Every statement should end with a question mark?

My friend Ryan Georgioff recently wrote,

Naturally, I can't help but feel this is one big cosmic joke.

Have you felt it? That hesitant panic that maybe you've been duped, been done over by Zeus and his Creons?

I'm not the first to feel it, I know, but when the curtain falls and Jesus is standing there with uncorked champagne toasting the end of life-as-we-know-it... well, that would just be fucking bizarre.

But no moreso than, say, the way life-as-we-know-it operates.

You really shouldn't read something like Ishmael if you're looking for inner peace, and you sure as hell shouldn't be reading anarchist literature. Yet this is how I've spent my recent days, pondering the perilous paths of precedents in full knowledge of the futile nature of my quest... yet questing nonetheless.

Oh, where my journey has taken me!

In my mind I have smashed the bank teller window and spray-painted vulgar graffiti on the McDonald's arch. I have marched hand-in-hand with flower children and acid-tripping hippies from the Nineteen-Sixties. When the riot police machines come I always throw their tear gas back to them, though they've forgotten how to cry. These glorious and grandiose dreams are then beset by the realities of my life.

No job, no money, and no real desire to have either. Like I said, don't look to Ishmael for a reason to keep at your mindless job or for motivation to stick it out and finish that lingering degree.

My mind is all-over-the-fucking-place.

I am posting this because I can, despite the fact that it's all shit. And to think I want to write for a living.

Ryan approaches his search for personal and spiritual enlightenment with passionate honesty. I admire his courage: I can vouch from personal experience it's terrifying to set off into the wilderness. Imagine climbing the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Half way up you meet an obstacle, only passable by unclipping yourself from your safety ropes. You face a sickening choice: unclip and keep climbing, or stick with the safety net and lower yourself back to the banal you climbed to escape.

Ryan and I both left our ropes behind. We're at various stages in that climb up Half Dome now. While he's championing his choice, "Oh, where my journey has taken me!", I'm second-guessing myself, clinging wearily to the perilous cliff, wondering if the ropes were really so constraining, if the institutions I abandoned were really so corrupt, really so evil, and imagining how happy my life could have been within them.

Certainly a grassy meadow, however illusory, appeals to a ropeless climber a kilometer above.

While Ryan reveled in the glory of the climb in his post above, I questioned our sanity, in my comment below:

What if this isn't all one cosmic joke. What if it's all true. What if in our efforts to tear down artifice, we pile the rubble in the doorways, walling ourselves in for a cloistered death. Starving ourselves of options by writing off entire movements, entire economies, entire ideas.

What if unfettered embracing, rejoicing, ego, and amorality, really is evil -- what if we evolved into orderly species because those who were disposed towards order procreated most successfully.

What if anarchy is what we fear in mobs. Just it's been tempered so far by the police. What if The Man is like Jesus said: established by Divine Right. And the police are God's fingertips, loving us toughly, for our own good.

What if McDonald's and Dow Chemical and British Petroleum really are symbols of the holiest system of social-darwinism ever devised by the divinely-inspired minds of righteously misogynistic white men. What if WE are genetically defective, unevolved. Is that why we despise dinero. Rejecting the nutrients that sustain us, like a baby refusing a breast.

What if we reach utopia. What if we hate that we've achieved equality and found no superior being to blame. What if we're not optimists. What if we're whiners. What if what Buddha was trying to say was stop suffering for your ideals, detach yourself from your humanitarian lust for justice, put on a suit, smile, and swallow the cum.

The Divine Chain Letter

I'm reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ". I'm in the first chapter, and already the book has inspired new questions about Christianity.

As I read, I'd like to raise these questions for discussion, in case anyone has insights or answers.

On page 30, the theologian Dr. Craig Blomberg is quoted, 

"Jesus says, 'Whoever acknowledges me, I will acknowledge before my father in heaven.' Final judgment is based on one's reaction to -- whom? This mere human being? No, that would be a very arrogant claim. Final judgment is based on one's reaction to Jesus as God."

Besides the irony of Blomberg's views on arrogance, he's making a gigantic assertion there. He seems to be saying final judgment is based on one's acknowledgement of Jesus as God.

Yet, supporting evidence for his claim is readily available: Jesus said in his commission at the end of Mark's gospel, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Jesus seems to say, Believe and then publicly demonstrate that belief. Or, according to Paul in his letter to the Romans, "That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." In this case you have to say the belief out loud, and then you're saved. 

Salvation according to Blomberg and Paul appears to come down to demonstrating you believe Jesus is God by telling someone else. You have to publicly step up and say, "Yes, I heard the gospel and I believe what I heard." Then you're saved.

I can't accept this interpretation. The message of Jesus could not possibly be so inane. This interpretation reduces the message of Jesus to a chain letter.

Exhibit A: "If you forward this message to ten of your friends, you'll have great sex for three years. If you don't, you'll be crushed by a flying camel."

Every time someone forwards a chain letter, they imply they are concerned about flying camels. They imply they believe the threat or hope for the promise. Those who believe follow the instructions and we who don't believe get junk mail. 

Exhibit B: If you publicly admit you believe the Gospel you'll live eternally on streets paved with gold. If you don't, you'll boil in the lake of fire.

The Christian church has glossed over the transformative message Jesus brought in favor of the chain letter version, to their detriment. "Tell someone you believe or you'll go to hell" may be a brilliant distribution strategy, but what use is it to spread a message that says merely, "Spread this message"?

Imagine if twelve people received an email tomorrow that said only, "Forward this." What would be the effect if they forwarded it to everyone they knew, who forwarded it again, until everyone on earth had received it? Well, we'd all have read and forwarded an email. Nice! 

Then what?

The message of Jesus should not be reduced to a chain letter. Regardless of opinions on his divinity, he preached vital advice on living well and peacefully with each other. Ascribing divinity to him only emphasizes the rightness of his message and should convince the church to implement it with all haste. 

Advice to Apostles and Theologians

What should Blomberg have said? What should Paul have said? They could be right. Maybe acknowledging belief ensures salvation. But what if they had said, "Implement the message of Jesus on earth. Then you shall be saved"? Would it have harmed their message?

You could argue that not everyone who believes Jesus' divinity will also be willing to implement Jesus' message on earth. But if they believe he's God, what delusion prevents them from obeying him? Clearly they do not actually believe.

The class of people who implements Jesus' message will always include every person who believes in Jesus. If you don't implement Jesus' message, you do not believe. 

(Yes, that class of people will also include a number who don't believe, or are undecided about, Jesus' divinity. If God is so legalistic, I wonder if he weeps that his caveat separates him from these samaritans.)

So it would have been safe for Blomberg and Paul to argue for sustainable action. Out with the chain letter, in with world transformation.

But what about Jesus? He also claimed those who believed and acknowledged (via baptism) would be saved. Was he advocating the chain letter approach to salvation? Well, then, he got what he asked for: the most popular chain letter ever. 

But, I don't think he wanted something so simple. I think he expected further action, and if he did, then the church needs to get back to implementing Jesus' message of living well with each other. If they do that, they're going to improve a lot of lives. If they don't, humans will suffer twice -- on earth first, and then in hell.

Maybe I'm complicating this. Maybe the church has it right. Perhaps Jesus too ascribed to the chain letter idea. Maybe he just wanted to get the message out, so that everyone would clearly hear the gospel: "Forward this or go to hell."

PS Let me stress my concern here is not with Jesus or scripture. It's with Christianity's portrayal of the aforementioned. For example, at university I learned in biblical studies that the word "saved" is "sozo" in the original Greek. "Sozo" doesn't mean salvation like Christianity traditionally teaches, a boolean switch between "unsaved" to "saved". Instead it means "restore", as in, if you publicly acknowledge your belief in Jesus, you'll be restored -- most likely a promise of gradual restoration to a whole peace and right relationship with earth, others, yourself, and God. It's called "shalom" in Hebrew.

PPS This may be off-topic, but look at the rest of that last chapter of Mark:

Jesus says, "And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well. After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it."

Those who believe will drive out demons, speak multiple languages, pal around with deadly animals, escape assassination and heal by touch. And according to Mark the signs actually occurred. Whenever a Christian preaches to me, I'm going to demand they prove they speak in Jesus' name. There's enough sick people around to last a lifetime. Either we'll eliminate the need for universal health care, or God isn't real, or the Christian doesn't believe.

Spitting on Michelangelo

The Seattle Times published a letter I wrote to the Editor last week. There's many people who are skeptical of human-caused climate change, and many who view Climategate as vindication for their views. This Letter to the Editor is my response to them:

Conspiracy theorists are like suicide bombers — loud and dramatic — but there are only a few of them, and they are soon forgotten by all but those they injure [“Hacked e-mails heat up Capitol Hill,” News, Dec. 3].

In the case of Climategate, the conspiracy theorists are wearing WMD and may injure us all. They’re generalizing a few pieces of doctored data in an attempt to impede the entire sustainability movement.

While it may be true that a few scientists in the U.K. have manipulated data, and while it may or may not be true that the climate is warming, what is crucial to realize is that both climate-change science and Climategate are red herrings, distracting us from specific, vital issues that threaten humanity.

Whether in climate change humankind has created a monster or a myth couldn’t matter less. Beyond the issue of global warming, readily verifiable facts show we’re running out of fish, forests and fresh, clean water.

If we continue to abuse the Earth, we in the developed world will certainly encounter a drastic decrease in the quality of our lives, while witnessing the excruciating deaths by starvation and poisoning of hundreds of millions in developing regions.

To improve the likelihood any response is well-aimed, allow me to clarify: climate-change and sustainability are two different things. Climate-change as caused by the Greenhouse Effect is not the same issue as overfishing, acidifying oceans, deforestation and desertification, or the exhaustion and poisoning of aquifers.

The issues connect, though they originate from varying causes and are fallaciously generalized as a unified crisis ("Global Warming", et al). Thus, if you claim you can refute one of these crises, you have not achieved victory. You still must face all the others, individually.

One last question I'd like to add: I know many of you are Christians and believe that God gave earth to humanity, choosing Adam and his descendants to subdue the earth as its Steward. If I grant you that, will you explain to me how you justify current human behavior as "stewardship"?

As far as I can tell, we're all spitting on The David, which is like spitting on Michelangelo.

Mini-Jesuses thrive, even with their discredited name

Reading on Revolution in Jesus Land and Thom Stark's Semper Reformanda I find hope that Christians do not take lightly the hijacking of their name. Even when poison calls itself dessert, the dessert makes itself unmistakable.

Though some congregations shoot those who assail them, others choose Jesus' way. I'm specifically considering the Amish who last October suffered five deaths in their community. I'm sure they considered their response with excruciating care -- the public relations and news-media megaphone crouched over their shoulders, poised to trumpet the actions of the Amish to perhaps a large portion of the world. What a crucible in which that community chose.

The leadership at New Life Church in Colorado Springs certainly faced a similar gravity in their deliberations. Yet the two congregations chose divergent paths.

New Life Church shored up their defenses and then shot the single assailant who fired on them.

The Amish -- they stepped onto the world stage and forgave. Pardoned. Jesused. "Forgive them father," Jesus said of his assailants, "for they don't know what they do."

Wolves in Jesus' clothing

I'm a ballerina. No, I've never taken dance lessons, but I'm a ballerina. True, I've never danced in the Nutcracker or Swan Lake or any other ballet, but I'm a ballerina.

In English, as in many languages, entities are defined by what they do or what practical purpose they perform. Would you call a phonebook a knife? Of course not! If you did, you'd ask your friend for a knife and she'd hand you a phonebook (if she patronized your silly semantics). You'd have trouble making your sandwich.

We want our language as precise as possible for efficiency. Philosophers have spent the past century striving for a language refined enough to convey both the simple and the sublime. One, Wittgenstein, devised a method for ensuring each word in a language had only one meaning. He failed miserably, but we accuse ourselves if we fault him for trying.

It's clear, if I don't do ballet, I'm not a ballerina. In the same way, I'm not a Muslim, because I don't practice Islam. Nor am I a Christian, since I don't do what Christians do.

Now to my point: it is constantly apparent a number of people call themselves Christians who do not perform the actions of Christians (and a similar argument could be made for Muslims and Conservatives -- i.e. Bush). Perhaps I should rephrase that: maybe these "Christians" act just like "Christians" but they don't act like Jesus. Christian, I learned in my class on Shalom this fall, means in Greek, "little Christ". So it seems we may agree on a standard: that those who call themselves by the word "Christian" should fulfill the same role Jesus did. Maybe I'm asking too much.

Yet, the recent actions of "Christians" do not even closely approach in likeness to Jesus' admonitions, much less his acts. "Christians" ignore guidelines like 'Turn the other cheek' and 'Lay down his life for his friends' and 'Care for the sojourner in your land'. Instead, "Christians" shoot assailants in their churches. They obfuscate Jesus' clear teachings into complex, borderline gnostic doctrines, Melissa Scott-esque non-sequiturs, and prosperity "gospels" -- for profit! -- and they whip earnest humans into harnessed oxen by which they power political ideologies.

I feel sick to write of it. Oftentimes the conspiracy theories about the Masons and Knights Templar seem so credible -- they hover like locusts demonstrating irrefutably the devised nature of this monotheism -- and so tangible -- I know I can touch their modern day counterparts by dialing ten numbers on my phone -- that such obvious hogwash appears more plausible than a virgin birth and a resurrection.

I'm not in a place to make any predictions about these "Christians" and their relation to any God they claim to serve. Jesus said he himself did not come to judge. Wiser learners than I have argued to me any imperative extrapolated from Jesus' assertion applies only to eternal judgment. Their advice allows me the freedom to say I do not approve of those "Christians" who do the opposite of what Jesus did. I feel they discredit those who strive so intensely to live up to all the
responsibility associated with Jesus' name, just as I discredit all ballerinas when I claim a likeness to their grace.