Roaches and Dinosaurs

When I walked into the bathroom early this morning, I flipped on the light and noticed a brown diamond-shaped splotch on the wall. Roach! Not only that, but this roach, just like the one I saw yesterday, had company. Baby company. Riding on its back. So, I grabbed the nearby can of Raid and gave him a little shot. He didn't move. The thing was just frozen in time. It looked like it was alive, but it wasn't. It was just hanging cryogenically on the wall with its little babies holding on.

Someone had come before me to smite the little guy - I mean girl - along with her babies. 

What does this have to do with the bible? 

There are instances in the scriptures (in the old testament) where the authors present humanity as roaches, and this invisible hand from heaven sprays a whole can of Raid on em. Usually, the roaches are the bad guys, like the Babylonians or the Sodomites, you know, in our day they'd be like members of Isis or North Korea or American Liberals. 

And we read these parts in the Bible, and for some reason even though we took all the required English literature classes, and some of us even graduated with degrees in the field, we don't bother to even think of questioning the validity of these stories. Yet, that's just what they are: STORIES!

And we go to church and hear supposedly schooled professionals speak as if Jurassic Park is a real thing, and tomorrow we may have dinosaurs coming to eat us if we don't change our ways. 

People have told me over the years that I have a problem with authority, and I agree with them. I don't get offended anymore, because they're right. I've gotten better with government authority, but it's the spiritual authority that just sets me on fire. We're supposed to interrogate the scriptures on one hand, but on the other listen to some preacher speak as if they opened the bible for the first time yesterday. As Paul once asked, "Where have all the teachers gone?"

Lets say the world is 12 billion years old. I don't remember how old it really is, but that's just the number I'm throwing out for right now. 

And then, let's say people didn't start writing until 4,000 years ago (which is pretty close to the truth I think). 

And then, let's say that the bibles we read (in English) weren't in circulation until the 1500's (another close-to-truth-truth).

That means, if it is all true, that we Americans have had roughly 500 years to process documents that have been around more than 4,000 years. 

It's no wonder there are still seemingly obvious social issues (like women in leadership, homosexuality, sex before marriage, etc.) that are still addressed with brainless answers like, "Because the Bible says so." 

Well, I'm getting off the because-the-bible-says-so train. Besides, I don't know how far these tracks are gonna go. Thank goodness that the problem of obvious slave ownership became a thing of the past, or has it? The slavery that exists today isn't so obvious, unless you frequent that nondescript neon-lit yellow building on the corner of Creeper and Family Man.

I've never, and probably will never in my lifetime, seen so many people take a book (rather, a library of books), so damn literally. And it frustrates the hell out of me. Why?

Because I'll be sitting in a church service somewhere. It can be anywhere. And I'll be thinking, and all of a sudden I'll hear a phrase like " . . . and they'll be thrown in the fire." And then I'll look around at all the sheep and everybody's just eating it up. And I'm wondering, "Are you kidding? Are you really feeding us this nonsense?" 

"Where have all the teachers gone?"

When Paul posed this question, I'd like to think he was thinking like I was, but he probably wasn't. My thinking is, is anybody willing to stand up at a podium and publicly interrogate the scriptures as they would have in Paul's day? Any good rabbi (including Jesus himself, who we've turned into the American bible drill champion for the ages) or Jew would have picked it up, questioned it, doubted it, criticized it, and picked it apart to look for a new nugget of truth other than, "Because the Bible says so."

I know this sounds crazy, but there are a lot of things in the Bible that will get me killed and get other people killed if I were to take them literally. For example, I could practice the spiritual lesson of ethnic cleansing and be like - who was it, Isaiah? - and invite all the local priests I don't agree with to the edges of town and slaughter them all. After all, God is for rightness if you read the bible in the same attitude that passage was written.

Or, I could practice the principle of sending-your-husband-to-the-front-lines-of-battle-so-I-can-sleep-with-you as King David did, and still get the label of a man after God's own heart. Is God's heart for this kind of thing? I hope not, at least not the God that I want to entrust my whole life to (including the sex part).

Why don't we take Shakespeare literally?
Why don't we take Dante's Inferno literally?
Why don't we take Homer seriously?
After all, they were circulating around the same time as our current English mis-translations.

Going back to the roach thing. I'm sorry if you still think that God literally smited anybody - wait, lets hear it - because the bible says so. And, I'm sorry if you think that God wrote the bible, or that the earth was literally created in six days, or that a donkey really talked, or that a man was really swallowed by a whale, or that Revelation is a story about how real angels on real horses are carrying real bazookas on real chariots of fire coming for real tomorrow to smite (or smote?) all the real wicked people on this planet.

I'm not buying it anymore, and there's a whole lot more folks besides me who are selling their bible-is-literal stock these days. If you haven't heard about it, then you probably live in an area that's saturated with conservative-Christian-censored-media-outlets like Lifeway and Mardel and the hundreds of propagandized church bookstores.

Back to the roaches again. 

I'm here to bring the good news that there isn't and never was a heavenly Raid can. And, humanity (even the worst of the worst) isn't like a bunch of roaches scurrying around running from the heavenly Raid can. God never smote, or smited, or smeethed anyone, but was rather portrayed as an armed bodyguard for the good guys, ready to take out the bad guys.

The good news is, we humans have a way of portraying God in a way that attributes our biases, our prejudices, and our loves. Our God is a concept of our belief systems, which is a very human and normal thing to do. If we didn't do this, we'd be robots (which I'm afraid is closer to the current state of evangelical Christianity than we'd like to think). And so, quit taking the bible so damn seriously. And literally. God is love. Wherever love is, God is also. And we all know love, so we all know God, right?

The stories in the scriptures didn't last long before they were taken places they were never supposed to go. And we still have this obvious thread of God-is-on-our-sideness saturating everything from the pulpit to the politician. 

So, this is my dare to you: 

Wake up really early in the morning.
Open the Bible.
Question everything that you've never experienced or heard of.
And then, search for the answers to those questions.

Chances are, the search won't get you answers, but it'll break you out of the box called biblical literalism. And that could be the most freeing thing you've ever experienced when it comes to spirituality.