Not that the average Christian reads the bible, but one who does can infer that the Messiah as he is portrayed in the New Testament probably had little in common with the most ardent of his so-called supporters.

Art Alexakis makes this poignant observation in Everclear’s new song, “Jesus was a Democrat.”

You can download it for free at the band’s official website or Myspace page.

Jesus was a Democrat

Lyrics:
Jesus Christ didn’t have blue eyes or blond hair
He looked just like all those people that you want to kill
Spin your hell into a heaven you can sell
Make it look like California with a bible belt
Jesus didn’t look like the boy next door
Unless you live in Palestine
I wonder what you mean by the golden rule
I think it is a scary play on words
I wonder what they taught you back in Sunday school

I bet you think of Him
As a nice clean long haired Republican, nah
He would be all locked up in Guantanamo Bay
If He were alive today
He would have been a revolutionary
Wanted by the CIA

I picture Him in all the wrong places
Finding diamonds in the dirt
A star of David tattoo
And a Che t-shirt
Jesus Christ was a left wing radical Jew
Murdered by people like you

If Jesus was a Democrat like the bible says He was
I don’t think He’s going to want to take the blame
For all the awful things you say and do in His name

If Jesus was alive He would be sad to see
That it is no different than it used to be
Someday He’s going to call you out
I am pretty god damned sure ……
He is going to be angry

You want to know what I think?…….

I think Jesus would have been a card carrying liberal
If He was a young man born in the USA

He would not be “fiscally conservative”
And He wouldn’t vote for John McCain
All those so called Christians that you see on TV
Maybe they scare Jesus like they scare me
Kick you the hell out of my temple too
Too many elephants in the room

If Jesus was a Democrat like the bible says He was
I don’t think He’s going to want to take the blame
For all the awful things you people do and say in His name

If Jesus was alive today He would be sad to see
That it is no different than it used to be
Someday He’s going to call you out
I am pretty god damned sure……
He is going to be mad

You say Jesus loves the little children
And I say I know that’s true
I say He loves all the Muslims and the Jews
All the addicts and the porn stars too
You say Jesus died to save us all from a fiery hell
I say Jesus died to save us
Save us from ourselves
Will you save me from myself?

If Jesus was a liberal like the red letters say He was
I know He would have big love for all the killers and the racists
And the bullies in this world

If Jesus was alive today
And you had a chance to meet Him face to face
I’m pretty God-damned sure that you and your friends
Would find some way to kill Him all over again

For years, whenever I saw a campus preacher going at it with some sinnister nonbeliever I’d stop and admire the latter, maybe even put in my own $.02.

I used to relish the process, the argument, setting up a sand castle just to smoosh it down and laugh.  I learned a lot by watching debates like this one, between Bill Maher and Mike Huckabee, sharp atheist and well-versed zealot, respectively.

But now I’m not so invigorated by that predictable thud I hear when the bottom falls out on the religious guy’s flimsy argument.  And it will fall out, time permitting.  The only hope for the devout religious one is to run out the clock; so that the commercial break knockout point.  By the time Geico’s geckos & cavemen & pseudofamous noncelebs finish being witty, most American viewers won’t even remember which topic the talk show people talking about–much less who had made sense and who just sounded stupid.

Stupidity is less amusing to me lately, more sad than it is entertaining.  Any dents religion gave to me during my formative years I can now really say have smoothed out.  For I know that whatever unease I felt at wanting not to fear death was nothing next to what my pious youth leaders would have suffered had they really heard and pondered my questions.  I should be over that now, those days in the church basement, being told not to come back, I wasn’t good enough for God.  It was as it was, because it had to be.

Reason was absent in our conversations; and I could not and would not believe the logicless answers offered in its place–the contradictions and the hypocrisy and the tragedy of simple minds taking great pains to remain simple.

But they need that simplicity, that hope–to guide them through the scariest question we face, the one for which there is no proof or definitive answer and never can be.  And that’s where Huckabee hits the nail on the head in his debate with Maher.  Why not live and let live?  Believing in a God is more important to them than debunking the myth of His existence is to me.  If faith brings purpose & hope & meaning to their lives, why should I bust their balls?  What improvements could possibly come to my life by stripping others of purpose & hope & meaning?

And now, to pose an even more disturbing question; consider the most mentally unstable of all fanatics, the ones with faulty wiring for whom religion is the only blockade between themselves and insanity, a necessary crutch that keeps them from going postal.  Would we want to live in a world where all those people, who right now literally need God suddenly don’t have Him?

The wealthy elites of Central America had been devoutly Roman Catholic for centuries. Their religious affiliation was almost has important to who they were as was their wealth and power. Almost, but not quite.

As soon as their class interests were feared at stake, four hundred years of ‘deeply ingrained’ allegiance to the Pope proved to be no match for their desire for money and power.[1]

As the twentieth century neared its conclusion, the Catholic clergy began siding with the oppressed. Wealthy Christian elites in Nicaragua and elsewhere throughout the region “discarded their Catholicism and joined Protestant fundamentalist denominations that espoused a more comfortably reactionary line.”[2]

Political scientist Michael Parenti writes in his book, The Culture Struggle:

“Not only the social elites, but also the impoverished populations underwent conversions to Protestant fundamentalism. For instance, in Guatemala, in an attempt to crush the popular insurgency of the 1960s and 1970s, the military destroyed hundreds of Mayan villages and deliberately targeted Mayan spirituality, including sacred sites and priests. Meanwhile, numerous well-financed politically conservative Protestant sects moved in. They divided community members into competing denominations, and distanced them from both the cohesive Mayan culture and Catholicism’s liberation theology.

Traumatized by war and stripped of all that was viable in their lives, many people embraced the new proselytizers, hoping to find an understanding of what had happened to them. Some evangelical preachers declared that Guatemalans suffered so much in the war because they had been living in sin or following the wrong religion. Protestant fundamentalism ‘encourages people to accept their lot in life without protest and to focus instead on the afterlife.’[3]

Many of the poor Guatemalans feared that if they remained Catholic they would be suspected of being sympathetic to the guerillas, so they converted to the new Protestant sects. A once unified insurgent population was now preoccupied with sectarian divisions, while denouncing ‘sinful’ personal indulgences and dreaming of reward in the afterlife. If any component of culture has proven useful as an instrument of elite social control in Central America and elsewhere, it is this fundamentalist religious proselytizing.”

The elites in Guatemala were neither the first nor last to exploit religion as a tool for class control. Such has been a nearly universal function of religion. Parenti writes:

“We cannot reduce all religious experience to its social base. But it is important to point out—and this is often conveniently overlooked—that religious attachment can be strongly linked to material concerns.”

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In light of recent pious parental stupidity, whereby a devout family chose prayer over proven medicine and a child wound up dead, it seems worthwhile to remind Christians, yet again, to think responsibly.

The logic is all tangled here. If God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent, then isn’t everything he creates beautiful and useful? In other words, maybe God’s pointing you toward the medical solution. Why would he set in motion a turn of events in which medical cures are discovered and made available to little girls if He didn’t want the little girl’s parents to let her drink the antidote?

Who are mortal human beings to question the integrity of God’s creations and God’s plan?

This tragic unnecessary death reminds me of an old joke we used to tell, which seems utterly unfunny now, but still does get my point across.

“A religious man is on top of a roof during a great flood. A man comes by in a boat and says ‘get in, get in!’ The religous man replies, ‘No I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’ Later the water is up to his waist and another boat comes by and the guy tells him to get in again. He responds that he has faith in god and god will give him a miracle. With the water at about chest high, another boat comes to rescue him, but he turns down the offer again cause ‘God will grant him a miracle.’ With the water at chin high, a helicopter throws down a ladder and they tell him to get in, mumbling with the water in his mouth, he again turns down the request for help for the faith of God. He arrives at the gates of heaven with broken faith and says to Peter, ‘I thought God would grant me a miracle and I have been let down.’ St. Peter chuckles and responds, ‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about, we sent you three boats and a helicopter.’”

A “miracle” should be a last resort–not one’s plan for getting through the day.

I suppose one could characterize Agnosticism as a “belief system” in the sense that Science is a belief system. But it is based on Reason, rather than on the superstition or mysticism that defines conventional organized religions.

I think it is a basic misunderstanding of religious people to classify the rationale of those who don’t believe in their Gods as a “belief system.” Whereas some devout religious folks are willing to die in suicide bombings to stick up for their God-of-choice, we agnostics are slightly less hardcore about our worldview. Answering the question of God’s existence holds a much lower priority for agnostics than it does for theists. We look at it the way one might look at the unsolved mystery of whether or not aliens exist. If you do not believe in extraterrestrial life forms, would you define yourself according to that non-belief? Probably not. The issue cannot be answered one way or the other, so you recognize that your position is an Opinion, and that those who say aliens do exist simply hold an opposing Opinion. For alien-believers to lash out at alien-skeptics (or vice versa) is pointless, as the truth is impossible to know without first traveling to each of the trillions upon trillions of solar systems in the universe.

However, those who believe that extraterrestrial life currently thrives on the Moon can and should be refuted; reason and logic have debunked such theories by providing scientific evidence to the contrary. Those who believe in life on the moon subscribe to a “belief system.”

As with the belief that aliens live on Mars, evidence that Jesus is the son of God cannot be found in any book that respects Logic and relies on Reason to reach its conclusions.

Yes, there is the Bible. There is also the Torah and the Qu’ran. Each, by itself, presents a case for a particular deity. But in order to Believe in Jesus or Allah, one must privilege their religious texts over all other books. That requires being hostile toward enlightened scientific proof, such as archaeological and geological findings that Earth was not created a mere 6,000 years ago, or biological evidence that Jonah could not have survived for three days living inside a fish’s stomach. To be a Christian, one must believe that, at its core, the Bible is a more reliable source of knowledge than all other books combined, because God wrote it. That is a “leap of faith.” And it is faith—not reason—that allows one to make excuses on God’s behalf when inexplicably horrific events like the cyclone in Miramar or the Chinese earthquake cost hundreds of thousands of human lives. So the typical Christian, unable to justify God’s complicity to prevent such horrors, simply concludes that they are part of “God’s plan” and that mortal humans are too stupid to understand it.

That is a Leap of Faith, based on a Belief System. If we apply the worldly gifts of enlightened thinking, the only logical conclusion is that not enough evidence exists to prove or disprove His existence. With regard to the Bible being the word of God, or even a reliable authority on how to live our lives, reason overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.

I once was recruited by a sect/denomination known as the Christian Alliance Church. These were some hardcore believers, not your garden variety churchgoer who deep down knows heaven is bullshit but prefers not to think rationally. The Alliance Church saw missionary work as part of their duty as good Christians, and our youth leaders had been all over the world spreading the good word of our good Lord.

From their perspective, there was nothing immoral about prosthelytizing. Why should there be? As I said, these were no fakers; they genuinely believed the official story the bible feeds us. That means death marks a fork in the road, two paths to two very different eternities. Believers spend forever in paradise; non-believers stay stuck in hell.

So if that’s what you truly believe, then of course you see yourself as doing folks a huge favor by attempting to convert them. You are “saving” them.  Anything short of that is evidence that you don’t actually believe the words in all-knowing bible.

Recently a Marine in Fallujah gave out Christian coins to Iraqi residents. On one side, the coins asked “Where will you spend eternity?” and on the flip side they displayed the beloved New Testament verse, John 3:16. Our soldier (presumably) wasn’t trying to disrespect anybody. He was trying to “save” them. A selfless act of caring, redirecting a hellbound peoples.

Many of the Muslim natives, however, saw it differently.  To them, the Marine’s actions, coupled with last week’s Qu’ran target-shooting episode, represents a deliberate attempt on the part of the United States to spread Christianity across the world.  They see that not as a rescue, but as an inappropriate cultural invasion.

Once again, the West and East demonstrate their complete ignorance about each other’s worldviews.

These repeated cultural misunderstandings are just further evidence that no God exists (or, at best, that the God who created man is completely disconnected from the Gods that man created). Either that, or He gets off on watching us suffer. An all-knowing, all-powerful entity would have the good sense to teach His science project how not to self-destruct. If He loved us.

(Cross posted at The Public Intellectual)

Let’s set aside that 95% of Jeremiah Wright’s “detestable” rants have been based on historical facts.

Bill Moyers points out the hypocrisy of Obama’s opponents’ using this as their political hobby horse.

“Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.

But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right.

After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America.

This is crazy and wrong — white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.

Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?”

Read the rest of Moyers’ essay.

Even though I still see Barack Obama as the least frightening of the three candidates, I’ve lost what little respect I had for him. Not because of his ties to Reverend Wright, but because he chose to cut those ties when things became too uncomfortable. Whether his rejection of Wright was genuine or staged, Obama showed that he is now a bonafide politician, more concerned with power than he is with loyalty. I fear his was a sign of things to com; that Obama will do the politically popular thing over that which he knows is right.

People keep saying “politics is politics” and “he did what he had to do.” But there were other “political” solutions that didn’t involve selling out friends and dumping his integrity.

Why not launch equally petty counterarguments against his opponents? He could have mentioned the hateful comments of Hagee, Robertson, Falwell, Billy Graham and the other white supremacist Christian leaders. He then could have called on McCain and Clinton to denounce and reject them. This would end hypocrisy, as no one wants to ringleaders of the white religious right–dead or alive.

Moreover, it would show that there is validity to Wright’s claims. Those who feel morally outraged by the black pastor would finally be forced to face their own hypocrisy. Racial prejudice is alive and well in America–otherwise we’d be as offended by the fancy white Reverends as we are by the angry black one.

Figures. The Christian who other Christians bash is the one Christian who inspires me.

Why does Easter bug me more than Christmas?

You’d think as a devout atheist/agnostic I’d be neutral about the death of Jesus Christ, and that if anything would bum me out, it’d the fact that he was ever born in the first place.

But for some reason, how I experience these religious holidays has little to do with what they’re technically supposed to represent. (In that regard I suppose I’m not unlike Christians, since after all, the whole Christmas tree thing started as a pagan ritual). On Christmas I can go through the motions happily, and often enjoy doing so. Sometimes I even get that magical feeling while decorating a tree, as if Santa Claus still exists.

Santa always went balls-out for me, splurged on toys and whatnot, while the stingy Easter bunny consistently delivered fewer, and shittier, gifts.

I haven’t celebrated Easter Sunday since I was in high school. In college we never got enough time off to warrant a flight home. So I just stopped acknowledging Easter altogether.

Nowadays I don’t even pretend to pretend, which makes it uber awkward to be around people when they hold hands and close their eyes and get all giddy for God. What am I to celebrate when gatherings where everyone’s celebrating religious holidays–especially the Easter kind, where there’s nothing traditionally fun about the day, no real point to the date itself, other than to commemorate some arbitrary mythological event that I believe either never happened or was totally trivial when it did.

I realize these dates are meaningful to people who are meaningful to me. And at times I do regret that the adult in me can’t figure out how to respect that. But that rarely stops my body language and facial expressions from telling everyone what they already know I feel: that religion exists solely as a crutch for weak-minded individuals scared shitless of dying; that all their spiritual bullshit is utterly bogus nonsense, a mask worn by those incapable of rational thought, to conceal their ontological anxieties; and that their Huckabee-esque rhetoric is bullshit, too, because I find far more love and joy in Godless living than they the pious could ever unearth in those holes the bible digs for them, that void that emerges in holy books dwelling only on death.