You shall have no other gods.

In “Yes, Virginia, there ARE liberal Christians” (29 Dec 06), I made an admittedly lame-ass and rather incoherent attempt to defend liberal Christianity against the great majority of bloggers I was reading who were not only “secular progressives” but often militantly atheistic progressives, sometimes rather harshly critical of Christianity in particular and religion in general. I admitted at that time that I was a rather poor apologist, but not because my faith is, again admittedly, rather tepid. It is mixed (although not, I think, weakened) by a healthy dose of skepticism (my birthday saint is Thomas the Apostle, the “yeah, sure, show me” saint) and a strong and irreverent sense of humor and irony concerning religion. No, I’m a weak apologist simply because I don’t like to argue. I really don’t much give a shit whether people agree with me or not; it’s their prerogative to disagree and I see no need to try to change their minds.

Besides, there are some fairly articulate atheists out there—who are not, however, any more likely to change my mind, since most of them aren’t trying any harder than I am to do so. One of the most articulate, to whom my guru recently called my attention, is Stuart Savory (“Stu Savory’s Blog”), who describes himself as “an overeducated, grumpy, blatantly opinionated, multilingual ex-pat Scot” living in Germany. (One of his recent posts is actually in Scots—an interesting read for the linguistically curious.) In “A Sunday sermon” (7 Jan 07), he says, “A handful of my readers (4 Christians, 1 Jew) objected to my demand for Equal Rites for all the gods on Xmas day. Vituperativeness aside, they all basically wrote ‘there is only one god,’ whereas correctly stated, it should have read that they believe there is only one god. . . . There are, in fact (?), somewhere between 2 and 3,000 gods.” He then gives a link to Godchecker.com, “Your guide to the gods,” which combines a whimsical irreverence with some impressive scholarship in their listing of “currently … over 2,850 deities” in the pantheons of the world, broken down into categories: African, Australian, Aztec, Caribbean, Celtic, Chinese, etc. The vast majority are from antiquity and are now no more than historical curiosities, and it’s not exactly complete even at 2,850. A search on Hindu gods gives the message, “The Indian mythology section is currently being updated. … 20 August 05.” A year and a half ago is “current”? Also noticeably absent are the gods of the three great monotheistic religions, and in answer to an FAQ about this, they reply:

“Unfortunately there's some confusion over who the One True God actually is. Christians believe one thing, Muslims another, and the Jewish faith is different yet again. It seems to us humble Godcheckers that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and Seventh-Day Jehovah's Mormons all devoutly worship the same Supreme Being. But the devil is in the details and, apart from confessing their devotion to the One True God, they can't agree on anything else. Which is very sad, as this has caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. . . . Monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself; that’s why I quoted it. I find it interesting and significant that the three monotheistic religions are also called Abrahamic because they all trace their roots back to the quasi-mythical patriarch Abraham, whom some chronologists date to the twenty-first century BC. And the Abrahamic history, as told in Genesis and as roughly confirmed by biblical archaeology, took place in that godforsaken corner of the Middle East now called, with a massive irony which nobody seems to appreciate, the “Holy Land.” The irony, of course, is that the so-called Holy Land (or the Middle East generally) is and always has been the site of some of the most wickedly unholy and bloody atrocities in the history of mankind, waged by the adherents of the monotheistic religions against each other in the name of and for the sake of Guess Who. (Not to mention the internecine battles within these religions—Protestants against Catholics, Shi’a against Sunni, etc.) Current attention is focused on the Islamic terrorists who ostensibly justify their wanton slaughter with something in the Koran about killing infidels, but some of their animosity toward Christians probably dates back to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when the sword was in the other hand and the Christians felt justified in wasting Muslims in their attempt to “reclaim” Jerusalem and the “Holy Land.” The present-day evangelical Christians, for their part, are content to get their jollies off on that disgustingly perverted Left behind trash promulgated by LaHaye and Jenkins, in which it is left up to “Jesus” and his angels, at the Second Coming, to make a worldwide bloodbath of all unbelievers so the Christians won’t have to get their own hands dirty.

It all boils down to the fundamental tenet of all monotheism, that if my god is the One True God, then anyone who worships any other god is worshiping a false god (even if they call theirs the One True God as well), and I’m entitled, nay obligated, to convert them to my One True God or kill them if they refuse to convert. (No wonder the atheists think we’re fucking insane; so do I, when it comes to that.) Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Christians and Muslins are guilty of that; at least some Christians would like to be able to do it rather than waiting for the Second Coming, although some of the more deranged members of the “American Taliban” advocate doing it right now. The Israelis, on the other hand, are guilty not of murdering others because they’re heathens but of stealing their land and murdering them because they want it back. Lest I be accused of being anti-Semitic, note that I accuse the Israelis, not the Jews. The distinction is of paramount importance to me because I consider the Israelis as members of a state to be the absolutely worst representatives of the Jews as members of a religion, and I think a lot of what is being criticized by Jews here lately as anti-Semitism is actually anti-Israelism, which is an entirely different matter. But in fact, the Jews even as a religion were just as guilty in the past. Clear back in Abrahamic history, Yahweh told the ancestors of the Hebrews to invade Canaan and slaughter all the native inhabitants, and when they did what Yahweh told them to do, they then displayed the most touchingly naïve surprise when the people they’d driven out of their land weren’t warmly fond of them. (“Oh, they just hate us because they’re jealous of our One True God who enables us to kick their asses.”) And when Old Testament history repeated itself in 1948 with the formation of the State of Israel, which again required the displacement of the Palestinians who had been living there for centuries, the Israelis once more justified their piracy by claiming that they were just fulfilling their mandate from Yahweh, and they still can’t quite seem to understand why the Palestinians hate them so much. Welcome to the “Holy Land.”

Well, I didn’t want to digress into an anti-Israeli tirade; that’s not quite the point, although it is related. The point, to re-quote Godchecker, is that monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people—not in all people, but in enough to give religion generally a very bad reputation. Another irony is the fact that religion is supposed to bring out the best in people; and it does, in most people. All the monotheistic religions have a central message of peace and justice and brotherhood as well as admonitions to deal with heathens and infidels in various unpleasant ways, but for some reason deeply seated in fundamentally corrupt human nature, there are always those who choose to ignore the former message and obsess on the latter. It is also worth noting that, so far as I know, this pathology is unique to the monotheistic faiths; I am not aware of it in any of the polytheistic faiths. Hindu-Muslim relations are less than warm, but guess whose fault that is. (Hindu-Sikh relations are also a bit chilly because the Sikhs are a splinter sect that rejected Hinduism, but let’s not get too involved here.) In fact, it stands to reason that if a polytheistic believer has ten or twenty gods of his own, he would have no problem accepting the fact that someone else has another ten or twenty gods. More irony: the Roman empire in the first few centuries after the birth of the church was perfectly willing to accept the Christians as just another cult among many; it was the Christians who refused to compromise with Roman polytheism. The Romans ended up persecuting them because they were frankly obnoxious, trouble-making pests. (See Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall.)

Ending (“none too soon,” I hear you mumble) on a lighter note: I find a perverse delight in the number of parody and joke religions, and even some of the bizarre cults, which have arisen from the general disenchantment with institutional Christianity. Among the first group, perhaps the most familiar are the Church of the SubGenius, which has as its avatar J. R. “Bob” Dobbs; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which “worships” just that and is actually a spoof of Intelligent Design; and the Landover Baptist Church, a parody of the worst aspects of evangelical Christianity. (A friend of mine years ago, a student of philosophy and mathematics, invented the Church of the Holy Nullity, based on the single doctrine that God was the mathematical Null Set. The idea did not catch on.) The bizarre cults that take themselves seriously—many of them based on some form of reverence for some charismatic but often more or less batty leader or avatar or god-incarnation or what have you—are too numerous to list, and the task would be rather depressing anyway. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so delighted by them because they give credence to the idea that all religion is the refuge of crackpots, but I kind of like the idea of people being able to dream up any hare-brained excuse they want to start a religion and expecting to be taken seriously.

LATE NEWS FLASH from Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird”! (Well, not really very late; 24 December, actually. My brother gives these to me secondhand and I sometimes take weeks to look at them.) How to start your own church. (I’ve always wanted to. Hasn’t everybody? Well, maybe not those who have no use for churches.) A group of nine college guys who wanted to live together in one house got around the zoning regulations against this by filing papers declaring themselves a church, which gets past the zoning restriction. I get the impression they don’t have to do anything “churchy” to justify this, they just say “look, these papers say we’re a church, that’s all we need.” Reminds me of the Universal Life Church, the group who ordain as clergy anyone who asks for it, free of charge, no credentials needed. See, you atheists, we’re not all bad. All crazy, maybe, but not all bad.