Holiday Greetings from a Godless Heathen

Posted by Jeff Clarke on 12.19.2008

An offer the evangelicals can't refuse...

This is the last column I'll be able to write before my son is born. Soon my energy that goes into trying to write funny, insightful, and provocative stuff will be devoted to being amazed at the little person my wife and I created, as well as being amazed at just how many diapers the little dude can fill in an hour.

So before I take a bit of a break and in the spirit on the holiday season, I'd like to present a gift to my evangelical friends out there. That's right. This old secular progressive, your sworn enemy in the War on Christmas, is going to make a deal with you. I've got a bible that you can put in the public school system that I'd be perfectly fine with.

While I subscribe to no organized faith, I do consider myself a spiritual guy. The universe and our place in it just seems too astounding to be a simple cosmic accident. There probably is something out there. At the same time, I'm not going to pretend I know what that something is. It could be Shiva, Vishnu, Yahweh, Allah, Jeebus, the Force, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or all of the above. Or NONE of the above. Who knows? I don't. And I'm okay with that. Life is so incredible and filled with the sublime and the ridiculous that I don't need to be sold on a second life in order to make this life worthwhile or meaningful. No matter what waits on the other side, my philosophy has always been "if I love my family, watch out for my friends, and help those in need, in any decently run universe I'll be okay."

This is where organized religion and I part ways, and where I start to have problems with it. Everyone is entitled to believe what they want to believe, and if organized religion is what helps you make sense out of life, more power to you. For some people it's religion, for some its activism, for some it's collecting Hummel figurines. No skin off my nose. But it is the smug self-assurance of religious organizations that gets mankind into trouble more often than not. "We KNOW how the universe was created. We KNOW the meaning of existence. Ours is the one true path." That is a dangerous line of thinking, because believing you have the inside track on the secrets of the universe and feeling it is your duty to show those not like you the error of their ways has led to the saddest chapters of human history. When you believe you are superior to another group of people, our funny little human foibles can lead us to do any number of terrible things. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinians, and 9/11 are all direct results of "my invisible man can beat up your invisible man."

Here in the United States, we're a little more civil in our attempts to break the spirit of the heathens. So we do things like take rights out of Constitutions because god says those people are wicked, or we try to institute prayer in public schools and hang the Ten Commandments on the wall. Then we run and hide behind the separation of church and state when it's convenient. This is another reason why organized religion bothers me: The hypocrisy. I'm all for church and state being separate entities, but it has to go both ways. When you tell your parish that god will hate you if you vote a certain way, don't whine when I want you to pay your fair share of taxes on all your real estate holdings. To paraphrase the late, great George Carlin, "Churches want to engage in politics and public policy, let them pay their fucking admission fee just like everyone else!"

But I said this column is a gift to my evangelical friends, and I meant it. I don't want prayer in my schools, but I will meet you half way and give you a bible. Yep, teach the bible in public schools, I'm totally fine with that. It just has to be a certain bible. If I start a campaign to get a bible into the public school system, you have to back me 100% when I propose the Thomas Jefferson bible.

Contrary to what our more bible-thumping politicians will tell you, the United States was not founded as a "Christian nation". The original European settlers came to this continent to escape religious persecution. And have you ever read the writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and so many other founders? They seem positively irritated with the church. It isn't that they were irreligious, but they were Deists. They believed that god is in the details of life, and that this world we inhabit is full of so many incredible things, the hand of god must be in all of it. They didn't worship at the altar of religious dogma. One of the best give-aways is in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson writes that man is given certain inalienable rights by "their" creator. Not "our" creator. You might want to argue semantics with me, but there is a profound difference between those two little words. If it had been "our creator", then the founders would be making a religious assumption that we all come from the same creator, no matter what we feel or believe. "Their creator" puts the question of creation on the individual. Do you believe god is your creator? Which god? Are your parents your creator? Because of that little word, the founders made the question of creation one that each person in this nation has to answer for themselves, and that's the way it should be.

But Jefferson goes even further, and despite all of his brilliant works, I wish this one got more exposure. Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the bible, or perhaps a better term would be "edited". He took the New Testament and eliminated all talk of Christ's divinity, and all of the magic tricks with the loaves and the fishes and so on. What is left? A book about a philosopher who told everybody to love each other in peace and harmony, a guy who stressed that the pursuit of money and power should not be mankind's ultimate goal, a groovy fellow that tried to get people to look out for the most unfortunate members of our society, and a teacher who said not to judge somebody until you truly understand where they're coming from.

Those are some pretty good life lessons, but when you wrap them up in a religious message, you get resistance from people who don't share your religion. I like to think that was Jefferson's point in editing his own holy book. If you make Jesus' teachings not about trying to change people's faith, but about changing how they treat their fellow man, maybe we can start to make this planet a nicer place to live. It is amazing to me that Christ teaches love and harmony, yet every two, four, and six years, the neo-conservatives prey on the intolerance of evangelicals in order to turn out the vote. "If you don't vote for George Bush, the gays and the atheists will move in next door! Boogey-boogey-boogey!" I can understand. I mean, read the New Testament, and you'll see that Jesus devotes much of his teaching to the persecution of homosexuals. Wait, what? He doesn't? Hm.

So there is the deal, my Christian friends. If you put up the Tom Jefferson bible, I will fully support it going into public schools. I'm a teacher, so I'll even help you come up with lesson plans. It obviously can be taught as part of 10th grade World Literature. We can ask the students to come up with plans to help the poor in their communities. They can write essays about how Christ would react to the conflict in the Middle East, or the rapacious greed on Wall Street. All kinds of learning opportunities are there. But most of all, maybe we could teach future generations that it is better to be "Christ-like" than simply "Christian."

So in the words of Krusty the Clown, "Have a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukah, a kwazy Kwanza, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn and respectful Ramadan." See you in 2009!