Jesus was way cool

Well, remind me not to joke about religion on the blog again. Which is what I was doing in the last post. I was a bit tired and antsy – train from Banbury had turned magically into a coach, chesty cough was going all sinal – and religion had been bemusing me of late, not just with this film, about which I don’t really care too much, but also the whole gay marriage thing. So I had a rant, and everyone took me seriously. I even got a nice email from Minnesota expressing amazement that I’d written it. So, for the record, here’s my cack-handed, ill-informed take on religion and I promise never to revisit it on this forum again.

I’ve had two major brushes with Christianity in my adult life. The first was back in 1992 when a friend-of-a-friend who had just been born again had taken it upon himself to save my friend Dave. We all became good drinking buddies and generally the god thing wasn’t brought up, but occasionally we’d find ourselves somehow in church. Dave took great offense at this, being a staunch atheist, but I found it quite fascinating. It was one of those happy-clappy, laying-on-of-hands “family” churches with an enigmatic pastor/vicar/preacher/whatever and a visibly geeky congregation. Or at least the young people were. I was struck by how those in their late teens and early twenties seemed to need the community of the church more than the actual religion. It was closer to genre fandom, of which I know a fair bit having been a regular attendee of comics conventions for over 15 years now, and had the same pitty-inducing feeling about it. A tribe of lost souls who don’t really fit into mainstream society so they take cover behind rules and rituals. But hey, I’m as bad as the rest (just with a more ironic knowing smirk, which probably makes it worse) so this isn’t a criticism, more that I could see it for what it was. What was really interesting was that they blanked me completely, even when I showed an interest and asked questions. Despite being officially an evangelical organisation they had an unspoken, and probably unconscious, criteria. I flattered myself into thinking I was too skeptical for them and maybe I was right. I was far too confident and sorted to comfortably take into their safe little world.

Fast forward to April 2002 and, after a troubling few months, I’m going to the doctor to sort out my depression. I am at my lowest ebb, having given up any hope of battling this on my own, and have gone to seek help for something I didn’t understand and could find no rational explanation for. Before seeing the doctor I had to have a physical check-up with the nurse, as reported on this blog, who spent 45 minutes telling my how Jesus had helped her in the past and maybe he could help me. Maybe she was right. Maybe If I had accepted Jesus into my life everything would be sorted out. And of course I was not at all confident and completely un-sorted. A safe little world would have been very appealing. Suffice to say I left feeling confused and, in retrospect, not a little bit angry.

Here’s what I think. The universe is a very complicated and confusing place. It is very hard for a human being to make sense of it and impossible to keep on top of it’s multifaceted causality. There are an infinite number of causes having an infinite number of effects which are so complex you’re not going to be able to cope with them. Even if you think reality is determined, that we have no free will and that our future is laid out it is so complicated that you might as well think we have total free will. So we cope with this by finding patterns and metaphors and the biggest one of all is religion.

Notice I’m not saying religion is a bad thing, or that subscribing to it is a weakness. I just see it as a way of putting the universe into easily manageable compartments so that the inquiring mind can be put to rest allowing you to get on with the more essential things in life. I have plenty of rules that I live by, some quite major (do good by others and they will do good by you), some pretty insignificant (buses will turn up as I’m walking to the bus stop but not when I’m at it), most not really worth articulating, and in essence they form my own religion. On the whole they work for me and they overlap with people I like to mix with enough that we’re able to get on. But, and here’s the important part, I know they’re not accurate. I’m prepared and often willing for them to be changed or replaced as necessary depending on the situation. There’s a general consistency between them and and continuity in the change but I don’t really consider them to be the truth because if I know one thing it’s that I can’t know the truth. I can just try to get as close to it as possible. (You are free to invoke Socrates at this point if you wish.)

When someone says to me that they follow the teachings of Jesus in their life then I generally have a lot of respect for them. I admire someone who is able to follow a spiritual path without wavering, to be aware of their thoughts and actions by contrasting them with a system of belief. I also have a lot of time for the teachings of Jesus. He seems like a good man to me – turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour, the establishment of non-commercial zones – and I used to joke (joke mind!) that I was probably more Christian than most of the Christians I’d met.

That said, when someone tells me that something is wrong because they Bible says so, well, I have a problem with that. Quite often it’s being used as a crutch to back up a gut feeling that can’t be intellectually articulated. To take a contemporary example, I can think of no reason at all why gays should not get married and I challenge anyone to do so without invoking religion. I suspect it comes down to not really liking the idea of it. (Insert rambling paragraph about how marriage is historically a financial contract between two families and that the notion of romance in marriage is a relatively modern concept.) If you can’t get your head around the intricacies of homosexual love, if it makes you kinda queasy to think of gay sex, if it all seems just plain wrong to you then, actually, that’s fine. But please, don’t try and rationally justify it by invoking your religion because that is not an argument. It’s just your way of dealing with things that don’t fit into your rules for coping with the world. And since your rules are not accurate you are going to meet things that don’t fit.

And that’s pretty much what I was getting at with my sarcastic questioning of the whole “Jews killed Jesus” thing. It strikes me that a lot of people who have a problem with Jews are going to use their religion as an argument to justify their irrational fear/hatred of them, and their using the ever-loving, ever-forgiving Jesus as the backbone to do this is either tragically sad or deliciously ironic. Mel Gibson may have made a wonderfully spiritual movie that touches on the essence of the Christian spirit or he may have made the finest gore-fest in the history of splatter movies (I refer you at this point to Mark Kermode’s excellent review from the POV of a Christian horror buff) – to be honest I’m not bothered either way. But if people use this as an excuse to foist their fears and prejudices upon the world in which I live in then they deserve to be, at the very least, laughed at.

In essence, then, believe all you want as you cope with this weird and wonderful world but don’t stop thinking.