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CounterPunch
Weekend
Edition
August 10, 2002
How Does Christianity
Work?
by Lawrence McGuire
I used to say that I grew up where the Bible Belt
buckles, but these days I wonder if that quintessentially American
expression has any meaning. Uncle Sam doesn't just have a religious
accessory now, a Bible Belt strapped around his Southern waist,
he sports a full length Bible Body Suit, a spiritual coat of
armor for defending all the soft spots (war crimes, corporate
theft, poverty etc.) of the body politic from The Devil Twins,
otherwise known as Common Sense and Reason.
I attended Sunday School and Church every
Sunday, sang 'Onward Christian Soldiers' in the children's choir
and for the Christmas pageant donned my Dad's bathrobe for my
annual shepherd's role. But though I memorized hundreds of verses,
for some reason religion rolled off of me like rain rolling off
a duck's back. I guess I was born with some kind of natural immune
system to the damp viral charms of Christianity.
Luckily for me I was born in twentieth
century USA rather than, say, twelfth century France, or twentieth
century Saudi Arabia, (or twenty-first century USA). I could
boldly say "Your God is a creation of  the human
mind" and though somebody might threaten to kick my ass,
there was little likelihood that I would be burned at the stake,
or have a hand chopped off.
As a self-proclaimed agnostic (pure atheism
seeming too certain, in effect another form of dogmatic belief)
I attracted the well-honed conversion skills of countless evangelical
Christians, whose good intentions were not wasted because they
stimulated me to develop counter-conversion arguments. Over the
years I heard just about every argument for Christianity that
has ever been formulated, and I learned how to refine my counter
argument. My problem was (and still is I suppose) that I could
never keep my mouth shut about Christianity. I not only did not
believe, I questioned believers about why in the world THEY believed.
My response to Christianity has changed
over the years. Originally it was 'that doesn't make sense'.
Among the things that didn't make sense were some of the basics:
the virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension, the divinity
of Jesus Christ. I simply didn't think the world worked like
that. No evidence.
Later I became critical of the logic
of the Christian belief, especially the tendency for Christians
to prove the Bible is the Word of God by quoting the Bible itself.
That, I would say, makes as much sense as asking a con man (or
a CEO) if he is honest, or a devout Muslim if the Koran is the
Word of God. It proves nothing. Another logical sleight of hand
that I uncovered was the 'leap of faith', whose honey can be
used to swallow any crazy idea that catches in your throat. But
it's not a recommended method for getting you over the Grand
Canyon, or even a roadside ditch.
But I found that logical inconsistencies
are absolutely no problem for Christians. Though they may attempt
to convert the non-believer with logical-sounding arguments,
Christians, if these arguments are proven illogical, just keep
on rolling like Casey Jones. They think up something else even
crazier, like Heaven or Hell or, my personal favorite, The Rapture.
So I switched to a more potent approach:
the accusation of hypocrisy and the evidence of Christian history.
I would quote the Ten Commandments 'Thou Shalt Not Kill', and
the New Testament 'Love Thy Neighbor As Yourself' and ask, "So
why do you, a Christian, support dropping cluster bombs on other
human beings?" This is where Christianity shows its human
pretzel ability. No matter how clear a certain verse sounds,
there's another one somewhere which says exactly the opposite.
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and Jesus cleaned out the temple
with a whip in his hands. Morality can be twisted and fly off
in the opposite direction faster than you can flip the page from
Matthew to Deuteronomy. You could say the Bible makes hypocrisy
inevitable. 'War is Peace' is, after all, not an invention of
Orwell. 'Just war' is not an invention of Aquinas. It's right
there in the Bible. And in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the
16th century Religious Wars, the Spanish conquest of Mexico,
the Anglo-Saxon extermination of the Native Americans, etc.,
etc.
The response to my recitation of Christian
Crimes was very similar to George Bush's current defense of corporate
capitalism: yes there are some bad apples, but the apple basket
is fundamentally sound. So, how much mass murder will it take
to delegitimize Christianity, or any religion?
But, looking at myself in the mirror,
I have to say 'we are all hypocrites'. And there are countless
Christians who put their belief into action every day. For example,
many of the people protesting courageously against the School
of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, are at least partly
motivated by their Christian faith. However there are also countless
others doing equally heroic moral protests who are not motivated
by religious belief. Moral courage is not dependant upon a certain
form of belief or non-belief. My critique of Christianity is
not disproved by courageous Christian activists.
However, seeing a flaw in my hypocrisy
argument I moved into my psychological phase. I studied the inner
Christian, looking for Nietschean 'ressentiment', and Freudian
'guilt complexes'. Frankly, this was a fertile area of research.
If you probe many sincere Christians you often discover oily
wells of anger, inferiority, guilt and shame. The religion seems
to create and nourish underground oceans of the stuff.
I started calling Christianity the Snake
With the Magic Tail. The snake has its fangs buried in your neck
(the shame and guilt) but if you bite down hard enough on the
snake's magic tail (absolute faith) it withdraws the fangs a
little, and your pain is relieved (forgiveness). It's a whole
system, but Christians don't see the connections.
During my psychological phase I also
discovered the reason for the pervasiveness of Christian hypocrisy.
People have a natural tendency to want to think well of themselves.
So they think 'I'm a good Christian' and 'The US is a good Christian
Nation' a few hundred times a day. However there is always evidence
that they are not a 'good Christian' and 'the U.S. is not a good
Christian Nation'; for example, those children's corpses at the
Afghan wedding ceremony last month, courtesy of US helicopter
gunships. But acknowledging this atrocity would prevent the pleasant
feeling which comes with thinking 'We are a Christian nation'
and also require the good Christian to challenge the status quo
(that is, to have moral courage). So the massacre of other human
beings is often ignored. Or even better (to get a really wonderful
feeling), justified.
Sometimes I would trip up my Christian
interlocutor with a particularly maddening little argument, which
I'm sure I encountered while browsing in a New Age bookstore:
Christians aren't following Jesus, they are following the followers
of Jesus. In reality Jesus never claimed to be divine, that was
a song and dance invented by his biographers, the famous Jerusalem
quartet, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and later developed by
Paul. The apostles deified Jesus in order to have the power of
Priests, and Christians have been worshipping the Priests' invention
for 2000 years.
Later I added the sociological 'opiate
of the people' angle, and I carried a pretty solid defense in
my briefcase against evangelical Christians.
But my greatest discovery was absurdly
simple: instead of asking 'Does it make sense?', or 'Is it logical?'
or 'What is its history?' or 'What is its psychology?' or 'What
is its sociology?' I asked another question: 'How does Christianity
work?'.
This is when I realized that Christians
(and all Believers, for that matter) are worshipping themselves.
This is simple to prove. It's as easy as 1-2-3.
1) Christians learn about Christ and
Christianity by reading the Bible, and by listening to others
'tell the story'.
2) This learning becomes part of their
memory. (It doesn't take a genius to see that around 99% of the
time people believe the religion of their parents and their culture,
which, like all conditioning, is carried by the memory.)
3) They worship this part of their memory,
calling it 'God'. Thus they are worshipping a product of their
own conditioning. They are worshipping themselves.
This helps explain many interesting characteristics
of Christian behavior. For example, since Christians are worshipping
themselves they identify completely with the object of their
worship. Any questioning of their religion is immediately felt
as a personal attack, and they react accordingly. And so the
court decision in California, which said that the phrase 'one
nation under God' was unconstitutional, was experienced by millions
of Christians as a personal threat.
And the conditioning process itself can
be seen as a parental form of spiritual violence against defenseless
children.
So now, when asked what I believe, I
state: 'I believe that humanity needs to examine the process
of how belief works' and I invite my questioner to examine that
process with me.
Unfortunately, after working so many
years to build up a solid analysis of Christianity, I made the
worst mistake a non-believer can make. I'm talking about a non-believer
like myself, who actually enjoys arguing with religious people.
I left the one place where my painfully developed skills could
be used 24/7 to frustrate conversion-oriented Christians, the
USA, and I moved to a place where there was nobody to argue with.
A place where people don't care much about religion. A place
where people are more concerned with cooking than praying. A
place where lots of people send their kids to private Catholic
schools (subsidized by the State), but almost nobody goes to
Church.
You guessed it, I moved to France.
So now, when I spot one of those duos
of white shirted well-scrubbed young Mormon men (I know, according
to some they are not 'real' Christians, but at least they are
definitely 'true believers'), who seem to be more prevalent in
European plazas than Peruvian bands, I immediately rush over,
and, with a little smile, offer myself as a conversion candidate.
It's a sure cure for homesickness.
Lawrence McGuire
is the author of The
Great American Wagon Road. He lives in France.
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August 10/11,
2002
Walt Brasch
The Bush
2 Legacy...So Far
August 9,
2002
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August 8,
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