Hell is a Path of Fear and Division

This is one of the most corruptive factors of Hell theology.  It puts a wall between neighbors.  The reason Evangelicals have such a well-defined and separate subculture is because they don't love their neighbors... they fear their neighbors.  Secularists, unbelievers, non-Christians, and people of other faiths (or lesser forms of Christianity) are good for only one thing - conversion.

ANY church that has Hell in their theology is on a path of fear and division.  They may have great coffee and children's programs.  They may do some fine local charity work.  Their pastor may talk about love and acceptance repeatedly.  But in the end, they will draw you into an insular community that cannot love people beyond their faith.

Ask the Pastor to give you a straight answer, "Do you believe God will eternally punish anyone who does not become a member of your faith?"  If he or she does not answer with a firm "No", leave immediately.

Before even getting that far, check their website under their Beliefs.  Churches often like to save their Hell talk for AFTER you join... but you can usually find it buried in their statements of belief.

Into the Trash Can

It is a testament to the grooming and indoctrination that children are subjected to that the moral horrors of this story do not occur to most American believers.  I actually spent decades siding with Jehovah on this story.

Growing up learning Greek Mythology, I was very aware of the human frailties of the gods on Mount Olympus.  They were petty, cruel, and often downright nuts.  Yet, I couldn't connect the dots for that awareness with my god.  I would read passages of scripture where Jehovah/Yahweh was being as awful as any Greek deity... but I just couldn't put 2 and 2 together.  I could spot the holes in other religions easily... but remained oblivious to my own.

The religious scholar, Bart Ehrman, has an explanation for this.  He says it is because we read the holy books of other religions objectively but we read our own devotionally.  That hit me like a bolt from Thor's hammer when I heard it.  I decided to try reading my Bible objectively.

Whoa, Nellie!  I had a Damascus road experience.  The scales fell from my eyes.  It was like reading a completely different book.  For the first time, it seemed really problematic that blood was painted over doorposts so that God would know which children NOT to kill.  How on earth had that not bothered me before?

For weeks after that revelation, I poured over scripture finding insults to humanity I had never "seen".  My god was just like all the other gods I had read about - just as petty, cruel, and often downright nuts.

It has now been over a decade since I have really read my bible.  While cleaning recently, I found it, dust-covered, underneath a dresser.  The Amplified translation, red cloth case, page after page highlighted with notes in the margins.  Unceremoniously, I took it outside and dumped it in the trash can.

I know folks still find use in reading it objectively.  Like the Greek Myths, there is value to be found when read as a story.  But for me, having been so indoctrinated, the greater value was in a clean break.  My moral compass can be encouraged and refined by books that do not, in my case, have so much baggage and negative history.

Before You Speak

I recently heard a believer state a commonly used position when arguing their point -

"Don't be mad at me, be mad at God. I'm just telling you what he says." 

Of course, I know other believers who use scripture to maintain a view opposite that of the speaker.  People bring their history, culture, politics, even their personality... to their reading and study. I don't think anyone gets a clean read... of anything.

In the end, believers draw different messages out of the Bible based on who they are. So, I maintain that everyone just needs to take responsibility for their own arguments.  As King Leonidas said,

"Before you speak, Persian, know that in Sparta, everyone, even a king's messenger, is held accountable for the words of his voice."

Cleaning the Classroom

The psychology of this is fascinating to watch play out in a classroom.  Kids are very different.  

Out of twenty kids, I will have 4 actively working... at not picking up or putting away anything. 

Another 4 are spending their whole time monitoring and being upset that other people are not doing their share and they have to give me updates (which prevents them from cleaning).  

There are the 4 who always need to use the bathroom the moment we start cleaning.

There are 4 cleaning but resenting the hell out of the 12 who aren't doing anything.

And there are 4 who happily make our room a nicer place for everyone.

Coin Toss

Years ago, I listened to a BBC podcast on wealth studies.  One of the experiments consisted of people playing Monopoly.  Before the game started, players had a coin toss to see who would play with advantages and who would play with disadvantages.  The advantaged players had the option of rolling 3 dice, started with more money and some property.  Disadvantaged could only roll one die.

The advantaged were soon winning and dominating the game.  They began to speak louder with an air of entitlement in their voice.  They even started hogging the snacks.

After the game, when asked what factors contributed to the advantaged players winning, most of the advantaged talked about their strategies and how they played the game.  

Only a small percentage of the advantaged ever mentioned the fact that they won the coin toss.

Over Coffee

ExPreacher says this way more harshly than I would, but he makes some valid points.

First is the point about some scriptures getting enormous airtime while others get none. You may hear, "I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" a half dozen times or more in sermons throughout the year.  However, there is a good chance you have never heard from the pulpit, "Take vengeance on the Midianites… kill all the boys and all the women who have had intercourse with a man.  Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves."

As a Christian, I knew way more of the bible than the average parishioner.  I had committed whole books to memory.  Still, there were swaths of scripture I was completely unaware of.  There are over 31,000 verses in the bible but only a few hundred of those ever make it into sermons.  When I was deconstructing, this kind of conversation happened regularly-

Me: Did you know the bible says you can have slaves and that you are free to beat them… because they are your property?

My wife: It does NOT say that.

Me: But it does say you should not beat them to death… you can get in trouble for that.  However, if they live for a few days after the beating and then die… it’s all good.

My wife: IT DOES NOT SAY THAT.

Me: Yeah, it does.  Right here.

My wife: What… the… hell…?!

Bible scholar Bart Ehrman says, “We read our scriptures devotionally, but we view the scriptures of other religions objectively.”  Read that slave scripture to your average Evangelical and tell them it is from the Koran and they will see clearly how awful it is.  Tell them it is from the Bible and the spin will begin.  

I was no different.  The few times I heard such biblical critiques as a believer, I quickly shrugged them off.  Even if I didn’t have a counterargument, I was confident someone somewhere did.

The second point ExPreacher makes is about the way most believers sign off on the Bible’s inerrancy while having so little knowledge of it.  Like the Terms of Service agreement on a piece of software, they click YES without having read the terms.

For evangelicals, belief in the Bible as wholly true and perfect tends to be non-negotiable, even when they don’t understand it.  I once talked to a pastor friend about these biblical concerns.  He agreed that the Bible is messier than most believers understand, that its construction was complicated and political, and that he believed for all of the divine inspiration that may be there… man's fingerprints are all over it.

“And I can say that here over coffee with you as a friend,” he admitted, “but I can’t say that from the pulpit Sunday morning.”

If you go to his church website, it is written in the belief statements that the Bible is “inspired, infallible, inerrant”. 

Simply put, most Evangelical churches exist to direct thinking… not expand it.  Christian churches have varied views on things like salvation, atonement, tithing, Hell, church governance, gender issues, etc.  There are Christian churches out there that are comfortable saying the Bible is not inerrant. Until I started to look at things with a little more objectivity, I was completely ignorant of how narrow my view of faith was.

As Salt Lake Tribune writer, Robert Kirby, put it -

"For years, I never doubted the truthfulness of what I was taught. This is not surprising considering that virtually anything will make sense if it's all you know."

They say the Truth does not need protection.  The Bible has centuries of safeguards put in place to keep most believers from ever viewing it with a critical eye.

No Hope for Fox

On my podcast list I have David Frum, Jay McFarland, David French, Bill Kristol, etc.  I listen to these guys because I want to hear a calm articulation of the conservative viewpoint.  I also eschew liberal voices that tend toward the sensational.  I want to try and understand reality as best I can.

I know I have friends and family who have a steady diet of Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart, and the AM radio talk show circuit.  Their view of reality could not be more tilted.

Folks on the Left, Right, and Middle who deal in reality are hopeful that the revelations these past few weeks - that the folks at Fox knowingly and willfully engaged in falsehoods in order to appease their viewers- will bring some change.

I don't have that hope... at all.

Every Kid Needs a George

Our local NPR affiliate did a story on a recent study which showed that a third of 4th graders are not reading on grade level.  I listened for the first 5-10 minutes and then turned it off in frustration.  They started to go down the path of how our schools teach reading and why it has been producing this outcome.  The thesis was that, about 20 or so years ago, schools moved away from phonics instruction.

This is a popular notion right now as the education pendulum swings back toward phonics.  States are jumping on board the train.  Here in Utah, every K-3 teacher has been made to take part in a two-year program to get them on the phonics page – essentially, a college class for teacher’s evenings and weekends.

Underlying all of this phonics fervor is the mistaken notion that schools can instruct students into reading proficiency.  Contrary to the radio show thesis, I think schools made the mistake of thinking they could move students to proficiency without family involvement.  

It was about 20 years ago that I noticed a shift in the rhetoric at trainings and meetings.  If a teacher brought up strategies for how to get families involved with reading with students at home we were told, “We can’t control that, so let’s talk about the things we can control.”  Instruction of students became less of a partnership between home and school.  Over time, the responsibility shifted solely to the school.  A lot of parents took that as a signal that they could leave the work of educating their child to that building the child busses to each morning.  For many, education became a consumer item that one could write a check for and forget about. 

So, in a lot of American homes, kids just quit reading.  There is your third of students not reading on grade level.  The best instruction by the best instructors will not change that.

There is a slice of students who need intervention due to reading struggles… but, in my experience, that is not the issue with most underperforming readers.  These kids need time on the page and they are not getting it.  They need daily, one on one, time with an adult who reads with them.  Schools (for all of their best intentions) and states (with their expectations) cannot make up for that lack.

Let me give the example of George.  He was a (very) senior citizen who came to my former Title One school every day to read with kids.  He was not a reading specialist.  He was available and he read with one of my 6th-grade students almost every day.  

My student read at a 2nd-grade level.  She didn’t like to read because she was unsuccessful at it and because she was unsuccessful at it she didn’t like to read.  Most of my Title One students were stuck in this vicious circle.  Still, she was willing to read with George.

Over the months, her resistance to reading lessened.  She started carrying a book in her back pocket and I would catch her at recess reading under a tree.  By the end of the year, she was reading at a 4th-grade level.

Her success had nothing to do with my reading instruction (I had 37 students that year).  It was her daily time spent with a saint who somehow got from his downtown apartment to our building.  

Moving that struggling third cited in the radio show to grade-level is not going to come about due to instructional methods.  It will happen when our culture gets back to adults being available to read with kids.

Rare Things Happen All The Time

Almost every day, I hear believers thank a deity for some happy circumstance or coincidence.  The fact that they got the job that they wanted, or that parking spot, or a reduction on some bill, is evidence of divine assistance.

Possibly.

At one time, I too saw little evidences of my god all around me.  I tabulated a number of such things when convincing myself to move out to Utah twenty years ago.

But I have been out of the faith now for a decade.  The interesting thing is that just as many happy coincidences happen to me now as ever did.  In reality, every person, regardless of faith status, gets their share of good and bad happenstance.

I now see all of that dot-connecting as a desire for meaning.  It may be great that I got that job... but if GOD got me that job, then I am significant.  I matter. I am seen.

But, that kind of meaning is exterior... and as with all such forms that give one a sense of worth, that route is fleeting.  

Friends and family, jobs and money... even gods... can only serve as a band-aid.  Eventually, alone with your own thoughts, you have to create your worth and meaning.

Marvel and Ant-Man 3

I saw AntMan on Thursday and it was... fine -as so many things have been from Marvel of late.  I enjoyed the flick, had a few laughs, munched my popcorn.  I was entertained for those 2 hours.

But nothing in that movie made me want to go out and grab another ticket.

I have watched the scene below a dozen times.  It is an intense scene.  Dialogue and story are at the forefront and the actors are bringing it.

There are lots of comic movies now that demonstrate such scenes.  Batman and the Joker talking in the jail during Dark Knight.  Civil War.  Winter Soldier.  Logan.  X-Men.  Superman: The Movie.

Scenes where characters are talking about things that matter.

That is what gets me right back to the turnstile line after exiting the ride.

I was rewatching Robocop again today... cheesy... but so many great lines.

There was nothing like that in Ant-Man... no scenes I want to head back to the theater for.  No lines to ruminate over again and again.

Almost every scene of dialogue was just segueing us to the next CGI MacGuffin chase.

There was a lot to like about the latest Antman.  I would give it a B... but that seems to be the best Marvel is doing lately.