Transfiguration and Ascension

Made it through Easter, especially challenging as I attended a Baptist church service in a small Texas town.  Preacher had no college and no seminary but he clearly had his own theology, quasi Christian, mostly red-neck.  I squirmed.

But I spent my time ignoring his sermon by reading Biblical passages about the Transfiguration and Ascension.  I have read all that before, but it was somehow even more enlightening while sitting among the cult members who were intent on the message and nodding their heads with an occasional "amen.."  No evidence of though processes, no hands raised with questions, just blank stares.

The transfiguration occurred somewhere in the middle of Jesus so-called ministry.  He is visited by Elijah and Moses who descend from heaven and Jesus starts to glow.  Really scary stuff.  But it points out several things.  Folks at that time still believed heaven was up and hell was down.  Had to be that way because the earth was flat and the center of the universe.  Of course we cannot find such places as heaven and hell, but that does not matter to these 1^st century Bronze Age theologians who still do up and down. 

More difficult to understand is the presence of Elijah and Moses, two Old Testament heroes.  They glowed too.  They descended from heaven.  Unlike Trump they were transparent.  Other than believing anything like this could ever actually happen, it raises a serious theological question for me.  So, how did Moses and Elijah earn their spots in heaven?  What process allowed them to die and go to heaven?  Clearly, there were souls in heaven before the death and resurrection of Jesus.  If that is true, why did Jesus come, die and rise?  Why not stay with whatever system was in place pre-Jesus?  Sure could have saved a lot of heart ache while God killed his son and Jesus committed suicide.  In other words, even if I buy the Biblical story the whole Jesus story seems pointless.  People were getting saved pre-Jesus.

The Ascension seems like so much more smoke and mirrors.  Again, Jesus glows, goes transparent and floats up.  Up is heaven.  Ha.  A modern human witnessing such events would likely need therapy until they died, or would end up in the same group as the UFO abductees.  Quasi-Quacks.  Rising from the dead is a ridiculous stretch.  Rising from earth to heaven is beyond belief.  The belief works because no disciple had a telescope to track where Jesus went, there was no radar, no Hubble, and there were no jets to scramble.  It was magic.  Miracles are magic until they can be explained, unless the event never happened.  Believing something to be true does not make it true.

This adds additional fodder for thought about why the Jesus story was told when it was told.  I imagine a 2019 birth.  Verifying the virginity of Mary.  Taking DNA samples of god.  Checking to see if angels show up on radar while singing and talking to shepherds, how a star hovered over a city without boiling the entire planet to a crisp, etc., etc.  If Jesus began his ministry today we would have cell phone videos of every miracle he supposedly worked and they could be debunked.  Same with the resurrection, transfiguration, and ascension.  If there is an all knowing god he would have to stage this story before there were any tools of science to analyze the events. Fortunately, those who blessed the New Testament 400 years after Jesus could make the story read however they wanted because we had no way to challenge.   Now, it seems as real to me as the Greek and Roman gods working miracles.  Poppycock and Balderdash.

Probably not a good thing for me to go to church anymore.

Happy Easter. Turn Off Your Brain

So much of what I read on social media is promoting religious belief, especially Christian belief.  It would be funny if it were not so sad.  Read a bit this morning that was fiction but was not labeled as such.  A mother prayed over her sick little boy who died of cancer anyway in the hospital.  Mom goes home, cries herself to sleep, then awakes to find a note from her deceased son that says he is in heaven, met Jesus, et al, his grandparents met him there, and God gave him a magic pen so he could write her.  He said God let him die because God loved him and did not want him to suffer.  Really?  Holy Shit.  Then why didn’t God cure his cancer?  And if there ever was a letter received from a recently departed it would be earthshaking.  No such thing has ever happened except in séances and they are bogus.

To celebrate Holy Week the brain cannot be engaged.  A human cannot ask questions and seek rational answers, mainly because this story was invented and cemented 400 years after Jesus died, if there ever was such a person as Jesus.  The big question for me is why did an omnipotent god design a forgiveness path that required his only son to die?  It makes no sense.  Unless one wants to promote a mythology that includes god walking among us, born of a virgin, walking on water, healing the sick, turning water into wine, and rising from the dead.  That kind of malarkey may have carried weight with the superstitious and illiterate of 2,000 years ago, but surely sounds like a story tale to any modern human.  Even if it was all true, it does not make sense.  No parent would allow, much less promote the death of their child.  Is that the model we should follow?  Don’t tell me god loves me more than he loved his own child.  That is irrational and I could not worship a god who was so uncaring for his own son.

And as I have said before, if Jesus had the power to climb off the cross and did not, he in effect committed suicide.  If God had the power to save him from such a torturous death and did not he is guilty of negligent homicide.  Neither action, nor lack thereof, merits respect, much less worship.  Jesus can dispel the crowd that was ready to stone the town whore but cannot dispel the crowd that wants him crucified?  Come on.  Jesus can stump the rabbis at the temple when he is 11, but he cannot outsmart the same crew at the end of his ministry?  Come on.  Jesus can get mad and drive money changers out of the temple but cannot get mad when they drive nails through his hands?  Come on.  And Jesus starts a cannibalistic ritual, this is my body, eat, this is my blood, drink.  Come on.  Reason must be totally suspended to assume holy week went as scripted and amended over 400 years post Jesus supposed death. 

Did anyone go to heaven prior to the resurrection?  If so, how did they get there and why couldn’t god let that process continue?

The real horror of the holy week story is the fear it implants in humans.  Now we are told Jesus watches our every move, he hears our every thought.  He is the ultimate cop in the sky and we never have privacy.  He keeps score.  If you do not do as he says you will die then spend eternity burning in hell.  What a wonderful, loving, caring god.  He will kill his only son and torture you forever if you do not appreciate it.  And while he is capable of all that, he cannot cure childhood cancer.

Maybe I am going to hell for thinking.  But I think not.  First, there is no hell into which souls float and are burned.  There are no souls.  If there is a hell, where is it?  It must exist somewhere and we surely do not have the GPS coordinates.  I think I shall just be a good person because that is the right and reasonable thing to do, not because I fear death.  Death is death.  I will die and my existence and my consciousness will end, just as my existence and consciousness began sometime after I was born.  I cannot have an immortal soul by definition if I had a beginning.

But reaching those conclusions is the result of thinking.  Even believers must admit that their god gave us the power to think, even though he punished Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge.  I am able to think as a result of evolution and a great education.  I know.  Blasphemy.  But I will not turn off my brain.