Bill Hillman Presents
REASON vs. SUPERNATURAL & FAITH
INSPIRATION SECTION
https://www.hillmanweb.com/reason/inspiration/

THE MATTER OF JESUS HAS COME UP
Den Valdron I have thoughts on the matter. Some of you may find this unpleasant or difficult. At the very least, it is uncompromising.  You may not wish to read it, and if you feel that you will be challenged or offended, then my advice is not to read it at all. Where I am is the product of many hard years, more than a little pain and suffering, relentless questioning and thought, I have reached my conclusions. I am not interested in dialogue, debate or even exchange of views. You are free to believe otherwise. But this is me.

I’m of two minds on the subject.  There is the simple part, and there is the complicated part.

There’s the simple part of the Jesus question - There probably was a man, likely an itinerant Jewish preacher wandering around the Palestine region during the Roman era in approximately the right time.  This person was not named Christ, may or may not have been called Jesus, or Joseph, or Joshua or Yusuf or something vaguely along those lines. They were not born on December 25, there was no star, there was no census as in the bible story. They may or may not have been born in a manger or some other lowly place, or maybe not. There were not three wise men. There was no childhood in Egypt, or any wonders by boy-Jesus displaying surpassing wisdom.

The person who came to be called Jesus probably said some of the things attributed to Jesus in the Bible, and probably didn’t say some the things attributed.  Other people probably said some of the things attributed to Jesus.  None of the miracles happened, sorry.  Everyone dies, so the person who came to be called Jesus died, possibly due to Romans, or possibly due to Jewish politics and infighting. He probably didn’t die on Easter.  Definitely wasn’t resurrected.

He was not a god or son of god.  He didn’t write the New Testament.  That was compiled 60 to 120 years after his death from multiple sources, some of these sources had never been anywhere close to any Jesus and were nakedly second hand. The New Testament was then edited and re-edited, and revised over the next few hundred years.  Seriously, there were entire conferences where they threw whole chapters out of the Bible, or ‘translated’ it to fit contemporary mores. That’s not the hand of God at work, that’s humans being humans.
That’s the simple reality of Jesus. Everything else is just faith. Which is false. By definition, if something is real, you don’t need faith - it is whether or not you believe in it. If you have to choose to believe...  Well, sorry.

Now for the hard part.  The complicated part of the Jesus question.  A little background: I was deeply religious when I was young. Truly believed, felt the spirit, attended church even without my parents.  That got burned out of me through the experience of what people really were.

But I had an experience, later in life.  As a young Crown Attorney, part of the job was to go to the Clerk of Courts, to pick up or file documents or deal with issues.  One time I was there, I ended up waiting a while.  In those days, they had Bibles at the counter so people could swear documents.

So with nothing better to do, I opened the Bible and started to read, and was transfixed as if struck by a force.  Because here is what Jesus said (I paraphrase): Give it all up, give away all your belongings, renounce money, renounce property, renounce your family, abandon everything to follow me and live by my principles, live a moral life.

There was something so absolutely uncompromising here that I was astounded. This was not anything I’d learned in Church, or in Sunday school, or in endless sermons and proverbs and proscriptions.  This was a Jesus that said “Fuck you, no excuses!”

I kept reading, again and again, finding this uncompromising Jesus that cut through the bullshit and called people out for their phoniness and hypocrisy.

This was a Jesus that said that if you did good works so that other people could see it, then you weren’t a good person, you were just an asshole playing to the crowd. Jesus said that if you gave money, expecting to get it back, then you were an asshole because if you expected it back, that wasn’t real generosity, just lending.

This was a Jesus that insisted on genuine honest, genuine compassion, genuine morality - not performance, not going through the motions.

It was powerful.  It was damned powerful.  It shook me to the core. It became part of my life.

There are other moral teachings that have also become part of my life.  The Seven Teachings of Indigenous people - Love, Respect, Truth, Wisdom, Courage, Honesty, Humility.  Or the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from a Birmingham Jail.

Honestly, I’ve spent years of my life obsessively pondering the subject of God, the meaning of the Divine, the problems of ethics and morality. I don’t know that I found answers. Maybe I just got tired of the subject. But I did put my time in.

But I am not a Christian. I am not a Christian, because I am not strong enough.

Because the real teachings of Christ were absolute and without compromise. You can’t be a Christian and live a regular life. Sorry, that’s just the facts.

Back in the first centuries after Christ, there was actually a major monastic movement, people literally abandoning society, going into the woods and the wilderness to follow the teachings. The hermitic tradition is an honorable one, and as close as you can come to being a genuine follower of Christ.  The Monastic tradition, next best thing. The Priest/Pastor tradition, a very very distant runner up.

And the rest of us?

G.K. Chesterton wrote “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

And that about sums it up.

Now comes the hard part.

I don’t recognize you as a Christian.you want other people to know, then you’re not. Jesus wants truth, not posers.

If you’re a Christian because you think that will get you into heaven, you’re not. Jesus wants people with convictions, not ambitions.

If you figure you can pick and choose, you’re not a Christian. Christ was not about compromise, he wasn’t about bargaining or game playing or performance.

You want to be a Christian?

Do it. Give everything away, leave your family and everything behind, abandon everything to follow the way, live the life.  It will be hard, every single step of the way.
It will be the hardest thing you ever did. And it will never get easy.

If you can’t, or don’t, or won’t, I’m not going to condemn you.  It’s not an easy thing, and it’s no shame to not be strong enough. I’m not strong enough. But you don’t get to pretend to me that you’re something you’re not. I’m not going to bust you on it, but it might not be a good idea to preach at me, because if pushed, I will push back. You won't enjoy it.

Of course, as Chesterton said, true Christianity, that’s difficult. There’s always hucksters selling snake oil. Promises that you can get into heaven just by ‘letting Jesus into your heart.’ Say a few Hallelujahs and pass the mashed potatoes!  Donate to Kenneth Copeland or the Catholic Church, cast your bread upon Joel Osteen, speak in tongues, handle some snakes, roll around in ecstatic fervor. That’s all bullshit. Christ offered no easy paths and had no time for compromise.

There’s hundreds of extant Christian denominations, most of them no more than cults like the Southern Baptists, and at least dozens of extinct faiths, all claiming to be the one true Christianity. It’s all corrupt nonsense. The Anglican church exists because Henry the 8th had a political confrontation. The Southern Baptists exist because some really horrible people in the Antebellum south wanted to justify slavery. The Rapture? That’s a 19th century concoction produced by cutting and pasting bible passages like a frigging ransom note. The Prosperity Gospel? Don’t make me vomit.

But each of them is absolutely the one true faith? Uh huh.  And all the rest are perversions and demonic idolatry?  Uh huh.  And the one real one is the one you happen to belong to?  Uh huh. I do not see Christ or his uncompromising demands here in any of them, just two thousand years of trying to wiggle out of them.

Beyond and including Christianity, there are over three thousand known and catalogued gods of every variety, inclination and mores. There is no reason to believe in any one over the others. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re all bull. They are all human creations, or mediated so thoroughly through a human filter, so reflective of ourselves and our aspirations or failures, that any trace of the Divine is inaccessible.

Are we clear on this whole Christianity thing?  Good.

Now let me be honest with you.

The kind of God that would create an eternal hell?  That god does not deserve to be worshiped.

The sort of person that lives their life with the intention of getting into heaven?  That person doesn’t deserve to go to heaven.

An afterlife? The truth is that we do not know, cannot know and should not know what comes after, if there is anything.  It’s not our business. As far as I’m concerned, it can take care of itself. Christ said 'enough with the afterlife, deal with this life.'

If there was a genuine divinity it would be incomprehensible to limited humans. It may or may not exist. We can’t know.

What matters is the world we live in. What matters is how we live our lives. And what matters is how we treat others.  That’s all.  If there is anyone or anything out there, then we are given this world and these lives, and no guarantee of anything else. We have a responsibility, a duty to live our lives as best we can, to struggle to be the best people that we can be, the smartest we can be, the most moral, the most industrious, the most careful and compassionate. We have the duty to live these lives in the best and fullest way.

And you know what?  Even that, is incredibly hard. Even there we fail all the time, we slip and we slide, we take the easy paths, we drift and dawdle, we’re mean, we’re nasty, greedy, violent, selfish, lazy. That’s just being human. Mostly we drift through our lives following paths of least resistance. And we are so prone to doing the worst.
Well, no one said it would be easy.

Even if we fail a lot, we’re still obliged to strive. Whether there’s anything divine out there, this is what we get, this little sliver of existence.

So make the most of it. Live a just life.  Or at least, make the effort. Wake up every morning and try and make the choice to be a good person.

In the end, I don’t really care what your supernatural beliefs are. They’re yours, not mine. We can respect each other.

What matters to me: Do you struggle to be a good person?