November 30, 2021
Cathedral City, California
It's hard to know where to start. So many things are going on, in the world and in my head.
As I write this my hand is on the bible. Funny place for it to be, but I'll explain. When we moved into this condo last February, it was furnished--not merely with furniture, but with a number of items of, shall we say, "home decor." For instance, there were at least a dozen large clocks (some working, some not) scattered throughout the place. The previous owners also were quite fond of faux French stuff--wall hangings, serving trays, pictures, etc. Gay Paree, by way of Pier One. There were many artificial flowers, as well as containers for them, including all sizes of baskets, vases, and ceramic pots. And a few books as well, which they evidently didn't think enough of to take with them. We got rid of most of the aforementioned stuff, managing to sell quite a bit of it out of the garage via Craigslist (it's amazing how much artificial plants cost at retail, and how much people are willing to pay for them after the fact). Some things we simply had to chuck because they were too hideous for anyone, and some things we kept--a few of the better clocks, baskets, pots, etc. One thing that didn't sell for some reason was the bible, and I couldn't quite bring myself to shitcan it. Probably a superstitious holdover from my childhood as a preacher's kid.
Well, it turns out that my computer mouse doesn't work well on the glass-topped work desk where I'm seated as I write this, so I decided to use the bible as a mouse pad. A couple of days ago my wife and I happened to be listening to an episode of "This American Life" on public radio. It was the first-person story of a man raised in an orthodox Jewish family headed by an abusive alcoholic father. The narrator attended a yeshiva rather than a regular school, where he had to learn all about the innumerable arcane rules of behavior surrounding the Sabbath, as well as everyday life, for orthodox Jews. Among them was the puzzling array of blessings to be given, depending on what type of food was being blessed. Separate blessings for dairy, meat, things made of wheat, etc. All kinds of blessings. At school the kid was in a sort of "blessing bee" when he was asked to give the blessing for an ice cream cone. He knew the blessing for dairy, but didn't know what a cone was made of, so he was stumped, as I recall, and decided to wing it, with bad results. And for him, overshadowing all these bizarre rules, and exceptions to rules, imposed by Hashem and taught at school, was the terrible drunken behavior of his father, often ending with beatings. A poignant story.
After having listened to this, I was back at the computer, and it occurred to me that I hadn't opened the bible at all during the time I've been using it as a mouse pad. I keep it face down, with only the black paper back showing. The print is tiny, and well, I spent so much of my youth reading from the damn thing, and the content is meaningless as it ever was. But on a whim I decided to open it to the crazy Hebrew part (as differentiated from the crazy Jesus part, which takes up only about a quarter of the whole bible). I flipped to the book of Deuteronomy, which is a veritable mine field of rules for the poor Israelite shmucks who had to follow them, and in some cases still feel compelled to do. At random I read a single chapter, and man, talk about rules. What to do if your wife isn't a virgin when you marry her, and what to do if she was a virgin but got raped on her way to the wedding, and how many shekels need to be paid for various infractions, and when someone needs to be stoned to death. Also (and I can't overemphasize this) do NOT wear clothing made of both wool and linen, do not yoke an ox and an ass together, and whatever you do, don't have sex with your father's wife. And all this in the same chapter! A quick scan of the previous and subsequent chapters indicates that there is much, much more of the same.
I personally can't imagine being an adherent of a religion with so many rules--and not, mind you, rules about how to behave kindly and generously and justly to your fellow human beings, Golden Rule type stuff, but about things like where to tie up your farm animals and which ones to eat and which ones to burn as offerings and where to do so. There are some people some who just get a bang out of not only following the rules, but of quibbling about what the rules mean, for their entire lifetimes. To sort of paraphrase Al Pacino's Satan in The Devil's Advocate, the God of the Jews definitely comes across as a cosmic prankster, keeping his people jumping from one foot to the other.
Not to pick on Jews only, to be sure. Muslims basically follow that whole megillah of Old Testament rules, too, and in addition are heavily into putting the message forth with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a machine gun. And Christianity, even though it was ostensibly based on the teachings of a Jewish guy who in essence said, "Fuck all these rules, just be good to each other" and paid for saying so with his life, has incorporated all this Mosaic nonsense into its bible, the King James Version of which sits, face down, under my mouse. And it's those crazy, intolerant, misogynistic laws, not to mention the silly creation myths that begin the Old Testament, that get used the most by fundamentalist Christians as a bludgeon wherewith to pummel the nonbeliever, and one another, for that matter. For Christians, if you want to be generous and tolerant, you cite certain portions of the New Testament, but if you want to be stingy and nasty and intolerant, you cite portions of the Old Testament. Except that some of the intolerance of the Old Testament got included in the New Testament, mostly because of St. Paul, a Jew who converted to Christianity, who wrote a big fat chunk of it. It's quite a versatile religion, when you come to think about it.
All of which has me scratching my head, as I often do when I contemplate our sacred western traditions. Not being a Muslim, I can't explain the allure of a religion that wants you to bow down in a specific direction and pray five times a day; to make a pilgrimage to a sandy no-man's-land run by a bunch of sword-wielding medieval chieftains, where you walk counterclockwise around a massive cube; and to spend the rest of your time, if you're lucky enough to be a male, hanging out with other hairy men who act the same way. And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon. Not being Jewish, I can't really explain the allure of a religion that has no meaning outside of adherence to a lot of anal regulations and ceremonies imposed by a perpetually pissed-off God who claims he loves you, but when he's not having you sold into slavery or massacred by goyim, is inventing little tricky pitfalls to make you disobey him so he can punish you all over again, and who doesn't even bother to tease you with offers of paradise or threats of hell in the afterlife. Just, I guess, a chance to rest up for eternity from having to remember all those fucking rules. And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon.
However, I was raised a Christian, and the son of a clergyman, so I suppose I should be able to explain that religion, but for the life of me I can't. First, as noted, there is Christianity's brutal underpinnings--the sort of preamble to the religion--laid out ad nauseam in the Hebrew scriptures, with all their laws and kings and judges and prophets and people smiting one another and getting smitten by others. The last words of the Old Testament, in fact, are in the Book of Malachi, with God warning the Jews to behave, "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." And really, that pretty much sums up the overall thrust of that section of the bible--God saying, Be good (which I know you won't) or I will put the shits to you (once again). I mean, really, why is this stuff even in the Christian scriptures? But it is, and shame on Christianity for including it.
The New Testament, on the other hand, offers a whole different kind of craziness. Here we are given to believe that Jesus was a direct descendant of old Abraham himself, as the very first chapter of the very first book tells us. Except not really, because his father Joseph wasn't really his father. Instead, his mother was miraculously made pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Joseph didn't have anything to do with it. Then, as things proceeded, Jesus became, first, a boy wonder, teaching his elders, then after that wandered around gathering disciples and performing miracles until finally the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities in Roman-occupied Judea (this occupation being another hurt put on the beleaguered Jews by their God for fucking up in some way) had had enough of his blatant disdain for their nitpicking rules and his claims that he was God's son, and had him executed for blasphemy against the Jewish religion. And that was a task the Romans were happy to perform, especially if it made the place easier to govern. Let's face it, if you're an empire and one of your otherwise fairly compliant imperial provinces is having internal problems, you do what you can to smooth things over. Okay, fine so far, and nothing particularly unusual. The Romans loved to crucify people. They really seemed to enjoy it, as much as the Jews enjoyed stoning people to death. It was just good fun.
If all this wasn't enough, however, Jesus appeared to rise from the dead after about a day and a half (or on the "third day," as Christians like to say, which counts the first half day, the whole middle day, and a tiny bit of the morning of the third day--the math here always puzzles me). Now, rising from the dead was not a bad trick, nor a particularly difficult one, considering that crucifixion was a deliberately slow form of suffocation by means of gravity and exhaustion, and wasn't meant to kill anybody right away. In fact, the average strong man could last for days up there on a cross, and sometimes died of starvation and thirst unless he was used for target practice by soldiers with spears or birds pecked at him too much. But Jesus played possum and was taken down after only a few hours and laid to rest. Small wonder that he recovered and got the hell out of the tomb, albeit with sore hands and feet and maybe a cut in his side. But really, only a wimp would die that quickly, and he seemed to be a pretty regular guy, physically. I mean, the son of God ought to be able to take a little physical punishment without croaking, don't you think? He carried that cross through town while being whipped, for crying out loud.
But that whole rising from the dead deal, along with Jesus's conception and birth that apparently had nothing to do with his father, are celebrated as the two Big Events of Christianity. Pretty thin stuff, if you ask me, and really no basis for a whole religion, which I guess is the reason we borrowed all the Hebrew stuff, to sort of fill in the gaps, and also made up a big city in the sky where the good people go and a lake of fire where the bad people go. If nothing else, heaven and hell have made for some good New Yorker cartoons over the years.
Then, we Christians had our turn at imposing our ostensibly forgiving and redemptive religion on everybody else on pain of death, just like our Muslim brethren have done and continue to do. Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it. But at least we get to eat bacon.
