Shout-Outs to my Godless Homies!

A couple of shout-outs to some great godless bloggers. There was a standout piece in this week's Carnival of the Godless, a deceptively simply little ditty from Spanish Inquisitor titled Why Didn’t Jesus Write?

This question -- and the whole host of questions that it raises -- is so obvious, I'm slapping myself on the head for it not having occurred to me before. The guy was supposedly God. He could turn water into wine, feed the multitudes with a couple of loaves and fishes, heal the sick, raise the dead. But he couldn't write down his teachings, to avoid twenty centuries of squabbling and warfare about what he really meant? Brilliant. Go read it.

I also want to say Howdy to Ed Brayton and his wonderful peanut gallery over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. He has a great post on the Wiley Drake/Mike Huckabee kerfuffle, in which Baptist minister Wiley Drake endorsed a candidate for President (big no-no -- religious leaders and organizations can't do that if they want to stay tax-exempt), got called on it by the Americans United for Separation of Church and State... and is now calling on his followers to pray "imprecatory prayers" against the AUSCS, prayers asking God to hurt or kill your enemies. Quote from Drake: "God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God's church... The Bible says that if anybody attacks God's people, David said this is what will happen to them... Children will become orphans and wives will become widows." Quote from Ed: "Very nice, Reverend; I'm sure that's just what Jesus would do."

Ed's piece is excellent, as always... but the comments are off-the-charts hilarious. People have compared Drake to a mob boss and God to a hit man; have pointed out how committed to family values Drake must be to call for wives to become widows and children to become orphans; have wondered why Drake is calling for imprecatory prayers against the AUSCS instead of, say, Al Qaeda; and, in my very favorite comment of all from Zek, asked this question: "So... God told him to tell people to tell God to kill people?" Excellent, hilarious point, and from now on every time a preacher says God asked him to call for prayers, it's going to be stuck in my head.

While I'm at it, Daylight Atheism also has an excellent and hysterical piece on the prayer attack against the the AUSCS, in which he mentions (among other things) a call for counter-prayers from Bruce Prescott of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, and drily points out that, "While I appreciate Dr. Prescott's concern, I can assure him that his efforts are unnecessary."

Finally: A huge, heartfelt "thank you" to Ebon Muse of Daylight Atheism and Ebon Musings. He not only came through in a recent comment debate here on this blog with an eloquent and thorough demolition of the supposed accuracy of Biblical prophecy; he then posted that demolition on his own blog. Thanks, dude. You totally hit it out of the park. Greatly appreciated.

Comments

[Shannon Lewis]

Read N.T. Wright's "Jesus and the Victory of God" sometime - I think you greatly misunderstand the concept of 'Jesus is Lord', given what you wrote above about Jesus supposedly being God. Otherwise, thanks for the suggestions.

[Greta Christina]

"I think you greatly misunderstand the concept of 'Jesus is Lord'..."

Ummm... I "misunderstand" it?

It's not "misunderstanding" a religion when you don't agree with it. And it's not "misunderstanding" a religion to discuss a very common interpretation of the religion that some people don't happen to share.

You might want to take a look at my recent piece "A Self-Referential Game of Twister: What Religion Looks Like From the Outside" (it's rather shorter and easier to read than the book you're recommending to me). It's a look at how every religious believer is convinced that their interpretation of their faith is the right one... and what that looks like from an outside perspective.

http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2007/08/a-self-referent.html

[stephen]

interesting you should mention there are no writings of jesus christ himself. when the bible was correlated, huge numbers of writings were excluded. many of the documents are still safely tucked away at the Vatican,. It is distinctly possible that the writings of jesus would be amongst those documents, and many people say they are, I am forced to wonder why these writings would not make the final draft of god's own word, being as the bible is supposed to be the ultimate resource for all jesus freaks. perhaps jesus wrote in limerick, or just maybe his anti-church tirades were just a little to controversial for the powers that shouldn't be?

[Eclectic]

Stephen: your assertions sound - with apologies for being blunt - like a conspiracy theorist's misunderstanding of the biblical apocrypha and the pseudepigrapha. See wikipedia on "Biblical canon" for background, particularly the "Development of" sub-article.

The biblical canon was chosen from a pile of candidate writings. In fact, various sects of christianity made different choices; the Catholic bible is not the same as the Protestant bible.

Finding English translations of the excluded writings is more difficult than for the more popular ones, but these days, it's just a quick web search.

Now, it sounds like someone got confused between "excluded from the Catholic canon by the Council of Trent" and "secretly buried in the Vatican crypts".

But just in case I'm wrong... is there something else that you're referring to?

(There is a brief discussion of (accusations of) Catholic suppression of non-canonical works in wikipedia's "Gospel of Judas" article.)