In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.
One of my biggest beefs with my baby brothers and sisters in Christ is their insistence that we cannot be Jesus people unless we interpret the Bible literally, which is literally impossible to do.
To interpret the Bible literally is to abandon all recognition of story telling elements. The logic of literalism demands we believe human history began in a garden with a talking snake and magical beings live in the sky.
Talking animals and sky dwellers occur frequently in stories not in the Bible. When I culled around in Campus Crusade for Christ during my youth, the standard objection to taking nonbiblical stories literally was that they were too fantastical to be believed, but plain damn science if they were in the Bible.
We hear legends, myths, fairy tales, and fables when we are children. These stories are called fabula.
No one believes the animals in Aesop's stories actually talked. I shouldn't have to write this. Anyone reading this blog knows it to be true.
However, evangelicals want to believe fabula is history if it happened in the Bible. In that, and in other ways as we have learned recently in the Sleazy Don era of American politics, evangelicals are all too easily deceived.
Imagine remaining a child all of your life and believing a wolf miraculously grew a larynx and vocal cords and actually spoke Greek in one of Aesop's fables just because grownups, who are elder children themselves, said you must believe it.
My second beef stems from the first. Evangelicals unfortunately are the most public face of Christianity American Style. This has dire results for our faith.
One result is virtually no scientific person will seek to be a Christian if they are convinced that they must believe nonsense. Evangelicals believe science is nonsense because sin makes it appear to be true.
That lightening theory that natural law makes electrical bolts strike the ground, or blasphemers, falls away from our eyes and our hearts once we accept the evangelical light of supernaturalism.
But the word "science" means knowledge. Knowledge is so true that the biggest lying, drunken, drug-taking woman or man-slut and brazen hypocrite on earth (or in office) should know the germ theory is true along with the most pious soul who ever existed.
And if it is not true, scientists will prove that to be the case.
Another result of evangelicals being the most public face of Christianity is the dire consequence that often follows their puerile thinking.
Covid 19 is a good example of the latter, but first, a few other asinine examples:
Public evangelicals make Balaam-asses of themselves when they invoke angels from Africa to stop citizens from counting votes or when a dubiously sane television preacher avers that his god told him Donald Trump would win the election.
I reckon God lied to him. Apparently, lying is no terrible sin nowadays in light of that nutty preacher's Trumpian dispensation theology.
Ditto a congregation that believes Jesus will inoculate them from the plague because their preacher tells them so. That kind of believing didn't work for priests during the bad old Bubonic times. It doesn't work now.
The plague is a force of nature. It belongs in the same mix of natural events that includes storms, floods, earthquakes, solar flares, asteroid collisions, and extinctions. Bad things happen in nature, and we would all do well to know bad can become genocidal if we do not use the knowledge we possess.
One reason why it is difficult to deal with a plague is because we don't like what our reason tells us. Plagues feel distant and harmless...that is until we contract it or witness the demise of someone we love who has contracted it.
Let's face it and not run away from it. God's ability to save believers and unbelievers from disease has vastly improved because of medical science.
Think about when the world wide flu hit in 1918. The germ theory was forty-seven years old. Pasteur created an inoculation that cured anthrax in farm animals in 1881. Thirty-seven years would pass before 1918 saw inoculations saving lives.
Today, we have more knowledge and experience during this Covid 19 year of 2020. If we rely on that, deaths will not be as bad as in the past. If we turn our backs on knowledge for some political or religious ideology (idolatry: same thing), we are choosing ignorance and the suffering that follows.
Going back to the hurricane analogy, a plague can feel as distant as a hurricane does if we are living on a mountain in Tennessee and watching a Katrina or a Zeta smash New Orleans. We see it happen in the news, but it is too distant to affect us. Tell that to the Big Easy.
However, a hurricane would feel really real if a storm knocked out our satellite grid so that we could not play Fortnite, or check our likes on Facebook, or hear a nutty preacher tell us that Jesus told him that he (or Jesus) would be playing in the next SuperBowl.
During times like this when truth feels right despite knowledge, we should rely more on reason.
We will never hear a politician say about a hurricane, "It's just a breeze. It's a hoax. It will miraculously disappear some day. Go outside. Buy some KFC. If it gets too breezy you can hide under a tree. Besides, it's not as if a little wind will blow your neighborhood off the face of the earth."
But we might hear a Deuteronomist minded Christ-child say that a hurricane hit Haiti a hundred years after they liberated themselves from a French oppressor because God wasn't too happy slaves wanted freedom and got it.
If we're going to think that way, let's be consistent. We could very well say Yahweh or Allah is punishing former confederate states, once again, for being terrible idolaters and systemic haters of humanity not of their color. Except this time, GOD didn't send a federal army. This time GOD sent storms, floods, earthquakes, and plague.
Are pharaohs governing Deep South states, now?
That wack is as plausible as that Haitian theological Balaam-assinity (sic) that nutty ninety year old baby Christian espoused.
It is crucial to shine the good lamp on doctrine. If dogma turns shadow before the glow of our GOD of love that we proclaim, then leave those doctrines on the wall or on the ground or in Sheol where they belong.
Blessings...
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