The Bible Buffet

Reflections on Religion, Scripture, Non-Belief, and "Salad Bar Christianity"

Who is Linda Barnes Popham trying to kid?  Last month, the Christian Fascist Southern Baptist Conference (SBC) voted by a 90% margin to expel Baptist churches with female pastors from their organization.   It did so on the basis of a literal interpretation of The Holy Bible.   As Albert Moehler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary argued, “It’s a matter of Biblical commitment…a commitment to Biblical scripture that unequivocally limits of the office of pastor to men.  It is an issue of Biblical authority.”

“The Spirit Gives Illumination to Our Hearts and Minds”

Popham, a female Baptist minister, has a different perspective. “I certainly agree it’s a matter of Biblical integrity,” she told the “P”BS Newshour last June 15^th. “However,” Rev. Popham added, “I also know that the spirit gives illumination to our hearts and minds and we’re able to interpret the scripture through the Holy Scripture’s leading.  I believe that The Bible is God’s perfect word.  I believe every word in The Bible, but there are passages such as those in First Timothy, in Corinthians, that our church would interpret differently than Albert Moehler interprets them.”  Popham told “P”BS that the SBC’s action reflected a nasty, in-Christian sexist bias against women holding positions of power.

I hold no brief for the Bible or Christianity, or any other religion, “God” knows, but the document that Popham sees as “God’s perfect word” is clear as day. In 1st Timothy 2:12, Paul says, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet” (c.f. 1 Cor. 14:33-35) Other parts of the core Christian scripture make it clear that Christianity’s founding fathers believed that “God” forbade women from being leading pastors (see Corinthians 11:3-12, 14:34-35, Titus 1, 2).

Rev. Popham is angry at the SBC’s treatment of women?  What does she think of “God’s” treatment of women in the Holy Bible?  Things really vicious from the start on the women’s question in the sacred book’s intro, Genesis, where we learn that a female named Eve committed got fooled by a serpent in committing a terrible original sin by seducing a male named Adam and that God decided to punish all subsequent human females with the curse of pain in childbirth – and with enslavement of women to their husbands:

“To the woman, THE LORD GOD said, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16).

What the holy f#*k? “And he shall rule over you.”

“A Cruel and Truly Monstrous God”

Honest investigation of the Bible reveals that the scriptural forbidding of female pastorship is just the tip of the iceberg of the Christian deity’s  savage sexism. It exposes what Bob Avakian calls “a cruel and truly monstrous God”  who demanded death by stoning of women who could not prove they were virgins on their wedding night!

Look if you dare at Numbers 31, where “THE LORD” tells his spokesman Moses to command the Israelite people to slaughter and rape the Midianites as punishment for not believing in the Christian “God.”  Here’s a key passage from that thrilling action-adventure chapter: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him.  But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.” Notice the pedophilia?

Again and again in The Bible, people and nations on the wrong side of “God” are slaughtered en masse, their women and girls raped with impunity as “just” punishment at His command.

Avakian has gone through the Bible word for word, and finds that “the following are just some of the extremely oppressive relations and beliefs that are upheld, commanded, and celebrated” in Linda Barnes Popham’s holy scripture, of which she “believes every word”:

“Slavery and other forms of ruthless exploitation.

The domination and degradation of women by men, including the so-called right of make conquerors to carry off women, especially virgins, as prizes of war, rape them and make them concubines – sex slaves.

The killing of women who are not virgins when they get married.

The execution of women believed to be witches.

The condemnation of homosexuality as an abomination deserving death.

The condemnation to eternal damnation and unbearable suffering in hell for all those who do not accept ‘the one true God’ – and, in the case of Christianity, Jesus as the son of God who was crucified but then raised from the dead.  

The cruel notion that disease is caused by sinfulness.”(Bob Avakian, Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, pp. 15-16).

Here is a typical passage in Rev. Popham’s “perfect word of God”

“Ai Captured by a Strategem and Destroyed…Then the LORD said to Joshua  ‘Do not fear and do not be dismayed. Take all the fighting men with you, and arise, go up to Ai. See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, and his people, his city, and his land.  And you shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king. Only its spoil and its livestock you shall take as plunder for yourselves. Lay an ambush against the city, behind it.’… And Joshua chose 30,000 mighty men of valor and sent them out by night.  And he commanded them,… rise up from the ambush and seize the city, for the Lord your God will give it into your hand.  And as soon as you have taken the city, you shall set the city on fire. You shall do according to the word of the Lord…. When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and struck it down with the edge of the sword.  And all who fell that day, both men and women, were 12,000, all the people of Ai.  But Joshua did not draw back his hand with which he stretched out the javelin until he had devoted all the inhabitants of Ai to destruction. Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their plunder, according to the word of the Lord that he commanded Joshua.  So Joshua burned Ai and made it forever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.  And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening. And at sunset Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree and threw it at the entrance of the gate of the city and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day” (Joshua 8:2).

The Bible is chock full of bloody and sadistic stuff like  that. Twelve thousand dead is nothing! In 2 Samuel, the Bible lovingly relates how God sent a plague to kill 70,000 of his own “chosen people” until King David followed the LORD’s order “to go up an erect an alter to the LORD” on a threshing floor where he was to “offer burn offerings” (David bought a threshing floor and burned an unspecified number of oxen to stop the plague!).   

Then there’s the “Ten Commandments,” whose announcement by “God” in Exodus contains a line that has always blown me away: “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me.”

What kind of complete and unmitigated asshole of a deity punishes children down to three and four generation for the alleged sinfulness of their parents?!

The punishment for breaking any of the Big Ten? Death by stoning! (From a quick perusal, I am condemned to death by at least seven of the unpardonable sins.)

No wonder a reader of the RCP newspaper Revolution penned a long letter and study calling “God the Original Fascist.”

One of my favorite parts of the Bible – I mean that in a sarcastic and darkly comedic way – the Book of Job, which can be pretty well summarized as follows: "I might be almighty God but I can't stop terrible things from happening to good people because that's just not how the cosmos is set up. Sorry about that.  But you must keep the faith. You must believe in me as an almighty anyway.  Thanks for your support!"

“The Good News”: Wait for Judgement Day

I can already hear the “good news” objection coming from liberals and leftists who identify with Christianity and The Bible - well, parts of it. “That’s the Old Testament, comrade.  The New Testament, the word of God through the living historical figure Jesus Christ is much better!”

I am aware of the various passages in the New Testament where Jesus can be construed to sound like some kind of left revolutionary enemy of class inequality, racism, and  imperialism.  I’ve favorably quoted and cited some of these passages in past writing and speaking – sayings like “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25; Mark 10:25; Matthew 19:24), or “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).  Such language seems to align Christianity with anti-capitalism, as does the Messiah’s  announcement that his return to Earth will mean  damnation for those who failed to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick or imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-48). 

Still, I’m not all that impressed. Beyond the thorny question of whether Jesus ever actually existed in the first place (there is no primary source evidence of that), it’s critical to recall that the “son of God” portrayed in the New Testament is thoroughly steeped in and deeply allegiant to the Old Testament, understood as the “perfect word” of his “father.”

Jesus is rooted in the Old Testament by a New Testament that portrays the Christian Messiah as a descendant of the Biblical figure David through his father Joseph – this even though Jesus’s mother is virginally impregnated by the Holy Spirit.  

As Avakian notes, moreover,  “the Old Testament scriptures were repeatedly cited by Jesus as the foundation of what he believed and preached.  The New Testament could not have anything to stand on without the Old Testament, which is why the Old Testament is still included in the Christian Bible, after all” (Avakian, Away With All Gods, pp. 31-32. emphasis added).    

The Bible’s Jesus “never challenged but incorporated into his teachings the view of women as inferior in their relations with men, and indeed as essentially the property of men – a view deeply rooted in the scriptures and religious traditions to which Jesus himself adhered,” Avakian oserves (Avakian, p. 20).  The “messiah” calls divorce and re-marriage the sin of adultery (Luke 16:18 and Matthew 5:31-32). He absurdly commands slaves to “love” their oppressive masters, not at all bothering to condemn the institution of slavery.   

Jesus propounds the scientifically unproven idea of the existence of someone (or something) called God who (or which) pulls the strings of the cosmos but who says he doesn’t when “good” people are punished (Job). The New Testament grants Jesus magical superpowers and portrays him curing people on the preposterous basis of the notion that their sickness is a result of their “sins.”

And bear in mind there’s no call for mass popular uprisings against wealth accumulation, inequality, and imperialism in The New Testament.  There’s no revolution.  There’s mass suffering partly alleviated by a man-God with superpowers who will one day – after dying to pay for Eve’s “sinful” sexuality –– return to Earth and introduce social and spiritual justice the wielding the vengeful sword of his dad, God.  In other words, wait for Judgement Day – pie in the sky. In the meantime, slaves should love their masters and women should be understood as the property of men (there’s very little to cite against patriarchy in the New Testament)

New Testament Professor Shelly Matthews: “God’s Violent Judgement” and “The Violent Structures of the Ancient World”

The New Testament is full of justifications for savage violence against non-believers. As Shelly Matthews, Professor of the New Testament at the Brite Divinity School notes (sorry, not sorry for the long quotation - it’s really good):  

“Is the New Testament a violent book? Is the God of the New Testament less violent than the God of the Old Testament? When people imagine an angry male God, dishing out punishments and inflicting suffering, they might identify Him as the God of the Old Testament. When asked to consider stories about inflicting harm, even death, upon others in God’s name, again, they might think they are in Old Testament territory. But the New Testament has its own share of violence committed by both people and God. Christians have sometimes assumed that the ministry of Jesus reflected a radical shift in the nature of God towards peace and love, and away from anger and wrath. Yet, depending on context and point of view, New Testament texts might depict God, and God’s people, as peaceful, or violent, or both.”

“Name-calling is a common type of violence in the New Testament. In response to the fact that many Jews did not believe that Jesus was the messiah, gospel authors told stories of Jesus attacking them in his teaching. In Matt 23:4-36 Jesus derides Pharisees as the vilest of hypocrites. In John 8:44, Jesus calls ‘the Jews’ the ‘children of the devil.’ While Jews are commonly the target of such name-calling, polytheists are also attacked. For example, Titus 1:12 dismisses the entire population of Crete as ‘liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’”

“New Testament texts often reflect, rather than challenge, the violent household and political structures of the ancient world. Jesus tells parables in which beatings, and even killings, of household slaves are affirmed as disciplinary measures (for example, Luke 12:45-47). Paul warns the Corinthians, that as their ‘father,’ he might return to them ‘with a rod,’ presumably to beat them (1Cor 4:21). In Gal 5:12, Paul expresses the wish that those who disagree with him on the matter of circumcision might ‘castrate themselves’” [nice].

“The final judgement is imagined in particularly violent terms in the New Testament, with the book of Revelation serving as Exhibit A. Revelation’s pages burst with gruesome scenes of cosmic battles, plagues, and bloodshed. Consider, for instance, the birds who gorge on human flesh at God’s banquet (Rev 19:17-21). While Revelation is often treated as an outlier, it is better to understand this book as fully at home within New Testament apocalyptic longing for God’s violent judgment against non-believers. Paul imagines Christ at the end of time, handing over the kingdom to God, but only after ‘he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power’ (1Cor 15:24). 2Thess 1:5-10 promises a final judgement with Jesus revealed ‘in flaming fire,’ and inflicting the ‘punishment of eternal destruction.’ Luke’s parable of the nobleman’s return, likely meant to represent Jesus’s second coming, calls for his enemies to be brought forward and slaughtered in his presence (Luke 19:27). Such violent images of final judgement owe to an increasing preoccupation with the afterlife, something of little concern in the Old Testament. This shift in focus between the Testaments once caused Mark Twain to observe that only after the Deity ‘became a Christian,’ did he turn ‘a thousand billion times crueler,’ by inventing and proclaiming hell.”

The Bible Buffet

Avakian makes an interesting observation about the selective and situational way in which Christians tend to approach their scripture and customs:

“[Christians] are practicing what you could call ‘salad bar’ (or ‘buffet’) Christianity…a phenomenon where they ‘pick and choose’ from the Bible and Christian religious tradition – embracing what they want to believe…while passing over or putting aside that which makes them uncomfortable or strikes them as wrong or as outdated…it is very much like being at a buffet and going down the line: ‘I want this and I don’t want that…I don’t like all that stuff in the Bible about killing children who are rebellions against their parents – I’m gonna put that to the side, I’m gonna take this part over here about love and peace. In the world today and in American society specifically, everybody who claims to be a Christian practices ‘salad bar’ Christianity, in one form or another….the Christian fundamentalists practice it – while they deny that they do and attacking others for doing it.  They insist that they believe every word in the Bible, that it must be taken literally,  that it’s the absolute truth, handed down from God in every syllable, but they themselves put to the side and don’t talk about things which, if they openly upheld them, would more obviously reveal them to be the monstrous lunatics they are.” (Avakian, Away With All Gods, p. 33)

Rev. Linda Barnes “I Believe Every Word” Popham is an example of this “salad bar” stance on the right, with a caveat. She discards or ignores key parts of Christian scripture that negate her claim that it is aligned with female pastorship and power, but she cites nothing in that scripture to support that claim (hence her resort to the notion that a holy spirit of some sort lets her interpret the Bible scripture in ways consistent with her pastorship). 

Many left-identified folks I’ve known and typically liked a great deal, go “salad bar” from the left, digging the Jesus they can portray as a socialist or left-anarchist and leaving out the parts of the New Testament that lean in a less than egalitarian direction to say the least.  

There but for the Grace of Social Historical Chance Go I

Religious belief must be inculcated, socialized into one, most commonly at a young age, to arise.  If it isn’t imposed it does not naturally or spontaneously emerge in the human mind.  I’ve been an “atheist” for  as long as I can remember.  This isn’t because of any special or purported intellectual gifts or inherent bent towards science and rational enquiry (as in thesis-evidence-conclusion). (Excessive juvenile delinquency cost me the advanced math skills required to become a scientist.) I could easily be a religious believer if my family of origin had been different.  I might even ironically say “there but for the grace of [no] God go I,” by which I would really mean “there but for the pure social-historical accident of birth into a non-believing family go I.”

This makes my parents more interesting. Both were raised in Christian households. What happened to make them into non-believers despite being raised by avowed Christians? I grew up in a Bible- and religion-free household thanks in part to the toxic Christianity of a paternal grandfather (himself the son of a charismatic circuit-riding Methodist minister in Missouri) who regularly lectured his hemophilia-plagued son, my father, on (a) how disease is a reflection of sin but then on (b) how bad things happen even to the righteous because the cosmos is complicated and the all-powerful God doesn't control everything ...but this doesn't mean you shouldn't worship "Him"/It/Whatever anyway (this is the actual argument in Biblical Book of Job). At some point in the early 1950s, my father saw through the absurdity, said “the Hell with that,” and got seriously interested in social science and the Black jazz scene on the South Side of Chicago.   

My mother's non-belief reflected a dull disgust at Catholic priests who said she and others in the flock weren't sacred or smart enough to read the “word of God” in The Bible; alienation from parents who insisted they were Catholics while drinking their asses off and never attend the church they claimed to uphold; alienation from a "God" who killed two older brothers at a young age.  Her beloved brother Connie was quite devoutly Catholic and was killed in the most ridiculous and perfunctory way in the Port of Oran during WWII – something I’ve written about earlier on The Paul Street Report.  

I do have a junior high memory of looking askance at a social studies textbook map showing the distribution of religions around the world: Christianity in the Americas and Europe; Islam in the Middle East and part of Africa and Southwest Asia; Hinduism in India; Judaism in Israel; Buddhism and Confucianism and vast swaths of Asia. The utterly non-random and geographically uneven distribution of dominant “world religious beliefs” told me that religion was a politically imposed institutional structure that must reflect different histories and power relations in different countries, with each belief system likely reflecting an absurd insistence that they possessed a monopoly on comic understanding. (I also recall the absence of such absurdly nonsensical belief systems in Soviet Russia and Red China as being part of what sparked me to want to know more about what was going on in these “communist  nations” and what Marxism was all about.)

None of what I have written above should be taken to mean that I believe in mocking and shaming people for religious beliefs.  Religion comes from somewhere very deep and elemental in the long human experience.   It reflects humanity’s search for meaning, explanation, and coherence over thousands and thousands of years when homo sapiens lacked the tools to rationally/scientifically explain life, suffering, joy, natural forces, and death.  My parents’ break from religion reflected not just alienation from their parents’ oppressive and hypocritical Christianity but their coming of age in a time when science and secular explanation were making huge advances in the United States and around much of the world.

Religious belief persists, I think, not only because masses of people remain ignorant about rational enquiry but also because organized religion bombards them with constant propaganda and because we have ruling classes and powers with a vested interest in keeping people removed from scientific understanding of the inseparably intertwined natural, social, political, and historical worlds. 

There will always be a natural human quest for soulful and wonderous connection to cosmic meaning  and wonder beyond what science can deliver. Still, there is no inherent reason that this quest must be moored to fantastic and preposterous notions of Divine control or arrayed against the rational and scientific perspective required for us to overcome the multiple and mutually reinforcing forces of oppression – capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and more – that have fueled and sustained religion while bringing humanity now to the precipice of a tragic collapse, perhaps even an extinction that is all too tolerable within the moral, epistemological, and ontological frameworks of every organized major religion