The Religious Lies that Cripple People, and the Truths that Can Heal Us All

If anyone tells you that you deserve the evil done to you by an evil person, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that you know hardship because you do not deserve happiness, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that you deserve to have been stricken with a physical catastrophe, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that you suffer a disease because you need to be taught a lesson, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that a loved one died or is dying an untimely death because you need to learn to suffer, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that there is evil in the world because there is meant to be evil, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that those who commit harm are moral instruments, that person does not speak from God.

If anyone tells you that you must go out and do harm to another to uphold the moral order, that person does not speak from God.

Even if someone tells you that laughter and humor are sins because they reflect a disrespect for the moral order, that person does not speak from God.

And most assuredly, if a person tells you that you deserve abuse, punishment or death because of what your parents did, or because of the culture or "race" you belong to, that person does not speak from God.

How, how, how can I "know" these things?

Because God is love.

The world is suffering, but it is also joy, if you open your heart to it. God is there to rescue us from our suffering, to heal us, to connect us with good people, to a fellowship of light. We can indeed learn moral insights from our inevitable suffering, learn bonding empathy for others, but only if people reflect God by showing us love and help us to recover. Some suffering is so great and lonely it teaches nothing but despair, and that surely does not come from God.

We are imperfect. We are emerging from ignorance. We are learning. We are seeking. We blunder. We fear. Sometimes we do rash things. But we have the power to love, the power to heal, the power to bring joy, the power to rescue the alienated. For these things, we are God's children, and good parents do not will harm to their children.

None of us are yet complete. There is unhappiness in even the most prosperous and healthy, even if unconsciously. The harm that the fortunate sometimes do is a reflection of their painful hollowness. The rich are rich without respect to their moral merit, and some do harm to the humble with the influence of their wealth, or in order to obtain their wealth. Does this seem like a divine plan? Does it seem like a sane or moral scheme? God does not reward people with wealth, health and success who come by it selfishly and without moral conscience. They have it by cleverness alone, not holiness. But who is happier in the long run? A good conscience and fellowship with good people is priceless. That may be an old saw of sorts, but it is no less true in the Silicon Age than it was in the Steel Age or the Iron Age or the Bronze Age or the Stone Age.

Let it not be said that one cannot find peace and healing and a sense of love, even in a solitary space and moment, amidst a scene and movement of "inanimate" nature, for God is surely there in that quiet beauty, as much as in good people.

Let it not be said that one cannot learn love also from observing the tender animal families of nature or the companionship of one's pets, for their love is also a reflection of God (and their souls are sacred too).

God can communicate and elevate the soul through music and art and dance and poetry and novels, and none of these needs to be overtly or directly or intentionally sacred.

God is forgiveness, God is mercy, God is grace, God is compassion, and for these things alone, God is Great.

Amen.

We Don't Need Any "Third Temple"

Most Jewish sects have evolved a higher theology that began with the new scriptural interpretations introduced by the Tannaim ("The Teachers") in their school of Yavne in Judaea, a reformist rabbinical council of the 1st and 2nd Centuries CE, which essentially states that the offering of meaningful prayer to YHWH (God) not only should supplant animal sacrifice, but that it is actually a higher form of offering. For the Tannaim, the Torah itself became the "new temple". The Medieval Jewish Philosopher Maimonides upheld this dictum from Late Antiquity in his magnum opus, Guide for the Perplexed, when there was talk of rebuilding the Temple to reintroduce sacrificial worship. Consequently, most Jewish sects today, except "ultra-orthodox" extremists, believe a Third Temple should not be built by human hands in Jerusalem. As for Christians, they would do well to remember that Jesus himself was not a fan of the self-aggrandizing religious authority or parasitic priestly tithings of the Temple-centered form of Judaism during his era (neither, for that matter, was his mentor, the Prophet John the Baptist). For Jesus, a person achieved expiation of his or her sins through sincere prayer, and departure from a sinful existence began with the formal symbolism of a baptismal ceremony, to which a person freely submitted him or herself at a spiritually cognizant age. Right-wing fundamentalist Christians, who minutely plot and madly scheme for the erection of a "Third Temple" as a way to usher in a "cleansing" doomsday scenario, are transgressing the will of Christianity's central teacher, Jesus. Indeed, Jesus foresaw the future physical collapse of Herod's temple as a just result for the world of corruption it bred among religious authorities, and wanted people to turn within to discover spiritual salvation through their inner light rather than through primitive acts of animal sacrifice on priestly-designated "holy ground". For those Jewish sects that believe a Messiah will one day come to liberate the world from its suffering, the Third Temple will simply arrive from on high through heavenly fiat. It will NOT happen (legitimately and therefore everlastingly) by human territorial aggression, seizing Mount Zion from the Muslims, and tearing down their mosque to rebuild the temple and to sacrifice an inaugural red heifer without blemish. Misinformed Christians, who contingently "love" Jews only as tools to one day build for them a Third Temple so that a specious 19th Century interpretation of The Book of Revelations might be "fulfilled", should rather learn to truly love Jews for themselves as fellow human beings, who are following an independently viable moral path every bit as pleasing in the eyes of God as Christianity. These Third Temple Christians should not ask Jews to be the mere servants of such a gratuitous and Biblically-unsupported direction of militancy, and not politically compel Jews to become a vanguard against a fellow Abrahamic faith that worships the same God as Judaism and the Christian faith. It is vile heresy to foment fear-based right-wing agendas in Israel to spark off the woeful flames of a Third World War. War is not pleasing to the eyes of loving God. If it was, he would not have sent us his messenger, the Prince of Peace. The body given each of us is our Temple, and the Holy of Holies is the indwelling soul of every human being. God has no need for any particular material scrap of ground, and certainly needs no human army to "conquer" it for him. "I AM THAT I AM" (the literal meaning of "Jehovah") is in all things and in all people. We worship a transcendent God, not a pagan deity of topography. Indeed, we are supposed to have known this from the very day that Moses first recounted it from his own trembling lips after he came down from Mount Sinai.

A Possible Reason for the "Either Lunatic or God" Argument

Why do some fundamentalist Christians embrace this strange "intellectual" argument that if Jesus is not God, he could only otherwise have been a "lunatic" or worse? Though such an argument is automatically specious to a progressive Christian, why should it all hold any water even with fundamentalist Christians, who supposedly revere Jesus? Then it occurred to me: what if the articulators of this argument have always been uncomfortable with some of the things Jesus said? I frankly admit that Jesus calls for a level of moral dedication and rigor that is difficult for me, living in a world with a multiplicity of demands and incredible complexity to psychologically navigate. But still, even in the most challenging moral arguments of Jesus, I see their merit, I understand his reasoning, and I respect their virtue. But if you are telling your congregations that Jesus said things tantamount to a lunatic if he were a mere human being, you are slyly (or perhaps unconsciously) invalidating and neutralizing the spiritual cause he preached. The implicit message of such an argument would be this: don't go trying to imitate Jesus or enact his causes, because you are a mere mortal, and you will be deemed a lunatic (or even demon!) by society if you do! So what is left for Christians hearing this? They are left to focus on what is deemed "divine" about Jesus, his magical powers, his ability to circumvent death. This puts one in an abjectly subservient relationship to Jesus as an inscrutable manifestation of God, and puts his social activism deep in the background. Jesus repeatedly preached the cause of the poor, the outcasts, the demeaned, the disenfranchised, and God's will that they not only be included in the Kingdom of God on Earth, but also that their sufferings be lifted. In Modern Society, a secular manifestation of this message is the new word for "witchcraft" among conservatives, whether they be religious or not: socialism. And not surprisingly, there is a Christian Socialist Party in the parliamentary democracy of Germany. I strongly suspect that socioeconomically conservative people in the 20th and 21st Centuries feel uncomfortable with Jesus words in a profound way, and this causes them to sublimate that discomfort by focusing chiefly on the grisly minutiae of Christ's trial, torture, bearing of the cross and crucifixion, instead of his life and words as a whole. I have heard people loudly pronounce that Jesus would have been a "Republican" if he had been born in our time. But the concepts of liberal and conservative would have been meaningless to him, whether in the actual province of Judaea where he lived, or in today's global culture. For Jesus, there was only the rectification needed between those who mistreat or neglect their fellow human beings for self-aggrandizement, and those of God's children who suffer at the hands of the powerful.

The False Logic That if Jesus is Not God He Was a Lunatic

I am utterly amazed at the pronouncement by Modern Christian Theologians that for Jesus' teachings to have any moral validity that he has to be God! It is quite putting the cart before the horse! It is like saying that if he had not risen from the dead after his crucifixion that all the things he taught, all the people he healed, would be of no consequence! However these theologians go further: they claim that if Jesus was only a man, his life would be tantamount to the ravings and behavior of a lunatic! "Lunatic" and even "demon" are the words these Christian "apologists" use. I would never use those words in the same sentence as Jesus' name, even in their theoretical sense of him being mortal rather than divine. Jesus was one of the most morally enlightened figures to make it onto the human record, God or not. For people like me who venerate him for the noble and courageous being he exemplified, he could have died of old age lounging in a boat with a fishing line dragging in the Sea of Galilee, and I would still find the mere words he left behind for us to be morally arresting. His spiritual communication brought a sense of liberation to people in his own lifetime, and his followers felt inspired to carry on his wonderful teachings after his untimely death. The spiritually parched world of the Roman Empire was thirsting for a person of wisdom and compassion who could articulate so well the moral need for human equality. That is why his teachings took off into a religion that spanned the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Sea within two generations of his death. For centuries, slaves and commoners had been ground down, increasingly disenfranchised and treated like miserable animals, or even got legally defined as "tools" rather than living beings in Roman jurisprudence. And there were even free and socially privileged people who were sickened by the inhumanity they witnessed in the daily life of the Empire. Jesus' message was the answer. If Jesus had only just performed a series of dramatic magic tricks, and then rose from the dead after his execution, no one would remember him. There would be no lasting universal religion that could have emerged from such a personality. Wonderworkers were a dime a dozen in the Ancient World -- had been for thousands of years. But finding a person who (just for example) taught a predatory tax-collector to love his fellow man and put aside his sinful ways by befriending that tax collector as he had never known friendship before, is NOT the behavior of a lunatic or a demon, nor does it need to be that of a god. It is the act of a morally enlightened soul with a truly wonderful gift of humanity. Jesus renewed souls with his kindness and wisdom, something we are all capable of if we care to learn and love.

How a Sect of Islam Can Teach Bigoted Groups in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition to Embrace a Loving God Again

Hate, anger and the desire to control and punish others in the name of God are forces that corrupt spirituality, just as surely as accumulating wealth in the name of religion renders it the bane of the soul. The media likes to target Islam for these faults, but Christianity, especially forms of it practiced in America, are guilty of the same transgressions. When Jesus vented his anger, it was toward hypocrites, the intolerant, and profiteering on religious obligations. However, Jesus was primarily about teaching people compassion and social-spiritual inclusiveness. What is more, Jesus was not about the subordination or humiliation of any portion of society. Men, women and children, both rich and poor, were all equal before his eyes.

Interestingly, the religion so often singled out for its meanspiritedness, namely Islam, turns out to have as many forms as Judaism and Christianity, and it includes faith traditions defined by compassion and peaceful coexistence. One of these Islamic sects in particular not only possesses these benign traits, but also a positive creative and community-building spirit. It is called Sufism, and it is a spiritual tradition that embraces the whole heritage of monotheism since it first emerged as a concept among human beings. Sufi Muslims include holy men and holy women who forgo a worldly existence to cultivate a more intimate connection with God. They employ prayer, meditation, the study of sacred texts and moral philosophy, communal gender-integrated spiritual discussion, asceticism, poetic composition, musical performance and ritual dance, all to achieve mystical union with God. Sufism also encompasses ordinary members of any given settled or nomadic community, who pursue regular lives but who also practice sociopolitical pacifism. For Sufis, the jihad is practiced not against others but against the moral weaknesses that spiritual reflection reveals within their own selves. The weapon they use against the human failings they share with all humankind is wisdom fueled by love. Sufis have festivals outside the normal Muslim calender of holy days, where they honor the memory of male and female saints of their sect, stretching back to its historical beginnings in the Eighth Century CE. These community-wide festivals manifest worship in the form of singing and dancing that pitch the celebrants into spiritual ecstasy and the purgation of accumulated woes, and bring on a sense of joyous immersion into a Divine reality.

The closest analog in America to Sufism in terms of its communion with God through dance, song and music would probably be the African American Gospel Churches, whose style and rituals have their origins in the secret holy services slaves held at night in the woods of the South to throw off the sense of mental and spiritual oppression they suffered at the hands of their slave-masters and overseers. This tradition ran as a subversive yet sincere parallel form of Christianity in opposition to the false Christianity whose services slaves were forced to attend and which "taught" them that their enslavement was "ordained" by God. In light of this, it is amazing that these slaves, who could not read the Bible for themselves, somehow discovered that the One True God actually wanted them to be free in soul, in mind and in body, and so intuitively created a true form of Christianity for themselves.

Many forms of Christianity in America are now more and more resembling the militant, politicized, fundamentalist forms of Islam that currently plague the world. If Christianity takes this path, it betrays Jesus as much as Islamic Terrorism betrays God and its fellow Muslims of righteous and peaceful nature. Since the Reformation, Christianity has developed different sects, and since the Enlightenment, Judaism has also branched off into a number of separate sects. These different sects evolved to serve the varied needs of different subcultures and even different socioeconomic classes, as the world grew more complex with the onset of the Modern Age. Different sects do no harm to a broader faith tradition, so long as they do not preach that those who follow other sects are damned and foment intolerance toward other people in the secular community at large, because of religious differences.

We are all coming out of a variety of ethnic, social and vocational experiences in America, where there are a wide assortment of denominations to choose from. Among these, a person of faith is free to choose a church or synagogue where they are most comfortable, whose style and emphasis of worship appeals best to that person's sensibilities and temperament. Yet no matter what the sect, if hate and intolerance is preached, it is a betrayal of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. On this point, the Sufi sect of the Third Abrahamic Religion (Islam) has much to teach us. The fact that Sufis themselves have been persecuted by Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world is indicative of their dedicated fidelity to the loving wisdom of God expressed in the Koran, over the dogmatic intolerance of their oppressors. For Sufis, the love of God and the people who are His children is their central law. Socially repressive laws are not their path.

So let us throw out rituals and sermonizing that cultivate hatred and contempt for people of other faiths, and replace them with rituals of music and dance that throw off intolerance and engender a sense of peace. Peace is what God wants us to have, for it is the only means to truly free ourselves from spiritual misery. Sufi Muslims, Progressive Christians and the Jews, unite!

Jesus' Lost Years, the Role of Women in His Life, and the Alternate Path He May Have Taken

What are we to make of Jesus' eighteen-year absence from the scriptural accounts? Aside from the pseudopigraphical account of the so-called Infant Gospel of Thomas, which reads like a blundering juvenile superhero tale out of the comic books, we know only (from the Gospel of Luke) of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem at around Bar Mitzvah age, where he indulges in a day-long discussion with Judaic scholars there, losing his sense of time in the intellectual ecstasy of philosophical disputation, and thereby unintentionally causing his parents great worry as to his whereabouts. Then we have the long blank until at age thirty Jesus seeks out John the Baptist, receives holy baptism into John's radical sect of Judaism, goes into the desert to test his soul's fitness for a higher calling in life, and then begins his fateful ministry. So what happened in between all this?

Many have pragmatically suggested that Jesus simply worked in his father's carpentry shop (or in alternate translations, "stonemason" shop) during that whole intervening period of nearly two decades. If he did pursue the life of a skilled artisan of the peasant class, we must assume the strong likelihood that Jesus would have married, as any male Jew living in a village community and of gainful employment inevitably would have. There is actually evidence for his married state in the non-canonical Gospels of Mary Magdalene and of the Apostle Phillip. In these, Jesus treats one of his female disciples with an intimate level of familiarity that Jewish custom would only have permitted between a husband and wife. Others have argued that the gestures and speech that would seem to indicate this indicate rather that this woman was not a wife but a platonic sister in a socially revolutionary cult bent on upending the imposed gender limitations of a traditional society now thought to be corrupted by its backward patriarchalism.

It is interesting that, though the canonical gospels only make peripheral mention of women (except in the discovery of the empty tomb) as "followers" of Jesus (e.g., Martha, Susanna, et al.), a rank below that of his intimate Twelve Disciples, the non-canonical gospels of Jesus, such as the Gospel of Thomas, contextually recount without any rebellious fanfare toward orthodoxy but with historical matter-of-fact equanimity as obvious the place of women in Jesus' ministry in the functional role of actual disciples. One of these non-canonical gospels (First Apocalypse of James) describes Jesus as having seven women disciples in addition to the twelve male disciples, revealing the gender equality and wholeness of his ministry as remembered by Gnostic Christians.

However, putting aside for the moment the role of women in Jesus' ministry, there is only one way in social historical terms that we can have an unmarried Jesus by the time he begins his life as a rabbi. During those "blank" years, Jesus might have left his family sooner than when he began his independent ministry. There are three known Jewish separatist communities during the time Jesus lived, wherein some of their members forwent marriage and adopted the spiritual asceticism of celibacy. These were the Therapeutae and the Qumran Sectarians. In these, there were both women and men members -- they were not sexually antagonistic monastic communities. If you want to believe that Jesus' soul came down upon the Earth and became incarnated in real human flesh and had to live in the actual body of a human being under all the stresses and temptations to which such a sentient and sensual body is subject in this sphere of existence, the youthful Jesus would have had to have practiced ascetic meditative disciplines within a supportive social community, which created for its members an alternate set of priorities and objectives than those otherwise fundamentally practiced even by virtuous people everywhere else.

It would then follow that, once Jesus had achieved a sufficient level of self-mastery over the twin forces of fear and desire, he might then have been attracted to the religious activist message of John the Baptist, an ascetic hermit, who left his self-isolation to pit himself against the corrupt forces of the secular world. After being inducted into John the Baptist's radical Judaic cult, the already ascetically-minded Jesus would have determined to test the last doubts he may have harbored about his spiritual capacities and rigor. Here he would have followed John the Baptist's own example. Jesus took the path of the hermit and faced his demons alone in solitary meditation for his fabled forty days in the wilderness (recounted in the Gospel of Matthew). This is something Jesus would not have done had he already once belonged to one of the separatist communities, where the ascetic practices took a communal rather than anchoritic form.

A recently recovered letter of the early Church Father, Bishop Clement of Alexandria, gives supporting evidence of a form of separatist cult ritual during Jesus' ministry. The Bishop tells his correspondent, a fellow churchman, that some Gnostic Christians have been sharing with their congregations a secret version of the story of Lazarus (Hebrew: "El'azar"), and enacting it as a "higher" initiation rite for Christianity, above the regular "initial" rite for acceptance into the faith used by orthodox Churches, which was simply baptism. The story the Gnostics were preaching was that Jesus had not literally raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, Jesus had actually sealed a fully alive Lazarus temporarily in a cave with instructions for his disciple to meditate and let himself "die" to his worldly desires. When the cave was unsealed three days later, Lazarus was commanded by Jesus to be reborn to world in his "higher self". Thus Lazarus' death and rebirth were not literal but figurative in the ascetic sense of those terms as metaphors for spiritual liberation from the psychological chains of worldly concern, desire and physical attachments.

But we need not wholly rely on extra-canonical scriptures for this possible understanding of Jesus' formative years. A memory of Jesus breaking with the normal fabric of Jewish life is even contained in the canonical gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, there is an incident where Jesus abjures kinship, declaring he has severed himself from being obligated to fulfill family duties to his mother or siblings because he has embraced the spiritual welfare of the world, taking the broader community of humankind as his metaphorical yet practical family of concern, which he then recommends as an attitude his disciples should adopt. This ideological premise would fit in well with the doctrines of the separatist religious communities enumerated above, in terms of its break with blood-relations who are committed to a more worldly existence, as well as with John the Baptist's call for people to spiritually engage with the whole of society, which John saw as having been led astray spiritually by invasive worldly forces.

Thus, it is possible to have a celibate Jesus who at the same time held women as equals (i.e., a non-misogynistic/non-misanthropic form of celibacy, wherein sexual desire itself was seen as a distraction from complete spiritual enlightenment, rather than being derived from any sort of idea that either gender was spiritually corrosive to the other, as the Church later taught). That Jesus had ultimate compassion for women and the lot they faced in his day is evidenced (though not immediately obviously) in his indictment of the approved practice of divorce in Mosaic Law. In his time, Jewish society was living under oppressive socioeconomic conditions from financially onerous and socially exploitative Roman overlords, and a corrupt and insouciant puppet dynasty of Idumaean client kings, whose Judaism was superficial and not of deep heritage. Under such circumstances, a Jewish man of humble means was quite vulnerable to the political web this created, and a Jewish woman of humble means was doubly so. The old system of broad kinship support for family members who had fallen into destitution due to the vicissitudes of life were breaking down, as everyone of common means faced the looming threat of politically enacted privation. Therefore in Jesus' time, a woman cast off by divorce was immediately thrust into highly desperate circumstances.

So Jesus castigates the man who would divorce his wife, because, in essence, he was abandoning her to the wolves. For women there were even fewer gainful and legitimate forms of employment than there were for men capable only of unskilled labor. And in the Roman Age which Jesus knew, women could no longer always depend upon their birth families to take them back after a divorce, due to the financial limitations most common families now endured. Such a desperate situation for the native subjects of the Roman protectorate of Judaea serves to help one understand how a man like Jesus, already precociously interested in the deeper moral questions of the Torah at the cusp of his adolescence, might have grown up during those "missing years" to reject the whole miserable set-up of a subjugated society. Had he been born into a better time when his people were free, Jesus might have been less radical in the formation of his spiritual doctrine, but still no doubt have addressed himself to the perennial moral issues that societies must face even in relatively good times.

However, the endemic suffering of his people he actually came into contact with historically would have led a person of his nature to ask deeper questions, probe for more fundamental answers. Was it merely the Romans and the lackadaisical Idumaean Court that was causing or allowing all this unwarranted physical and spiritual hardship? Or was there something more basically wrong with the whole secular enterprise of the human race? What, indeed, made humankind vulnerable to the exploitative and exclusionary cultural practices that resulted in so much social injustice? Such questions as these would have led Jesus not only to formulate a radical rejection of secular culture (with or without the Roman hegemony), but also to conceive his idea of the Kingdom of God, a utopian spiritual society on Earth. Such a religious utopia could be the only solution for a world (at least the one Jesus knew in Late Herodian Judaea) that gave every evidence of being on the brink of self-destruction -- at least in terms of how it had come to define itself over the then past twelve hundred years since the arrival of the Israelites from their forty years of wandering in the Sinai.

Sex and the Bible

Since America has certain politicians and their supporters pushing their interpretations of the Bible's ideas about human sexuality into secular law, I thought I would discuss some of the principal sections in the Bible that would demonstrate the sexual culture of the Ancient Hebrews. I will be citing the Hebrew (Old) Testament, since that is the foundation for all Judaeo-Christian notions of sexual behavior.

First of all, there is a key episode in the life of Lot, the righteous nephew of the Patriarch Abraham. In the story he receives two men of comely bearing (who are really angels). He offers them the ancient right of hospitality. Shortly a ravening mob of the city of Sodom where he lives lays siege to his house, demanding he give up the guests to them (which had been observed entering his home) for their coercive orgy, so Lot dutifully seeks to protect his guests from being raped. His guests then reveal their angelic identity by using their supernatural power to stymie the sexual madness of the crowd. Non-consensual sex is the featured sin of this story, and for this foul proclivity (among other recalcitrant inhumanities committed by that city), Sodom ends up being destroyed by Divine Wrath.

Adultery is a major sexual issue in the Hebrew Testament. It is first revealed in the life of Abram, when, fleeing famine in his own country, he repeatedly seeks to elude being murdered by his hosts by passing his wife Sarai off as his sister, because he knows men of power will covet her for her physical attractiveness. It would seem that the rule against adultery was universal in that region of the world, but that people tried to get around it by murdering (!) the husband. However, the moral sentiment of the Bible against adultery is most dramatically told in the story of David and Bathsheba. King David sees her being bathed by her maidservant from his rooftop. He falls in lust with her, but he cannot take her for a wife (though Hebrew society then did permit polygamy) because she is already married -- and to his own military commander, Uriah the Hittite. However, Uriah is away at the front, so David arranges a secret tryst with Bathsheba and they make love. She conceives, and so later informs him. David tries to elude discovery by calling Uriah back from the war to take a furlough at home with his wife, so that her conception can be rationalized as being from Uriah's lying with her. However, Uriah is too dutiful a soldier. His conscience cannot bear being given respite from the war while his fellow soldiers are suffering on the battlefield, and so he demands to be sent back. So David orders his officers to put Uriah into the battle lines where the fighting is thickest. Uriah is killed. David marries his widow. Their baby dies, and David is punished with family discord that results in a dynastic war. David repents of his sins, so God allows him to conceive another child with Bathsheba who becomes the great Solomon, and ironically, his dynastic successor.

The story of Onan is perhaps the most culturally distorted by Christians. Onan's brother died, and under the ancient laws of the time, Onan was expected to help his brother's childless widow to conceive in the absence of another male, by becoming her reproductive mate, in the event that she desired to conceive children. She implicitly did, as having children was a mark of distinction and fulfillment for women in Ancient Hebrew society. Onan, however, did not want to provide his brother's wife with heirs. Onan wanted to inherit her property, so, when he had relations with her, he pulled out before orgasm, thus dodging insemination. He died unexpectedly, and his kinfolk decided he had been struck dead by God for his selfishness. The sin here was greed for his brother's property, and robbing his brother's widow of the opportunity to have children.

Then we have the Song of Songs, an entirely poetic section of the Bible, which is attributed in authorship to King Solomon, which is why it is also known as the Song of Solomon. This is erotic poetry. It has been said that it is a metaphor for the "marriage" of the Kingdom of Israel with God. Even if it is, it uses erotic metaphors, and if these erotic expressions had been considered indecent to use between regular men and women in love, they would certainly not have been used to describe the love of God for his people of the land of Israel. And if this poem would have been considered indecent to be read literally (which many scholars think it actually was, even back when it was first written), it would not have been given the supremely grand title of "Song of Songs", whose implication puts it at the heart or center of things. It's like saying, the "Poem of Poems". Love and sex here are put on a high pedestal, and there is no discussion of procreation -- just sexual love and sexual attraction, and all in lush Semitic imagery.

The Torah portions of the Bible deal with sex in terms of ritual cleanliness in order for a person to be permitted to engage in worship and sanctified acts of devotion. Sex is implicitly accepted as a normal part of human behavior, and good hygiene is indicated to follow sexual activity. The Torah, of course, has a rule against adultery (not surprising considering the stories related above), but it also grants the right of divorce (and most especially if the marriage is barren, though it does not require that divorce be the response -- witness the decades-long childlessness of the mutually loyal Abram and Sarai). What the Torah portions of the Bible say about homosexuality must be understood in terms of the fragility of the human population in the Ancient World (indeed for most of human history). For comparison, we have pagan writings from those times where homosexuality was not considered immoral, but interestingly, we find that pagan homosexuals of means took wives and had children by them so that they could have heirs to inherit their property and to teach their offspring the worldly skills that had brought them financial success or stability. The Ancient Hebrews, being a minority (even when they had their own sovereign country) amidst neighbors of much larger populations, could not afford to have any fertile male or fertile female not participate in adding to the population of their nation. This is not a problem the human race has today. The world today is bursting at the seams with people, and economies are not growing to accommodate all this increase. Take my point where you will.

So, does the Bible teach us to be celibate? No, unless we are talking about the Pauline Epistles of the Christian (New) Testament, and that is a matter at odds with the rest of the Bible! Does it teach us to be asexual? No. Does it teach us to use sexual relations only mechanically for procreation and not for pleasure? No, unless (again) you are talking to the Apostle Paul, who was an ascetic Neoplatonist. Does it teach us to hate homosexuals? No -- just the failure to reproduce in a former society that had a high mortality (and infant mortality) rate. Does it teach us to vent our spleen against masturbation? No, it is not a topic of any importance. Does it condemn feelings of sexual attraction? No, it celebrates them. In sum, the Bible on sexual matters is most principally against rape, and against having sex with another person's spouse: adultery. It also has sacred laws which protect the innocence of children, and protects the physical integrity of animals against sexual violation by humans. The Bible points to a humane path in matters of sexuality, and must not be misinterpreted or narrowly read. The Bible is also a product of the necessities of the times in which its various books were written. Unlike the sexual legislation done in the name of God by American politicians, the Bible is not about meanspiritedness.

In light of all this, we must reconsider how we as Christians and Jews deal with the increasingly important issue of homosexuality and the civil rights of homosexuals. Science has proven it exists as a genetically-coded behavior in all species of intelligent animals. Among primates (the biological family we humans belong to), homosexual apes and monkeys have been observed as helpful protectors and caretakers of the young. We should not condemn homosexuals for not heterosexually reproducing offspring in today's society. However, if a homosexual couple are good-hearted human beings, we should not prevent them from adopting children to bring up as their own, or if they are lesbians, from receiving artificial insemination in order to have a child they can raise and nurture for themselves. Today in America, mainstream Jewish sects, like Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, and progressive Christian sects, like Episcopalianism, Lutheranism and Presbyterianism, do not condemn homosexuals. Mutual love between any two human beings is sacred in the eyes of God.

Is it God, or Something Less Than God?

There are instances from history and the Bible itself where one might rightly ask, "Is this really God speaking, or is it the wish of a less than godly scribe or soothsayer? The most obvious contrast is the God that taught the ancient Hebrews not to commit murder and to take care of their fellow humans in need, and the god that commanded them to commit acts of genocide against the Canaanites. The two voices are incompatible, and the Book of Ruth proves that at least one strong element among the ancient Hebrew community did not believe God's moral writ ended with the Hebrews themselves. Certainly by the time of the Books of the Prophets, Jewish prophets did not invoke the bloodthirsty god found in the Book of Joshua, but the just God who wanted human beings to liberate themselves from self-destructive and community-destroying moral blindness. Now going back to a more primitive era in Hebrew tribal religion, I do not dismiss the possibility that there were men who thought themselves divinely inspired who commanded the ancient Hebrews to war on their neighbors to acquire more land, but such "holy" men might have been clinically mad, or else, they were obeying something their then highly limited understanding of science left them to deduce had to be "God". We Americans do ourselves great cognitive harm in summarily dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrial life having visited the Earth in the past, much less in the present. If a technologically advanced being or beings visited ancient peoples in the Near East, those peoples could not be blamed for confusing these beings with God or his angels. If such were to have happened, we could well suspect that these visitors might run the same gamut of moral conscience to which we humans (as a species) are apt. Some might have brought messages of peace and love, and others might have sought to manipulate humans to do their will if there was something they materially needed from the Earth. If these extraterrestrials were in competition with each other, they might even resort to using their worshipful humans to commit acts of war in their "divine honor". Whatever one might choose to believe, it does not sit well that the One True God would ever have wanted human beings to commit acts of violence against each other (except in the dire necessity of self defense or in the defense of a person's loved ones and community). So laying aside the alternate possibilities that it could have been alien agents provocateur or simply charismatic sociopathic soothsayers who managed to convince their followers that god wanted them to go out and kill, this is a moral question not only of recent vintage, where philosophers most often address it to distressing historical and contemporary acts such as the Crusades and Jihads. Gnostic Christians asked the same thing: if God is Love, and murder is the worst denial of the Truth of Love, then instances in scripture where there is some sort of "divine" being telling people to make war on others must be a false god. The Gnostics called these false gods, or usurpers of the Earth, "Aeons". The Aeons were guilty of preventing the moral progress of humankind on Earth in order to maintain their power. Aeons posed as god and used humans to create political situations that suited the purposes of the Aeons but otherwise brought misery and injustice to most of the planet's inhabitants. The Gnostics ("Knowers") sought to use meditation, exegetical analysis and revelatory techniques to overthrow this deception so that their members could perceive the One True God and the true will of God on Earth, which they believed was thoroughly that of compassion and social justice. In this way, their minds and ultimately their souls could be freed from the trap created by the Aeons, who embroiled humans in deceptively justified conflicts that held back true enlightenment and the fulfillment of humankind's moral growth. So, while many orthodox faiths deride the Gnostics today as the "lunatic fringe" of the Ancient World, I find myself thinking that anyone who believes their god has told them to go slaughter their neighbors is the real member of the fringe of lunacy.

Is it Envy? Or is it a Thirst for Righteousness?

Envy is a sin long targeted by Christian dogma, and is rooted in the Mosaic Decalogue, which commands people to "not cover thy neighbor's goods". The Apostle Paul rightly pointed out that envy undermines Christian fellowship. In Catholic doctrine it is a "deadly sin", because they define it as a desire by the sinner that a person who has something the sinner lacks be deprived of that thing. Now we have political candidates using Biblical and theological language to characterize the outcry against greed and the gross imbalance in the distribution of wealth (which has become a 99 to 1 ratio in the United States), as the "sin of envy".

Is it really defensible on a Christian basis to justify the siphoning of wealth from the many into the hands of the few, and to call the righteous indignation of the poor, "envy"? I have yet to find the model in either the Hebrew or Christian Testaments for this concept of "divinely favored" capitalists "rightly" quashing the "whining" throats of the "unworthy" poor, as though the poor were enemies of God, "the Giver of Wealth". Where is this gospel, this epistle, this proverb, this psalm, this legendary exemplum in holy scripture that justifies or alludes to such a reading of our present circumstances? I find it nowhere in either the canonical books of the Bible, nor even in any of the ancient Christian or Jewish texts that were at one time or another used for religious guidance but didn't make it into the Bible.

Jesus humorously said that it is easier for a poor man to enter the kingdom of God than for a rich man, for whom it is like trying to push a camel through the eye of a needle. The Hebrew Testament decries those who worship the pagan deity, Mammon, who was a god of wealth, seeing such worship as an abomination to those who worship a moral deity, namely, the One True God. So we really need to back up from the claims these politicians are making about the religious connotations of "covetousness" and "envy".

The Bible is full of compassion for the poor, and does not fault them for their poverty (a point I have addressed in an earlier article of this blog). In fact, the the prophet Amos specifically blames a rise in poverty on the gratuitous actions of the wealthy, whose corruption he deems sinful in the eyes of God. In light of this, we must qualify that "envy" and "covetousness" in an accurate Biblical and religious context must mean not merely the desire for things one does not have that another does, but actually, a desire for things one does not need, if it is to be considered sinful.

The outcry of the poor is not for the private planes, helicopters, limousines, villas, beach houses, expensive clothes, precious jewels, rare wines and exotic cuisine of the rich. Rather, it is the reasonable desire for decent jobs, decent health-care, decent schools, decent housing, clean water, clean air, proper transportation, and the financial ability to have enough leisure to spend quality time with family, loved ones, and even alone with oneself. A demand for such basic human needs hardly constitutes "envy" or "covetousness", that is, if we are invoking Biblical authority or the time-tested religious doctrine of any Christian of Jewish denomination.

These politicians are distorting, even perverting the context and meaning of holy scripture and established moral teaching in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. To so cynically undermine moral principles in the name of God for such mercenary purposes as to obtain a seat of power constitutes more than heresy. As Christians, as Jews, we must not allow politicians, much less pundits posing as preachers, to hijack unchallenged our faith traditions in the world of public discourse and political action. Jesus was not afraid to call hypocrites by their proper descriptor.

The Alternate Soteriologies of the Judaeo-Christian Tradition

Soteriology is the religious doctrine of spiritual salvation. The first answer you will get from most Christians on how to find salvation will be some form of the following injunction: "accept Christ as your savior and believe that he died on the cross to save us from our sins." Yet there have always been the added doctrines of repentance and good works. The troubling matter is that Christians have traditionally not believed their Jewish siblings are saved, because Jews do not believe that Christ is the Savior. What Christians fail to grasp is that Jews have been concerned with salvation from the beginning, and that their rite of Yom Kippur is as solemn and moving a ceremony as Good Friday. Yom Kippur is the focus of Judaic repentance and salvation, but it emphasizes salvation in this life. It is both a personal and communal recognition of and meditation on human moral fallibility and the harm we do each other and ourselves, either through ignorance, insouciance, fear, anger or greed. Yom Kippur is a day to renew one's personal covenant and for the human community to renew their covenant with God. The covenant in question is not worthiness for the piece of real estate called Canaan. It is about the privilege of continuing to live in this world, where we have the opportunity to make a positive difference in our own soul and in the lives of others. It is also the culmination of their New Year Festival, which begins on Rosh Hashanah, and the great metaphor is "for God to inscribe one's name once again in the Book of Life". It is a beautiful ceremony, and as a Christian, I have never found anything in it that is not in agreement with the spirit of Christianity. In fact, it leads to an important realization: Jews do not need the Crucifixion to be saved. They've got the salvation thing well in hand. Christians need to consider that Jesus himself set up the meditation for spiritual salvation before there was any foreshadowing of unavoidable doom on the cross. It came in the form of what we call the Lord's Prayer. This prayer, which many scholars believe is the most authentic utterance of Jesus reported by the gospel writers, is more like a recipe for establishing and maintaining a good covenant with God, and thereby, salvation. The key phrase is a metaphorical one: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors", or in an alternate version, "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespasses against us". This is one of the greatest challenges a Christian faces, but there were Jews in the Qumram sectarian community who were writing in Aramaic (Jesus' mother tongue) on the same difficult moral realization before Jesus began his ministry. There are people who harm us out of moral indifference, our of malice, out of ignorance, out of jealousy, and any number of other bizarre psychological reasons. We ourselves, even if blessed with spiritual guidance, meet with difficulties in this life that cause us to hurt the feelings or condition of others, and to harm ourselves, out of fear or lack of reflection, or maybe even for the same reasons listed above for why others choose to hurt us. We want God to forgive us for these errors, even as we seek to repair the damage we have done in our thoughtlessness. Jesus' pairing of "forgive and you shall be forgiven" demonstrates his own soteriology, before people decided after he had died that his soteriology devolved from his Crucifixion. Jesus saw everything and everyone as interconnected with each other and with God. We want God to understand our moral frailty and give us another chance, but so we must do the same for each other, that the world might be healed. Of course, common sense dictates that we protect ourselves, remove ourselves from those who are bent on doing harm, because they are incapable of moral reason, either because of sociopathology or a thoroughly abused or neglected childhood, or because they were taught not to care. And we must remember that to forgive is not to condone a misdeed. But while Jesus certainly would not want us to continue to be victims of such people, he does want us to pity them (for their actions reflect an inner hell), and to forgive them is to let go of the harm they have done that cripples us. I do not say that I find this easy or always do-able. It would be nice if everyone you might forgive were people who were mostly good or well-intentioned, but had made a mistake, a misjudgment, an error born of impulsive haste. This is sometimes the case. There are impoverished youths who commit crimes in the desperation and confusion of adolescence who later repent of their wrongs in the spiritual maturity and healing gratitude of a second chance in adulthood. And one need not tell a person you have forgiven them -- in fact, such an act might in some cases be dangerous or unappreciated. The forgiveness can be expressed in the silence of prayer, in the private sanctuary of the mind. It is more about letting go of the bitterness so that the heart can be free again. The Lord's Prayer and the great sermons of social conscience of Jesus are the essential link Christianity has with Judaism in terms of spiritual renewal. Through his words and exemplary acts of compassion, Jesus gave us the means to salvation before he was executed on the cross by due process of Roman Law and its colonial judicial system. If Jesus had lived out a full life and simply died of old age like so many rural rabbis of his kind before and since, he would still have imparted to us a solid soteriology. No, Jews do not need to believe in the Cross to have salvation. They worship the same God Christians do, and before his untimely death, Jesus left behind for searching Gentiles moral directions to the Way of Judaism.

The Error of Right-Wing Christianity on the Issue of Poverty

"The poor shall always be among us," Jesus famously said. But his observation was not to excuse the society that generated poverty, or to accept it without seeking to right the social injustices that cause poverty. Jesus realized that we live in a world that will always have forces of greed that cause problems of need in other portions of the population. The Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke clearly spell out that Jesus did not condemn the poor for being poor, but put their suffering among God's foremost concerns. The two primary theologians of predestination, Augustine and Calvin, were both quite wrong in their lines of logic. Using Augustine, Medieval Catholicism practically institutionalized poverty as divinely ordained. Taking their cue from Calvin, Protestantism determined that the poor were poor because of their sins. Nowhere does Jesus say anything remotely like this. Moreover, if we look at the holy scripture that Jesus himself studied, the Hebrew Testament, we find the tradition of compassion for the poor goes way back. Among the Bible's books of the prophets, like that of Amos, and in its books of moral law, like that of Deuteronomy, we encounter unreserved expressions of a sense of duty to the poor, and that such an attitude was considered Divinely enjoined upon the people and whatever form of governance they might create for themselves. Jewish prophets and Hebrew priestly writers demanded that laypeople take responsibility for the issue of poverty, to care for the poor, to correct the imbalances that create poverty, and to reflect upon the sins of greed and narrow-minded self-interest that exacerbate poverty. So poverty is a central issue of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is solemn responsibility among the Mosaic lawgivers, and a burning moral concern in the ethical injunctions uttered by the prophets. Therefore, a natural form of orthodoxy in the expression of Christian faith would be to support governments, economies, policies, laws, bills and political leaders that correct imbalances between those who are flourishing and those who know only (or mostly) want. Charitable work is critical, but it does not solve the problem. People must be given the means to escape poverty. Instead, Christian fundamentalists have been supporting political agendas that are entrapping more and more people in a state of poverty. Yes, the poor will always be among us, for any variety of reasons, including mental illness and self-destructive psychologies, but most people can be saved from poverty, because most people have a will to flourish. But people cannot flourish if there is no real substantial capital available for them to work for or work with. Where have all the factories gone? They have been moved to where people are made to work like slaves. This is not a Christian policy. It is a violation of both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments.

To Question Is to Be Jewish: A Healthy Example for Christians

If we want to focus on perhaps the most intrinsic difference between Christianity and Judaism in terms of spiritual temperament, it is that Jews freely put the beliefs and stories of their faith to questions, while Christians tend to be timid, even when they are feeling internal doubts. Whence the cause of inhibition among Christians, when their parent faith, Judaism, is unafraid to pose questions to the claims and will of God, holy scripture and religious authorities?

In the Hebrew Testament (Tanakh), there are actual mythic (I mean this adjective in its original sense) precedents for the right of human beings to petition resolutions or to demand explanations for the justification of supposedly moral acts of dubious nature: in Genesis, Abraham questions God about whether all the people of Sodom deserve to be destroyed, or whether the innocent should die alongside the wicked, just because the latter prevail, and God honors Abraham's plea that the innocent be given warning that they might flee before its destruction; in the Book of Job, the central figure of Job questions God about his numerous and prolonged sufferings, despite the virtuous life he has unfailingly endeavored to live, and though he is chastised for presuming he can understand the motives of a Supreme Being, God nevertheless does not punish Job for plaintively asking, even if, God, in this tale, feels it is practically impossible to make a mere mortal understand the complex designs of the divine cosmos. In the Gospel of Matthew of the Christian Testament (the most Judaic of the Gospels), Jesus himself asks God why He has forsaken him while he is dying an undeserved death, and earlier, whether he must "drink" from such a fatal "cup", when he contemplates the imminent threat of crucifixion by the Romans. We must remember that Jesus was a Jew, and so he felt no disinclination to ask questions of God. Jews would go on to affirm the act of the question as a virtual sacrament in the rabbinic tradition of Midrashic debate, which stretched from Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and to this very day (though admittedly the philosopher Spinoza, when he questioned the very existence of God, was excommunicated in the Seventeenth Century by his own community of Dutch Jews, thus showing there could be limits to this principle in some Jewish congregations).

However, very soon after the establishment of Christianity, one branch, that of the Apostle Paul, resolved that if questions were to be asked, they should be asked not of God, but of authoritative religious figures such as Paul himself. The congregations who asked questions of Paul as an arbiter of orthodoxy, were expected to be satisfied with his answers, which admittedly were for the most part well thought out, if not always without personal prejudices (which later proved problematic for a balanced development of Christian spirituality). Other scholars who joined the Christian faith followed Paul in assuming they could tie up any doubts, as though doubt itself were an inherent threat to the viability of the faith. By the time the orthodox writer Augustine had completed his City of God, the form of Christianity that would eventually win out over others was pretty much bottled up in terms of whether or not there could be any more "open" questions.

This is in contradistinction to a parallel form of Christianity embraced by the Apostle Thomas, for which asking questions was a sacred and protected right of any Christian: this was Gnostic Christianity. The fact that Gnostic Christianity was effectively demonized by the Church Father, Iranaeus in the Second Century and finally implicitly outlawed by the Council of Nicaea in the Fourth Century, does not mean its spirit did not live on through the Middle Ages and into the Reformation. Perforce of social frustrations and real unmet spiritual needs among people from all walks of life (but especially the disenfranchised), Christian heretics reopened the questions that upholders of orthodoxy had assumed their tradition had sealed. Those branded as heretics were able to ask these questions long enough at different times for the reigning Church to register them in defamatory records, and then suppress the questioners through various forms of intimidation. And to make extra certain that none of the Church's own ostensibly loyal clergy had become contaminated by these outbreaks of heresy, great thinkers serving the Church were recruited to work out new arguments that would further solidify (or plug the leaks) in the inflexible doctrinal positions established hitherto by the Church Fathers.

Later internal corruption had created such dry-rot in an institution grown weak by over-protection, that Martin Luther's originally intended call for a scholarly debate set off the spark of a revolution (which we today call the Reformation) among a spiritually alienated populace. At this time in the Sixteenth Century, the questions were reopened, and the secular powers at last stepped in to protect those questions. Unfortunately, secular and reformist religious authorities imposed a limit on how many questions these liberated Christians could ask. Thus the Protestants themselves persecuted some of their own fellow revolutionaries as heretics: the Lutherans disavowed the Anabaptists; the Calvinists disavowed the Anti-Trinitarians; the Anglican Church under King Henry VIII disavowed the de facto Neo-Lollardism of William Tyndale and his followers; the French humanists came to disavow the Huguenots; the Puritans disavowed the Quakers. So Protestantism (no less than Catholicism) showed itself resistant to the natural human desire to question spiritual and religious assumptions.

Today, we Christians should consciously embrace from our Judaic heritage (if nothing else) at least the sense that God grants us the right to ask questions and question acts made in His name. No soul can grow without asking questions of this world, and it is no less true of religious faith. There are eternal truths that do carry over from age to age and culture to culture. However, the world and knowledge of the universe is ever changing, and the human mind itself is rapidly evolving. Under these circumstances, for any faith tradition to survive and remain relevant, it must welcome the questioning mind and not condemn it.