I find interesting is that for Comté-Sponville, it almost seems as if this problem is emotionally, as well as intellectually, unsatisfying. He notes that we are continuously confronted with Mystery, including that big bugaboo, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" That is, why Being itself? There's an amusing part where Comté-Sponville mentions a painter friend who declared that he wasn't an atheist because there was a mystery in life and the universe. "Ha! No kidding!," Comté-Sponville writes, "I, too, believe there is a mystery! In fact, I believe there is not much else!"

We are finite creatures. No matter how much we learn, we are are always going to be confronted with that most basic of mysteries -- why the hell there is something rather than nothing. I personally find that quite glorious, and it's that basic mystery that invokes the awe that can sweep over me when I really let the Cosmos impinge on my consciousness in some real way -- losing myself in a landscape, or in the night stars, or the simple joy and wonder in personal relationships.

The idea of God not only doesn't explain anything -- it doesn't even, really, add to the awe quotient. Staring up at the night sky, we are still faced with the same unanswerable question. We exist, and Universe exists. There is Being instead of Nonbeing. And it is glorious.

Right there is one of the reasons I'm an atheist. It isn't just that God is an incomprehensible explanation for reality or for questions of how to live our lives -- there's a, well, poetic level, I guess you could say, where God seems just as useless. There's so much to be staggered by just by looking around. You don't need to make up anything.

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.

Madness and Witchcraft

Sometimes, you find yourself staring madness right in the face. I don't mean the metaphorical kind. I mean the honest to goodness mind off kilter kind.

The short form of the story:  sometime ago, back on skin hunger, some of you may recall that I posted a video by a young Christian woman that was...odd. She responded to my post, which in turn led to an exchange of emails. Then she facebooked me. Haven't had much of a chance to chat since. Couldn't really get the heart up to, because I had already seen the pattern in the "conversation" -- there wasn't going to be much of one, frankly.

I knew, from her Youtube videos, that, er, her experience of the world was different than, well, most everyone's. Whether that qualified as some kind of mental illness was not going to be something that I was going to pretend to be qualified to judge. She seems a rather sweet person, really. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But.

Yeah, there's a 'but.'

I've unfriended her on Facebook, largely because, well, she scares the heck out of

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me, especially after this week. Because there's a kind of belief that is so medieval, and so dangerous, that it chills me completely to see a person actually holding it:  she believes in demons. And witches. And Satanists (with real, demonic powers, not just the silly pretenders of the Church of Satan). To wit:  she thinks she is under attack from all of the above.
Really. Honestly. I've never honestly met someone like this, someone with a persecution complex so extreme. Witches working magic against her! Dark Satanic prayers being leveled at her! Demons in the house! Desperate calls for a "prayer shield." It's a simple world view:  people who don't believe what she believes are demon-controlled. Or Satanists and Witches, ie active agents of Evil.


Harmless crackpot? Some of you may also recall a video that made the rounds a bit -- I posted it myself at one point -- that showed people in Africa being burned alive as witches. Those kinds of beliefs have had devastating consequences far too often for me to dismiss her as just another harmless crackpot.

When a person's beliefs are so deeply delusional, who knows where they will lead? We do know where they have led in the past -- to fires and stonings and pogroms. Magical thinking is dangerous, dangerous stuff. It's a floodgate that can devastate everything when it's opened. I can't really hem and haw and say, well, maybe she isn't too scary, maybe she's harmless, maybe she's just a bit odd and all. She's delusional. And delusional people can do a lot of damage.


It's also hard not to notice how her particular religion can reinforce and strengthen her delusional thinking. The persecution complex, the infantile ordering of the world into Good and Evil, Dark and Light, with our Mary Sue as the Stalwart Hero fighting the dark forces. And, of course, being heavily persecuted for doing so. I think we all know how that kind of thinking often turns out in the real world.


Definitely a learning experience. There's always part of me that thinks that everyone is reachable. But. Yeah. There's always a 'but.'

(And, of course, since I wrote this, I am now persecuting her. Or so she'd probably read it. Probably I'm possessed by a demon. Or maybe I'm a Warlock. *tries to cast spell, accidentally sets hair on fire*)

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.