Green Oasis

Judas has a point.

Jesus and Mary Magdalene are good, but the actor who portrays Judas owns this movie.

Daylight Atheism has an excellent post on the deficiencies of the moral teachings of Jesus along the same lines (but better than) my post Lithium for Jesus. In short, not only is Jesus not the best moral teacher in history, on average we are now more compassionate than Jesus.

As I listen in on conversations between Mormons and mainstream Christians, much of the discussion centers on whether or not Mormonism is Christian or Biblically based. More and more, this seems like a waste of time, like fighting over which of the other kids get to join your neighborhood club, which end of the egg to eat first, or who the better Darrin was on Bewitched: Dick York or Dick Sargent?

Many Christians are ignorant of the history of Christian theology. They assume that their brand of Christianity is the authentic version. Then they seek to exclude Mormons from the Christian community because Mormons don’t believe in Christ like they believe in Christ. Mormons don’t interpret the Bible the same way, so their interpretation must be the wrong one. These Christians forget that they don’t believe in Christ like other Christians have in the past. They forget that they were once the targets of the Inquisition. All Christians are heretics (even the Catholic and Orthodox Christians since they excommunicated each other) and the sooner they remember that, the sooner we can move on from fighting over fairy tales to more important questions like how to ameliorate poverty.

The Bible Unearthed tells the story of the Old Testament from what we can gather from evidence. I haven’t read the book the the History Channel broadcast a program based on the conclusions of the book and centrally featuring its authors, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
• Part 10

My takeaway message from that program (and other sources) is that the biblical history of the Israelites before King Hezekiah is not supported by archaeological evidence. In many ways it is contradicted thereby. If we allow the evidence to speak to us, we learn that Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, and Moses all belong to prehistory. Most of the Old Testament is therefore a collection of mythic history which has perhaps some basis in fact, but we cannot tell from the evidence at hand. Any belief in the literal historicity of the early Old Testament is therefore not based on evidence but on word-of-mouth, on a game of telephone that’s been going on for over two millennia.

I can understand turning to the books of the Bible to learn about our cultural forebears’ struggles with morality and the numinous. I cannot understand, however, seeking to claim supernatural authorship for this thoroughly imperfect, human book. The Bible is useful to bring us closer to ancient human beings and their understanding of the world, but it is unconscionable to hold up a collection of their myths as an absolute moral authority. If we let the evidence guide us, we would hold the Bible on par with other myths like the Eddas of the Norse or the tales of the Greek gods: instructive but not normative.

I pass a group of magazine stands on my walk to the office every morning, the kind that dispenses free classified ads and similar local publications. One magazine usually captures my attention with covers of slinky sirens or similar eye-catching material. Until this morning, that never translated into me actually picking up a copy. This week’s cover story changed that: O, Come All Ye (Un)Faithful by Greg Beato with the caption “Atheists have been on a roll lately but the God squad still has better stuff”. Ever the consummate journalist, I decided to pick up a copy for the benefit of my loyal readers.

Thumbing through to find the article, I found the magazine to be exactly what I had always expected: pages and pages of augmented women pimping for night clubs, interspersed with one-page articles. The article (once I found it through the forest of silicone) surprised me with its content. It wasn’t one of the same stereotyped critiques that I’ve read too many times. Its basic premise is that while atheism makes the most sense, it has yet to catch up to Christianity on what people really want: kitsch.

No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers—one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?

If proponents of atheism want to make it more popular, Mr. Beato says they should follow the example of Christian entrepreneurs:

At last year’s International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia, hundreds of vendors displayed a rich, vast Eden of Christian pop-culture products that were just as slickly produced, just as fashionable and entertaining as anything secular pop culture has to offer. Atheists, meanwhile, are still in the pop-culture Dark Ages—their T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing, their tchotchkes aren’t as diverse, their rock bands are not spreading their 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up the stockings of nonbelievers with atheist junk that is just as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.

It makes an odd kind of sense to me. But perhaps atheists are catching up after all.