This is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and hThis is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and had the lightbulb idea of incorporating it into his sermon in the form of an ongoing story – come back next week for part two, everybody! See what happens when our characters try to live their lives asking WWJD all the time! The idea was a huge hit, his church was packed, and at the end of it he wrote it up as a novel and serialised it in a religious magazine and tried to get it published. The publishers turned him down flat. So the magazine decided to publish it as a novel themselves, and they sent off the manuscript to be copyrighted but they didn’t send the whole manuscript and the copyright office said their application was invalid. So the magazine version sold out immediately – 100,000 copies, apparently, and of course other respectable publishers spotted this phenomenon and also saw that it was out of copyright and pirated it and sold millions, and poor Charles Sheldon didn’t get a dime. How sad. But it was God’s will, you know!
I read all this in the preface, which also tells me In His Steps has been
carefully edited and updated for modern readers.
Hmmm…. What could that mean? I don’t think they did a great job because quite soon we have Rev Sheldon introducing a young female character like this :
A statuesque blonde of attractive proportions, Virginia had an appealing face. The spectacles she wore simply emphasised her gifted intellect.
Well anyhow, the story is located in the town of Raymond and focuses on the big cheeses in the church who take the WWJD pledge, such as the editor of one of the main local papers. He immediately decides to stop publishing accounts of prize fighting and he cancels all adverts for alcohol and tobacco, much to his manager’s consternation, who loudly proclaims they will go bust within the month.
Transposing the moral teachings of first century rural Judea onto late 19th century middle America throws up some bizarre questions, which Rev Sheldon acknowledges :
It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilisation that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?
Apparently if you feel that’s what Jesus would do, then that’s enough. So we get some ludicrous stuff like :
The three agreed that, whatever Jesus might do in detail as editor of a daily paper, He would be guided by the same general principles that directed His conduct as the Saviour of the world….Jesus would not issue a Sunday edition.
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The big idea is actually most interesting – what would happen if Christians actually took the teachings of Jesus seriously? The characters are convinced they are at the beginning of a social revolution. And yes, you can see that could very well be. But the novel fritters the big idea away, and its band of well-meaning wealthy types spend their time and money improving the lives of the poor by singing beautifully to them and closing down saloons. There are cringe-makingly pat scenes such as the one where it is discovered that a member of the church is the owner of some slum tenements – he immediately weeps and promises to fix all the plumbing. (In fact there is a whole ocean of religious weeping here, the pages are wringing with it. )
But I will give the Rev Sheldon credit for one scene, in which a bunch of working men let the do-gooders know what the real solutions are, as opposed to the weeping, singing and nourishing soup. One guy frankly says that revolutionary socialism is the only way forward, none of this mystical nonsense.
And indeed there is a lot of Christian self-criticism in here :
The bishop was appalled to discover how few of his wealthy friends would really suffer any genuine inconvenience for the sake of humanity.
Well, as a novel this is hopeless, the reverend was no writer, his characters are thin puppets, and he has no idea of a plot, but we can’t complain about that, it’s all about the Big Idea; and I don’t think he worked it out well enough or went as far as he could with it.
This is not quite what I thought it was going to be but it’s still excellent. The subtitle A History of the Afterlife gave me the idea that it was goiThis is not quite what I thought it was going to be but it’s still excellent. The subtitle A History of the Afterlife gave me the idea that it was going to be a history of ideas about the afterlife, but actually, it’s the history of Christian ideas about the afterlife in the first five centuries after Christ. Other religions are not invited to this feast.
Bart Ehrman writes about this severe stuff with a twinkle in his eye – one chapter is called Life After Death Before There Was Life After Death – and he keeps the story motoring along, beginning with a supermarket dash into classical Greek philosophy (where we find that Hades was really sooo boring and nothing ever happened at all); and then a more leisurely stroll around the Old Testament.
We only get to Jesus around the half way point.
Nowhere in the entire Hebrew Bible is there any discussion at all of heaven and hell as places of rewards and punishments for those who have died.
Unlike the Greeks, the Jews did not believe in an immortal soul – as Bart says they thought that “when you stop breathing your breath doesn’t go somewhere. It just stops.” It’s true that occasionally there are hints that there may be something after death, like in Deuteronomy, where people are forbidden to seek oracles from the dead, and there is one resurrection story, King Saul and the Witch of Endor who raises up the spirit of the dead Samuel. But these are just hints.
Jesus did not teach that when a person died they would go to heaven or hell. He taught that the Day of Judgement was soon to come, when God would destroy all that was evil and raise the dead, to punish the wicked and reward the faithful by bringing them into his eternal, utopian kingdom. …He had no idea of torment for sinners after death. Death, for them, is irreversible, the end of the story. Their punishment is that they will be annihilated.
Jesus preached that before most of his hearers would die the Kingdom of God would be established here on earth and everyone should repent of their sins now – emergency! Paul and the early Christians had to figure out what to think when that did not happen, and kept on not happening. Paul modified Jesus’s theology and later, the church modified Paul’s theology.
Later Christians came to affirm not only eternal joy for the saints but eternal torment for the sinners, creating the irony that throughout the ages most Christians have believed in a hell that did not exist for either of the founders of Christianity.
AWKWARD QUESTIONS
When the second coming and the Kingdom of God failed to happen, Christians had to answer the question – what has happened to all the faithful who have died ? They are all waiting for the Day of Judgement – are they in some deep freeze somewhere? This anxiety was added to another one. I’m okay with saints being in heaven, singing and praising forever, and I’m okay with the wicked being boiled forever, they were so nasty, but what about the great majority of people who aren’t either wicked or saintlike, they’re just ordinary, and if they do commit sins they’re so very tiny you have to use a magnifying glass to see them. It shouldn’t be either heaven or hell, there needs to be some nuance here.
Thus the idea of purgatory was born. In The Sopranos Paulie Walnuts is explaining the idea to Christopher :
You add up all your mortal sins and multiply that number by 50. Then you add up all your venial sins and multiply that by 25. You add that together and that's your sentence. I figure I'm gonna have to do 6,000 years before I get accepted into heaven and 6,000 years is nothin' in eternity terms. I can do that standing on my head.
After that came the idea that there was a kind of spiritual marketplace whereby if you prayed enough to a particular saint, that saint could ask whichever department was in charge of Purgatory to knock off a thousand years here or there for a beloved family member. It seems a pretty weird and gross idea, but in the words of Nietzsche “human, all too human”. Christians were always stumbling into imponderable thickets when they thought of the afterlife. Bodily resurrection? But which body? What about amputees? Ah will we all get our healthy prime of life body? What about little kids who died before they had a prime of life body? What about this, what about that. But they could not give up that idea, and for many still can’t. As Brother Claude Ely sang in 1952
There ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down When I hear that trumpet sound Gonna get up out of the ground Cause there ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
MORE THOUGHTS ON THE AFTERLIFE FROM SOME OLD RECORDS
Fuel we use is the old time religion Holy Ghost is the fireman’s name God the Father has charge of the throttle Jesus conductor to the heavenly land
- Sister Cally Fancy
Tell you once, tell you twice Can’t get to heaven with another man’s wife
- Sister O M Terrell
I’m gonna meet God the Father and God the Son I’m going to sit down, tell Him my troubles About the world I just came from That’s when we walk on that milky white way Oh Lord, some of these days
- The Trumpeteers
Some glad morning when this life is over I’ll fly away To a home on God’s celestial shore I’ll fly away Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away To a land where joys shall never end I’ll fly away
- James and Martha Carson
On that resurrection morning when all the dead in Christ shall rise I’ll have a new body, I’ll have a new life
- Hank Williams
Note : Hank Williams adheres to a Pauline interpretation. The Trumpeteers seem a trifle presumptuous to me. And finally, a wonderful summary by Charles Wesley from the Sacred Harp tradition :
And am I born to die? To lay this body down! And must my trembling spirit fly Into a world unknown?
A land of deepest shade, Unpierced by human thought; The dreary regions of the dead, Where all things are forgot!
Soon as from earth I go, What will become of me? Eternal happiness or woe Must then my portion be!
Waked by the trumpet sound, I from my grave shall rise; And see the Judge with glory crowned, And see the flaming skies!...more
REVIEW OF THE NEXT TO LAST CHAPTER : LIFE BEYOND DEATH
Roger Olsen very helpfully lays out the orthodox* then the heretical beliefs about life after deREVIEW OF THE NEXT TO LAST CHAPTER : LIFE BEYOND DEATH
Roger Olsen very helpfully lays out the orthodox* then the heretical beliefs about life after death in his penultimate chapter, and many interesting ideas are revealed.
Roger is greatly distressed by the state of modern Christian belief. He thinks modern Christians get all sorts of wrongheaded “folk religious” notions from books, movies, youtube preachers, televangelists, pop songs – everywhere, in fact, other than the sober writings of the Church Fathers. His main beef is that there is a very widely held belief that when you die your eternal soul immediately zaps off to heaven or hell.
This kind of thing :
Some glad morning when this life is over I'll fly away To a home on God's celestial shore I'll fly away Just a few more weary days and then I'll fly away To a land where joy shall never end I'll fly away When I die, Hallelujah, by and by I'll fly away
No no, utter nonsense, says Roger. The New Testament is festooned with explicit teaching about BODILY RESURRECTION. He says “the life to come in Heaven with God is bodily and not ghostly or ethereal”.
In fact he says that the belief that your physical body (that one you wince at in the mirror and poke and squeeze mournfully) will be raised from your grave and reconstituted** is the single point of greatest agreement in the history of Christian thought.
And yet it seems that the vast majority of Christians do not know this and neglect belief in bodily resurrection in favour of belief in immediate postmortem heavenly spiritual existence as ghost-like beings (or even angels!)
He says that actually the dead will just have to wait their turn, until Jesus returns and the Day of Judgement happens. Then, and only then, will they get their heaven (or hell). Therefore, logically, there is an “intermediate” place that souls go to wait for their bodily resurrection & judgement. He says that for saved Christians this place is “paradise”(not to be confused with heaven, although I see that on a dark night without any GPS you could make that mistake and take the wrong exit ramp). Where the unsaved go is not known. But Roger does not admit that if this is so, it appears that a judgement has already been performed on the dead, sorting them into different waiting zones. Otherwise you would have a situation where my Aunty Gladys and my Aunty Connie could bump into Heinrich Himmler at any moment, and that would never do.
Note : absolutely everybody who has ever died in the last 2000 years is crammed into this waiting zone since they can’t move on until the Second Coming and the Day of judgement. And yet.... if there is this waiting zone and if nobody has yet been bodily resurrected, then our eternal souls do fly off to some kind of quasi-heaven or quasi-hell after death. Hmmm... I think I'm confused.
Roger’s version of orthodox Christian belief seemed topsy-turvy to me. I would have thought that the belief in literal physical bodily resurrection was rather crude and unsophisticated, and the belief in the soul as the eternal part of a human being was the more evolved truth, but it turns out to be just the other way around. Belief in the eternal bodiless soul
is the common, default belief of folk Christianity – the informal, unreflective beliefs and practices of many Christians that are drawn more from comfortable slogans, legends and stories than from biblical materials
So it’s completely wrong.
WHY DIDN’T GOD MAKE ALL THIS A BIT LESS VAGUE?
Christians have been sifting through the Bible for clues about life after death for 2000 years – Roger says “Christians believe that God has answered these questions in admittedly somewhat opaque language”. Likewise, when Roger is discussing the End of the World he says Christian belief derives from certain passages of scripture that are “notoriously difficult to understand”. And you have to wonder – why didn’t God just make the whole thing clear? He had had all of human history to do this, either via one of the prophets or through Jesus himself, who at any point could have laid out the whole thing for his disciples or as a sub-clause of the Sermon on the Mount.
ANNIHILATIONISM – SOUNDS OKAY TO ME
The vast majority of Christians have believed that those not saved will be sent to hell where “they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Revelations 20). Actually, I think a great number of Christians no longer care for that doctrine too much, but that’s not what Roger says. Some Christians, however, believe that bad people will simply be obliterated – no eternal life of any sort for them. Roger calls it “God’s form of mercy killing or capital punishment”. But I couldn’t see that this annihilationism as it’s called would satisfy our human desire for justice.
Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance.
(Book of Job, chapter 7)
Simple obliteration (exactly the thing I think does indeed happen to each and every one of us) doesn’t seem like enough of a punishment for some people I could think of.
But the really tough question which the Bible never seems to get to grips with though is what happens to average mediocre types after death – they just dithered their life away on earth, never achieved much, didn’t murder anyone but didn’t give hardly anything to charity either. They married average people and had ordinary kids. They don’t seem to deserve an eternity of bliss swooshing about with the angels and the saints, nor yet do they deserve being boiled or getting their toes gnawed off. What happens to them?
*meaning – what most Christians have believed during the last 2000 years **I imagine something like packet soup but more complicated...more
Francis William Newman was the younger brother of John Henry Newman who was the bigshot theologian influencer of the 19th century. So he came from a fFrancis William Newman was the younger brother of John Henry Newman who was the bigshot theologian influencer of the 19th century. So he came from a family that took Jesus very seriously. This is a short but very dense account of how FW, by the application of his diligent, remorseless brains, gradually, over some years, completely dismantled the authorised version of Christianity he had inherited. It’s not a casual read but it was kind of a breath of fresh air after watching too many Youtube videos where religious people and atheists engage in the art of high decibel talking past each other. He is so careful and modest and sweet.
He outs himself on p 13 as a vegetarian, an anti-vaccinationist, a total abstainer and a supporter of women’s suffrage. So, one of those.
A fellow student said
nothing but unbelief could arise out of the attempt to understand in what way and by what moral right the blood of Christ atoned for sins
This whole book kind of proves this student right. As soon as FW begins to think about his faith it begins to disintegrate.
EARLY CHRISTIAN BELIEFS WERE DITCHED
FW notes that the Apostles were expecting a near and sudden destruction of the earth by fire, and that the return of Christ was going to happen at any time. From his reading of the gospels, Acts and letters this was a central part of their belief. And there is a dreadful inference to be drawn from it, as this doctrine “totally forbids all working for earthly objects distant in time”.
For a statesman to talk about providing for future generations sounded to me as a melancholy avowal of unbelief
Yes, extraordinary as it sounds, if we take what the early Christians believed, long term planning is a tacit rejection of Christianity. It shows you do not have faith in the imminent return of Christ. So all that magnificent Victorian engineering – the railways, the viaducts, the sewers – all unchristian, all impious.
He notes that Christians ditched this belief.
MISSIONARY TO THE MUSLIMS
He went to Baghdad as a missionary but instead of converting them they converted him – no, not really, but they did say that the Christian belief in the Trinity was blasphemous because God was One, not three. And he realised they were right, so he had to throw out the Trinity, and got into many fights with his friends and family, and they threw him out.
We cannot admit that the Father was slain on the cross or prayed to Himself in the garden
BIBLE IS FULL OF CONTRADICTIONS AND THEREFORE CANNOT BE THE INERRANT WORD OF GOD
He finds logical problems everywhere he looks – in the genealogies of Matthew and Luke for instance. And he says “neither Evangelist gives the genealogy of Mary, which alone is wanted”. Joseph wasn’t the father, so why do we need his genealogy?
THE OLD TESTAMENT
I had also discerned in the opening of Genesis things which could not be literally received [such as] the curse of the serpent who is to go on his belly (how else did he go before?)
More seriously, the morality of the Old testament is scrutinised. Actions are praised which are actually criminally and morally loathsome – Abraham’s intention of sacrificing his son Isaac, the Israelites’ genocidal war on the Canaanites, and so on. He is forced to the conclusion
the assumed infallibility of the entire Scripture is a proved falsity, not merely as to physiology, and other scientific matters, but also as to morals
RE-EDITING THE BIBLE
He tears into the universal New Testament belief in possession by devils as the cause of illness :
Clearly they are convicted of misstating facts under the influence of superstitious credulity
He now realiseD the Bible is a concatenation of dubious spatchcocked documents of varying or non-existent religious value. He begins to prune. Out goes Revelation (“a false prophecy”) and Hebrews, Song of Solomon (“consists of fragments of love-songs, some of them rather voluptuous”); Ruth and Esther get the boot along with Ecclesiastes (“a meagre and shallow production”), Chronicles (“not only credulous but unfair so far as to be actually dishonest”); indeed all historical books; and in the New Testament
I found the first three books and the Acts to contain many doubtful and some untrue accounts and many incredible miracles….many persons after reading this much concerning me will be apt to say “of course, then you gave up Christianity?” Far from it.
FRIGHTENING LITTLE CHILDREN FOR JESUS
He is appalled by the idea that children and people in general are frightened into believing in Christ by threats of horrific eternal damnation (see James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a great example of this – but you don’t have to look far to find others).
And finally he is offended by the central nature of Christianity which
was one of selfishness. That is, it inculcated that my first business must be to save my soul from punishment, and to attain future happiness
THE COMEDIANS OF WIKIPEDIA
He was president of the Vegetarian Society 1873-1883 but he did not like the word. He wanted to rename it The Anti-Creophagite Society. Wiki says
This idea was not supported by other members of the Society, as few people knew what the term meant.
This is one of many splendid examples of deadpan wit in Wikipedia.
So, he was a bit barmy, an oddball, but a very endearing one.
What a massive book, 535 dense large pages, - extremely readable but very old fashioned and badly edited. It was published in 2010 and I was thereforeWhat a massive book, 535 dense large pages, - extremely readable but very old fashioned and badly edited. It was published in 2010 and I was therefore most surprised to see Muslims being called “Mahometans” – until I checked the author. He was 85 when he wrote it! So this is the oldest author I’ve ever read. He is writing about a whole hot mess of very controversial subjects but he scrupulously avoids editorialising…except for the very occasional zinger when he peeks over the teetering pile of his erudition to say
In rejecting “Victorian values” the modern world has little better to offer than bewilderment and mayhem.
Ouch.
His subject is the great spiritual convulsions of the English Church in the Victorian period. It’s not all about science vs religion but the wider doubts and disbeliefs that roiled in from every direction, beginning with the Bible itself.
For most of its history the Catholic Church was violently opposed to translating the Bible into local languages. No! – it should be in Latin or Greek and be only read by priests. Ordinary believers had no business with it. And this was a very wise policy, because look what happened when it did get translated – the people went to school and learned their letters and then read it, thinking it was a good thing. And then, in the 19th century, the things they read in there caused them to lose their faith. Well, it was all the stuff about genocide being approved by God, it’s in the Books of Judges and Samuel, check it out. God tells the Israelites it’s okay to exterminate some people, e.g 1 Samuel 15:3
Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey
This sort of thing made John Stuart Mill say
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to Hell for not so calling him, to Hell I will go.
Some Victorians started to feel distressed about such doctrines as Original Sin (“an horrible notion”)* and everlasting damnation (“shockingly immoral”) and Jesus as a sacrifice (“barbarous magic”). A clergyman named Markham Sutherland can stand in for the rest. He said that it was true that in primitive times people had “degraded notions of the Almighty”, believing “that they could appease his anger by wretched offerings of innocent animals” but such crude beliefs could only offend modern Victorians, so if the Bible was saying that Christ was a sacrifice made in order to gain salvation for us humans from an otherwise vengeful God “then in awe and perplexity I turn away from the Bible”.
I made many notes while ploughing through this excellent volume (it is no mere book, it is a volume). But it would take me a month of Sundays to type them all up, and you wouldn’t thank me for it if I did, so here’s just a handful of quotes.
Giles when thoroughly exasperated is not above mockery at times:
In the 17th century John Lightfoot, a learned Old Testament scholar, calculated that the Creation began at nine o’clock in the morning of October 23rd, 4004BC. So far from being laughed out of court, his ludicrous precision became generally accepted and the date was actually printed in the margins of many Bibles.
And he says
The more Victorians studied different faiths of the world, the more they came to recognise that what men believe depends upon where they live.
(It’s obvious, but it does need to be pointed out now and then.) And he says that some Victorians asked the following cheeky question :
How had kangaroos contrived to cross the Indian Ocean in order to join Noah’s Ark?
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*Best use of Original Sin in a song : The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer :
Get in line in that processional Step into that small confessional There the guy who's got religion'll Tell you if your sin's original...more
BREAKING NEWS : PROBLEM OF EVIL SOLVED SAYS THEOLOGIAN GOD NOT OMNIPOTENT AFTER ALL
In a bombshell new book The Puzzle of Evil by Dr Peter Vardy, a Briti BREAKING NEWS : PROBLEM OF EVIL SOLVED SAYS THEOLOGIAN GOD NOT OMNIPOTENT AFTER ALL
In a bombshell new book The Puzzle of Evil by Dr Peter Vardy, a British professor of the philosophy of religion at London University, it was claimed that Christians have got God wrong for centuries. Our Religious Affairs correspondent Emily Allbright has been talking to the radical religious reinterpreter.
Emily : So Dr Vardy, are you saying that you have solved the problem of evil?
Dr V : Well I wouldn’t put it quite like that but yeah.
Emily: And how did you do it?
DR V: Well, I realised that we live in a finely tuned universe. So although God is omnipotent in a technical sense, he can’t make all the bad things go away like you might think he could. If he did, the whole thing would come crashing down.
Emily : But the Bible constantly bangs on about how totally great God is, how he made the stars in the firmament and the lizards and the waterfalls and so forth. He is worshipped as an omnipotent being.
Dr V: Well, I think they went a little bit too far with that line. They got carried away. He did make the stars and the lizards and okapi and all, sure, but he can’t fiddle around with them otherwise there’ll be no free will and the laws of physics won’t work anymore. You see, if you have an omnipotent God, you have a real problem of evil. But if you don't, the problem goes away.
Emily: So are you saying that if God intervened to save one person from toothache or one dear little lambkin from being devoured by a wolf the whole fabric of the material world would be torn asunder?
Dr V: Well, I kind of guess I am. Yeah. I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous. But yeah.
Emily : So what’s the point of it all?
Dr V: The point? The point of all this misery? I'm sorry, I have no idea.
Emily : Thank you for your time Dr Vardy. And with that, back to the studio....more
LaHaye and Jenkins, the Simon and Garfunkel of the Apocalypse, one tall and blond (he did the typing) and the other short and dark (he had the ideas).LaHaye and Jenkins, the Simon and Garfunkel of the Apocalypse, one tall and blond (he did the typing) and the other short and dark (he had the ideas). In the photo on the back they are grinning like maniacs. They are happy.
A REVIEW FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NO INTENTION OF EVER READING THIS
We begin in Israel where a scientist has invented a New Formula which makes the desert bloom. This means Israel becomes the richest nation on earth – the formula earns them far more than their “oil-rich neighbours”. I expect this is from tomato and cucumber exports, it is not spelled out. Now, the Israelis don’t let anyone know their Secret Formula and this leads Russia to send a bomber fleet to “annihilate” Israel. In the world of Left Behind there is no such thing as international diplomacy. It turns out that Russia is in a secret alliance with Ethiopia and Libya. So this vast fleet of bombers appears in the Israeli skies one night without any advance warning (there is no radar or US led intelligence in the Left Behind world either). But miraculously all the airplanes kind of explode in the air and disintegrate, and not a single person in Israel is harmed.
So that was the first thing. The next thing was that a few weeks later millions of people disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving their clothes and wedding rings behind. Oh, all children and babies in the womb also disappear. There’s a later conversation about how mean God is to deprive abortion clinics of their livelihood just like that. But of course that’s not the main problem – when all these people disappear there are thousands of hideous car pile-ups, plane crashes and houses burn down.
The story follows two guys throughout this mayhem – Captain Rayford Steele, pilot of 747s, tall, bulgingly shouldered, with a terrible guilty conscience. (His crime was that he thought about having an affair, but he didn’t actually have one. But he thought about it.) The other guy is crack reporter Buck Williams of the Global Weekly.
So it’s the Rapture – you knew that. God has gathered up to heaven all the True Christians. I will come to the theological implications of that in a moment but first we must follow Rayford and Buck through many pages where they try to phone people but can’t because the lines are jammed. They can’t get a cellphone connection, they queue for hours for a payphone, this goes on for page after page. And I think the Rapture would be just like that – people frantically trying to find out which loved ones have been raptured – but man it makes for some dull reading. “Buck hung up and dialed his father. The line was busy.” You don’t say so.
I was interested in the craziness that would happen if millions of people were raptured but I was disappointed, our authors aren’t bothered about the huge human drama of it all, they are wanting to get on to the Big Picture – after the Rapture will come The Rise of the Antichrist.
This whole plotline sinks the second half of the book which up to then was kind of goofy but also sort of entertaining too. But now we get really dull stuff about a Romanian politician called Nicolae Carpathia and how he becomes Romanian president and then ludicrously becomes General Secretary of the United Nations. Hilariously, he has a shopping list of demands before he will accept the job :
1) UN HQ to move to Babylon!
2) All member states to disarm totally – 90% of their weapons to be destroyed and 10% to be given to the UN
3) All member states to agree that there should be only one religion, not many.
As they say, good luck with that.
Captain Steele’s wife & son were raptured – his wife had been nagging at him for months about the Apocalypse and the End Times, kind of irritating, but now he sees she was RIGHT ALL ALONG so he goes to see the pastor who confesses he hadn’t taken Christianity seriously so hasn’t been rap….
Wait, let’s try to figure this thing out. If God has taken all the True Christians up to Heaven, those who are Left Behind are the fake ones and the non-Christians.
Not once does this book mention any non-Christians apart from Jews. We must assume that no Muslims disappeared. So Muslim countries never experienced all the plane and car crashes and thousands dying. So from their perspective the whole Rapture must have seemed like God’s punishment on Christian countries for not being Muslim. Now the other point that bugged me was what about all the people who died in these plane and car crashes? Did they all go straight to hell? This is not explained.
So the LB fake Christians figure that God has actually given them a second chance. If they get born again, they will become True Christians and will get to Heaven eventually. Being born again seems to be a matter of being completely sincere plus some fancy mental footwork. It is not really explained.
Anyway, Captain Steele has a big sweating crying conversion scene and he is now a True Christian. He learns from the pastor (also born again) about all these Biblical prophesies. There will now be a seven year period of “trials and tribulations” and there will come The Antichrist and blah blah blah.
A great many pages are then taken up with Capt Steele trying to convert his skeptical daughter. Clearly he thinks she might die at any time then go to Hell. Even though she’s a pretty nice kid. Because the pastor keeps banging on about how there’s no one righteous, no not one. Everyone’s a sinner, even the sweet little old ladies who make the tea.
Well, trying to cram all the weird complicated Biblical prophecy End Times stuff into a novel, even a sequence of 12 longish novels, was never going to be easy. The ludicrous turns of events, the cardboard characters (that’s an insult to cardboard), the drab inept dialogue that exists only to shoehorn more prophecy ideas into the book all make the book collapse into a welter of silliness.
It ends with a now-read-on cliffhanger, but even at the peril of my very soul, I am going to resist ordering volume two. And volumes three to twelve.
Here is now the review of pages 265 to 517 or to put it another way from 1511 to 1975
During these 200 years four things happened to Christianity :
1) The Reformation in which the Protestants said rude things about the Pope & stopped sending him Christmas cards
2) The invention of actual science which kind of blasted huge holes in the Bible
3) The First World War
4) Communism and Fascism
All these things demonstrated the impotence of Christianity – the Church could not stop itself splitting; it could not resist the deluge of new information which entirely capsized what every Christian had previously believed; and it could not prevent Christians from murdering each other on a vast scale. During World War One, it was painfully clear that in every country patriotism overwhelmed Christianity :
On one side were ranged Protestant Germany, Catholic Austria, Orthodox Bulgaria and Muslim Turkey. On the other were Protestant Britain, Catholic France and Italy, and Orthodox Russia. … Christian soldiers of all denominations were exhorted to kill each other in the name of their Saviour.
Well, twenty years later, Hitler arrived with his evil gang, and as is well known, the Churches bent over backwards to make nice with him, yes, the same Hitler who said
Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished… but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the same of their miserable little jobs and incomes.
PJ’s section about the Nazi period is great :
The churches continued to greet Nazi victories by ringing their bells, until they were taken away to be melted down
Oh hold on – maybe they weren’t all sleazy supine jackboot kissers : check out this speech by the Pope. He said Nazism was
A satanic spectre… the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of his doctrine and of his work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity
Hey, pretty strong stuff from the Pope…but he waited until June 1945 to say it, when Hitler was dead.
****
Paul Johnson manages in this excellent book to cram the history of this enormously complex religion into a mere 500 pages, mostly without losing the ordinary reader in a welter of theology and weird sect names. He is a great companion, throwing out summaries and judgements boldly and crisply. Here for instance is PJ on the witch craze :
There is no reason to suppose that such a phenomenon as witchcraft ever existed. The myth was on a level with the supposed ritual murders of Christian children, of which the Jews were accused in the 12th century. Witches simply replaced Jews as objects of fear and hatred, and torture supplied “proof” of their existence and malevolence. Witch-hunting could not survive without torture.
I could quote many favourite passages. But enough. Even if I think a one volume history of Christianity is an impossible thing PJ here pretty much does the impossible. I probably shouldn’t like him so much since he’s a “conservative Catholic” according to Wiki. But he never shrinks from putting the boot in where it’s deserved. And he is such good company....more
After reading this pleasantly-proportioned lighthearted fast hotrod ride through every conceivable atheist argument, I have a confession to make. If yAfter reading this pleasantly-proportioned lighthearted fast hotrod ride through every conceivable atheist argument, I have a confession to make. If you were to chuck out the God of Classical Theism (which is the one you know and love, yeah, Him), and instead give me a non-omniscient, non-eternal, non-omnipotent one, I just might be interested. That one might make a little bit of sense. This more realistic God would also not be Good. A non-good God gets rid of the Problem of Evil, so you can see becomes immediately more believable than the current model.
Our jolly author says rather boldly and with a difficult to detect level of seriousness:
It is imaginable that future findings of physics might cause us to entertain the hypothesis that a powerful intelligent being, or association of beings, set the dial for our universe.
STOP THAT EARTHQUAKE NOW
Well, of course, the problem of evil is thoroughly discussed here, and it’s an old favourite of mine, often on the turntable, almost as often as "Paint It Black". Let’s spin it one more time.
I’m not sure this aspect of the argument about the problem of evil has been sufficiently aired so I’ll mention it here. We have two types of evil, that created by humans and what’s called Natural Evil, earthquakes, hurricanes and so on. The first type is explained by Free Will – God had to allow humans the ability to choose evil, indeed, this is the whole point of creation, to find out if us guys will choose evil or not. Natural evil is harder to explain for believers. They have to come up with reasons why God couldn’t have put us on a planet with stable tectonic plates, for instance. Now DRS says this – having given us a planet where earthquakes happen frequently, God could, if he desired, still stop all earthquakes by miraculous intervention. Humans wouldn’t notice anything. He could have stopped every earthquake from the beginning of history, so we never knew they could happen. God would be intervening in human history all the time, but of course this is what he did anyway, throughout the Bible, eventually sending us his only begotten Son, which is an intervention for sure. So it’s kind of hard to understand why God doesn’t stop earthquakes, at the very least. You might think a) he doesn't care or b) he isn't there.
THE FRIGHTFUL LAMPREY AND THE HUMBLE POTTO
I was thinking in a lazy way that there was no intrinsic contradiction between belief in God and Darwinian evolution but DRS put me right. There was a Catholic theologian who was grateful for evolution because it got God off the hook – no once could accuse him of deliberately creating the bug that caused the Black Death or malaria and so on. Instead having created the universe with certain physical laws, he allowed evolution to take its course. Let the chips fall where they may. Not my problem, guvnor. But of course he would have been aware of all the suffering involved in this clumsy and wasteful evolution process. Anyway, what would be the point of all this? In order to finally arrive at the magnificence that is humanity? Why not cut out the middle dinosaur and create a fully functioning Planet Earth with everybody already here if that’s the point of all of this. Why waste all that space? (Well I guess there’s no real space wasted since there’s limitless space available since God created it all. He could create way bigger universes that the present one if he wanted. Probably already has. He gets all this stuff for free, you know.)
An omnipotent God would not and could not have means to ends: he could directly attain any desired ends.
Oh also
If God is omnipotent and omniscient then everything that happens is something God does
The Creationists have the problem of explaining why God having created all the individual species like the wombat, the spiny echidna, the golden tamarin, the potto, the lamprey, the hammerhead shark, the huntsman spider and the Portuguese Man o’ War then went on to create all the bacteria and viruses that make us go blind and suffer horribly and die.
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ER... WHAT WAS THAT AGAIN?
Sometimes DRS cruelly exposes my lack of rigorous thinking, or to put it another way I can’t tell if he’s talking nonsense or being too clever for me. In discussing the old chestnut “why is there something rather than nothing?” – I bet you asked your partner that very question only yesterday – he says
If it’s a requirement of “true nothing” that it lacks any properties and any laws, then true nothing must lack any law prohibiting the appearance of something. The assertion that, given true nothing, a universe could not pop into existence is therefore self-contradictory.
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THERE ARE NO KANGAROOS IN AUSTRALIA
He throws out some sentences that made me want to say STOP – write several paragraphs on this! – but then he flies off into another blizzard of theological speculation. For instance
You can never choose your beliefs, though you can choose to pretend that your beliefs are other than they really are
Well, this is a great question – CAN you choose your beliefs? I kind of think that most people who define themselves as believers never go into the detail of the thing, never bother their heads about theodicy or free will or creeds or predestination or eschatology or even the thought that maybe they’re in the wrong religion, they just admit all of that is above their paygrade and say to themselves they believe what they’re supposed to believe, whatever that is, and hope nobody questions them too closely. So I guess the great majority of religious belief is : I think this must be true because all these other people say it is, and some of them are quite clever. They can’t all be wrong. Can they?
A little thought experiment DRS suggests is this : try to believe there are no kangaroos in Australia. There – you can’t even believe it for a second. Because you know it isn’t true.
There are so many arguments and points of philosophy and science here your head will be spinning. Mr Steele cannot be criticised for pulling punches (on page 154 he takes on Islam). I would complain about the dad-type jokes about dinosaurs and some smirkiness here and there but heck, he does such a lot of heavy lifting here I think I can safely say that this solid and gratifyingly not too difficult book is recommended for everybody.
There is not, and can never be, a text of “the New Testament” as it left the hands of Paul, Luke or John: we have THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR FUNDAMENTALISTS
There is not, and can never be, a text of “the New Testament” as it left the hands of Paul, Luke or John: we have only variants. The implications of this for theories of the inspiration and authority of the New Testament have scarcely begun to be worked out. Where the words of Jesus are concerned, for example, we often know only roughly what he is supposed to have said (and whether he really said it is of course yet a further question).
No, this was not written by a New Atheist, but by a church of England priest (since 1973) who was also Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture (a great title, you will agree) at Oxford University for 13 years.
John Barton is a great calm steady hand on the tiller as he guides you through the vast torrents of thinking within and without that bizarre wondrous collection of ancient texts we call the Bible. Like the World’s Strongest Man dragging a tractor across a field with his teeth, he shifts mountains of congealed thought aside with each paragraph. He has the breathtaking intellectual confidence to summarise the Bible into four handy bullet points.
THE CHRISTIAN MEANING OF THE BIBLE
The Christians came along and hotrodded the existing Bible, which was the Old Testament, of course, but it wasn’t thought of as Old (although it was old) because at that point there wasn’t a New. I should say that hotrodded is my word, not Professor Barton’s, but that’s essentially what happened. The Jews considered their scriptures to be all about them and their exclusive deal with God, but the Christians said no, no, and with the hi-torque retooled engine of Jesus and the rocket fuel of the Holy Spirit they said this thing is not just for the Jews, this is for the whole world, and the story so far can be summarized like this :
1. Creation 2. The fall into sin (Adam’s disobedience) 3. Individual salvation from sin through Christ (the second Adam’s obedience) 4. End of the world and final judgement (date TBC)
The Jewish meaning is completely different – there was no disaster and rescue, no fall, Adam is marginal, Abraham is central, and there is no individual “salvation” – the Jews would have been mystified by the concept. Instead of all that, the Bible is “about how to live a faithful life in the ups and downs of the ongoing history of the people of Israel”. That’s all, and that was enough. So, the Hebrew scriptures may be shared between the two religions, but the interpretation is completely different.
I would like to expatiate on the way that St Paul came along and re-programmed the tiny little Jewish sect that was the Christians after the death of Jesus and changed it completely from being about what Jesus said and did (he was a moral revolutionary) to being about what he was (the mystical Son of God, the Saviour). And also to mention how long it took to assemble the Christian part of the Bible (and quote John Barton about how Da Vinci Code type conspiracies were always just what they seemed, mildly entertaining fantasies). But that would make this review too long even for me to get to the end of....more
The first chapter tells the story of Megan, a middle-aged barristers’ clerk, and her one way love affair with her dentist Dr Verma, and it suddenly smThe first chapter tells the story of Megan, a middle-aged barristers’ clerk, and her one way love affair with her dentist Dr Verma, and it suddenly smashed into my brain that this was a perfect metaphor of how monotheistic religion works.
Megan visits a new dentist who performs a complicated extraction. During these visits Megan falls in love with Dr Verma and at the same time believes he has fallen in love with her. This is monotheism – the believer does not simply believe in God (that doesn't seem unreasonable to me) but believes that God is a loving God who loves the believer back. Frank Tallis recalls asking Megan :
"How did you know that Dr Verma had fallen in love with you?"
"I just knew"
"Yes, but how?"
"I just knew."
Getting nowhere, he rephrases the question.
"So what were your reasons for believing that Dr Verma had fallen in love with you?"
"It’s not something you can analyse."
And later :
"I couldn’t stop thinking about him. And I could sense him thinking about me. "
Now, Megan was married. Her husband clearly represents the tribal gods that were abandoned in favour of monotheism. Of course it also turns out that Dr Verma is happily married. I’m not quite sure how this fits into the metaphor, but let’s proceed.
Now that she is no longer needing to see him for any further tooth extractions, Megan phones Dr Verma and proposes that they meet to discuss their situation.
"And how did he respond?"
"He pretended he didn’t understand. I persevered but he was evasive. He made some excuse and hung up."
Just like God. He won’t meet up with his believers at an agreed time either, whether it’s at a chic French restaurant in Chelsea or at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. The silence of God can be disheartening for the believer. But the true believer will point out that faith is faith, not certainty. So Megan wasn’t discouraged.
She phoned Dr Verma repeatedly, sometimes several times a day. The dental secretaries –
(I take those to be angels)
The dental secretaries became frosty and asked her to stop… Megan wrote letters to Dr Verma every day;
(I take these to be scriptures)
long, detailed letters suggesting solutions, begging him to recognise that their love could not be disowned or denied.
Dr Tallis then reveals that Megan was suffering from de Clerambault’s syndrome, first described in 1921 (but recognised for centuries).
Typically, the affected individual falls in love with a man with whom she has had little or no prior contact and comes to believe that he is also passionately in love with her… This perception arises in the absence of any actual encouragement. The man is often older, of a higher social status, or a celebrity… A hapless and unwelcome pursuit follows which is experienced by the victim as extreme harassment.
Megan took to hanging around outside the dentist’s surgery on all day vigils
Sometimes he would see her and send his secretary out with a message: go home. Megan didn’t argue. What was the point? She smiled, and nodded, and made her way back to the tube station. It didn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things, because ultimately, her patience would be rewarded.
When the poor dentist can’t take it anymore, he and his family relocate to Dubai. Megan is devastated, but her love endures. She builds a shrine to the absent dentist in her house. It’s a box containing a single news clipping (he attended a gala dentist event), a business card, a pen and a few paperclips from his office. She tells Dr Tallis :
"I like to be on my own in the early evening because I know that in Dubai he’s just gone to bed and he’ll be lying in the dark without any distractions. … And he’ll know that I’m thinking about him – and then he’ll start thinking about me – and we’ll both be thinking of each other… and it’s like… it’s like we’re one.”...more
Like all of these satires (Pilgrim’s Progress, Rasselas, Candide, etc) a cartoon figure wanders about a cartoon landscape and encounters other [image]
Like all of these satires (Pilgrim’s Progress, Rasselas, Candide, etc) a cartoon figure wanders about a cartoon landscape and encounters other cartoon figures who Represent Something. This novella has a pop at several versions of God and perhaps surprisingly not just Christian versions. Along with Jesus, Mohammed himself appears to debate with the Black Girl at one point. I would be interested to find out if modern Muslims find this part offensive.
I liked the feminism of the following dialogue –
“A Man needs many wives and a large household…” said the Arab. “He should distribute his affection. Until he has known many women he cannot know the value of any; for value is a matter of comparison.” [Note : Smokey Robinson in “Shop Around” by the Miracles says the same thing.]
“And your wives?” said the black girl. “Are they also to know many men in order that they may know your value?”
“Learn to hold your peace, woman, when men are talking and wisdom is their topic. God made Man before he made Woman.”
“Second thoughts are best,” said the black girl. “If it is as you say, God must have created woman because he found Man insufficient. By what right do you demand fifty wives and condemn them to one husband?”
(In case anyone may think that this is a rather racially stereotyped argument aimed at the famous Arab harems, I was watching an excellent documentary on Netflix called Oklahoma City, all about the Timothy McVeigh bombing. The background to that bombing was the attack by the US government on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, so all that came under the spotlight, and guess what, David Koresh had himself a real harem going on in Waco before it all went up in flames. As do most cult leaders. My theory is that cults are started by men to accomplish just that, and all the theology involved is just a means to that end. The Arab's point of view is still shared by a great number of men. Look no further than all the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys.)
ANSWERS TO THE BLACK GIRL
This information is all from Wikipedia, but pretty interesting – Shaw’s book caused a few people to write responses in 1933 :
The Adventures of the White Girl in her Search for God by Charles Herbert Maxwell
A white girl meets Shaw and the black girl and they visit H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and other authors to discuss modern ideas about God.
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The Adventures of the Brown Girl in her Search for God by Mr and Mrs I. I. Kazi. A Muslim answer to Shaw. Promotes the idea that because all true religion is monotheistic "every prophet preached Islam".
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The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for Mr Shaw by Mabel Dove
The Adventures of Gabriel in his Search for Mr. Shaw by W R Matthews God sends the Archangel Gabriel to seek out the real Bernard Shaw, discovering four "sham" Shaws
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The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl by Brigid Brophy
I thought of a very short summary for those who don't have the time to read the whole thing. It's along the lines of the synopsis of Moby Dick I read I thought of a very short summary for those who don't have the time to read the whole thing. It's along the lines of the synopsis of Moby Dick I read somewhere:
Boy meets whale; boy loses whale; boy gets whale back again
So for the Bible it's
God meets people; God loses people; God gets people back again
In theological terms that's covenant; apostasy; incarnation and atonement
I admit my summary misses out the part where the incarnated God is deliberately killed by people and then resurrects himself (and they do make rather a lot of that part of the story), but if I included that it wouldn't have been so neat....more
What I learned from this book is that a third of Christians in the Anglican Church don't believe in life after death. The author who is a bigshot clerWhat I learned from this book is that a third of Christians in the Anglican Church don't believe in life after death. The author who is a bigshot cleric at Westminster Abbey, no less, includes himself in those. And here I was thinking that all Christians thought life after death was sort of the basis for the whole shooting match.
Apart from that this book was full of the kind of woolliness that sheep can only look upon with envy.
It’s not so surprising that most of these cults are broadly similar but it still surprises me that there seems to be such a limitless supply of idiotsIt’s not so surprising that most of these cults are broadly similar but it still surprises me that there seems to be such a limitless supply of idiots out there who willingly believe that this or that motormouth bozo has got a direct message from the Ancient Ones about the End Times to the point where it is necessary to live with the bozo in an old warehouse with a lot of other idiots and give at least 50% of your income to the great leader and please read the latest memo which says that the leader shall have access to all the females in the cult at all times from now on, of whatever age. So you could say that a cult is just a skeezy scheme for some ugly guy to get his hands on a lot of women and money, and that’s what it boils down to. Maybe we could check this out. This particular book is excellent (and also very stylish) but it has NO PHOTOS – what? We want to look at the mugshots!
YEAH, MUGSHOTS
Joseph di Mambro of the Order of the Solar Temple
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Guilty of around 60 murders
Jeffrey Lundgren of the Kirtland Cult
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Guilty of five murders and a real lot of other horrible stuff
Yahweh ben Yahweh
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Guilty of around 12 murders
Roch Theriot of the Ant Hill Kids
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Guilty of one murder and many many tortures
Ervil le Baron of the Church of the Lamb of God
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Guilty of at least 35 murders
(If Charlie Manson ever read up on these cults he must have laughed himself silly – all of them did just as gross stuff as his famous Family did and most did way more murders but Charlie got all the publicity and the fan letters. )
THEY EVENTUALLY ALL GO COMPLETELY MAD
The well-known mass suicide of the People’s Temple out there in Guyana is still the number one shocker, and it’s the poster for what happened to a lot of these cults. At some point the great leader succumbs to paranoia. Either there are plots against him from within, or there are evil forces to be resisted from the outside world. With remarkable swiftness a guy preaching cupcakes and warm baths for all humankind one moment will be dispatching death squads to his rivals’ houses in the next moment. These guys, they turn on a dime. (In England we say “turn on a sixpence” but the sixpenny coin hasn’t existed since the 1970s so we don’t say that anymore. It wasn’t replaced by “turn on a 5p” after decimalisation.)
You will be familiar with a handful of the cults in this book – Manson, Aum Shinrikyo, the Branch Davidians of Waco, the People’s Temple – but there are a whole lot of obscure crisply written horror stories here, plus simply strange stuff like Synanon (which started out as an early version of Narcotics Anonymous) and Heaven’s Gate (which was a UFO cult – they all calmly committed suicide too because it wasn’t suicide, it was transitioning to the Planet Zorgenblooch or whatever).
I can list this book on my True Crime and my Theology shelf – neat!...more
When some nomads started staying put and growing some taters & turnips around 10,000 BCE they became acutely aware of the weather and they needed to cWhen some nomads started staying put and growing some taters & turnips around 10,000 BCE they became acutely aware of the weather and they needed to contact whoever was in charge of rain and sunshine and get a little co-operation going. They figured just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there. So, for instance, the wind. These invisible things – let’s call them spirits – were just everywhere, and they were running wild. But some people could talk to them, and make deals. You do this for us, we’ll do that for you. So that was the concept of sacrifice. Here’s a goat, now give me a wife. Alright, two goats. Arm-twister! Hey, don’t snow all over my cabbage patch, here’s a donkey.
Some of it wasn’t no donkeys neither. It turns out that the grisly heads rolling down the ziggurat scenes in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto movie were factually correct. Ugh!
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Some bold types called shamen took strong medicine and went across to the spirit world and returned with very specific knowledge (the necklace you lost is behind front door of your neighbour’s hut – not saying how it could possibly have got there).
Oh, humans have spirits too, and the good news is, they’re immortal. Actually, the land and the spirits and the creatures and the humans are all part of each other, it’s like that crazy novel The City and the City by China Mieville, these different worlds all co-terminous in the same place and interweaving and all.
Well, several thousand years passed and spirits in some places became gods and got specific powers and tights and capes to wear too, and city states grew up all over, their kings were divine or divinely chosen, and the people believed that tosh because the priests told them it was true. That happened in the USSR under Stalin too, so it’s an idea which took a long time to die out.
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This excellent book then moves on to the oldest living religion, Hinduism, followed by Buddhism (which might not be a religion, it’s much more a philosophy), Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three great monotheisms. Finally we get a miscellaneous section which tears through Sikhs, Santeria, Mormons, Baha’I, Tenrikyo, Cargo Cults (which have now disappeared), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafari, Cai Dai, Scientology, Unification Church, Wicca, TM, UUA, Krishna Consciousness and Falun Dafa. They all go by so rapidly that I’m not sure the subtleties of each faith are adequately explained - the Unification Church appears just to believe that everyone should get married, for instance. I think there must be more to it than that.
But mainly the nine authors of this classy compendium can cheerfully collect compliments and congratulations for their collectively crisp, cool, calm compression of these copious complex, confusing and contrary concepts....more
I am the kind of atheist who believes in God. This calls for a little explanation. As you know the cosmologists are generally agreed that this whole gI am the kind of atheist who believes in God. This calls for a little explanation. As you know the cosmologists are generally agreed that this whole great thingummywhatsit in which we sit reading our novels, this vast firmament with its black holes, dark matter and colliding galaxies, began with the Big Bang, and before that there wasn’t anything at all, not even nothing, not even any time or space for there to be nothing in. And I can go along with that, I don’t have any rocking alternative theory. And it’s pretty clear to me that there is a Universe, as opposed to no Universe. I can see it outside my window. We’re here rather than not being here. It’s all very strong evidence that Something happened.
Okay, what I say is, since only ten people on the planet have any idea how this Bang Event could have occurred, for the rest of us, we might as well call the thing that happened or made it happen God. Your conventional definition of God always says that God created Himself and then the universe, so I see no problem in calling the Big Bang God. What’s in a name? That which we call a Big Bang by any other name would bang as loudly. Religious people say God created the Universe. I agree. Why not. No problem. He did it.
However, religious people then add a few things to the definition of God, which they are not so quick at explaining. If they asked me “do you believe in God?” I might say “yes”, thinking of the mighty creation of the entirety of all matter, space and time. But really that’s just the first bit for religious people. Their idea of God, mostly, is that not only did he create everything, he’s deeply, profoundly interested in the teeny tiny part of his creation which became us, the humans. In fact this whole universe is just the real estate for us to build our little houses in so we have somewhere to sit. It’s all for our benefit! The religions then work out what makes humans so interesting to God, and it turns out that it’s certain forms of assent that we make in our minds that is the whole point of Creation. If we don’t make this required mental assent, when we die we will be tormented forever on a different plane of reality (the details can be a little unclear). It’s a whole big deal.
It’s all these add-ons which I can’t go along with. I don’t get why the mighty creator of ten trillion galaxies would be that bothered with us low types. It seems a bit arrogant for us to say so, but all of religion is based on God’s total and unwavering obsession with humans. There are too many presuppositions here – that God has a personality in which emotions can be recognised, that his intentions can be understood, that there aren’t a billion other sentient races which are much more interesting than us here, and so on.
If you don’t go along with the add-ons, though, to a religious person you’re still an atheist, and you can babble all you want about the Big Bang but they’ll say if it walks like duck and quacks like a duck it’s an atheist.
This book of 24 short essays by mostly female writers is pretty unsatisfying. From believers who go to sit at the feet of holy women for hours waiting for the thirty seconds where she holds their head and looks in their eyes (boy did this make me cringe) to atheists more militant than I am, it was too hyperkinetic, each writer trying to cram their profound experiences and thoughts into 6 or 7 pages. There were an awful lot of cancer stories - the health of loved ones is the big test of faith for all believers. A lot of it was pretty painful reading.
I think Sylvie Simmons’ essay was my favourite – she wrote the excellent biography of Leonard Cohen called I’m Your Man. She writes of growing up loving Jesus but hating the Church, and as an aside she mentions
Many of my boyfriends, I have to say, would not have looked out of place on a cross.
I think she meant they were long-haired and had beards.
That reminds me of a remark overheard in a Nottingham jewellers some time ago. A girl was looking at a display of crosses and asked the shop assistant to let her have a closer look. "Which one are you interested in?" she asked, and the girl said "Can I have a look at the one with the little man on it?"...more
On the cover of this book is the publishers’ upbeat trademarked tag
Making Everything Easier! ™
You have to smile when it’s on the front of a guide to COn the cover of this book is the publishers’ upbeat trademarked tag
Making Everything Easier! ™
You have to smile when it’s on the front of a guide to Catholicism, because I can safely say, having perused this fat volume at length, that being a Catholic does not make anything easier. Not at all. Quite the opposite. The Catholic faith makes everything, from declaring war to telling the rosary, a whole lot more difficult, way more complicated than the most complicated computer or board game, which, many times, it resembles.
Because the whole thing is a Quest. The Player is issued with a Soul at the beginning of the game, and the object of the game is to convey the Soul to Heaven and avoid Hell. It sounds simple, like every great board game (the object of Monopoly is to bankrupt all the other players which may be unkind but it’s very clear). This detailed account of the rules for How To Save Your Soul is just exhausting. If God has set up so many many traps to fall into, hundreds of things you must do (confession, the sacraments), things you mustn’t ever do (extra-marital sex, pre-emptive invasion of a foreign country without sufficient justification), things that whilst not essential would please him if you took the time to do (self-mortification, pilgrimage), he’s just giving me the strong impression that he’s just waiting for me to commit a mortal sin and die without a priest and then zzzzap me off to Hell without no Get Out Of Hell Free cards, of which there are none in this game, that is not a Catholic concept.
THE GNASHING OF MY TEETH
I think this is probably something the general “For Dummies ™” series editors insist on, but the language used in this book is likely to set your teeth on edge
(The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge, Ezekiel 18:2.)
It tries so frantically to be hip and street and down with the kids and like your breakdancing uncle at Christmas it just makes you wince. Some examples -
In this chapter you get a peek at what Catholicism is all about – the common buzzwords and beliefs – a big picture of the whole shebang.
(Discussing differences in worship between eastern and Western traditions) Both Masses are cool by the pope, though.
What’s referred to as The Force in the Star Wars movies is not the Holy Spirit (I’m glad they cleared that up)
And a favourite :
Even Jesus got some downtime. Jesus wasn’t a workaholic.
THIS BOOK COULD HAVE BEEN SHORTER
There are pages devoted to the most tedious and you may think unnecesaary details :
Diocesian priests are responsible for buying and maintaining their own automobiles
The local bishop blesses three oils during Holy Week… the Chrism Oil, the Oil of the Sick and the Oil of Catechumens. The bishop blesses all three oils in multigallon containers. Chrism is the only oil that has balsam added to it.
THE RESTAURANT ANECDOTE
I was in a restaurant the other Saturday with a friend of mine. He recognised the guy sitting on the next table and a conversation ensued. It quickly turned to matters of religion, I can’t remember why. And it was like we were part of a joke beginning “A Muslim, a Catholic and an atheist go into a bar” because that’s what we were, a Muslim, a Catholic and an atheist. The reason I mention this is because it was very striking when our Catholic was trying to explain the Trinity and saying that Jesus, as he wasn’t the Father but the Son, wasn’t, of course, God, because only God is God. Well, he wasn’t a very diligent Catholic because even I know that all three guys in the Trinity are completely God 24 hours a day. To quote our authors:
Jesus is regarded as fully human and fully divine – true Man and true God. This premise is the cornerstone of all Christian mysteries. It can’t be explained completely
I wonder how many Christians also do not realise that Jesus is God. I think they think that because he’s got the title Son of God, it’s like Son of Godzilla, and the son of Godzilla is not the real Godzilla. But the news which is now 2000 years old is that Jesus is GOD.
YOU ARE MY SPECIAL ANGEL
before the first human beings were created in the Garden of Eden, God created beings known as angels : beings with no bodies. Angels are pure spirit. An angelic nature consists of an angelic intellect and an angelic will.
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Where do they get this from? Because it’s not in the Bible. And it's not from Bobby Helms. Answer is : sacred tradition. So I think that means somebody like St Augustine just kind of made it up in the 5th century.
WHEN YOU’VE TRIED ALL THE REST, BABY
I was impressed that the authors are careful never to rubbish any other Christian denominations or other religions. They never say non-Catholics are wrong. What they do say is Catholics are just the best, baby, the best.
The Church believes that all religions know some truth, but it knows more. Jesus Christ himself founded the Catholic Church, and therefore the Church possesses all the truths and graces necessary for salvation, whereas other faiths possess only some (partial) truth or grace.
What they don’t say is what will happen to non-Catholics in respect of the ticklish but kind of crucial Heaven/Hell thing. I mean, do all good Muslims go to hell? Or because their faith possesses “partial” truth maybe their heads and right arms can go to Heaven and the rest goes to Hell? Or maybe they end up in Purgatory (that’s where you go if you die without confessing your sins but your sins aren’t mortal) for a few thousand years of theological correction.
WE DON’T MAKE THE RULES
The Reverends Trigilio and Brighenti, our authors, do not pull their punches about the less popular aspects of Catholic teaching, so you got to give them respect for that. According to the Church, ALL I mean ALL sex which isn’t between a married man and the woman he’s married to is a sin and you shouldn’t do it, it will put your soul in danger. And even some sex between a married couple is sinful, too. I would explain further, but children could read this. So I will just let you adults use your imaginations there. But not too much, because thinking about a married couple having sex if it’s not you and your spouse is also a sin. Actually, from what these guys say, I’m going to say that thinking about you having sex with your spouse is also a sin. You can see that none of this is Making Everything Easier! ™
A MINOR OMISSION
What this book did not tell me is how a loving God can and does (according to this guide) allow humans to condemn themselves (I guess that’s the way I should put it) to an eternity of horrible torture in Hell. I mean, that's a real kick in the head when you think about it - all eternity! I never could believe that one.
CONCLUSION
This is a very solid, very detailed explanation of WHAT Catholics believe. HOW they believe it is not explained....more
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