Memo: Editing Jesus

Rick Bachabee
President

Cross and Sword Coalition of America

“Wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”

Brothers and Sisters,

The Religious Right has had some real success in the the last few years. The Tea Party movement has finally brought Christ's message of small government and low taxes to state governments and the halls of Congress. I'm happy to say we're as powerful as we've ever been. 

But, brothers and sisters, I'm troubled by the things I hear from our enemies. No, I'm not talking about the Muslims or the gays. I'm talking about those who call themselves Christians, but turn their backs on far-right politics. Some of these pretenders, and their secular allies, have taken to calling us the H word. You guessed it...hypocrites. They go on and on about how Jesus loved the poor and healed the sick, and they say if we really wanted a Christian government, then we would want that government to help them. They even say that's what our Savior himself would have done! Where do they get this stuff?

Even worse, these pretenders in Christ have taken to quoting scripture, using the Bible--OUR Bible--against us. They're getting that hypocrite stuff right out of the Gospels, using Jesus' own words to call us "false prophets" and "wolves in sheep's clothing." The nerve of some people! 

Just the other day I saw people using these verses from Matthew against us:

 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ 44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ 45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Now, we all know Jesus wasn't really taking up for a bunch of ragged takers looking for handouts. It might seem like he was, but that's a misinterpretation. Some parts of the Bible should be taken literally and some shouldn't. The parts about God creating the Earth in six days, the snake that talked, Noah living 950 years; those are literally true. That's just common sense. 
But some passages require a more subtle interpretation. 

Those words from Matthew are those of Christ himself, and we all know he spoke in parables. He didn't literally mean to give food to hungry people, or invite dirty, half-dressed strangers into our houses and places of worship. I mean really, is that how our Savior would have acted? It's a parable, like the mustard seed or the camel passing through the eye of the needle.

You knew that one would come up didn't you? They love to use that part of Matthew against us. You know the one, where the rich man asks Jesus what he should do to get into heaven:

21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Those verses always have been troublesome, haven't they? Personally, I don't think Christ could have really said them. Sell your possessions and give to the poor? That's practically communist! It doesn't fit in with our gospel of prosperity at all. And that stuff about how hard it is for the rich to get into heaven...what is that about? That young man was a job creator!

No, Jesus just wouldn't have said that, and he certainly wouldn't have said it twice for emphasis, like that passage implies. Of all his lessons, why would he pick that one to emphasize? Why not the evils of homosexuality, the dangers of evolution, or the importance of keeping "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? It just doesn't make sense.

Brothers and sisters, there's only one thing to do: We've got to change those verses. That's the only way to keep people from reading them in inconvenient ways. The ones I've been quoting make Jesus out to be some kind of bleeding heart who loved everybody unconditionally. And we can't have that. 

So let me show you what I have in mind. Take the first pairs of “Blessings and Woes” in Luke. We could change those in several different ways to reflect their one true meaning, but here are my suggestions:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God rich, for you are the job creators, and yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now,  for you will be satisfied are well fed now, for that proves you are hard workers. Or at least rich, and therefore blessed (see above).

But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort poor, for you have already received your handouts. 

Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry who hunger now, for we cut your food stamps.

See how easy that is? And speaking of blessings, we can leave "blessed are the peacemakers" alone. That was clearly a prophecy foretelling the coming of the Colt Peacemaker; the gun that would win the west. When Jesus comes back, I'm betting that's the sidearm he'll carry. Try taking that one away, gun-grabbers!

I could do this all day, but I think you get the idea. Give it a try! Grab the Sermon on the Mount and a red pen and get busy. It's time we bring the Bible in line with our actual practices. If we start talking like we've been walking, how can anyone accuse us of being hyp...the H word?

Now, I know some of you will have qualms at first. But what are our other options? As long as we say we want a Christian government, people are going to say, "Well, then, why don't you want it to help the sick and poor?" We could cave in and let them keep church and state separate, but then we'd be taking mandatory prayer out of the schools, teaching unexpurgated science, letting homosexuals marry, and opening liquor stores on Sunday. And we can't have all that. 

The other option is to keep calling for a Christian government, and start following all that stuff about helping the poor, healing the sick, loving our enemies, being merciful, blah blah blah...  I don't know about you, but that one doesn't sound good to me either. 

No, if people keep using the H word on us, there's only one way to have our cake and eat it too, and that's editing the Holy Scriptures themselves. I know it may seem shocking. But if you think about it, we on the far right have been editing Jesus for a long time with our words and deeds. All I'm doing is pointing it out; spelling out what's usually unspoken. What should be shocking is for Christians to act in direct opposition to Jesus' words.

And that's why we have to change those words! Sure, people will give us a hard time at first, even that foolish majority of Christians who think Jesus meant what he said about this stuff. But if we keep repeating the new versions, they'll eventually forget the old ones. Americans have a short attention span these days. Besides, if we finally take over this country, then we'll be the ones calling the shots about how the Bible is read.

Yours in Christ,

Rick Bachabee

And the Truth Comes Limping After

"A lie will go around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on."

                                                                                                   - Mark Twain

That's always been one of my favorite Mark Twain quotations. It's just so true. Except...it's not. It's a true observation, to be sure, but Mr. Twain never actually said it. A guy named C.H. Spurgeon did, in 1859. And he borrowed it from other sources, which can be traced back to 1710, when Jonathan Swift said, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

Here we have a delectable irony--a quotation about how fast lies can spread is itself a lie; one that has indeed spread around the world. It proves how true it is with its own falsehood. Or...something. 

Anyway, I got an amazing lesson today about how true it really is. As I write, it's day three of the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In a Facebook discussion today about Obamacare, someone illustrated their objections to it by linking to an essay by a Louisiana attorney named Michael Connelly called "The Truth About the Health Care Bills." Connelly lists several reasons he believes House Bill 3200 is unconstitutional. The only problem is, House Bill 3200 is not the Affordable Care Act. It's a different piece of legislation altogether, and it never passed. I don't know whether Mr. Connelly's analysis is correct, but that's beside the point, since it never passed anyway. It certainly shouldn't be spread as if it were a critique of Obamacare. 

But that's exactly what was happening. When I looked at the Facebook link where Mr. Connelly's essay had been posted, it had been shared over 4,000 times since the day before...by people who thought it was about Obamacare. Many of them shared it with comments like, "Wake up people! Obamacare is taking away all our rights!!!" 

Whether they are right or wrong isn't the issue here. The issue is that they were accidentally spreading misinformation, and spreading it fast--sharing the link every few seconds. 

I watched the number of shares climb to 5,000, and then 6,000. Finally, I asked to join the Facebook group it had appeared on, called Repeal ObamaCare, so I could leave a comment on the post. I was accepted within 20 minutes, and posted a link to the Snopes.com article showing that the essay was not about Obamacare. 

And then, nothing happened. People just kept on sharing it. In the 40 minutes after I posted the Snopes link, nearly 1,000 people shared the essay. Finally, the guy who originally posted the link said he would take it down, and he did, just before it hit 7,000 shares. 

It was a small victory, but I'm not going to lie--it was sweet. Tilt at enough windmills, and you might knock a small one over.

Of course, as he said: "It's out there now." Seven thousand people saw that link and shared it without ever checking to see if it was legitimate. They didn't know enough about Obamacare to realize the essay wasn't about Obamacare, but they were sure they were against it, and that essay explained exactly why! Except it didn't.  But that didn't matter...it kept right on spreading. And for thousands of people, I'm sure it confirmed what they already believed in the first place.

As I said, though, my point here isn't whether Obamacare is good or bad. My point is about people's willingness to spread what they want to hear, without taking just a few seconds to see if it's true. I'm not sure the majority of people even care whether it's true, as long as it supports their point of view. I hope I'm being too cynical on that score. 

One thing is certain, though, and that's how true the old adage about the speed of lies is, whoever said it. These days it's more true than ever. While the truth is pulling its boots on today, a lie can circle the world hundreds of times per minute, multiplying as it goes. The only way to prevent that is to actually care what's true--to prefer a truth we don't like to a lie we do. Lies are swift, tough, and almost impossible to kill.  The truth is fragile, plodding, and utterly precious. It needs all the help it can get. 

Thorn Trees, Avocados, and VLS's (Very Large Sloths)

Photo by Greg Hume, Wikimedia Commons

This weekend I went for a walk with two of my friends through a swamp outside New Orleans. We saw plenty of waterbirds, three young alligators, some burly swamp rabbits, and a total of seven snakes. But what impressed my companions most was a honey locust tree we came across. Those are fairly common where I'm from in Arkansas, but they aren't common here, and they had never seen one before. Hearing them talk about it, I started seeing it with new eyes. The honey locust really is a stunning tree, with its clusters of icepick-sized thorns along its limbs and trunk. It's clearly not a tree to be trifled with.

Then my friends asked a question that I had never thought to ask: why does need such huge thorns? What assailant is it protecting itself from? Is it just paranoid?

None of us had any ideas, so we kept walking and forgot about it. But the next night, in one of those weird little jolts of serendipity, I stumbled across a possible answer. I was leafing through a picture book about natural history, and saw the following passage in the section on plants: "Species with fleshy fruits use animals to disperse their seeds: many of them are swallowed whole and then scattered by birds. In prehistoric times, wild avocados may have been dispersed by giant ground sloths."

That's right, giant ground sloths. They really existed. One of the most jaw-dropping things I have ever seen is a skeleton of one of these in the Smithsonian. I had seen the dinosaurs and pterodactyls skeletons and been duly impressed, but then, in the Ice Age hall, I came across the towering skeleton of Eremotherium; one of the largest of the ground sloths. The thing is just gigantic--as big as an elephant standing on its hind legs. You could build a small tree house between its pelvis and its ribcage...and it's a sloth. I stood there and stared at it like I was three years old.

Photo by Postdlf, Wikimedia Commons

Ground sloths were superficially built like long-armed bears, and like bears, they could stand on their hind legs. Some of them could reach nearly 20 feet into the trees to browse on buds, leaves, and fruit. And some of these fruits may have co-evolved with ground sloths and other big ice age mammals, as a way to disperse their seeds.

Plants can do many things, but what they can't usually do is get up and move around. That means they have to find ways to reproduce while being stuck in the same spot all their lives. They have to get their pollen to each other somehow, and then they have to scatter their seeds so that their offspring won't grow up right on top of them. Pollen is mostly spread by the wind, or by bribing or tricking flying animals like insects, hummingbirds, and bats.

Plants scatter their seeds in equally inventive ways. Dandelions and cottonwoods send them aloft on little cottony parachutes. Maple and sycamore seeds whirl like helicopter blades as the wind catches them, and the Javan cucumber's seed has wings like a hang glider. The seeds we call burs hitch rides on animals, and on our pant legs. Coconuts disperse by floating in the sea, sometimes drifting hundreds of miles from their parent plant. Some fruits dry up and explode. Impatiens are a familiar example--their fruit may burst if you touch it, which is why they are also called Touch-Me-Nots. But even more impressive is the Sandbox Tree, AKA the Dynamite Tree. Its fruits explode with a deafening blast, launching seeds over 150 feet away.

Of course, many fruits have evolved to entice animals to eat them. Plants don't put all that energy into producing sweet, tasty fruit because they have benevolent spirits. They do it to spread their seeds. Some seeds can't even germinate unless they've been through the gut of an animal. This often weakens their tough coating, and as a bonus, the seeds end their intestinal journey in a little dollop of fertilizer on the ground.

And that brings us back to avocados. Avocado seeds are too big for most modern creatures to swallow regularly, but huge prehistoric creatures like ground sloths might have gulped them down without even thinking about it, and then deposited them later in their poop, the way birds deposit blackberry seeds. Today, the ground sloths are gone, and avocados might have dwindled away too if people hadn't come along and started cultivating them. Perhaps that's only fair, since we may be what killed off the ground sloths in the first place, along with a host of other Pleistocene creatures of the Americas, including giant bison, mammoths, mastodons, and four-tusked gompotheres; as well as the predators who relied on them--massive dire wolves, sabertoothed cats, and 1800-pound short-faced bears. The fauna of the Americas was as impressive as the African savanna until a few thousand years ago--right around the time the first humans seem to have arrived. Of course, the climate got a lot warmer at the same time, so the jury hasn't declared humans guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But they're eyeing us pretty suspiciously.

Anyway, it may be that avocados weren't the only plants left without partners by the extinction of the big mammals. Another tree I grew up around, the Osage orange, may have co-evolved with mammoths, mastodons, and their relatives. These trees once had a wide range across North America, but today they are confined mostly to Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Some biologists think this may be because their giant dispersers disappeared. In most places, Osage orange fruits simply pile up and rot under the tree. Most modern native animals ignore them, but horses eat and distribute them now. That has a certain symmetry, since Osage oranges would have evolved with native horses of the Americas, which went extinct at the end of the ice age. The reintroduction of horses from Europe may have reintroduced two old friends.

And what about the honey locust, with its menacing spikes? It's another tree that may have co-evolved with giant mammals. As prickly as it is, it's called the honey locust for good reason--its seed pods are filled with a sweet-tasting pulp that probably evolved to attract large animals, who would eat the seeds along with the pulp. If the seed pods aren't eaten, they just fall to the ground, and the seeds inside will be destroyed by insects. But if they get eaten by a large herbivore, they will pass through its gut unharmed. This is actually what happens with relatives of the honey locusts in Africa, the acacias. Elephants help disperse some acacia seeds by eating the pods. The insects attacking the seeds are killed, but the seeds do just fine; and are actually much more likely to germinate if they've made a trip through pachyderm innards. But elephants and other large mammals can be hard on acacias, too--stripping their bark, pushing them over, and browsing too many of their leaves. That's why acacias have thorns--to deter this sort of thing. Their cousins, honey locusts, have even bigger thorns. And maybe that's the answer to my friends' question. Why does that tree we looked at just this weekend have such huge thorns? Maybe it's still trying to protect itself from giant creatures that disappeared thousands of years ago. Those great beasts may seem almost mythical to us, but they were very real, and museums are full of the bones to prove it. They were certainly real to the honey locust, and it still has its thorny daggers ready, in case they ever return.

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Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them / Connie Barlowe

The Trees that Miss the Mammoths / Whit Bronaugh

Saving the Seeds (David Attenborough clip on acacias and elephants)