Remarkablogger

There’s a t-shirt or whatever that says, “I found Jesus: He was under the couch the whole time.” Right now I feel a little like that. All my adult life I’ve been railing at how ridiculous it is to believe in any religion. Globalism has truly shown us that our religion is other people’s mythology (to reverse-paraphrase Joseph Campbell). I find it laughable that I might think my religion is “true” and yours is “false.” The problem with all this, of course, is that thinking and belief have little to do with each other.

To put it another way, belief is a euphemism for brainwashing, and brainwashing is a form of training. The purpose of military training is to get personnel to automatically react according to how they have been trained. Most people believe in the religion in which they were raised. That simple statement says much about why we believe what we do; it has nothing to do with thought, analysis, historical accuracy, seeking the truth, or even spirituality. If you were born into a Catholic family, chances are you’re a Catholic (even non-practicing Catholics often refer to themselves as lapsed Catholics). If you were born into a Protestant fundamentalist family, chances are quite good that’s what you are, too, and you believe that people of other faiths are doomed to Hell. No, don’t kid yourself; you may talk nice, but in your heart of hearts I bet that’s what you really believe. If you were born into a Muslim family, you would be raised as a Muslim. You wouldn’t question your faith. You would probably hate the “Zionist dogs,” or whomever you were indoctrinated to hate as a youth. You would believe in Allah and you would believe that Christians were a bunch of soul-destroying crusaders. That your religious beliefs are very nearly determined for you solely by geography alone should give you pause. Born in the Middle East? Guess what? You’re Muslim! And you believe it with all your heart. What does your belief have to do with truth? It has more to do with place.

Let me tell you a story from my life. Over a decade ago, I felt lost and directionless and I had no prospects. I decided to enlist in the Marine Corps. The first month of basic training was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. Years before this, I had renounced my faith and my belief in the existence of God. At that time, becoming an atheist seemed exactly like I had simply made a decision. Suffering under the enormous physical and mental stress of Marine Corps basic training, I realized that decision had nothing to do with what I believed.

I found myself praying to God and reading my tiny little Bible. There is an old saying: There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. I wasn’t even in a foxhole. I wasn’t in mortal danger, about to be blown to bits. In that time of intense stress, I had, quite helplessly, it seemed, retreated into my indoctrination. From when I was very young, I was told there was a God and a Heaven and a Hell. I was told this when I had no capacity to reason it or doubt it or investigate it. I was told my religion was the true path, and that all others were on false paths which led straight to Hell. Before I posessed any analytical skills or the initiative to question what I was told, I was told that the Bible was the infallible Word of God passed to humanity via the Holy Spirit. When I was older, the more I read the Bible and studied it the stupider and more impossible it seemed. But there I was, crouched at the foot of my bunk in Hotel Company barracks, reading my Bible as though my life depended on it.

During that first month of basic training, stress fractures developed in both of my knees and ankles. I was dropped from training after a physical training test (I think it was a one-mile run, but I’m not sure anymore). I was in some serious pain, and pain, as any Marine can tell you, is just weakness leaving the body. I had to grab onto a drill instructor’s shirt and be sort of towed to the finish. In a perverse and determined way, I am proud that I finished the run. My legs immediately gave way and I collapsed. I spent three months in a medical rehabilitation platoon, but did not heal fast enough for the Marine Corps, which gave me an honorable dishcharge after another month in a separations platoon. I’m now ten percent disabled, which is just enough to piss me off but not enough to really stop me from doing anything, as long as it’s not too strenuous. My left knee often hurts, a reminder of that time when I discovered many of my limits.

Christians are extremely good at twisting facts and reality to fit their own ideas. They would see this episode of my life as evidence that God was real, not as evidence that He wasn’t and that I had been, in actuality, responding to my religious training just as a Marine would respond according to his military training.

In recent years, I have learned some very well-documented facts about how this supposedly infallible Bible came to be. Christianity is no less a mythology and no more a truth than any other religion in the world. And yet, there has always been the question of what to do about the historical Jesus. Science fiction loves to speculate on matters of time travel and what one would do if presented with the opportunity to travel back in time. I know exactly what I would do. I would want to see who Jesus really was and I would want to see what really happened. It seems fairly obvious that there was a real human being behind the myth and legend of Jesus the Christ. It may have been several human beings, melded into one mythic character after enough retellings.

There is a part of me that believes in Jesus that is my own belief and not a product of indoctrination. His words from the New Testament, are, even to this very day, utterly shocking and profound. They are world-changing, and perhaps that is why it seems nobody lives by them. Somebody said them. Maybe that person was named Jesus. When you go outside the canonical scriptures to examine the Gnostic gospels and historical texts, a more complete picture of who Jesus was can emerge. It is a picture despised by most Christians, as evidenced by the vitriolic and ignorant reactions to Dan Brown’s terribly written and terribly popular book, The DaVinci Code. There is life-changing wisdom in the words of Jesus, and that is what I believe in. Everything else is politics and revisionism.

The behavior of Christians and Christianity is nothing like the example set by Jesus. Ghandi was more like Jesus than Pat Robertson will ever be. It’s quite frightening, really, when you realize how people aren’t even close to being like Jesus. Your religion is worthless, a political entity concerned with its own power. If you really wanted to be like Jesus, the directions are complex, but I think you just may be able to understand them:

1. Sell everything you own and give the money to the poor.
2. Love one another, as Jesus loved you.

This is the most radical way to live ever conceived. You cannot possibly live this way and be accepted in modern society. Listen to what Jesus is saying: you are to be utterly penniless and homeless. There is no escape clause, no out.

So where does this leave us? I’m afraid this post is long enough as it is. You will have to wait until part 2 to find out how all this about belief and the possible reality of Jesus comes together.