Recently, while roaming around in the local bookstore with a friend, I found that aside from the “Remix” version of “The Message,” there is a new one: the “Text” version. Now while I have a fairly curious streak, I have read “Remix” and a “Text” version elicits too many cringe worthy ideas that I could not bring myself to open it and find out if, indeed, the Sermon on the Mount now contained any ROFLs. If it had, I certainly would have thrown the volume in my had across the room and then sought out a pot of ashes I could sit in.

Regardless, I took a picture of the spine of the book and put it on Facebook asking “What does this even mean!?” I got a few responses, one asking me if this was some kind of remix of “Remix.” To wit, I responded, “I wouldn’t touch Remix with rubber gloves. Someday, I’m going to hunt down Mr. Peterson and beat him with the collective works of Shakespeare.” A few hours later, as I laid down to sleep, this came back to bite me. A thought popped into my head and I hurriedly got up, went to the computer and wrote the following.

And so, I present to you my latest satire of “The Message.”

2b or not 2b, lol,

or if Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act III Scene 1 appeared in the “The Message // Remix” version of the Bible.

By Ben Craton

Should I kill myself or not, that’s whats bugging me:
Is it better for me to sit here and suffer
All these problems that keep coming up,
Or should I stand up against them
And hope they don’t come back: Dying would be easier
There’d be no more waking up to
All this heart-ache and the pile of crap
I’ve got to put up with? I really,
Really wish I could. If I were dead, I could rest
Maybe even dream; yeah, but there’s the problem,
I mean, what is on the other side
When I’m dead makes me rethink the whole thing. There’s the respect
That makes things worse the longer I live:
Who would seriously put up with all that,
The bad guys’ evil, the boasting of some jerk,
The feeling of being rejected, the lack of justice,
The rudeness of those in charge, and the dissing
That the normal guys have to take,
When they would rather stab themselves
With rusty scissors? Who would work so hard,
To bother with such a tiring life,
Unless he was scared of what might happen after they die,
No one knows what is there, ’cause no one
Has ever come back to life, it hurts my head thinking about it,
And makes us want to keep on keeping on,
Instead of wanting to die so easily.
Basically, we’re all just a bunch of cowards,
So now the whole idea, like,
Seems idiotic, now that I think about it,
Any kind of suicidal thoughts I might have had,
After all this are just retarded,
And I will not do it. Awww,
Shit, it’s Ophelia! Girl, You gotta pray for me,
For all the sins I’ve done.

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In this post I would like to attempt to add my commentary to the arguments Inman lays out. I do this, not because I hate silly internet cartoons (in fact, I love The Oatmeals other comics), but because Inman has conveniently posted a list of some of the most common arguments against religiosity, and I figure this is a good a time as any to do a survey on why I think they are misguided.

Click here to read the original

The comic itself is pretty harmless, though I have no doubt several zealous people have already attacked Inman for heresy and the like. The problem I have with the comic is not the message, but the reasoning behind it. The arguments in the comic are basically the main talking points for the so-called “soft atheists” who seek to remove religion from society through trivializing it and through subtle social movements that don’t really offend anyone anymore than you can offend someone by saying they dress tacky. This is juxtaposed with a “hard atheist” who takes the view that religion should be suppressed by any means possible, though they rarely take the idea that violence should be used, at least not publicly. These two often align between new and old atheism, respectively: old being the atheism of the philosophers of the mid-twentieth century such as Sartre and Russell who took their reasoning seriously, taking their arguments to their logical conclusions, and new being that of Dawkins, Hitchens, and your friendly internet atheist who use weak arguments, usually from a misunderstanding of the subject, and do not fully consider the consequences of their reasoning beyond “it frees me from the tyranny of god”. At any rate…

Note: I will assume that Inman is making a point about Christianity above other religions unless otherwise noted.

 Judgement

This is an often cited argument, that religion tells its adherents not to judge, but they end up judging others anyway. Now, in the one sense, this is a valid point. Hypocrisy is something to be despised. I for one abhor it and have taken the line in front of a congregation from the pulpit. Of course we are told not to judge, for who among us is any purer in virtue than any other? If someone is taking the line that “I am better than you, so you are below me,” and they claim to be following Christ, they are clearly not. I can see, though, how someone outside the church would view it: as the entirety of the church coming down on them. However, one must understand that Christianity at least is not a religion for the saved, it is for the unsaved–for sinners. So of course adherents of the religion will end up judging others, because they are sinners and screw up. That doesn’t mean we should vilify the religion for the conduct of those in need of rebuke.

On the other hand, there are circumstances when we must judge. If we do not call out one another (within the church), how will we know when we have fallen? How will we learn from out mistakes? And if we truly believe that others’ actions may cause them to go to hell, why should we not try to aid them? I’m not advocating zealous proselytizing here. Don’t think I would expect a Christian to tell anyone they are going to hell (how would they know anyway?), but I would expect that, through the way they live their lives and interact with others, they might seek to bring others into the fold.

 Science and Religion

Oh, the old “you persecuted Galileo” argument. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, but this is bunk. We should all know by now that Copernicus discovered a lot of the things Galileo later rediscovered and published in a book (albeit with a little note saying it was theoretical only). The church then didn’t really care. The problem with Galileo was he was kind of a jerk about it and tried to subvert and annoy the church any chance he got. At any rate, the idea that the church hates science is ridiculous. Aside from some nutty protestant groups, no serious religious person would think that modern science as a whole is evil. Even more silly is the specific calling out of the Catholic church here, the same organization which donates heavily to the science and to CERN.

The issue here Inman seems to take issue with is that religion has a sense of moral duty when it comes to science. We ask not only “can we?” but “ought we?” and these are monumentally different questions. To take the argument here about stem cells, the question becomes “are we assuming these stem cells to be from aborted babies?” If so, we have to ask, “Is this right?” Is it morally right to sacrifice an unborn child so that someone else may live? That doesn’t have a clear-cut answer because there are so many factors. But those in the church who have thought about these things long and hard have a final answer after much deliberation and reasoning: “No, it isn’t.” Often, I find, atheists react only with this last portion of the reasoning chain, not bothering to ask why, and assume that the church has come to some knee-jerk reaction based on some baseless belief system. If they stopped to think about it, they might discover underlying arguments about what is life, how much is one person’s life more valuable than another’s, what if we were wrong about the unborn, etc.

Children and Authority

These two go together. There has been some considerable noise, especially from Europe, that teaching religion to one’s children is tantamount to child abuse. Without assessing that fact, or in this case, assuming the religion is without merit because it was passed down through time. Even taking the simple approach of saying that religion is simply a moral system, one can easily see why this is silly on its face. First, by accepting this argument you have to start asking “Well, what is permissible to teach your own children?” You can get by easy by saying “Well, education and stuff” which is correct. But parents are responsible not just for what their children know, but how they behave. How does one know how to behave? Through a system of morals. How does one learn morals? Through religion or ethics, and ethics, if we are honest, is a subset of religion. One would have to start saying that any moral system is not valid to teach their child because it might align with a religion. This is because, as a subset, ethics can only go so far in explaining why one must act in a certain way. At some point, we have to say something arbitrarily if we are to avoid using religion. And this doesn’t mean the arbitrary reasons are bad or not well thought out; most are and have books on the subject, but they are still arbitrary at their base. Second, why is religion the only thing that is apparently bad to teach your kids? What about other non-verifiable subjects: economics, political theory, poetry, etc? These are not definitively quantifiable subjects yet they are valuable to children just as adults. Are they only to learn such things when they are older?

As a corollary, I must say that Inman is partly right. There is something sad about someone who is brought up in the church on authority alone. If a child is not taught how to reason through the teachings of his faith on his own, what good is that faith? Does he truly understand, or is he now parroting an ideology?

Sexuality

This is probably the most controversial of Inman’s arguments, at least I think so. The argument here stems from the hard-line that all the branches of the church have taken with sexuality. There is something fundamentally problematic when talking about sex with someone outside the faith. Religion sees sex in one light and those without see it in another and neither is usually willing to discuss it past the talking points (enumerated on the chalkboard here for our convenience). The problem stems, often, from neither side actually knowing its own reasoning for their position. The religious often just know “sex outside of marriage is bad” and others just know “sex feels good and hurts no one, so who cares?”

If you understand the church’s position, things become clearer. Sex is the most tempting, the most powerful of fleshly desires and has led to a lot of problems between people and within individuals’ consciences so that is needs to be reigned in as much as possible. Not only that, but at least in the Catholic and Orthodox views, sex is the actual becoming one with another persons which is seen as symbolic of Christ and the Church and as such is a sacrament. Protestants inherited the former, but not the latter, often having difficulty explaining why we should bother so long as no one is getting hurt. Catholics usually try explaining the later using logic without a lot of feeling which goes over the heads of those in lust. On the other hand, unbelievers don’t bother thinking about the consequences of their actions or their policies and become increasingly upset when a thousands-year-old establishment which has seen such things before holds up a hand and says “Hey, you know, that’s probably not the best of ideas.”

Proselytizing

Mocking Beliefs

Voting

Extremists

Dying

Killing and Ultimate Justification

Conclusion

The post Response: How to Suck at Your Religion appeared first on Tsunami.No.Kami.

The Bird,

or If Poe’s The Raven  appeared in “The Message” version of the Bible

By Ben Craton

One dark and stormy night, while I was thinking
About some old books that no one remembers,
I was very tired, but suddenly there was a tap,
As if someone was knocking softly on my bedroom door.
“It must be a visitor,” I muttered, “knocking on my bedroom door-
Only this, and nothing else.”

Oh, I remember clearly, it was the in the middle of Decemeber,
And embers from my fire died on the floor.
I wished it was tomorrow;-in vainity I wanted to read
My books to bring an end to my sorrow-sorrow for my lost Lenore-
That special and glowing woman that the angels named Lenore-
She no longer has a name.

And the sad, nervous rustling of the silk purple curtains
Excited me-filled me with nightmarish terrors I’d never felt before;
So that now, to stop my heart from beating so hard, I stood repeating
“It’s some visitor wanting me to open my bedroom door-
Just some late vistitor wanting me to open my bedroom door;-
That is all, and nothing else.”

At this, my courage grew; and waiting no more,
“Sir,” I said, “or Ma’m, I am so sorry;
But I was just taking a nap, and so when you knocked so softly,
And you did knock very softly, knocking on my bedroom door,
That I wasn’t sure I heard you”-here I opened the door wide;-
There was only darkness, and nothing else.

I looked deep into that darkness, I stood there a while, fearing,
Doubting, thinking up thoughts too frightening to be thought before by anyone;
But the silence continued, and the darkness was too dark to see anything,
And the only thing I could think of was to whisper, “Lenore!”
After whispering, an echo repeated back, “Lenore!”
Only this, and nothing else.

I turned back into my bedroom, furious and frightended,
But soon I again heard a knocking, louder than before.
“Surely,” I said, “surely that is something at my window shade;
Let me see, then, what it is, and figure this out-
Take a deep break and figure this out;-
It’s just the wind and nothing else.”

At this point I opened the shutters, when, with feathers rustling,
A raven stepped in, looking all prim and proper;
He didn’t pay attention to me, he didn’t wait a second;
But, acting like a snob, perched above my bedroom door-
Perched on top of my bust of Pallas just above my bedroom door-
Perched, and sat, that is all.

This this black bird caused me to smile,
Since it had this air of nobility,
“Even though your feathers seem like it,” I said, “you aren’t a coward,
You depressing and old raven wandering in from the night-
Tell me what your name is in hell!”
The raven said, “Nevermore.”

I was struck by hearing this nasty bird talk,
Though its answer didn’t make any sense;
Because who else could ever say
That they had seen a bird above their bedroom door-
A bird, or any animal for that matter, on a statue above their door,
With a name like “Nevermore.”

But the raven, sitting by himself on that bust, only said
That one word, as if he said everything he was in that word.
He said nothing else and he never moved a feather-
Until I muttered under muy breath “All my friends have left me-
In the morning, he’ll go away, just like all my hope.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”

I was startled at the silence being broken by just a sharp reply,
“At any rate,” I said, “it only knows that one word
He probably learned it from some pathetic owner who had some sadness in his life
He probably repeated this word over and over in his crying-
Until his hope was gone and only this bird could say this word,
of ‘Never-nevermore.’”

But the raven still made me smirk,
I wheeled my chair in front of the bird, the bust, and the door;
Then, I sat down, and started thinking
Long and hard, wondering what this ominuous looking bird-
this dark, clumsy, skinny, and ominous bird
Meant in saying “Nevermore.”

And so I tried to guess, but I said nothing out loud
To that bird whose eyes seemed to burrow right into me;
This and more I sat thinking about, while reclining
On the soft lining that glowed from the lamp’s light,
But whose lining that glowed from the lamp’s light,
She will never touch again!

Then, I thought, the air seemed thicker, and began to smell
As though angels had entered the room.
“Wretch,” I screamed, “your God has sent you with these angles
Escape and wine for forgetting my memories of Lenore!
Let me take the wine and forget all about Lenore!”
The raven said, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” I said, “You evil thing!-still a prophet, regardless if you’re a bird or devil!-
Whether you were sent by Satan, or you were blown in by a storm,
Alone yet completely clam, on to this empty land-
On to this house which is haunted-tell me the truth, I beg of you-
Is there-is there salvation?-tell me-tell me, I beg of you!”
The raven said, “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” I said, “You evil thing!-still a prophet, regardless if you’re a bird or devil!-
In the name of heaven-in the name of God who we both love-
Tell me, sad as I am, if, in paradise far away,
There lives a woman who the angles named Lenore-
There lives a special and glowing woman who the angles named Lenore.”
The raven said, “Nevermore.”

“Then with that, please go away, you bird or enemy!” I screamed, standing up-
“Go back into the storm and the darkness of the night!
Do not leave any feathers as a reminder of what you just said!
Let me be along!-Get down from the bust above my door!
Take your beak out of my heart, and your body from off of my door!”
The raven said, “Nevermore.”

And the raven, never moving, is still sitting, is still sitting
On the white bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes seem like those of a dreaming demon,
And the lamp’s light casts his shador onto the floor;
My soul is as black as that shadow on the floor
And will always be that way!

The post The Bird appeared first on Tsunami.No.Kami.

As you may or may not know, I identify most strongly right now with that of the Orthodox tradition. In their Easter or Pascha service, a phrase is used quite frequently; that of “He is risen!” with the response of “Indeed He is risen!” I had never heard this phrase before I had begun to go to Pascha service about four or five years ago and it struck me as something unique to the Orthodox faith, like a calling card of sorts. It seemed kind of like the custom in Alabama of saying “Roll Tide” or “War Eagle” to which the other party would respond in kind as a symbol of a shared secret brotherhood to which the outsider was ignorant.

Last year, Pascha and Easter were on the same day so when I saw the Facebook posts stating “He is risen” and “Indeed He is risen” from some people whose faith I did not know precisely, it only passed over me that perhaps there were more people out there that found Orthodoxy, or at least perhaps the liturgy, inspiring. This year by contrast, I saw about a tenfold occurrence of the phrases used by people I now know, or have known, have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy or Catholicism (or any faith with a liturgy). Indeed, the phrase has morphed into “He is risen” and “He is risen indeed”. A very odd thing that protestants would want to take something from a liturgy at all, so I figured that the changing of the phrase was to make it slightly less recognizable in its origins.

Then, as I was wondering about this, I saw some other posts not saying “Happy Easter” but instead saying “Happy Resurrection Sunday.” OK, I thought, so they are trying to put the emphasis on what Easter is all about, but then that didn’t really make that much since because that is all Easter is about to begin with. Why the need to change the name at all?

At this point, something occurred to me. Several years ago, a pastor friend of mine said that their particular church was trying to incorporate more things into its service that were “high church,” as he described it. It was this recollection that made me reach a kind of epiphany as to what was going on. I’m not sure why, but it seemed to me like these folks weren’t really sure who they were. It seemed like they were re-branding themselves, or at least re-branding what it was they were professing. It’s not as though this would be anything new, modern protestant churches are usually trying to change things about themselves so they appeal to more and more people, but for some reason these simple little observations make me feel like the re-branding has gone deeper than just changing service styles to changing the faith below.

It’s worth noting that I already feel like when I visit protestant churches now a days it feels like I’m going to amateur hour. Perhaps it’s my terrible judgmental side coming out, but after seeing how the Orthodox conduct themselves in worship to God, seeing protestants attempt the same thing with little to no “professional” guidance makes it seem a shadow of what it could otherwise be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not commenting on the sincerity of those present in the service, but the service itself and the underlying principles seem pale and transparent, like returning from the Louvre to a small town art show.

What stuck me how the use of these things, the liturgical phrases and changing of the name Easter, seemed like new paint on a worn out car. It is as if to keep the spirit of Easter alive they have to take from the “high church” and make it seem as though they are closer to deep truth than they would be otherwise. It is as if they admit that they have lost the meaning of Easter already that they must rename it. And I find myself asking, if they already lost the name, why would they not lose it again? What is in a name? If they find deeper truth in liturgy, why do they insist on just taking bits of it, why not the whole thing? Or to put it more bluntly, do they know who they are?

I guess the real rub of the matter is that in just seeing a few phrases bandied about, I find myself thinking that the answer is: no, they do not know who they are. All the re-branding is just a glossing over of that fact. If you keep changing yourself, you come to a point when you no longer can point to the real you. I have to wonder, are they willing to ask themselves who they really are? Am I?

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It’s been a while since the last time I wrote anything. I apologize for that. It seems that for the last year or so I have been wrestling with some questions. Some of these questions are about religion in general and some of them are directed solely at the Christian Church. A lot of these questions remain unanswered, even after taking so long to meditae on them. The other night, though, I found something that opened my eyes to a new way of seeing things. I found a new way of looking at not only my own questions, but of the things the questions themselves were questioning.

If you know me, you know that I have a deep seeded resentment towards ignorance in the face of knowledge. Show me someone who would rather take it easy rather than learn something about themselves or the world and I would see someone I would rather kick in the back of the head. For a long time, whenever someone in the American Christian church would talk about religion, I would basically tune it out. The reason being that I had come to the conlusion that most American Christians would rather be boiled in acid then acually have to think for themselves. I chalked it up to a hatred of knowledge on their part and dismissed the idea that maybe there was some other factor involved. That is, until I read something in a book.

In his book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamees Buddhist monk, discusses the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha. For the first part of the book I was not much impressed. I had read much concerning Buddhism beforehand and what this book was saying about the similarities between the two religions was not very revealing, at least not in a new and novel way. It wasn’t until I got to the titular chapter that I had my mind blown. Hanh states, “When Jesus said, ‘I am the way,’ He meant that to have a true relationship with God you must practice His way. … But we must distinguish the ‘I’ spoken by Jesus and the ‘I’ that people usually think of. The ‘I’ in His statement is life itself, His life, which is the way.” It was here that suddently things began to click.

For as long as I can remember, the statement “I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the Father except through me,” was always used only in one context: to prove that Christianity was the only way to heaven. I can not recall a time in which this statement, spoken by Jesus, was not used to disregard another religious teaching or philosophy. The only way to heaven is through Jesus, which means that the only way to heaven is by worshiping Jesus, which means that anyoen who doesn’t worship Jesus is going to go to hell. That was the interpretation I learned from the Church and from other Christians. But this statement by Hanh, esspecially put in the context I had prior to learned about Buddhists, is of monumental importance to me.

The true meaning of the statement, in my view, is two fold. The first one is like the original interpruation: Jesus is the way to heaven. The second one is this: being as Jesus is the way to heaven. I think that American Christianity has lost a lot of itself in he last century. It is told to me that there were people in the world who became like Jesus; people who, instead of following a list of regulations and conforming to a set of social expectations, actually embodied the attributes of Christ in the world. Today, it is hard to imagine what such a person would be like.

Christians today have taken, what I consider, a grave turn. Instead of becoming like Christ, they have instead taken to becoming a Jesus cult. This may sound ridiculous, but consider it for a moment. A lot of Christians today would describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” or would give an account of the religious affiliation as “I love Jesus”. Go to a “praise session” at a modern church and you will find people who will, instead of reflecting on how to become more like Christ, put their hands in the air and chant or mutter “Jesus” over and over. There is a strange fixation on the death and sacrifice of Jesus to the point where all other teachings of Christ fall by the wayside. I think it would be fair to say that to some extent they could be called a Jesus-cult. A cult which is hung up on the humanity of Jesus instead of on his divinity and his teaching.

Let me clarify a bit. I am not, I repeat Not, saying that loving Christ or the sacrifice made by him for humanity is not important or in anyway a bad thing. What I am saying is that it would seem that Christians today, especially in America, have become stuck in a rut of making those the focal point of their entire lives. Why, though, is that a bad thing? Christ did come to die for our sins, no doubt. However, if that was all he was here to do then he could have done that at any time. What makes a Jesus-cult bad is that it religates the teachings and the life of Christ to the back burner if not cuts it out all together and begins to teach that all that is needed for salvation is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and all is forgiven and you are heaven bound. If that was really all there was to it we would be no better than the Buddhist cult that believes that they can lead any kind of life, but as long as they call upon the name of the Buddha before they die they are guaranteed to be reincarnated in the Pure Land.

Christ did not come just to die so that we could claim him as a savior and then go about our merry way so long as we worship his name every noe and again. He came to teach us how to live–Not only as a guideline, but as a requirement. It is not enough that we say “I believe in Jesus.” We must become like Christ. We must live like Christ. We must follow his teachings: Love God with all your heart, soul and mind; to love your neighbor as yourself regardless of what he has done or what he believes; to be charitable and merciful; and to seek peace within ourselves and to spread that peace to others. As Hanh says, “If you only satisfy yourself with praising a name, even the name of Jesus, it is not practicing the life of Jesus.”

The Jesus-cult is so prevalent because it is so easy. In today’s society we like things that are simple, easy, and convenient. Showing up to church, praising the name of Jesus, getting swept up in the emotion of a crowd (as opposed to fostering true emotions within one’s self), claiming Jesus as a personal savior, and going home, these are easy and simple. There is no real life change except maybe for a new schedule to follow and a few new social norms to abide by. But the true person has not, I think, been changed at all. What has been changed are only the clothes of the person. Being a true Christian is hard, strenuous, and tough. It requires not only “rebelling” against a society in which we are in to be “good” but requires us to change ourselves from the soul out. It demands us discovering who we are, who this person is whom I call “I”. It requires knowledge and wisdom, something that has become hard to aquire as those who could pass it on have themselves passed on and those who seek the easy path have nothing to offer. When Christ said that there were two paths, a wide, easy path a rocky, narrow one, he did not mean just “being evil is easy and good is hard”, he also meant that being good is easy, but following his life and his teachings is hard.

Examine your own faith, if you are a Christian. Are you being as Christ or are you simply praising the name of a man?

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