Last Updated on May 9, 2012 by James Dziezynski
REO Speedwagon ain't the only ones who heard from a friend who heard from a friend who.
OK fine, you’re going to argue that the Bible says gays are an abomination in God’s eye, yatta yatta yatta and you’re personally offended that any nation could endorse such a heretical stance. Specifically you’re a Roman Catholic Christian, likely indoctrinated into the faith from a young age with all the requisite shame and guilt that keeps your mind resolutely focused away from reason. Truth shines in your life like through slits like a boarded up window. Since you have made a choice which needlessly inconveniences a lot of decent people, I ask: have you ever considered the source from which you’re getting your bigotry? Because I like you, in a lot of ways you’re a good, honest person and you have a lot of admirable traits in your character. So where does this all come from?
Let’s start with the big guy.
The Biblical God, mostly defined in the Old Testament, is an angry sort of fellow, more like a frustrated middle manager than an all loving, all knowing being. This makes sense because at the time he begins to appear in literature, that’s what most gods were: exaggerated extensions of human nobility and frailty. After centuries of smiting the bejesus out of people, he sent his Holy Son Jesus to set his house in order, after which people smote the bejesus out of one another. Sort of a lateral move if you ask me.
The problem with Ol’ Yahweh, besides being terribly insecure, he’s also tragically lazy. Rather than simply write a book, burn a DVD or carve his will into side of a magnificent mountain, he hand picks a charismatic cast of oddballs and riff-raffs to share his great word. Moses was a murderer. Jesus was a convicted criminal and frequent trouble maker. Muhammad was a violent, unscrupulous exile. Joseph Smith was a swindler and a pedophile. And that’s not even counting the endless stream of individuals whose prophecies never gained adequate traction. I’m just saying if you’re the all powerful being in the universe, you probably could have used better spokesmen.
Don't make me come down there!
However, I’m willing to give our list of prophets some leeway, since hey, we’re all at least partially human. Moses, for example, killed a slave owner beating his slave. Teenage Jesus seems no worse than your average angst ridden dude, unless you consider stories from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where Jesus wastes a couple of kids that get on his nerves. It was probably a wise decision when the canonical books of the New Testament were put together some 300 years later to leave this one out. Muhammad makes no apologies for his bloodlust, as presented in this charming passage: Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” And Joseph Smith, while relatively peaceful, just couldn’t keep it in his pants.
The problem I have is God decides to communicate with each of these already suspect characters in super-duper secret sessions that nobody sees. Many of them occur in dreams, ala Freddy Krueger minus all the hot teenage make-out sessions (well, except for Joseph Smith). If I was God and I was opting to pick my unique messenger, I’d do it in the most public place possible, say the Super Bowl. And in the cases of Moses and Joseph Smith, apparently he did them the courtesy of sending them printed material, but did so with the caveat it would disappear, which would have been a much better policy for student loans than the word of the almighty.
So we’re already two degrees of separation from God’s lips to your ears. Assume now, as some theologians do, that the Old Testament God needed someone to improve his reputation on Earth and sent his only son Jesus to take care of business. Much like his Pops, Jesus didn’t write anything down, which would have saved us all a lot of trouble. The reason for this may have been attributed to being born in the backwater town of Nazareth, where literacy was not found in most common people. The first written, surviving accounts of Jesus come from the early letters of Paul and the Gospel of Mark (which most scholars agree is the original gospel, subsequently copied by Matthew and Luke).
The problem here is the gospels were written at minimum 30 years after Jesus’ death and possibly longer than that. Add to that the gospels are written in Greek while Jesus spoke Aramaic. So imagine if you will trying to remember the accuracy of something that happened in 1982 and in another language. And let’s add one more layer of intrigue: no existing originals of these New Testament works exist, all we have are copies, and most of them are copies of copies. This was common in the old world. For example, Paul’s letters which make up a good chunk of New Testament canon were written to the specific churches he created with the intention of being read aloud to the masses, then passed along. The wax tablets and papyrus originals have yet to be discovered (and it’s likely Paul only wrote about 2/3 of the work attributed to him).
The flow chart looks something like this:
God > Prophet > One or Two Language Translations > Later Disciple FINALLY Writes Something Down
We can add in a few more steps here, as there are a host of errors and translations pulling the old texts from Hebrew and Greek into other languages. One study shows over 30,000 discrepancies between source material and final copy (and remember, the source material itself is likely a copy of a copy).
No wonder everything ends up so vague and contradictory. It helps explain why it took over 300 years to get everyone to agree what was valid and what wasn’t (Second Council of Trullan of 692 AD) and to formalize it to Bible we know today at the Canon of Trent in 1546 (for Roman Catholics) and around the same time for the Protestant Reformation.
So now we can add in:
God > Prophet > One or Two Language Translations > Later Disciple FINALLY Writes Something Down > Erroneous Translations > 1000 Years > Your Modern Bible.
Why does our good news always come with an asterisk?
As time has gone by, Judaism seems to have adapted the best, with most unorthodox sects being savvy enough to distinguish metaphor from history. Christianity, as it has been famously noted, as split off into more sects than there are words in the New Testament (180,500 or so depending on your language). Islam obviously still maintains the militaristic traditions it was founded on and Mormons still dutifully carry on Joseph Smith’s divine virtue of avoiding coffee and humping like rabbits.
One thing all four of these Abrahamic religions believe is that they are the one true religion and all others are false. Bear in mind that Jesus himself was Jewish (Matthew 5:17, “Think not that I come to destroy the law or the prophets; I come not to destroy, but to fulfill.”) and it was Paul the Apostle who founded Christianity as a religion not by Jesus but about Jesus. From there, we get our subsequent faiths, all tweaked to fit into the time period and circumstances of their respective prophets.
Chances are you wouldn’t be so keen to ardently follow any advice that is thousands of years old and diluted through so many filters from any other remote source. This is why we no longer drill a hole in your head to release the demon; rather, we painlessly extract the offending abscessed tooth. And if you’re a decent human being with a thoughtful approach on the world, you might even give yourself some wiggle room to overrule some of the more unfortunate aspects of scripture (just like so many, many other concrete and blatant rules that are in scripture but distasteful in modern times). Hopefully you’ll see how a slight change of heart can make the world a better place and let’s face it, your chosen deity built in enough vagueness to let you do so.
Like Yoda said, let go of your hate. Because a wise, little green puppet from a swamp makes as much sense as any thing else.
Believe what you must and if your opposition to equality is far too deeply entrenched, at least try to refrain from making things more difficult for everyone else. You see, most of us have figured out that who we love and how those people bring us joy, comfort and compassion is a deeply human trait, no matter what any law or prophet says. Our need to bond with one another is as natural as the sun and the stars.
If not… well, when I was in kindergarten little Tommy told me a watermelon will grow in my stomach if I eat a watermelon seed. Maybe I should write that down. In Japanese.
