What Jesus says about snow blowers

My neighbor and I have identical snow blowers, and we confer during a storm about the best time to go out, the best techniques, whether we have enough gas, stuff like that. Yesterday she told me she was going to do another neighbors’ sidewalk in addition to her own because, as she put it, “I’m a good Christian.”

I like my neighbor. I’ve never thought of her as a “Christian.” She never talks about God, she doesn’t go to church; the only remotely “Christian” thing she does is work at the thrift shop of a local church. And so, for her, it was just a turn of phrase, not a declaration of belief.

But this is exactly what I found so irritating. Why are “good” and “Christian” synonymous? Here’s the subtext of her statement:

“I believe that the baby who may or may not have been born 2010 years ago, who may or may not have died on a cross 33 years later, was actually the son of, and the proof of, a supreme being; and because I believe this I’m a good person.”

I would really like to believe all this about the baby, but I don’t. And just to prove that atheists (or agnostics – I’m so unwilling to commit to a system of belief I can’t even call myself an atheist) have access to the same realm of moral values, I rushed right out and cleared the other neighbors’ walk.

It wasn’t really because I’m a good agnostic, though. Snow blowing is fun.

Pioneer Day

Two thousand years from now, maybe presidents will be sworn in on golden plates and we’ll all be rushing to put together our celestial families before we die, instead of following some commandments found by a really old guy in a burning bush, or proclaiming some people can’t get married because God said so. In other words, antiquity confers a certain credibility, and Joseph Smith would only be 203 years old today, instead of 2009 years like Jesus.

An angel told Joseph Smith about those golden plates; he translated them into the Book of Mormon without letting anyone else see them; he figured out a way to say you needed multiple wives to get into the best of the three heavens; and then he was murdered in his Illinois jail cell. Brigham Young took over and led his followers to Utah where, on this day in 1847, they first beheld the Salt Lake Valley.

If you live in Utah, you don’t even have to believe all that in order to get a day off.

Pentecost

Syncretism is one thing if it happens over centuries. Like let’s say you’re Italian. A long, long time ago your ancestors had a mid-winter festival in honor of Saturn celebrating the birth of the sun; and then Constantine, who ruled over those ancestors’ children, came along and converted to a new religion that was started by a guy called Jesus; and then those children’s children gradually came to believe that that Jesus was born at that same time, in the dead of winter, and. . .

But I keep thinking about those apostles who, just ten days ago, had seen Jesus’ body disappear; coming together there in Jerusalem to pray about the Torah; and then those tongues of fire appeared over their heads and they could suddenly speak all kinds of languages; and so they went out into Jerusalem and converted 3,000 people to this new religion.

Well I guess all that is pretty persuasive, and I guess it’s like suddenly becoming born-again. The only part I don’t get is why they were still celebrating Shavuot.

Shavuot

I wonder if Jesus, assuming he really existed, meant for all the special days he celebrated to get turned into something else. I can understand why his apostles might have forgotten about Passover, given that he died the day after and then came back to life. But apparently they were still counting the omer 49 days after Passover, because there they were celebrating Shavuot when those tongues of fire appeared over their heads and all of a sudden it was Pentecost.

I’m not sure I get it. If they’d really seen Jesus along with his body going up into the sky, why were they celebrating the giving of the Torah just ten days later? And what happened the next year? Did they finally stop counting?

Ascension Day

I’m trying for the life of me to figure out how anybody could believe in this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way is not to think about it too hard.

I can get to the belief that this man named Jesus existed; that he was wise beyond his time and his years; and that he was crucified. I can even stretch it to believing that his followers, like Mary Magdalene and his apostles, were so much under his spell that they believed they saw him after he died. I mean I do believe people see ghosts – or, better put, that they believe they have seen ghosts.

But that he rose, bodily, into heaven, forty days after he came alive again?

If I did believe this, I’d want to go to one of those churches with a hole in the roof where they take this statue and somehow, with great Broadway stagecraft, make it rise up into the sky.

Feast of the Finding of the True Cross

I used to think that because so many people for so many centuries believed in Jesus, there must be something to it (omitting Yahweh, Mohammed, Buddha and who knows how many others out of ignorance, not prejudice).

But here is one strange story. Remember that tree of life that the Norse god Odin hung himself on before he got resurrected? Well, there was apparently another tree of life in the Garden of Eden. When Adam was dying his son, Seth, put a seed from this tree in his father’s mouth and a new tree grew. This tree was cut down eventually and made into a bridge; and after some complicated business involving the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, it was dug up after being buried for fourteen centuries and used for the True Cross upon which Jesus was hung.

Story not over yet. Three centuries later, Helena, mother of King Constantine (whose conversion to Christianity and brutal repression of those who refused to believe resulted in my knowing a lot more about Jesus than Zeus), found this cross buried (again) in Jerusalem. On May 3, supposedly.

But maybe we’re not really supposed to believe all this, since the Second Vatican Council removed this feast from the liturgical calendar in 1970.

So what are we supposed to believe, after all these trees and all these gods? Well, one thing’s for sure – an awful lot of people, for an awful lot of centuries, have had a very strong need to believe.

Holy Saturday, more reflections

The other day I read about an atheist who for an hour each day pretended he believed in God. It’s an interesting thought experiment, especially for this somber purple-shrouded day, the last of Lent.

So let’s try. Let’s pretend that the things Jesus said in the Bible are commandments from God, since he was supposedly the son of God.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind;
and your neighbor as yourself.”

According to Luke (10:27), that’s what he said to a lawyer who wanted to know what laws he had to follow to gain eternal life.

What would Jesus say, then, to the Republican legislators in Iowa who think they can overturn their Supreme Court; to the Mormons who funded the California Proposition 8 battle; to the governor of Vermont; or to the National Organization for Marriage’s “Two Million for Marriage” drive (which they propose to call, hilariously, 2M4M)?

I say, let’s give all of them WWJD bracelets.