Via PZ, it turns out that there's a passage in the Book of Matthew that for some reason doesn't get read on Easter Sunday:
50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and[e] went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
The fact is that the most devout Christians simply have not read the Bible and do not know what is in it. If you want to keep the faith, you can't just sit down and read the whole damn Bible because you will very quickly discover that it is full of nonsense, self-contradiction, exhortation to evil and injustice, and that God is one nasty, repulsive son of a bitch.
If the preachers weren't embarrassed by the idea that not only Jesus, but a whole lot of other folks, were resurrected, they'd at least mention it once in a while. But even though it's still in the Bible, it's completely censored from the Easter story and is carefully skipped over in church. Next time you get a chance, you might ask your own guy in a dress about this.
3 comments:
The Southern Baptist Church my family attended for about 6-7 years of my youth regularly included these verses.
My experience (based on maybe 30 different non-liturgical Christian churches of different denominations) is that the non-liturgical churches are quite likely to emphasize the congregation reading along in a personal copy of the Bible, brought along to church (you'd be a little embarrassed if you didn't have yours), so it'd be kind of difficult to simply gloss over it, assuming the congregation can read.
Score an unusual point for the Baptists over, say, the Lutherans.
Our token right-winger who rides the bus was once going on and on about how the welfare state makes people lazy or whatever--I had largely tuned him out, though his words continued to fall on my ears. This man proudly and loudly describes himself as a Christian, always in a context that implies that liberals are not Christians, because our values aren't Christian. So anyway, he says something, and I have a delayed response because I've been trying to tune him out. It took me awhile to find my lower jaw on the floor and just as I inhaled to correct him, a really nice guy, who happens to be a Mormon, gently suggested that he was incorrect. Our token wingnut had said, "As Jesus says in the Bible, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for life."
He was flabbergasted by the news that it wasn't in the Bible. Even when he came back the next day and admitted that the Mormon was right, I doubt he thought about how antithetical that maxim is to the loaves and fishes story that is in the Bible.
I am not Christian, my reading of the Bible was all done in high school as part of a "Bible as literature" course (try doing that now!) and even I knew that guy was seriously ignorant of the religion to which he professes.
Sorry if I've posted this story before.
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
Post a Comment