The failure of gods, and those who claim to be the followers of gods, to make living fuller and better rather than shriveled and harder, is all the proof anyone should need to grasp that the gods do not exist. It hasn't worked out that way of course. World over people are following religion into hate, war, death, and personal denigration and debasement. The middle east is a cesspool of Islamic inhumanity and its residents are, by far, the most religiously degraded members of the human family at the moment. Still, much of humanity is following a similar path. In the US it is the Christians who are on the leading edge of evil.
American Christianity took its hard right turn toward doing harm when American Christians decided that coupling faith with political power was the way to “save” the nation. I was a member of the church back then, an ardent and committed follower of Jesus. Most of my doctrine came from the words and stories attributed to Jesus, which focused almost exclusively on how a person should live their own life, and included how they treated others. Compassion was at the base of it, along with tolerance, an effort to understand. A genuine and selfless love lie at the foundation for it all.
The “Old Testament” was sacred of course, but as the background story of history that focused human hope on the teachings that Jesus shared. In a like manor most of the rest of the New Testament” was expository, also sacred, but exposing the efforts of people to put those same teachings into practice. And, quite frankly, those efforts often seemed contradictory, sometimes deeply flawed, and clearly influenced by the context of the societies they inhabited. Paul's fondness for the imagery of slavery and his relentless misogyny were clearly the marks of a man limited by his society of some 2000 years in the past. The Bible was a source of wisdom and understanding in all things spiritual. No one with any sense suggested it as a text book or "owner's manual".
For some reason, along with the lust of political power came “literal” interpretations of scripture. That seemed okay at first, how could a literal interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself”, the Sermon on the Mount, or the story of the Good Samaritan, go wrong? An American society measuring up to the standards demanded by the sorting of nations into goats and sheep would be a testament to just how far a human society could go toward justice and peace. But those weren't the parts of the Bible the American Church took literally. In fact the Church leadership spent more and more time demanding that the stories of the Old Testament be taken literally, and less and less time bothering, if they bothered at all, with the stories of and about Jesus. Stories once told mostly to children were insisted on as facts of history. Anyone who dared disagree was declared an enemy of god's own word. Every Sunday morning was more hate, more intolerance, more anger, and an ever increasing call to do battle the very people Jesus had called us to love. It wasn't long before the Church was a place I didn't understand, didn't fit, and could no longer endure.
I often wondered why the backlash of those who followed the teachings ascribed to Jesus, against American Christianity, never materialized. Many of my believing friends became professionals (for lack of a better term) in the Church. Ministers and Preachers and the wives of Ministers and Preachers; some going on to be Professors in theological seminaries and universities. In just a few years people who once favored the story of Jesus and the women brought before him to be judged, took to the pulpit to judge everyone from gay people to political liberals to unmarried mothers. Eventually even the poor and the homeless became targets of contempt. Churches grew bigger and more expensive while the preachers took to limousines, Rolex, and TV. I don't recall hearing of a single one of the people I knew rejecting this bastardized Christianity and walking away. But now I think I know why the backlash never came.
Those who would have been true to the teachings of Jesus, who would have lead the revolt against those who turned the Church toward power and greed, are simply not Christians anymore. They left the church, abandoning faith as the central theme of life. The demands of the Literalist and the Judge are those of nonsense and evil. But grasping that leads to the understanding that all of Christian doctrine is based on mythology rather than truth. The Fall, the Curse, Hell, blood sacrifice, the very idea of a god-man, the doctrines of Christianity are irreconcilable with the ideas implicit in many of the teachings of Jesus. Humility, love, understanding, a desire for truth, forgiveness and compassion are the truth of his doctrines. Many of the “Real Christians” followed the teachings of Jesus out of the church and away from the faith.
I suppose I was one of them. But the distance between me and American Christianity is now so great that it is hard to remember, or even imagine, that I once considered myself one of them. There are no gods. Humanity's only hope is to listen to truth reviled in the teaching of the best of its teachers. Among those being some of the words shared by the character of Jesus. Our mythology holds truth and light, offering guidance passed down through the generations. Religion, however, has always been completely compromised. The demand that one worship and accept as an unquestionable authority both a “god” and those who claim to represent same, has as its foundation the lust for power. That lust is the basis for all evil, and the very act of worship, of bowing a knee without even the idea of questioning the rightness of that being worshiped, twists and poisons the heart.
The lust for power is resurgent in the world and thus, so is religion. Yet love is the very opposite of wielding power. When the backlash, the true revolution, the real revival of the human spirit comes - if it comes - it will show itself as the rejection of the power of one person over another. It will include, and maybe start with, the rejection, of religion.
If it doesn't come human kind will have a short, ugly, and forever forgotten history in the cosmos.
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