Jesus As A Serial Killer
"Roast the non-believers!" This is not your kinder, gentler Jesus that best-selling novelists Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins write for the fundamentalist set, but, as Nicholas Kristof notes in his New York Times column:
The "Left Behind" series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching."Gosh, what an uplifting scene!
If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series, have both e-mailed me (after I wrote about the "Left Behind" series in July) to protest that their books do not "celebrate" the slaughter of non-Christians but simply present the painful reality of Scripture.
"We can't read it some other way just because it sounds exclusivistic and not currently politically correct," Mr. Jenkins said in an e-mail. "That's our crucible, an offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and tolerance."
Silly me. I'd forgotten the passage in the Bible about how Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren't born-again Christians.
I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word.
What their particular word of god got me, as a little Jewish girl, was chased down the street in a Detroit suburb by Christian kids shouting "dirty Jew." When they weren't busy doing that, or throwing chairs at me in the junior high school hallway, or toiletpapering our trees, they were smashing pumpkins on our driveway or egging our house or shaving creaming the words "Dirty Jew" on our garage door. Want to talk reality, Mr. Jenkins and LaHaye? THAT is the reality of the shit you're shoveling.
Religion is about irrational belief in god, and it's based in primitive fears, and it leads far too many of the irrational believers to hate, be violent to others, and go out of their way to discriminate. It's backward, it's primitive, and it's depressing how many people believe in god, sans any reasonable proof (see Sam Harris quote) that there is one, instead of using their ability to reason -- which would get them to where I am: I have no idea whether there is or isn't a god, and I couldn't care less.
It's perfectly possible to be a good person without believing that somebody's going to smite you if you don't do as some book, supposedly handed down from the heavens, says you should. In fact, it's far more virtuous if you're good for goodness' sake, rather than because you think you're going to get something out of the deal. So, exactly how righteous are all of these believers?
Finally, someone points out the small-minded hypocrisy of a group that practices "good works" out of a desire for divine reward or fear of divine punishment. The usual criticism of fundamentalists is that they're moralists, while their selfish pragmatism is left unstated.
Jake at November 25, 2004 5:11 PM
"Selfish pragmatism" is a great way of putting it.
Amy Alkon at November 25, 2004 5:25 PM
No issue whatsoever with your criticisms of the literal biblical writers and their version of scriptural euthanasia.
However, I would add that so far in modern times, not too many western christians have taken to beheadings and suicide bombings to get a jump on the islamic edition of religious euthanasia. There seems to be more to fear in a literal life or death sense. Christians are seemingly content to let the supernatural figureheads lead the way on this, in some hazy future time. When real live humans take on this killing role, right now, it is whole 'nother ball game.
allan at November 25, 2004 6:51 PM
For the sake of pushing the critique a little bit further out from the same old focus on religious folk, here's something that was written back in 1965:
"I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing -- beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code -- what is 'right' and what is 'wrong,' what is 'good,' and what is 'evil.' I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of 'morality' seem to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to 'believe' in something, like assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in the New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with 'morality.' Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."
Joan Didion
“On Morality”
Lena-doodle-doo at November 25, 2004 6:59 PM
Fundamentalist Christians are not killing people like the Muslims are, no, but they are quite content to impose their irrationally-based morality on the rest of us. Stem cell research, anyone? Legislating to control what the rest of us can see on TV? Creationism taught in schools? Access to birth control and the morning after pill? To RU-486? I don't run around trying to legislate people into rationality. Luckily, most fundamentalists only pick and choose from their Bible, or you'd see them gearing up to have people stoned for adultery.
Amy Alkon at November 25, 2004 7:26 PM
Yes, I'm still agreeing with you. I was just making a dotted line in the sand between fearing real killers having utter disgust with moralizing legislation from a religious bent, or junk science platform.
allan at November 27, 2004 2:03 AM