MATHETΩN

This talisman the Evangelicals flaunt, that they have said words to make Jesus their personal savior, is easily debunked with a little observation.

So Jesus you have contracted as your own personal rescuer? Then what are these bills for house insurance, health insurance? What is this record of your having called the fire department, the police? On this date you begged your banker for a loan. At this meeting you demanded a teacher improve your daughter. You have turned to counselors to keep your marriage and to lawyers gainfully to end it. Every November, you petition governments with votes, and every May, you hang a flag hoping an Army will remember you.

Everywhere I read a Christian writing about God, these days, she seeks miracles. She dwells upon whether God may have intervened in her life in some forgotten way or whether God can be made to intervene in her life in future. Have Christians never read, “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign”?

Yesterday I even read a pastor declare that, if only he were faced with an event from no explicable cause, he would find it easy to believe God the cause of it. Could he be less logical?

God planned the universe. It revolves at his will by his laws. Were he always to be crossing himself with miracles, surely this would cast doubt on his plan’s prudence.

(And what is so special about a Christian, anyway?)

As long as the church translates scriptures, scriptures are much in danger of sounding like the church.

“Blimey!”, that favorite crow of fictional Londoners, derives from the ancient blasphmers’ prayer, “God blind me!” I thought today how many are making this supplication in churches all over the land.

What is the Evangelicalist religious symbol? It is not a headdress, like the Sikh’s. It is not a saffron robe, like the religious Buddhist’s.

I began to think of this today as I read a newsstory. A cashier at a Home Depot store in Georgia was — cashiered for wearing a button that said: One Nation Under God Indivisible. Company policy is that no employee may wear non-store symbols and badges. However, the cashier is suing, claiming religious discrimination. Said his lawyer: “There are federal laws that protect religious expression.”

An analyst — a law professor from nearby — countered: “This sounds more like a political message. Wearing a button of that sort would not easily be described as a traditional form of religious expression like wearing a cross or wearing a yarmulke.”

Such a symbol may not be a tradtional religious garb, and yet it is a perfect Evangelicalist one. Upon consideration, I predict that, if ever Evangelicalism becomes venerable enough to have an accepted “traditional form of religious expression”, it will be — a pin of the American flag.

I think it is the most important comma in the history of the universe; it can be found in the so-called Apostle’s Creed:

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell.”

Let me repeat that:

“… born of the Virgin Mary COMMA suffered under Pontius Pilate …”

That comma obscures the life, temptations, teachings, doings, healings, sayings of Jesus. It obscures Jesus. To do that, I’d think the hymnbooks would need a font at least a hundred stories high.

“The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

“His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him— Mount Zion Lighthouse, part of the powerful Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria.

“A month later, he died.

” ‘Witchcraft’ has taken on new life because of a rapid growth in Evangelical Christianity. Their parishioners take literally the biblical exhortation, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in only two of Nigeria’s thirty-six states over the past decade and around 1,000 murdered. The United Nations Children’s Fund says tens of thousands of children have been targeted throughout Africa.

“Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected ‘witch children.’ Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones—eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day. ‘Poverty must catch fire,’ insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets. ‘Where little shots become big shots in a short time,’ promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road. ‘Pray your way to riches,’ advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away. It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition, so some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.

“Sam Itauma of the Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation Network said it is the most vulnerable children—the orphaned, sick, disabled or poor—who are most often denounced. In Nwanaokwo’s case, his poor father and dead mother made him an easy target.

” ‘Even churches who didn’t use to “find” child witches are being forced into it by the competition,’ said Itauma. ‘They are seen as spiritually-powerful if they can detect witchcraft, and then the parents pay them money for an exorcism.’

“That’s what Margaret Eyekang did when her eight-year-old daughter Abigail was accused by a ‘prophet’ from the Apostolic Church. A series of exorcisms cost Eyekang eight months’ wages. The payments bankrupted her. Members of two other families said pastors from the Apostolic Church had accused their children of witchcraft, but asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. The Nigeria Apostolic Church refused repeated requests made by phone, e-mail and in person for comment.

“At first glance, there’s nothing unusual about the laughing, grubby kids playing hopscotch or reading from a tattered Dick and Jane book by the graffiti-scrawled cinderblock house. But this is where children like Abigail end up after being labeled witches by churches and abandoned or tortured by their families.

“There’s a scar above Jane’s shy smile: her mother tried to saw off the top of her skull after a pastor denounced her and repeated exorcisms costing a total of sixty dollars didn’t cure her of witchcraft. Mary, fifteen, is just beginning to think about boys and how they will look at the scar tissue on her face caused when her mother doused her in caustic soda. Twelve-year-old Rachel dreamed of being a banker but instead was chained up by her pastor, starved and beaten with sticks repeatedly; her uncle paid him sixty dollars for the exorcism.

“Israel’s cousin tried to bury him alive, Nwaekwa’s father drove a nail through her head, and sweet-tempered Jerry—all knees, elbows and toothy grin—was beaten by his pastor, starved, made to eat cement and then set on fire by his father as his pastor’s wife cheered it on.

“The children at the home run by Mr. Itauma’s organization have been mutilated as casually as the praying mantises they play with. Home officials asked for the children’s last names not to be used to protect them from retaliation. The home was founded in 2003 with seven children; it now has 120 to 200 at any given time as children are reconciled with their families and new victims arrive.

“Helen Ukpabio is one of the few evangelists publicly linked to the denunciation of child witches. She heads the enormous Liberty Gospel church in Calabar, where Nwanaokwo used to live. Ukpabio makes and distributes popular books and DVDs on witchcraft; in one film, a group of child witches are depicted pulling out a man’s eyeballs; in a book, she advises that ‘sixty percent’ of the inability to bear children is caused by witchcraft. In an interview with us, Ukpabio was accompanied by her lawyer, church officials, and a personal film crew. ‘Witchcraft is real,’ she insisted.

“After he publicly identified Liberty Gospel as denouncing ‘child witches,’ armed police arrived at Mr. Itauma’s home accompanied by a church lawyer. Three children were injured in the fracas. Mr. Itauma asked us not to reveal other churches identified by children, to protect their victims. ‘We cannot afford to make enemies of the churches around here,’ he said.”

God damn Christianity.

Today I was browsing Eugene’s little basement used–theology-and-philosophy–book dealer — Windows Booksellers, it’s called — and came across a like-new set of the original printing of The Fundamentals. I’ve read the Table of Contents online and read excerpts here and there, but this was the real artifact.

I browsed as much of them as I rapidly could — the store was closing. Ah a maddening and depressing episode! They asked many of the right questions for their crucial time, and answered them so very, very wrongly — wrongly in a way that was cunningly effectual to build a machinery of lies to outlive them.

It’s tempting to me to spend the money and bookshelf-space to acquire them. After all, when I was more political, I used to own Mein Kampf. Or to buy them, take copious notes, and return them — I am told the store accepts returns.

Each day I feel more convinced — yesterday as I took an evening walk I was feeling it most peculiarly — that Satan has nor ever had a stronger tool than that of the Christian church.

(I think I should not have posted these emotions until I could accompany them with those copious notes.)

To our homeless youth “drop in” center, on Wednesdays, comes a dapper young intern from Eugene Bible College. He is tall, blond, and adept at holding his hands and mouth in a moderately-fashionable way. I have often envied him moving among the youth, wished for his bravado, and wondered what he has to say.

Tonight I had some leisure, was in the right spot, and heard what he has to say:

“Hey guys — guys can I just pray for you?

“Hey guys okay we’re gonna just stand here and pray.

“First — hey — do you guys have Jesus in your hearts? You know, have you asked for Jesus?

“Cause it’s not really any use praying unless you do. That’s the first thing.

“Does anybody want to just accept Jesus before we pray?”

… Only let me not give up my life irrationally, only let me not give up my life faintheartedly, or from some casual pretext. For again, God does not so desire; for he has need of a good universe and of good men to go to and fro upon earth. …

What then? Must I explain these things to the multitude? When the children come up to us and say ‘Happy Saturnalia!’ do we say to them, ‘No, all this is not good’? Not at all; but we cheer too. And so you, therefore, when you are unable to make a man change his belief, realize that he is a child and cheer with him or hold your peace.

All these things a man ought to remember, and then, when he is summoned to meet some difficulty, he ought to know that the time has come to show whether he has learned. Wrestling students act displeased with the youths of light weight: ‘He cannot lift me,’ says one — ‘bring me a sturdy young man.’ But when the crisis comes, sometimes they weep and say, ‘I wanted to keep practicing!’ Why, what did you practice for! Now, I like to think that someone among you reading this is in travail within his soul, saying, ‘Alas that such a difficulty does not come to me now as came to such-and-such good man! Alas that now I must be sitting in a corner!’ You ought all to be thus minded.

If one should take away from a good tragic actor his paraphernalia, is he lost or does he abide? And so it is in actual life. God may say, ‘Take the governership’: I take it and show how a man educated in the good comports himself. ‘Lay aside the robe of state and put rags on’: What then? Has it not been given to me to mount the stage now as a witness summoned by God?

What kind of witness do you bear for God? ‘But, O Lord, I am in sore straits and in misfortune; no one regards me, no one gives me anything, all blame me and speak ill of me.’ Is this the witness that you are going to bear, and disgrace the summons so important?

Or what if the priest declares, ‘He is impious’ — what has happened? ‘I have been pronounced impious.’ Nothing else? ‘No nothing.’ And if he had made a declaration: ‘When it is day, then it is dark,’ or: ‘The circumference of a circle is not equidistant from its center’ — would the educated man pay attention? So why when he passes judgment on what is holy and unholy, just and unjust?

How great is the injustice committed by us if we do so! Leave to others quibbles, grumbling about the good. For what is lacking now is a man to bear witness to these arguments by his acts. This is the character I would have you assume, so that we may no longer use old examples of good men in the schools but may have some examples from our own time!