Dear Humbuck: credibility

Dear Humbuck

After waxing so eloquent about our work in christendom, I’d like to say a bit about why it matters, even today.

Perhaps the smallest advantage we get from our work is to be found in those who want to bring back christendom. Don’t get me wrong, I would be very happy to see the world burn in the fires of a new techno-christendom, one that would make the old christendom look like a mere child’s game. This new christendom would have all the former fire and zeal, but with access to all the tech toys the humans have made in the past centuries. Can you imagine an Inquisition as zealous as the last, but with the many ways of spying and intruding on people that are now available? An inquisition that can watch all the persons all the time, can hear every word they mutter, read every word they type? It would be exquisite! The modern totalitarian wannabes have only the faintest clue what such a thing would unleash upon the world.

But putting aside such pleasant dreams, there is a very real advantage that we have even now. We have made it so that the church and by extension their sacred book have no credibility.

Perhaps it would not have taken 1500 years of religious wars and slaughters, doctrinal disputes running riot on the streets, monarchs massacring the unbaptized, crusaders and colonizers praising God as they slaughtered the heathen, and other such events to cause them to be discredited, but we have all of that at our disposal anyway, and who are we to shy away from using such overwhelming evidence?

The believers love to hold themselves up as paragons of morality and virtue. They want to say such things as, for example, the places where they have gained power and influence have been bastions of morality, places were the people were good and virtuous, where the laws have been just and fair, where people have had freedoms and happiness. If they are believers living in the US, they are even more prone to such hyperbole, because they see themselves as the best of the best that ever was, they finally got it all right, their country is the greatest thing to ever happen on earth, they did it right (at least up until, let’s say, after what they call the Second World War and the Post-War Concensus or until the 1960s and hippie kids and Woodstock or some other rather arbitrary moment they want to latch on to as the first sign of cultural rot), the founding fathers are like demigods in their eyes, everything they did in founding the nation was clearly Christian thus God was sure to bless it (well, Jefferson is a complication who must be explained away and, well, that whole slavery compromise thing, too, but let’s all just ignore those things, ok?).

To look at it in light of my great twin vices of fear and pride, well, pride is so very obvious in all of this that only blinding ignorance, either involuntary or self-inflicted and usually based in fear, can keep them from seeing such blinding arrogance.

Here, we have a few things on our side.

One thing is that the churches hate history. The average believer is almost completely ignorant of any real history. In the US, there was a character on a certain comedic television show who spoke something that the average US believer takes more as truth than the words they read in their holy book, “History began on July 4th, 1776, everything before that was a mistake.” 

We could go further; everything before 1776 was a mistake, and everything after that was unquestionably good (until, you know, WW II or hippies or whatnot).

Of course, the churches will deny this claim of mine, which makes me smile all the more. They will say they admire many “heroes of the faith” from long ago, people like Luther and Calvin, Edwards and Whitefield, the puritans and especially the puritans of Massachusetts. They may even know a few stray facts about those men.

The reality is, the church doesn’t want history, it wants propaganda.

It wants Luther to be some brash, bumbling, lovable man from long ago who once did a brave thing and started a revolution in the church. The don’t want to hear about his violent and hateful rhetoric, his rather strange ideas about us, his quarrels, and certainly not his anti-Jewish writings, though at least they haven’t yet been able to keep people from learning about that.

It wants Calvin to be a bit grim and dour, but also someone theologically brilliant. They don’t want to know about him having such control over Geneva that he even dictated clothing fashions and how much people could have on their dinner tables. Of course, lots of people know about the Servetus thing, but that can be dismissed by, as one of their own recently said, saying that “Servetus was a bad man”. That got a laugh.

Probably few but the learned know about Zvengli, and even fewer now about him fatally baptizing the Anabaptists in the river that ran through his city.

Culturally, the people in the US know about the witch trials that happened in Puritan New England, most famously in Salem, but few of them really dig in to see what was really happening. Humbuck, they put a child of 4 years of ago, a girl child, into their jail for months because they suspected her being a witch! They crushed a man to death over two days, not because they had evidence that he was guilty of a crime or of being a witch, but because he would not confess to being guilty or not guilty! They believed that a witch could not recite the Lord’s Prayer, but when right before they were to be hanged the condemned recited that prayer, that didn't keep them from being executed! And they used “spectral evidence” for many of these condemnations and executions! If I ever need a good laugh, I remember that time!

And to continue piling on, look at how they have used their holy writings? They have used it to defend such things as burning heretics, pilgrimages, papal divine authority, indulgences, forcing parents to have the state church baptize their children, giving the nations of christendom the power to claim for themselves lands not ruled by believers. The New England Puritans used their holy writ to justify a wholesale slaughter of the Pequot people, and they searched far and wide in their writings to find why they couldn’t find victory during King Philip’s War. The later believers used their Bible to defend slavery, then they used it to defend Jim Crow, then to defend why they didn’t want black people in white schools and colleges and in white churches.

Now, there are some of them claiming to have scriptures that tell them they can take away rights from women and other peoples. They want to make it so that women cannot vote. If they had to power, I do not doubt they would keep women out of places of higher education, because they think their holy writings say that a woman’s place is the home and she should stay in it and not get involved in the outside manly concerns, but she should live sheltered and under her father’s or her husband’s umbrella of total authority over her.

At this point, no one wants to hear it anymore. We have done well.

And so, we have essentially two prongs we can use against the “back to the Bible” type of people.

One prong is that we can point out their own hypocrisies. The church that wants to put so much stress nowadays on sexual morals and sexual purity has in the past and in the present been a sexual cesspool. The same church that wants to speak out against political corruption and oppression has been the most corrupt and oppressive force ever known on the earth. The fundamentalist churches that rant and rave against rock music and women wearing pants will harbor ministers who sexually assaulted children in a fellow church the next town over.

Another prong is that people can simply ask, “Didn’t you people used to say the Bible wanted you to have slaves and to keep other kinds of people out of your churches”, then they can walk away as the believer either fumbles for an answer or manages to give an answer that will only make them look all the worse.

At any rate, we need to do very little now, because we’ve already won. The believers are too proud to be truly humble, to be truly repentant.

So, let the church believe the myths of their own superiority, such arrogance does not help them, and let the world have some small knowledge of what the church is hiding behind its smug boasts. Let there be another round of church scandals, another minister caught with a prostitute or with a deacon’s wife (or, better still, the deacon himself). Keep the sins of the church before the eyes of the world. Do that, and it is unlikely they will notice the few true believers out there.