Flies In The Face Of Reason
“If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but…life, uh, finds a way.” – Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Saving my theological rants for other places, I’ll briefly assert that one of the benefits of a simple, clear god, is that he always does what you say he says he’ll do, and he never contradicts what you thought he said last. In church terms, his promises are true, and he’s a good goD. (Sorry – I spelled that last word backwards.)
As conjecture was praised as fact, the wonder evaporated from the Wonder-ful leaving us -ful of something else, while we mistakenly believed that our delusions would carry the same weight in every realm, even annihilating the lies of evolution, psychology, and every significant endeavor that did not pay respect to our brand in the Jesus corporation.
But slowly, much of the framework of the org’s worldview started to break apart for me, fragmenting and becoming annoyances; like a cloud of gnats pestering my pursuit of reality. My authorities were there in front of me, but my mentors were in my head, entering through my eyes and ears, and encouraging me to dare to journey wherever truth led me.
I developed an insatiable appetite for books and podcasts. Conservative talk show hosts Armstrong and Getty taught me about libertarianism, and the importance of mutual respect for people with differing beliefs. Oliver Sacks taught me that “I” am often not who I think I am, and that what I had attributed to a “soul” or “spirit” was just as often attributable to chemicals. Christopher Hitchens taught me about the dangers of good intentions, and also exemplified that just because a person is an ass is not sufficient reason to throw out their ideas. Meanwhile, his biggest fan, Sam Harris, taught me the importance of being open to being wrong.
Contrary to what I had been told I would be told, my new influences, by and large, did not attack me, nor my beliefs, nor my morals. They did not attempt to lure me away and pollute my mind. In fact, many of them expressed deep reverence for the effects and the underlying principles of my worldview, even as they could not honestly make the faith leaps we were. Almost all of them expressed jealousy of my built-in community and the valuable ceremonial rituals they had to work so hard to mimic.
They were still dangerous, though. Much to the chagrin of my conservative heritage, my new mentors encouraged me in much more nefarious ways than tempting me to sin or change my mind. They all pushed me back – 2,700 years, to the 9th commandment: don’t lie; not even to yourself. You’re allowed to believe what you want to believe. You’re allowed to not know. You’re just not allowed to lie about either one.
In the following years a decades, a lot of pillars, because much of what the church calls “faith” is better labelled “intentional self-deception”. I had true faith that, for example, I could play the piano, even when I wasn’t sitting at one. But the “faith” I had in, for example, nonsensical Biblical passages felt more like strong wishes. So, step number one (which I’m still on) was taking the thousands of ideas I had been handed and sorting them into the buckets of “I Believe”, “I Don’t Believe”, and “Not Sure”. (I need a bigger bucket #3.)
I was proud of my growing strength to utter the very un-Coller phrase, “I don’t know,” and even my spiritual mentors encouraged the habit as they redefined the God I was searching for. I actually read the Christian authors my parents had just been quoting, like C. S. Lewis, St. Augustine, and Martin Luther, and found them to be just as insightful as my parents had promised, in a host of directions my parents never would have predicted. (Starting about 10 years later, Timothy Keller would flip my religion on its head, teaching me in his book, “Prodigal God“, and later in his podcasts, that religious fervor actually keeps adherents as dangerously far from God as anyone could be, and R.C. Sproul convinced me to keep intact the holy reverence that such a revolution would usually burn to the ground.)
All week long, I would be tutored somewhat passively by spiritual and rational giants. Then on Sunday morning, I sat in the front row and took copious notes, convinced it was only because I wasn’t listening hard enough, that the sermons sounded like passionately ignorant ramblings on whichever topics had been on the bumper sticker in front of my pastor that week; topics which had no application to my life or anyone else’s, except as rallying points for belonging at the org.
(To be fair, my dad wasn’t more boring than average, even if he was more republican and more certain. Honestly, no pastor can compare to the genius writings, audio, and video that litters the libraries and internet. This was precisely my argument in the years to come: perhaps a pastor’s job should evolve to just being a content curator, or maybe the sermon should go away altogether. But I couldn’t figure out why any modern pastor should think he could say anything of special value on a Sunday morning, when speaking to a literate audience…much less every Sunday!? Adhering to Commandment #9, it seems like there’s either some terrified job security or some intense narcissism going on there, or – more likely – they’re just continuing the tradition, without really adhering to #9 themselves.)
I spoke less and watched more, just like everyone – including me – wanted.
Spanish Fly By Night
One of the clearest and most memorable examples happened on a Mexico missions trip. We attended a marathon-length church service, where the Spanish-only “pastor” seemed to finally be wrapping up the 3-hour service that had to be translated for us, one sentence at a time. It might seem that would make the service exactly twice as long, but in my experience, most pastors, like most bloggers, will usually use up approximately 172% of their audience’s attention span before concluding, regardless of how much valuable information they actually have to convey.
But attention spans must grow longer closer to the equator, because this pastor was not wrapping up, just changing gears, transitioning into his leg-healing routine, using the power of God to lengthen the uneven legs of a small boy pulled from the audience. I hadn’t seen the trick before, but it struck me as a odd that of all the cancers and other maladies that surely existed in that room (extreme poverty being the most obvious and most prevalent), Jesus chose to bypass the physical laws of the universe to help out with a slight discrepancy in the length of a kid’s legs. What was next – healing someone’s cold? Or growing out a bad hair cut? Jesus Christ: at least break the laws of physics to help out with something of consequence, like an ingrown toenail or acne or something!
The most impressive part of the miracle was watching the surprise on people’s faces as he showed his poor victims the problem they had been living with and not even noticing it! The pastor’s real superpower was apparently not so much the healing, as it was the ability to size up leg lengths, just by eyeballing it.
By the time he had used his breath to “heal” a good half-dozen, random people, I figured we probably all had slightly different length legs, or that is was a common defect from Mexican malnutrition or something. If I had it, I was ready to just live with it, rather than waiting around for Jesus’s magical cosmetic surgeon to finish with the whole church.
Magicians aren’t supposed to repeat a trick for the same audience, for good reason. Multiple times, as he brought participants’ legs together, they were obviously the same length, and he would have to jostle them around until he had jammed one stiff leg back into the hip, showing an obvious difference in length, and turning to the audience with a poo-eating grin, as if to say, “See? Needs healing, right? Watch this!”
At this point, I remembered showing my dad a similar sleight-of-posture trick I had learned as a small child at my grandparents house, watching the Mickey Mouse club. While he was brushing his teeth one night, I extended my arm to barely touch the bathroom wall in front of me, proving it was exactly an arms-length away. Then I bent that arm, keeping my feet in the same position while I rubbed that elbow with my other hand. Then I re-extended the arm, which suddenly didn’t reach the wall any more. I decided I should only show this trick a few times, for fear that my arms would eventually be so short I could not use them. But my dad relieved this worry without a word by pushing on my back, smashing my extended fingers into the wall. Phew! Sadder but wiser. Thanks, dad.
So as the Mexican quack started to blow on his 20th pair of shoes, it became obvious that this fraud’s show would be leading to a “love offering” for his anointed services, which he just might impose on the entire audience. I turned to my youth leader and chaperone, Ward Smith, hoping to gauge whether or not he was also growing tired of this bullshit. I tried my best to create an expression that communicated, “Really?? Come on! Can we leave yet?”
Despite being only 3 feet away, and directly in his line of sight, he avoided all eye contact with me, choosing to instead, stare straight forward as reverently (…worshipfully?) as was demanded by the situation. After all, if this Open Bible faith healer was conning the audience…well, a whole lot of inconvenient conclusions would follow.
Thankfully, the huckster finished his lackluster show before he got around to fixing my feet. (At least in a black church, we would have punctuated the hollow platitudes between patients with some dominant B3 stabs and a few impressive drum fills. But the Mexicans were lacking in showmanship that day.)
As the charlatan started bringing his two-bit snake-oil sales pitch to a close, he invited the entire congregation to the front to be prayed over. He would soon be extracting payment for his treatment, and we apparently possessed no right of refusal. Shoulder to shoulder in a small, un-air-conditioned church on a hot Mexican summer night, I was a willing participant, hoping that compliance would speed our exit.
Like a samurai master unaware of his lack of real magic, this pastor assumed 100% compliancy as he made it clear he was going to begin slaying us in the Spirit (knocking us blissfully semi-unconscious by the power of the Holy Ghost). We were standing on his right, and he started using his powers on his left, assaulting people with Jésus as they fell, miraculously, unharmed onto the tile floor.
I had never been slain in the Spirit, and though I believed in it, I could tell this guy did not have what it would take to get the job done. I spun around again, to visually check in with Ward, “Do we really have to do this?” But just as I turned, I barely met his gaze out of the corner of his eyes before he closed them and extended his hands to the air, praying in tongues and preparing for his glorious descent.
Son of bitch! I would have thought, if I used language appropriately back then. I can’t be the only person to not go down. Then everyone will think there’s something wrong with me, not Fraudy McFraudface. I guess if anyone else stays up, I can stay up too.
But as I watched him make his way through the congregation toward us, I noticed the only people staying up were the people who hadn’t received their cue because they were busy, like Ward, preparing for the powerful wave of the Spirit.
Their punishment for being too involved with God to notice the power of the Holy Spirit was that the pastor attended to them individually, palming their forehead like a basketball and jolting several times, as if unable to contain the pulses of Holy Spirit power coursing through his hand, until the recipient succumbed and lowered themselves to the ground.
Well played, Señor McFraudface. I could choose between falling on my own, or enduring his personal, un-returnable attack. If it were me today, I would like to think that when he approached me, I would return the favor by placing my hand on his forehead, shaking even harder, and shouting even louder, until he gave up or succumbed, in which case, I would raise my fists in victory and take the offering for the real slim shady.
But I had no such boldness back then, nor did I want to make a mockery of a practice I still believed in (minus this guy’s abuse of the system). So I looked back one more time to my youth leader, who had wisely opened his eyes, ever so slightly, gazing heavenward, so he could see out of his peripheral vision when it was time to take a dive for Jesus.
On cue, we all carefully lowered our bodies to the floor and waited for the signal to start meandering back to our seats. A blast from the real Holy Spirit should probably last at least a good 3-4 minutes before wearing off, so that’s roughly what we gave this guy. Generally, a slain person should also begin speaking in tongues, but that was a bridge too far for me. I just made my peace with the significantly cooler, cracked asbestos floor and waited for the Holy high to wear off my compatriots before we found our seats again, healed and humiliated.
When the offering plate was passed, suddenly Ward was able to make eye contact again. As he and his wife each dropped a ten in the plate, his face was easy to read, “Don’t make me look bad.” Shamefully, I put a couple bucks in, the same way I’d later learn to give money to a bum: I don’t buy your act, but you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into it, and I can afford it, and I don’t want you to hurt me, so let’s just get this ritual over and walk away real peaceful-like.
Of course, we never talked about any of this. But Jamin treasured up all these things and pondered them in his heart (Luke 2:19).
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