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The NYT has, oddly it seems to me and others<\/a>, been running opinion pieces by an Anglican priest named Tish Harrison Warren. These amount to Christian sermons, and I wonder what they’re doing in a general newspaper. NYT trying to attract new readers, perhaps? Then why not perspectives from other religions?<\/p>\n Today’s print paper has yet another by Warren, How a Cancer Diagnosis Makes Jesus\u2019 Death and Resurrection Mean More<\/a>, which strikes me as yet another example of how you can take a religious story and make it mean anything you want. (Not just religious stories — all stories have certain basic patterns that reflect human psychology — but especially religious stories, which like the cold readings by psychics, are sufficiently vague that they can be “interpreted” to mean whatever is desired at the moment.)<\/p>\n There’s even a second religious piece in today’s paper, by a rabbi, Sharon Brous, called Imagine a Bible With No Moses, No Story of the Exodus<\/a>. This tells about the “Slave Bible,” first published in 1807, that excluded all references to the Exodus story — no Moses, no burning bush, no fleeing slavery — so as not to give slaves in the British West Indies ideas.<\/p>\n Thus, the supposed great truths of the Bible are picked and chosen, selected or ignored, depending on the audience. Like any stories are.<\/p>\n \\<\/p>\n But the most interesting religious article in the NYT lately is one that came online today, but hasn’t seen print yet. Presumably it will be in the Sunday edition. This is In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God<\/a>, by the writer Shalom Auslander.<\/p>\n The writer recalls being taught the Passover story when he was 8 years old.<\/p>\n To get us in the holiday spirit, [our rabbi] told us gruesome tales of torture and persecution.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n God, the rabbi said, struck all the Egyptians with his wrath, not just Pharaoh and his soldiers. Egyptians young and old, innocent and guilty, suffered locusts and frogs, hail and darkness, beasts running wild and water becoming blood. Mothers nursing their babies, the rabbi explained, found their breast milk had turned to blood.<\/p>\n \u201cYay!\u201d my classmates cheered.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n Surely, I wondered, there were some Egyptians who didn\u2019t<\/i> whip Jews, who didn\u2019t have anything against Jews at all? Surely there were Egyptians horrified by slavery, Egyptians who disagreed with Pharaoh as often as we do with our own leaders?<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone?\u201d I asked the rabbi. \u201cHe struck everyone?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone,\u201d the rabbi said.<\/p>\n \u201cYay!\u201d my classmates cheered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These kids cheering on God’s indiscriminate wrath against the Egyptians sounds just like those child informants in Russia, as I posted about five days ago. Get ’em when they’re young, they’ll believe anything.<\/p>\n The essay’s point is:<\/p>\n Perhaps now, as missiles rain down [in Ukraine] and the dead are discovered in mass graves, is a good time to stop emulating this hateful God. Perhaps we can stop extolling his brutality. Perhaps now is a good time to teach our children to pass over God \u2014 to be as unlike<\/i> him as possible.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd so God killed them all,\u201d the rabbis and priests and imams can preach to their classrooms. \u201cThat was wrong, children.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGod threw Adam out of Eden for eating an apple,\u201d they can caution their students. \u201cThat\u2019s called being heavy-handed, children.\u201d<\/p>\n Cursing all women for eternity because of Eve\u2019s choices?<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s called collective punishment, children,\u201d they can warn the young. \u201cDon\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBoo!\u201d the children will jeer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n *My* reaction to this piece is to wonder how any thinking adult can believe such stories from the Bible. They are both absurd, and despicable. Is that the best God a believer can conceive of?<\/p>\n These stories are believed by children because they are taught them at an age when children will believe anything, and the only important thing to them is learning how to be part of their family, their church, their tribe. As children they haven’t the mental capacity to perceive how absurd these stories are; they assume since their parents tell them they’re true, then they must be, and if they don’t quite see the logic of these stories, they assume they’ll figure it out later, or that it doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n And adults don’t disown these stories — all of these religious stories, including the Christian tales of resurrection and the Muslim tales of Mohamed — because the stories have been an essential part of those cultures for centuries, a means of binding those cultures together, which is far more important than the stories’ plausibility, let alone their truth.<\/p>\n \\\\<\/p>\n To be honest with yourself, you have to step outside your culture, think your way around the problems of these stories, and think for yourself. Realize why the stories are still told, still mean something to so many people, without them being literally true.<\/p>\n It’s precisely the people, religious and nationalistic, who believe their culture’s stories are literally true, who fight the wars, and who oppress others.<\/p>\n And thus the others who understand the roles of stories, yet who allow them to be told unchallenged throughout time, are complicit in the crimes committed by those literalists.<\/p>\n \\\\<\/p>\n More stories:<\/p>\n OnlySky, Hemant Mehta, 13 April 2022: David Barton is spreading a new lie about churches and the Constitution<\/a>, subtitled, “Pseudo-historian David Barton is trying to rewrite history again. Why won\u2019t more Christians challenge him?”<\/p>\n Christian pseudo-historian\u00a0David Barton<\/strong>\u00a0has made a career out of twisting and distorting the words of the Founding Fathers and the Bible itself in defense of Christian nationalism<\/a>, homophobia<\/a>, and bigotry<\/a>. Now he\u2019s doing it again with the Constitution.<\/p>\n He\u2019s such an egregious Christian liar that he claimed to have an earned Ph.D. that was later revealed to be a hoax<\/a>. And he once wrote a book about\u00a0Thomas Jefferson<\/strong>\u00a0that was\u00a0so full of misinformation<\/a><\/em>\u00a0that his Christian publishers<\/em>\u00a0pulled the book from the shelves<\/a>, saying, \u201cThere were historical details \u2014 matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.\u201d (The book was ironically titled\u00a0The Jefferson Lies<\/em>.)<\/p>\n And yet conservative Christians and Republican politicians still cite him as an authoritative source of information. They all know the sort of people who take them<\/em> seriously aren\u2019t really interested in honesty. They just want someone to say, with total confidence, whatever they all wish was true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n