The natural superiority of Christianity

Guest post by televangelist John Hazee

There are none so blind as those who will not see. And friends, today there is a plague of blindness on this land. A plague, moreover, which afflicts Christians, and keeps them from the service they owe to Jesus!

Yes, friends, many of our professed brothers and sisters in Christ have been struck blind by demonic power! How else can you explain their failure to deal efficiently and effectively with the anti-Christian forces which are gathering around us and threatening to put the Christian light back under a bushel!

One of the leading demonic forces is an evolutionary biologist, whose evil book The God Delusion sat atop the bestseller lists for weeks like the devil surveying his mighty works in Hell. And what have Christians decided to do when confronted with arguments that evolutionary biology disproves the truths of the Bible? Why, their response boils down to “Does not!”

Oh, yes, they came up with Intelligent Design. Proponents of Intelligent Design argue that since certain features of living organisms are supposedly too complex for us to understand, they must have been produced by an intelligent creator. Friends, I don’t understand what Paris Hilton does with her life, but that doesn’t imply that her life is the product of intelligence.

What is the correct way to respond to evolutionary biology? Friends, the answer is simple. When David went to fight Goliath, did he think “What I’ll do, see, is persuade him that he’s got the wrong ideas about us”? No, he didn’t. He thought “I’m going to beat this giant on his own terms,” and that’s what he did.

And we can beat the evolutionists on their own terms, using their own evolutionary principles! Evolutionary biology holds that species evolve by natural selection of organisms with superior characteristics which make them more likely than other members of their species or of other species to survive. Well, if we look at religions from an evolutionary perspective, what do we find?

First, we find that Christianity has evolved considerably over the two thousand years of its existence. At first a humble doctrine of obedience and love preached by impoverished members of the peasantry, it is now a collection of giant corporate enterprises whose leaders command the attention of the great and powerful and who live in affluence to rival that of the rich and powerful!

Furthermore, as a result of evolving to this highly selected condition, Christianity has become the dominant religion on the planet! Hallelujah!

After spending a thousand years evolving as it repelled repeated attacks from Asian pagans and middle eastern Muslims, Christianity was finally able to burst forth from Europe, conquer its traditional enemies, and then spread round the world as it made and conquered new enemies! Hallelujah!

Vastly outnumbered by Hindus, Christians conquered Hindustan and ruled it for hundreds of years! Hallelujah!

Christians were out numbered in Africa, but they conquered African Muslims and the adherents of all the other religions found there and ruled that vast continent for nearly a century! Hallelujah!

When adherents of Shinto tried to enslave the millions of the far east, Christians dropped atomic bombs on them! Hallelujah!

When adherents of Islam destroyed the World Trade Center, our Christian leaders destroyed Iraq! Hallelujah!

Christianity is the superior product of millennia of evolution which have made it the dominant spiritual and ethical force in the world. Richard Dawkins and others like him are mere evolutionary curiosities – random mutations whose function is to amuse us for a short while with their curious features before they are condemned to the evolutionary dead end of extinction.

How far do you think Richard Dawkins would get if he invaded Iraq?

The natural superiority of Christianity © 2007, John FitzGerald

You are what you ought to eat

Every day it seems I hear something new about good food and evil food. Eat the good food and you will live forever! Eat the evil food and you will die, shortly, in sin and despair!

The decline of organized religion has resulted in the ascendancy of morality. Without God around to save us, we must save ourselves.

Food is important. We have to eat to live, and we have to eat fairly frequently. So our new morality has a lot to say about food.

Of course, Christianity had nearly two millennia to perfect its act. The new mainstream religion is considerably more primitive. In recent Christian days evil was considered to be intangible; it was an inherent personal disposition against which one had to fight constantly. We sophisticated moderns, though, prefer to think that evil is tangible.

Specifically, we have embodied evil as taboo food, most notably fat. Fat is evil made flesh. Fat clogs your arteries! Fat makes you fat! Turn from fat and all its works so that you may be saved!

What is this salvation, though? It appears to consist of losing weight and having a greater chance of living into that period of life in which health problems get extremely serious. It doesn't quite measure up to the Christian idea of salvation.

On the other hand, salvation by food has the advantage that evidence of its existence can be found. People do indeed lose weight by changing their diet. They tend, though, to gain it back, and more.

Then once you fail in your attempt to gain earthly salvation you are open to the religious argument that you have been following a false god. You were eating the wrong food. And on you go in your spiritual quest.

To be fair, food cultism may on the whole promote healthy eating. It exaggerates the effects of diet, however, and of specific components of that diet. It holds, for example, that blood cholesterol can be easily controlled by diet, while the research is considerably more equivocal.

The main point of food cultism is not really good diet. Food cultism uses food to satisfy our hunger for evidence that we are not ordinary and that we have control over our lives. It tells us that if we only stop violating its food taboos we will live healthy, productive lives, unlike the sinners who do not share
our knowledge of good and evil. Believing that we are pure and everyone else is foul is of course the traditional conception of human dignity.

God works in mysterious ways

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

–Emily Dickinson

Did George W. Bush lie about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction? Did he lie about Iraq's supposed plans to obtain uranium? Did he lie about Saddam Hussein's supposed support for al-Qaeda?

Probably not. He probably didn't tell the truth, but the reason he didn't is far more interesting than the idea that he simply lied.

One fact which people consider important about the contemporary Republican Party is its strong support among evangelical Protestants. Chief among these evangelical Protestants is Pat Robertson, head of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which grew out of his evangelical television show The 700 Club. Despite the recognition of the importance of the evangelicals to the Republican Party, though, no one seems to have realized the connection between evangelical theology and the Bush administration's dubious assertions.

Now, no one questions Christians' abilities to come up with wacky ideas. After all, the largest Christian denomination continues to organize its worship around what it considers to be an act of cannibalism in which believers consume the body and blood of their god. Nevertheless the evangelicals have come up with a few lulus lately.

Pat Robertson is known as an exponent of Kingdom Now teachings. In themselves Kingdom Now teachings are not all that wacky, but he combines them with another type of evangelical teaching which is, to use the technical term, looney.

Kingdom Now teachings hold that it is the duty of Christians to establish dominion over the earth by taking control of government and social institutions (I said they weren't all that wacky, not that they weren't wacky). Is it all that surprising that sending missionaries to Iraq turned out to be one of the chief American concerns after Iraq fell? Anyway, Kingdom Now devotees believe the Second Coming will be postponed until this dominion is established.

Kingdom Now adherents have many close relationships with another Protestant school of thought, the Word-Faith movement, also known as Positive Confession (we have now reached the really wacky bit). Word-Faith holds that if a person has faith, any word that he utters as a consequence of that faith must be true. Often the proponents of this view – the most prominent these days being Kenneth Copeland, Paul and Jan Crouch, and Benny Hinn – encourage people to believe that faith can make them rich.

Wealth, in fact, is seen as the right of the believer. Word-Faith has a highly deistic view of God, and believes that if what you say is based on faith in God, God is required to make your utterances true. So if you say "God will make me wealthy" (a statement of the type known as a positive confession), God must make you wealthy. Really. They believe that.

On the other hand, Word-Faith preachers tend to be loaded, so maybe they're onto something. Have a look at Rod Parsley's television show sometime. Besides being one of the most entertaining people on television, Pastor Parsley simply reeks of moolah. His suits are magnificent, and his headquarters in Columbus, Ohio is starting to make the Taj Mahal look like a shack. Benny Hinn doesn't look as if he has to go down to the food bank too often, either, although you'd think if positive confession was all that effective he could do something about his hair.

Anyway, one Kingdom Now adherent who has close ties to Word-Faith is...Pat Robertson! The 700 Club has Word-Faith preachers like Rod Parsley as guests, and the show has long featured Word-Faith shticks like praying over stacks of viewers' letters containing prayer wishes.

Now, George W. Bush, as every Republican tells us, is a spiritual man. No doubt he has been heavily influenced by Pastor Robertson. When faced with doubt about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, what would a Word-Faith believer do? He would believe that if he said Iraq had WMDs, then Iraq must have them.

That does seem to be the most persuasive explanation of what happened. It is simply more plausible than thinking that a bunch of intelligent people like Mr. Bush's advisers could think they could lie about issues like that and get away with it. It's more likely that they thought that if they believed it then it must be true.

Of course, many people think like that without the encouragement of evangelical preachers, and this type of thinking is rampant among the wildly popular American success experts. Even Dr. Phil, who at least has had the decency not to start his own cult, tells people that they come into this world with every ability they need to get whatever they want. However, among the exponents of this doctrine it is Pat Robertson who is the power within the Republican Party and the source of much of its funding. President Bush is more likely to have been influenced by him than by Dr. Phil or Anthony ("if I can go from being an overweight slob living in a rundown apartment to being an immensely wealthy exemplar of fitness who is accused of stealing other men's wives then so can you") Robbins.

The Administration's response to the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction confirms my analysis. Instead of simply planting some evidence, they continue to tell us that they are sure they will find some WMDs. They believe they will, so it must be true.

When you think about it, isn't it much better to have your country run by a bunch of those lying bastard politicians that everyone is always complaining about than by a bunch of religious wackos who are immune to reason and evidence? A lying bastard would have known better than to lie about things you could be caught out on.

But what about Tony Blair? He's probably not a Word-Faith devotee, and he's not a lying bastard (because a lying bastard would have known better). So I guess that makes him a stupid bastard.

Originally published in 2003

God Works in Mysterious Ways © 2003, John FitzGerald

Four short pieces

1. WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN

Christianity imposes on believers two impossible duties. First, one is required to accept doctrine which cannot be justified logically or empirically, such as the various doctrines about Christ's nature. Even if one attempts to devise one's own Christianity from reading the Bible one is still forced to accept doctrine for insufficient reasons. Why should one not covet? Well, God says so. So why should we do what God says? Well, read the Bible. Why should we believe the Bible? Because it's God's word. Oh.

The second impossible duty is you've got to be good. You've got to give your goods to the poor, man. Well, really. Now we all know that that would be better but, hey,...I'm not gonna. What have the poor ever done for me, anyway, besides let me be rich?

2. THE RELIGION OF SUCCESS

A popular contemporary belief is that the world may be mastered by hard work and planning. To be successful, the story goes, all you have to do is plan to be successful and then persevere till you are. The enormous body of popular writing about success identifies it with money and possessions. Many success gurus describe money as a scorecard that lets you know you're successful.

Hard work and sound planning may help substantially in becoming successful, but they are neither sufficient for the achievement of success nor necessary. Luck is sufficient, and opportunity is necessary, but the success gurus never mention opportunity except as something which may be unerringly tracked down by the astute believer, and mention luck as infrequently as possible, and then only as something which can be easily overcome. The existence of luck is to the religion of success what the existence of evil is to Christianity – a phenomenon which preachers find most convenient when kept as far as possible from the layperson's consciousness.

One of the political implications of these ideas is that the poor and the failed are the authors of their own misfortunes. In fact, the more one is successful, the less opportunity others have to become successful themselves, but that fact is clearly heretical, just as the idea that the earth revolves around the sun used to be.

What is surprising, though, is that in a society so extensively educated, beliefs so patently irrational and futile as those of the success zealots should be so widely held.

But then our system of education is principally the creature of the religion of success. One goes to school not to improve one's understanding of the world, but to make "something" of oneself. Something. Anything.

3. EDUCATION

Most people seem to think that the schools should be preparing students for jobs. Supposedly the high schools should be able to assign students to appropriate courses of training, even though the jobs at which the students will eventually work may not exist yet. I entered high school in 1961. No one could have advised me in grade 9 to train to be a systems analyst. Thank God.

4. MONEY AND POWER

Orwell observed that the political ideas of the bourgeois of his day (they called them bourgeois back then) were the ideas of a class which had never held power. Today's popular ideas about success are similarly the ideas of people who have been trained to ignore or deny the existence of power. The devotee of the religion of success will vehemently argue that we all have equal opportunity – equal opportunity, that is, to think success is the ability to buy even more of the products that our masters want to sell us. An ability which one person's success must deny to others, regardless of how much the successful person thinks they should be able to make something of themselves, too.

In theory any American woman can become president, but in practice none of them do.

Mr. FitzGerald is available to address your church or school group. His Topics include:

• Dodgeball as a Model of Society
  
• Become Successful While You Sleep!
  
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Sex with Lots of Models in the Back of my Escalade!

Four Short Pieces © John FitzGerald, 2006

Theo-corporatism

One of the advantages of Western civilization has been that it has had competing centres of power. Church and state have been competing for power for centuries, so that neither has been able to impose its will on society. That gave Westerners the opportunity to develop a quality which is highly prized today – diversity. In particular, Western society developed diversity of thought and diversity of action, two types of diversity which encourage innovation, invention, and improvement.

These days, though, government and religion seem to be heading toward a reconciliation. Religious groups are being treated as if they have legitimate claims on society as a whole. The most striking example recently [Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2006.] has of course been the worldwide protests against the publication of caricatures of Mohammed by an obscure newspaper in Denmark. One government after another has said that it deplored the violence of the protests, but that it also deplored the offence which had been given to Islam by the cartoons. This approach neatly placed irreligious cartoonists on the same moral plane as religious arsonists, bombers, and murderers – You think the killing of all those Christians in Pakistan was bad? What about those awful cartoons!

The new Canadian government wants to hold a vote on whether to restore the traditional definition of marriage to replace the definition currently in effect which allows people of the same sex to marry. The so-called traditional definition of marriage, however, turns out to bear a strong resemblance to the predominant Christian one. The traditional views of the non-Christian members of our diverse society will not be presented as options. And for sure the Mormons needn't hold their breaths thinking their traditional definition is going to be legitimated.

The problem is that political parties have done so well in gutting the political philosophies they supposedly represent of any distinctive meaning that they can no longer count on voters inspired by the same principles as they to support them. In Canada the supposedly socialist party now devotes itself to proportional representation rather than to economics. The supposedly conservative party is still trying to patch together a compromise position on what conservative principles are that will satisfy both the factions which recently patched themselves together into a single party, and the supposedly liberal party tried to inspire the populace during the recent election campaign by claiming the leader of the conservatives was a secret American agent. Any comprehensive analysis of society that can withstand intelligent questioning for longer than ten seconds is beyond all of them.

So not for them any ringing declarations of the priority of freedom of expression over the violent propensities of the faithful. Not for them a declaration that the civil definition of marriage is something different from the religious one. Not for them a further change in the definition of marriage to assert the primacy of civil marriage over marriages performed by clerics.

Instead, political parties have started trying to co-opt the inspirational power of non-political ideologies – environmentalism, feminism, religion. Of these the most dangerous is religion. Environmentalism and feminism are, whether you agree with them or not, characteristically reasonable. Their tenets are expressed in ways which can be tested. Religion, however, brooks no testing. Its tenets are not descriptions of the world but arbitrary assertions about it which the religious refuse to modify. The religious deal with the resulting inadequacy of these tenets to account for what happens in the world by attributing their failure to the actions of enemies – Satan, liberals, Danish cartoonists.

The extent of the danger can be seen in the current plight of the Republican Party of the United States. From one point of view, the Republicans have done well from their courting of the religious. They have a stranglehold on the federal government.

From the point of view of the United States as a whole, though, the deal looks less desirable. The religious faction in the Republican Party tends to come from the Word Faith branch ofevangelicalism, a branch that holds views that are highly compatible with making unsubstantiated claims about the threat posed by Iraq – and with believing them. According to Word Faith theology, any assertion of yours that arises from your faith must be true. The next step is believing that whatever you believe was told you by God, and therefore inerrant. The step after that is acting on those beliefs.

The previous post, about neo-corporatism, points out that the traditional democratic view of society as composed of equal individuals is being replaced by a conception of society as composed of "communities" with unequal rights which need to be made equal. Labour is considered to be such a community, women are one, minorities are all communities, and religions are being seen more and more as communities.

The idea that any of these groups is a community or any other type of cohesive group doesn't stand up to scrutiny, of course. The idea that Christians are a community (and they are frequently discussed as if they are one) is belied by phenomena such as the detestation of many Roman Catholics and Protestants for each other. Evangelical Christians often find it necessary to send missionaries to Catholic countries to convert the benighted papists.

The idea that Muslims are a cohesive group is just as questionable. A civil war is going on in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, but we are expected to believe that there is a single entity called Islam. Once we believe that there is a single entity called Islam, then logically we believe that it can be offended. And if we're one of those religious people driven into paranoia by the futility and irrationality of the principles we accept as guides to life, we think something needs to be done to punish the offence, whether it's real or imagined. Whence abortionist-killers, embassy-burners, and Peter McKay's cowering before the might of Islam.

So we may be on the verge of a society in which we have freedom of religion but not freedom from religion. Nor will we have the freedom not to have a religion. If the religious get their way, every law of a once democratic society will be made to conform to the paranoid preferences of the religious. That idea might sound paranoid itself, but we need only consider the conformity of the Bush administration to the agenda of evangelical Christianity to see that it's not.

Unfortunately, Canadians seem to be falling for this idea. Most think it was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, and from there it is but a short step to believing that their publication should have been prevented.

There's only one thing for it, I'm afraid. Sane people must start their own religion, the key principle of which is that it is unafraid of criticism.

What kind of God is it, after all, who can't tolerate the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark? Not a very self-confident one, it would seem. And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity like that?

What kind of God is it that can give His people a Bible which no two of them understand to mean the same thing? Doesn't the multiplicity of Christian denominations and sects suggest that the Christian God is a pretty ineffective communicator? And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity who can't make his advice clear?

A real god would be unafraid to state his or her principles clearly. A real god would pity unbelievers instead of craving their painful and eternal punishment. A real god would not be offended by the actions of people he or she created.

Theo-Corporatism © John FitzGerald, 2006, 2009

Forgive us, environment, for we have sinned

This last weekend that emptiest of empty gestures, Earth Hour, was held for the second time. In dishonour of it we are re-posting NEW IMPROVED HEAD's 2007 article about Live Earth.

No sooner are we finally willing to admit that God is dead than we’re lining up to worship a new one. Atheist books are finally showing up in the bestseller lists and the churches are collapsing under the weight of the damages they have to pay to people they’ve abused, but people are lining up to worship at the altar of the Environment.

Last weekend (July 7, 2007) had Live Earth, where musicians preached to us about how we need to be more responsible stewards of the environment. The musicians at Live Earth wanted everyone to sign the following commitment:

• I will change four light bulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) at my home.
  
• I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.
  
• I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.
  
• I will forward a Live Earth email message to five friends.
  
• I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I’m not using them.

You know, you musical types could conserve more energy than that commitment ever will just by committing to holding one less concert a year, eh? Funny how that never got into any commitment.

Well, as Ambrose Bierce once wrote, a Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. It appears that to Live Earth an environmentalist is someone who follows the teachings of Al Gore insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of mindless consumption.

I mean, look at that “commitment.” Order your Escalade with an energy efficient radio and you are virtuous. Change four crummy light bulbs and you are SAVED!! The environment will be HEE-YULLED!! It’s the old religious con: follow these easy rules and you’ll be saved some time way in the future; in the meantime, give us money. But instead of putting money in the plate you just keep on buying CDs as if you were going to listen to them on a solar-powered player.

Environmentalism even has its own form of that Roman Catholic institution, the indulgence. In the old days rich people used to establish orders of monks and nuns in their wills on the condition that the monks and nuns spend all their time praying for their benefactor’s soul in purgatory. Some bright spark in the Church realized that with all those monks and nuns it had lying around, it could sell prayers to those without the cash to endow religious orders, and the indulgence was born. Even today, to get someone’s soul prayed for by the congregation at a Roman Catholic church you slip the priest a little cash.

The environmentalist equivalent of the indulgence is the carbon credit. In their original form, carbon credits made sense. Countries assigned quotas to businesses establishing the amount of greenhouse gases they could emit. Businesses which were able to reduce their emissions below their quotas were then allowed to sell the unused part of their quotas to businesses who were having trouble reducing their emissions.

In its original form the carbon credit was a sensible way to deal with the inevitable errors in estimating reasonable quotas, and with differences between industries in the difficulty of reducing emissions. It encouraged companies to cut emissions and increased the probability that the country as a whole would meet its target for emissions. It wasn’t going to save the atmosphere all by itself, but neither is forwarding a Live Earth e-mail going to.

But the indulgence-sellers quickly got into the carbon credit business. Now you can issue carbon credits if you promise to plant trees. The idea is that if someone emits a tonne of greenhouse gases, he or she can pay a company to plant enough trees to remove a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air – assuming that the trees don’t die and aren’t cut down (for the new high-tech headquarters of the tree-planting company, for example). And assuming that they actually get planted.

Carbon credits like these of course paid for a large part of the anti-environmental excess which was what Live Earth was in practice. The performers travelled a total of something like 200,000 miles by jet to get to the concerts, and corresponding indulgences were purchased to save their environmental souls.

Salvation is easy! that's what the religious are always telling us, anyway. You want to go to heaven? Then just stop making them graven images. And cut down on that coveting. You want to save the environment? Then change four light bulbs. Or light four votive candles and save both your soul and the environment.

Given that the religious haven’t even managed to keep their simple promise not to make graven images, I don’t see much hope for any huge surge in public transit ridership as a result of all those commitments people made at Live Earth.

Making life tolerable is hard and requires courage, but religion tells people that if they don’t worry about this life but instead worry about the next one, everything will be peachy in the end. Improving the environment is hard and requires dedication and a willingness to live with the idea that our standard of living might have to be reduced, but the religion of individual environmental action tells us that if we don’t worry about the environment as a whole but only about the mundane trappings of our daily individual lives the environment will be peachy in the end.

Religion’s had a long and successful career, but we’re still pretty sinful. Promising to be good isn’t going take carbon dioxide out of the air, either.

Forgive Us, Environment, For We have Sinned © John FitzGerald, 2007