I recently read Mark Twain’s brilliantly acid Letters from the Earth, written in 1909, a year before his death. I highly recommend it. Satan visits the earth and sends back dispatches to his fellow archangels about humans’ conception of God, Genesis, the Fall, and Heaven. Satan’s account of the Flood is particularly instructive. The challenging logistics of fitting all those life forms into the Ark have not heretofore been adequately analyzed, nor was it widely known that Noah was sent back to pick up some flies in order to ensure that man’s subjection to typhoid fever and other filth-born tribulations would remain total:
Noah and his family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them; distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. . . . If [God] had had a motto, it would have read, ‘Let no innocent person escape.’
Science would eventually make a few inroads against disease, however, which God then promptly got credit for:
If science exterminates a disease . . . all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. This is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time.
I did a show once on “Religion in America” where I juxtaposed this book with Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. I too chose to quote the Noah portion of Satan’s tale in my reading (along with one of Twain’s two footnotes :-).
What with spiders over flames and flies filled with typhoid, it was a frightening day for humanity – albeit a delightfully fun one for an obscure talk show artist filled with holy tremors as he channeled a couple of late great Men of
Words in their bellowing denunciations of God and Man.
Up with Satan.
Heather, check this out.
I often make the joke about how “Jesus died for our sins and I try to ensure that his death not be in vain” yadda yadda yadda, the point of which is that mainstream American Protestants believe in a form of salvation that leaves no motivation for people to actually be good to each other in real life being as, heck, salvation is entirely dependant on whether one accepts Jesus or not and would lead to the same Heaven or Hell for Gandhi as for Hitler.
I’m sure some well-shaved theologian in an ivory tower somewhere has a well-worked-out response but the regular folk with whom I’ve employed this line of reasoning seem to wholly buy into this logic and offer nothing of any substance in attempting to explain what motivation a “Christian’ has to lead a good life.
Anyhow, some people go the extra mile to actually SPELL IT OUT.
Here’s the final entry from that dude who shot up the gym yesterday:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20671413@N02/3792484079/
So sure, Nihilism might kill but so does Apple Pie Christianity.
Awesome! (Thanks Georgie)
Oh and one more thing Heather, couldja add to your page some method for people to be able to email you? There’s no way in hell I’m sending any email through the Manhattan Institute who have never replied to any of the three emails I’ve sent to McWhorter through their fine servives. Emails that go to some alleged consortium of people may as well be emails printed and tossed into a bonfire. Nowadays, it’s pretty normal for even busy folk to have an email address available where they can be reached.
@anony
As a strong philosophical atheist, I hesitate to provide a defense, but I will say that most Protestant dogmas require their adherents to acknowledge past moral failures (“sins”). It’s not exactly a specific prescription for good future behavior, but admitting to past failures might be seen as the first step in a program of behavioral improvement.
It doesn’t really go further than that, but it does not justify future immoral behavior, and makes clear that there is a difference between behavior which is desired by God and behavior which is not.
Now I understand why Noah didn’t swat those two mosquitoes…