Myth and Miracle

Robert Ingersoll delivered this speech in 1880.

The election that year had historically high turnout.

The winner, pastor James Garfield, whom Ingersoll endorsed, was shot by pastor Charles Giteau.

Pastor Garfield lived for more than two months while the nation prayed for his recovery but miraculously he was not saved.

And Pastor Giteau went to the gallows anticipating an infinite reward.

After Garfield’s death, Ingersoll said “We in America know how much prayers are worth. We have lately seen millions of people upon their knees. What was the result?”

In all countries touched by the message of Christ the religion of the majority is much the same.

It whitewashes the tombs and gilds the lilies with taxes raised from people too poor to afford a tomb or a single piece of gold.

It keeps these people ignorant of their history, resentful of one another’s freedoms, and overprotective of their own.

Christianity, as it is most often advertised and practiced, speaks of inclusion but in fact is explicitly totalitarian.

To be a believer in your religion is to believe it was the first one even if you know it wasn’t. It is to believe every other religion that might have had the same or similar ideas earlier was plagiarizing from yours.

Certainly as a Christian I believed this even though I knew it was not so.

If the King James Bible said Pharaoh’s chariot tracks were miraculously fossilized on the shores of the Red Sea to this day then I believed it and that settled it.

I was groomed to be even more credulous than the very bible story characters who supposedly saw the sea parted for themselves.

When I got my hands on Josephus’ ‘Antiquities of the Jews’ at age 11, imagine my disappointment when I found not one reference to Jesus Christ.

At least, not one reference except for an obvious Christian scribal annotation.

Josephus talked about all Herod’s massacres but he never mentioned the one in Matthew.

I’m sure I always knew that the cross had been a symbol of life long before it was a symbol of human sacrifice.

But this fact had absolutely no register with me because I believed absolutely that my religion was the original one.

Certainly I knew that the kings and nobles of Europe spent basically the whole Middle Ages role playing the Old Testament with one another.

And I believed this was a good thing. Almighty God could multiply a few loaves and fishes with no difficulty but he could hardly make an omelet without breaking any eggs.

In Bible college I learned that this was the best of all possible worlds.

I knew Exodus and Leviticus had been pretexts for slavery ever since they were written.

My ancestors who sympathized with abolitionists did not tell me that. My ancestors who sympathized with slaveholders told me. They told me because they were defending slavery.

Well, you may ask, how can a Christian defend slavery?

Let me tell you. A Christian believes slavery is the state of nature. Everyone by nature is a slave either of God or of God’s enemy.

If you agree with a Christian they believe you are a slave of God.

If you disagree with them they believe you are a slave of God’s enemy.

To be a Christian is to believe it’s better to be a slave of God.

Christians today take credit for the abolition of slavery in the US. But actually the abolitionist movement was started by deists. Until non-Christians entered the conversation it was impossible to abolish slavery in Christian countries because the conversation about slavery was not about emancipation, it was about evangelism.

And for this reason there was always very little abolitionism in Christian countries until after the enslaved people had become Christians.

If you are enslaved, a Christian is more anxious that you share their opinions than they are that you share their freedom.

As long as they believe God made Adam and Eve but not Adam and Steve they will be hostile to the rights of LGBTQ people.

As long as people believe the afterlife is a holocaust they will be insensitive to atrocities that don’t harm them personally, they will feel attacked by facts that prove them wrong, and those facts they will attack back politically.

Is this the best of all possible worlds?

Did an almighty being make a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it any higher?

To be a Christian is to believe that.

However, anyone has the honesty and the courage to put themself in the place of others will sooner or later see right through it.

We need not fear the anger of a being we cannot injure.

Rather we should fear to injure one another.

There is only one way to be happy, and that is to make other people happy as well.

Background art

The Matrix (1999).
“The Resurrection of Lazarus,
Léon Bonnat (1857).”
The Transfiguration, Peter Paul Rubens (1604-1605).
Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pompeo Batoni (1767).
Prometheus Bound, Thomas Cole (1847).
The Worship of the Golden Calf, Filippino Lippi, 15th century.
Flagellation of Christ, Bacchiacca, 1512.
The Legend of the Danish Flag (the Dannebrog) Falling from the Heavens during the Battle of Lyndanise in Estonia in 1219, Christian August Lorentzen (1809).
Pope Urban II preaching the First Crusade, Francesco Hayez (1835), Gallerie di Piazza Scala.
God Inviting Christ to Sit on the Throne at His Right Hand, Pieter de Grebber (1645).
Crusaders before Jerusalem, Wilhelm von Kaulbach (c. 1826-1874).
The Last Judgment, John Martin (1853).
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Thomas Cole (1828).
Prometheus’ Liberation, Carl Bloch (1864).
The Matrix (1999).