Sunday Beefcake

Top Ten for the Evening of June 4th, 2011

1. Gil Scott Heron: “New York Is Killing Me”
2. Des Ark:  “Two Hearts Are Better Than One”
3. Kate Bush:  “The Man I Love”
4. The Kills:  “Sour Cherry”
5. Lulu:  “To Sir With Love”
6. Arcade Fire:  “The Suburbs”
7. The Flaming Lips:  “Do You Realize??”
8. Devendra Banhart: “16^th & Valencia Roxy Music”
9. The National:  “Think You Can Wait”
10. Tilly and the Wall:  “Sing Songs Along”

Blood Atonement, Made Simple

To explain the Christian concept of blood atonement adequately would require more time than I'm willing to free up to get into, not today anyway, but this morning the thought of it came up as I was thinking about, of all things, V8, the 100% juice drink.  Actually, I was probably on an unconscious level thinking about the HBO series True Blood, whose third season just came out on Blu Ray, which I have been chomping at the bit to have as part of my extensive collection of films featuring shirtless guys.  And I do not doubt that vampire lore has a not too subtle connection to Christian theology, a link which may be freely investigated post-1975, back when Anne Rice finally put to rest the notion of vampires' not liking crosses--more specifically, crucifixes, with their shirtless and very buff Jesuses.

Anyway, here goes.  First, the basics.  Blood atonement is Christians' attempt to explain why their god not just chose but also needed to sacrifice his only begotten son to wash away the sins of the world.  Blood is necessary because their god's sense of justice is so high.  Only most Christians are quick to add that, unlike Genesis 1:1 and so on, we must not take the word "world" (John 1:29) too literally because apparently the atonement works only for those who believe what various parcels of Christians insist that we all believe, exactly as they do.  And, of course, we have to forget the painful logic that an all-sovereign, all-sufficient, and all-powerful god would probably not "need" to do anything he didn't already intend to do from the beginning--well, from before the beginning, to torture logic and language further.

The atonement is evident even in the Old Testament, say the Christians.  It involves the sacrifice of something that bleeds--so, even in Moses' first book, God favors Abel's sacrifice of a lamb over Cain's vegan offering.  More importantly, the thing that bleeds must be innocent and without blemish.  To sacrifice something that by all ethical standards should not be put to death--the innocent--is precisely what the Judeo-Christian god demands as fulfillment of his sense of justice--a sense of justice well beyond our small human minds' ability to understand.  Clueless mortals that we are, we tend to think of an innocent as precisely the one we would not want to kill--or have killed for our satisfaction.

At one point, evidently, children were a satisfactory option because, I assume, they had not yet lived long enough to be corrupted.  (Christians vary on the point--often within themselves--of children's innocence:  they are born into sin, which is why it's okay to scare the hell out of one's children to turn them towards the paths of righteousness, and they are born into sinless innocence, which is why it's not okay to let them watch R-rated movies.  Nobody's very good at explaining the contradiction.)  Of course we all know (or should know) that it's the pagan god Moloch who demanded the sacrifice of children--not the god of the Hebrews and later of the Christians.  Moloch got a lot of bad press in the books of Leviticus, Second Kings, and Jeremiah, long before Allen Ginsberg singled him out as the god of the military-industrial complex.  

However, if Moloch is the bad guy, explain this.  It is Abraham's god who suggests to the "father of faith" that he should deliver up his son Isaac on an altar.  See Genesis 22.  As we're all told in Sunday school, this is just a "test" of Abraham's faith--but it's worth paying attention to the fact that Abraham neither balks nor regards the command as unusual--and this is only four chapters after Abraham begs till the cows come home to save the citizens of Sodom for the sake of ten or so righteous men.  But about his own son, he doesn't say a peep.  Had Abraham lacked faith when he pleaded for the lives in Sodom?  Or was a son--specifically his favorite son, born of his and Sarah's old age--somehow less worth pleading for?

Ultimately, even the sacrifice of harmless innocents is not enough to satisfy this god's idea of perfect justice.  The sacrifice must be human and entirely without sin--i.e. morally perfect--and as much god as man.  This ideal and completely good man must die.  Christ!  He must not die like Socrates, drinking poison from a cup, and he cannot simply die of old age.  He must die a brutal and bloody death--of the sort only the cinema of Mel Gibson can do justice to.  If he dies--in just such a vicious and comfortless way--with his god and father's back turned on him the whole time--then the rest of us can have everlasting life and go to heaven after we shed this mortal body (still dying, as it turns out, no getting around that).  

Well, some of us can have everlasting life--about 3% of the whole human population, according to some estimates, perhaps as few as 144,000, indeed a small "world."  Very small.  Hardly enough, it would seem to me, to warrant the death--and such a grisly death!--of a perfectly innocent god-slash-man.  But, then, the Christian god is a good god, not one of the cheap phonies the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians cobbled together out of their studies of nature.  The Christian god won't hesitate to sacrifice his only begotten son--born miraculously without regard to rules of nature and norms of sexual partnership (keep in mind that Mary was purportedly about 15 years old in 0 B.C., which would constitute an age difference in Jesus's supposed parents of upwards of 13.75 billion years--Mary Kay Letourneau, eat your heart out!)--and for all the god's trouble, and it was reportedly the best he could do, we have fewer people going to heaven than presently living in poverty (~80%), the famously "blessed" poor (no numbers yet on the "meek").

So whether there's a god or no god, I cannot pretend to be an authority.  But if the Christian god is the one and only--and if he is exactly as described by professed Christians (about 33% of the world population--perhaps 11 times the number actually "atoned")--and if this god is loving, holy, good, all-powerful, all-knowing, never-changing, though not exactly punctual (ouch, Harold Camping!)--I strongly suspect the atonement would not meet even FDA standards of efficacy--much less be all that impressive to me.

End Times

It must be a sad, gray Sunday morning at Harold Camping's house.  Camping, of course, is the 89-year-old California false prophet and cofounder of Family Radio who predicted that Jesus was coming again yesterday--and that those who had been faithful to God would be scooped up into the clouds to meet the lord halfway.  I take hardly any pleasure in the wrongness of his calculations, more than anything because I was hoping the seven years of tribulation predicted in the Books of Daniel and Tim LaHaye would be slow to kick in and we'd enjoy one or two weekends free of Christians, real ones anyway--and, I'm sorry to have to say it, folks, I sincerely do love some of you guys, but you do tend to be wet blankets (and that's when you're not being utter assholes).  And except for the terror that must have filled the hearts of trusting children for the last few months and the credit-card-bingeing of some of the shopaholic faithful, it was a harmless enough prank--old fart gets his last hurrah in before he dies, an HBO movie gets made starring Ed Asner or Don Murray, watching it we all get a few more laughs out of our system, and the delusional fool is duly forgotten before another dozen years pass (as new spokesmen for Jesus draw new crowds, who think this sort of thing has never been said before).  Supposedly, according to Reuters, nobody was answering the door at the Camping home yesterday.  No wonder.

Sure I made one or two snide comments, but, on the whole, I avoided jumping on the bandwagon of those who reviled Camping and his followers.  Not because I was holding out "just in case" their prophecies were correct.  Rather, because it's too easy to laugh at the gullibility of others.  Who are we to point fingers?  We live in an age of harebrained beliefs--bomb shelters and "duck and cover," trickle-down economics, Y2K, President Bush's sixteen words--or that Brokeback Mountain would sweep the Oscars.  And the sky has been set to fall so many times already that our Chicken Littles now find gainful employment as talk show hosts and political commentators.  In an era of mass communications, mass hysteria has become pretty ho-hum.  Even when there are some shreds of evidence for some cataclysm--climate change or "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."--we prefer to fully experience our emotions over these revelations than to actually try to find out the facts and do something about them.

Back in my churchgoing days, my bible-believing and soul-winning days, the church I attended would not have necessarily believed his prophecies, but Camping would have been welcome as a special speaker--or someone else attempting to explain Camping's "theories" to us.  We did, for example, get to hear Tim LaHaye speak, back in the days before he realized his stories would be even more salable as unconcealed fictions.  We had a lot of special speakers who'd drop by, like Chautaqua educators explaining the latest archeological dig or scientific finding--only ours never spoke of science, except disparagingly, as an ungodly false faith.  The word "knowledge" was highly regarded in our circles, not so much its essence.  Feelings were our preferred currency.  We did get to see and hear the guy who drove the getaway car for Bonnie and Clyde (who'd found Jesus, only to face a diminishment of his life's interestingness, as a result) and the guy who played Eb on TV's Green Acres (whose interest factor was, for most of us, the allure of his being both redeemed and hobnobbing with the worldly likes of Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor).  

When we had speakers who predicted end-times events with more particularity--we had learned, for instance, that Henry Kissinger is the Antichrist (more farfetched back then than it is now, in retrospect)--our pastor would politicly say, when questioned, that he both agreed and disagreed.  That is, the prediction seemed "likely"; however, he himself did not think the details were important.  It was more important that we all live in anticipation (fear and dreamy hopefulness combined) that Jesus would return at any minute--in the twinkling of an eye, less than a scientifically probable pinpoint.  Like Jesus and the apostle Paul, our preacher believed that the end times would be in our lifetime--but he was never so foolish (like Camping) to actually put a number on it--or money.

Frankly, I prefer Camping's approach.  Foolhardy--but better foolhardy, than merely fool.  There's some backbone to being hardy that I have to respect.  Still the man was a fool, no doubt about that.  As were those who believed him.  As were those who thought they were better than those who not just believed but (the truly hinky part) did so robustly.  I'm of the camp that thinks it's better to believe nothing than to believe bullshit.  However, there's a great danger in putting all knowledge, all beliefs, all opinions, all statements of fact in the same basket--like those who say, "Let's just agree to disagree," or "You've got your facts and I've got mine," or "Nothing is worth arguing over"--fools like that, the biggest fools of all.

Sunday Beefcake

God Gave Me This Message for You

Though he may be saving the gift of heaven for special people like you, he gave rights to every human being.  His perfect will for you, for all of us, is, at the very least, to keep hands off the souls of others--which partly consist of their autonomy as people possessing free will and the capacity for reason and love.  It also includes their physical lives and well-being--and their right to pursue happiness so long as doing so does no real harm to others.

Zeal is understandable, times being what they are--especially so, the more furious your concept of God happens to be.  But think hard--where might Jesus hanging on the cross for the sins of the world stand on the issue of church leaders and religious groups opposing legal protection for children and young people whom others perceive as gay, lesbian, or whatever, regardless of whether they are or not?  How might he, who took the sins of the world on himself so as not to put the blame on anyone else, look at his would-be followers blaming every earthquake, hurricane, and economic downturn on a group of people his followers happen to revile (or rather, as you might say, whose sins you revile, not the sinners)?

He knows you hate it when other people think that perhaps you act and look the way you do because you are a self-loathing homosexual.  So imagine how you would feel if people bullied you or your children because of this idea that somehow got put in their heads--and how would you feel, inside, if you heard others who claim to love God objecting--with some vehemence--to the idea that anyone might want to do anything to stop that bullying.  What if the time came when simply badmouthing gays and lesbians all the time no longer convinced others that you yourself are not a child of Sodom?

He also wanted me to tell you that while you're doing a pretty good job at resisting the temptation to engage in homosexual practices--though you might do a better job of it when you think nobody is looking too--he wants you to obey the WHOLE revealed truth--which means you probably ought to stop eating pork and shrimp, gossiping, and working and shopping on Saturdays--and, if you're really serious about this (it's your choice so I won't push it), you need to give away all your possessions, leave your families, and follow him only.

That's quite a lot to ask, I know.  I couldn't do it, but then I don't claim to be one of God's people.  Possessions and families are nice and hard to resist (but then so are the other pleasures of the flesh).  I suppose it's a lot easier to oppose the gay agenda (which is, basically, to protect everyone's God-given rights, including yours) than to actually follow all the commands God mentions in the scriptures.  Whew, there are a lot of them, aren't there?  By the way, not one of them is to boycott gay-friendly businesses or petition for legal injunctions against homosexuality or the miserable sinners (and here we're all in the same boat, aren't we?) who practice it.  (Some, I hear, not only practice it, but have gotten pretty good at it too.)

God doesn't talk to me a lot, but he did press upon me the importance of urging you to clean up your own life, seek goodness and holiness in private (and stop praying in public--he hates it--Matt. 6.5), and leave other people in peace.  Much better that the godless look upon God's followers as people who make the world a better place for everyone--or at least no worse--than as a bunch of meddlers whose own gnawing sense of guilt triggers the persecution of those who have never met you, much less done anything to hurt you.  

If Jesus wants you to turn the cheek when others hit you, imagine how he wants you to behave towards those who have done nothing whatsoever against you, who would be just happy enough if you were to mind your own business and leave them in peace--perhaps to find God and God's will for themselves in their (and God's) own sweet time.

Sunday Beefcake

Richard Lima via Hunk du Jour.