Choosing Your Own Adventure

The Question: 

Why do Christians contend that Jesus is the only way to truth? There are so many religions in the world with historical figureheads. My conclusion is to remain neutral on choosing one over the other.

The Answer:

Christians contend Jesus is the only way to the truth for the same reason most other religions make the same claim for their idols: if it isn’t the only way to the truth, there isn’t any reason to be a Christian. 

There’s a lot of money, power, and status riding on the question. Religious leaders may or may not believe in God, but a great many of them most assuredly believe in money, power, and status. It beats making an honest living by a mile. 

Being neutral to all religions but finding them all to be potential repositories of truth is not very different from believing any one of them, and certainly no better; what does it require of you in terms of living a moral or ethical life, to be undecided or neutral? Perhaps you have your own moral code and beliefs, and perhaps they are merely convenient excuses allowing you to do whatever you like, or perhaps the principles you live are rigorous and challenging in light of life’s perennial temptations and confusions, but whatever the case may be, if you are deciding the meaning of the universe, life, and everything by cobbling together bits and pieces of every religion on your own, why bother with even a casual assumption of a multi-faceted but hazy god structure to support it? Most religions will condemn you out of hand, for not believing their particular version, whereas you will find few friends among atheists like myself will reject your vision because it appears on the surface to be nothing more than a religion of convenience but still a religion, carrying all the harm of religions in general by supporting the notion that there is something out there we owe fealty or allegiance to even if we can’t pin it down exactly, while doing nothing to advance the truth that we are, in fact, responsible for all of our ideas about what matters and what doesn’t ourselves. We are the agents, and the authority, and we need to address this honestly rather than by hiding behind old religions or by creating new ones either out of whole cloth or by pulling out and combining ideas from religions that already exist.  

To sum up, it’s bad to suspend judgement on the idea that all or most religions might be on to something. It’s bad to justify the existence religion by making up another one. You need to pick a team. There either is a god, or there isn’t. Agnosticism is the only position of the three main positions concerning religion that has no chance of being right. Or, as a minister friend of mine used to say many years ago, shit or get off the pot.

This new age stuff is appallingly fuzzy-headed; I respect religious people who follow one brand of nonsense more than I respect purveyors of blended nonsense from multiple sources (Not much more, but some. They at least have to have some discipline and do things they don’t want to do, if they actually follow their faith.) You can tolerate. You don’t have to succumb to religious thinking. Break free all the way.

What’s Right and What’s Business As Usual

The Question: 

Why do people have to constantly stir up trouble and gossip about people that they call friends? Isn’t that hypocritical and mean-spirited?

Christians especially are called to love others, but there seems to be more backbiting than peacemaking.

The Answer:

Gossip about friends is mean-spirited. Gossip about people you don’t know can be a bonding exercise with people you call your friends. Calling people your friends and talking about them behind their backs is hypocritical and mean-spirited.

Welcome to the human circus.

Christians are called to love others, but it isn’t something only Christians ought to do. Nor is Christianity required to choose to value respect and honesty over being disrespectful and spreading dirt. What’s required is the will and determination to be a good person, in defiance of the norm.

You’ll be swimming against the current, but you’ll be in better physical condition than those who just choose to float downstream like everyone else. And you will find others swimming in the same direction.

Some will admire you for it. Others, perhaps the vast majority, will stir up trouble and gossip about you. Which they will do even if you are just one of them, rather than a person trying to live with more honor and integrity. 

Angels Dancing On The Head Of A Pin

The Question: 

Sometimes I wonder if friends are worth the trouble. Mine seem to always discourage me about my faith in God. While they say they believe there’s a God, they claim He really doesn’t care much about what happens on this planet. If people can really go that far to believe in God and then doubt His power, isn’t that a dangerous position?

The Answer:

I don’t know that it’s any more or less dangerous than believing in a God that is all powerful. It’s every bit as half-witted and unsupported by evidence, though. The problem is not the nature of God, but belief in God in the first place. Arguing about the extent of his supposed powers or involvement in our lives is merely an exercise in the continued suspension of logic and common sense.

You can ditch your friends and find ones that share your specific delusion, probably in whatever church you attend. Or you can take the more mature route of accepting that in a field in which every God exists with zero evidence for its existence, the nature of God will be subject to the whims and opinions of every individual believer, making differences of opinion inevitable as well as pointless. Or you can take the even more mature position of not believing in any God whatsoever until actual evidence of one or more is presented. That is, evidence that everyone can clearly see, not testimonials from people in which causal connections are all unsupported suppositions and arbitrary connections between unrelated events. “I prayed to Jesus, and my prayer was answered” doesn’t cut it. You can get the same results (some prayers answered, while others are not) by praying to your left elbow.

Mulligans

The Question: 

It’s hard to forget the past and try to do better. I have a lot of regrets but surely there is a way to move forward and not be stifled by yesterday.

The Answer:

Forgetting the mistakes of the past is the surest way to repeat them. Trying to do better requires you to remember. That’s how you move forward. That’s how you do better.

The past, the present, and the future are all connected. The more aware of this you become, the better person you are capable of becoming.

The absolution for your sins that some denominations offer is a false doctrine and an immature response to our mistakes.

Hissy Fits

The Question: 

Why must we hurl accusations and hatred? Seldom do I pass someone with a smile on their face or a spring in their step. People seemed so unhappy, so burdened; even in families, there seems to be conflict present. What has happened in our culture that we cannot at least be civil to one another?

The Answer:

We don’t have to hurl accusations and hatred. We choose to. 

If you’re not unhappy in this climate, you’re not paying attention. On the one side, people who trust science, truth, and reality, are upset about global warming, Trumpism, and inequality. On the other side, people who trust internet rumormongers, ideology, and fiction are upset about people trying to take money from billionaires, Bidenism, and people who don’t look or sound like them.

Then there is the vast pool of people who are just pissed off because its their nature, or because they don’t have the lives they thought they should have or deserved. It’s not hard to be angry, for good reasons and for not good reasons.

The other day I was waiting to cross a parking lot to get to the dog food store while an older lady struggled to back out of a parking spot. It took her a couple of tries to straighten it out, but she made it and was driving away. A lady in a car that had to wait for her rolled her window down and was shouting at her for not pulling out far enough the first time. She was livid, like this was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of humanity. The old lady then apparently wasn’t driving off fast enough, because the angry lady gunned her engine and tailgated her all the way out of the lot. Your reaction would probably be the same as mine: the old lady isn’t the problem, mad lady; you’re the problem. Grow up.

This is not to say I don’t get angry myself, or that I only get angry when it’s justified. Anger is an emotion, and emotions aren’t ordinarily under our conscious control. I usually feel bad about flaring up afterwards, sometimes within minutes of the occurrence. Maybe angry lady was ashamed of herself once she calmed down a bit. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she feels entitled to her rage at any and all times.

The cure is not easy, nor will it ever be universally applied, but each of us can do our part.

Disagree without anger. Put politeness and respect for others ahead of hostility and selfishness. To be a civilized society, requires civilized behavior. It’s only us, after all, and we’re all in it together.

Wear a mask, in other words, when and where safety and health or just company policy require it. No fundamental human rights are involved, one way or the other. When you see someone defying a common sense practice that makes us all safer, shake your head at their stupidity and move on, saying nothing. You can lead a jackass to water, but you can’t make him drink. Yelling at him just upsets everyone, and he still won’t drink unless he wants to. Let him go on his angry, civilization-destroying way. Don’t put another log on that fire.

Frame of Mind

The Question: 

Is it true that the Bible says to eat, drink, and be merry?

The Answer:

Sort of. It’s a combination of a couple of Bible quotes from the Old Testament and the New, but it isn’t meant as a direction to actually live that way, but rather as a caution of how empty and pointless your life would be without God. Most people who have employed the quote since have taken it in the opposite direction. This is because “eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die” is actually pretty good advice. 

I would just add don’t eat, drink, and be merry at the expense of others, or to their detriment or the detriment of your own health, or as a substitute for fulfilling your responsibilities and living ethically. 

Eating, drinking, and being merry should be more of an occasional perk and a philosophical guiding principle rather than a 24 hour a day pursuit. A reward and a comforting idea, not a goal. Because nothing really matters, everything really matters.

Celestial Gladys Kravitz is Watching You

The Question: 

Even as a Christian, I stay torn when it comes to making decisions about the smallest things. Many times I get conflicting information from my friends in comparison to what I believe the Bible instructs me to do. Does God care about our everyday decisions?

The Answer:

As much as any imaginary being can.

I have a question, though. Can you direct me to the parts of the Bible that is giving you instructions about your everyday decisions? I need to decide this morning whether to take the dogs for a walk or take a turn on the recumbent bike instead. Should I fry an egg for breakfast, or have a bowl of cereal? Spend the afternoon watching television, or read a book instead? Which TV show? Which book? Not only have I been unable to find specific guidance on these decisions in the Bible, I have trouble finding any friends who have opinions on these choices either, conflicting or otherwise. 

We do know from our preachers, however, that even if God is vague on the details of our every day decisions, he is really watching and recording our every move, for the purpose of judging us later, like Santa Claus. This in spite of having a universe of billions of galaxies, stars, and planets to manage. He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows every detail of your life, down to your every last thought, and he’s going to use all that data to decide whether to torture you forever in hell, or let you into his theme park in heaven, where you can worship him and do his bidding forever. What a happy thought that is. 

Unicorns, Leprechauns, and Big Foot

The Question: 

I’m a high school senior. One of my teachers says that we can believe anything into existence and in a sense be our own gods. I know this isn’t true but I don’t quite know how to debate the claim.

The Answer:

You may possibly have misstated what your teacher said. We can’t believe anything into actual existence, but we can convince ourselves to believe anything actually exists.

All we need to do is call on faith.

All Gods are our own creations. In a sense we can be our own Gods, but its a pretty stupid direction to take, no less stupid than believing in any Gods that are not ourselves.

We need to banish the idea of Gods altogether, until someone can produce one that does not require faith to believe in. 

Jesus Is Everywhere

The Question: 

My college assignment is to debate a fellow student about the impact of Jesus’ life when he lived on Earth – without using the Bible. She claims that Jesus only impacts those who are weak. Is it true that the calendar is based on the life of Jesus?

The Answer:

There’s nothing tough about this assignment. The impact of Jesus’ life on Western Civilization, and the world, is immense. Whether Jesus lived or not, you win if you take the affirmative in the debate. He affects everything through his believers, from our sense of ourselves as a people and a civilization to how we behave and how we treat other people. As with all religions there have some benefits in people who use the teachings as a guide for their own lives and are thereby inspired to lead moral, ethical lives, but that must be reckoned against the great deal of harm that is done when religion is used as a cudgel against other people, including wars, oppression, persecution, and the repression of scientific inquiry and advances that go along with the celebrations of ignorance and faith that still plague us. Nothing good that has been done through Jesus could not have been done just as well without him, if people were as willing to commit to the principles Jesus allegedly espoused as they were to the cult of personality that grew up around him.

The calendar is not based on the life of Jesus. It’s based on the number of days it takes the Earth to make a complete circuit around the sun. The months and days are named after various Gods and Goddesses from other religious cults, mostly Roman and Norse. We do number our years from the year Jesus was supposed to be born, but I seem to remember a controversy from a few years back that we got it wrong by 4 years, and if that’s the case we’ve been counting it wrong ever since. This applies mainly to the West and countries who have adopted our ways. There are countries, cultures, and religions which count the years differently, using other starting points. They are all woefully short on reflecting what year it actually is, if we were to count from the beginning of the Universe, or the beginning of the planet Earth, the beginning of life on Earth, or even the beginning of human beings. And of course, if we are to think about the Universe in its entirety, the number of days it takes the Earth to go around the sun is a poor and hopelessly provincial and myopic unit of measurement to begin with.

Taking One For The Team

The Question: 

What was the meaning of the sign that was put on the cross when Jesus was crucified? I read that it was intended to mock Jesus, is this true?

The Answer:

The sign was allegedly put up by the Roman soldiers who were in charge of the execution. You do the math.

Of course, later on those soldiers had some doubts because God made it thunderstorm-y, as proof of his all-powerfulness, and how pissed he was that the Romans and the Jewish priests had done exactly what he already knew they were going to do, because that was his plan all along. But the darkness added to the drama of the moment and God does like a good show every now and then. After all, he could have just signed an executive order and forgiven mankind’s sin out of the goodness of his heart; the sacrifice of Jesus was completely unnecessary. If God is all powerful and the creator of the universe he can do whatever he wants., including letting anybody into heaven without conditions, or resorting to primitive sacrificial rites like some backwoods voodoo priest. He chose to torture and kill his own guy (aka himself) for no reason.