The Truth

You may have told someone, or been told yourself, that the facts don’t care about your feelings.

But do your feelings actually care about the facts?

‘The Truth’ is one of Robert Ingersoll’s most powerful speeches, and it could have been equally powerful either for me personally or for my closeted gay grandfather.

His beliefs and his sexuality made him an enemy of himself. Although my sexuality was different, I adopted the same beliefs until college when I became an ally. And as long as I held his beliefs I was an enemy of myself too.

However, he remained an enemy of himself even after I was his true ally. And the reason he never found out that I would have loved him for who he really was, was because he had already driven my mom and me out of his life.

However complex his motives may have been, they all ran through his religious faith. His faith said that if you have something nice then that means God gave it to you and therefore you have a duty to like it.

He had a stepmom, for whom he gave thanks to God. He believed she was nice because God gave her.

My mom, on the other hand, had a marriage which she did not think was nice, and when she told her dad it was not nice he did not believe her. Her husband shared his faith. Because her husband shared his faith, he told her for 20 years keep her discontent between herself and God in prayer and ask God to change her mind.

His faith said divorce should be almost completely prohibited by law and strongly stigmatized socially as well. This is the clear teaching of the Old Testament and Jesus reaffirmed it. According to Jesus, divorce should only ever be allowed when a man is sure his wife has cheated on him, and even then, he’s still encouraged to be the bigger man and take her back. Jesus did not say if a man was obliged to grant his wife a divorce for the same reason, and therefore it has traditionally been understood that when a woman cheats on a man, it’s between the two of them, but when a man cheats on a woman, it’s between him and God.

This was even upheld by Paul when he said God put men in charge of women same as Jesus in charge of men and Himself in charge of Jesus.

For 2,000 years, therefore, Christians have upheld a double standard where tithe-paying, sin-confessing men were free to take mistresses, get divorced and remarried just as easily as joining the military or taking a job in another town. The priest would forgive them in private for any indiscretion as soon as the details were shared and some money exchanged. All a scoundrel in a Christian country then had to do was allege in public that his wife had cheated, and the priest would happily forgive him again for lying. That was all the social or financial support he needed to move on with his life, and that was probably all the social or financial support she had.

Women, on the other hand, were unable to get divorced unless somehow they had their own bases of financial and social support. They could confess their sins and frustrations to the priest, but the priest always had the same advice: get on your knees and pray for God to change your mind and your husband’s mind. A lady’s financial support probably depended on whether she could prove her husband had cheated beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. And her social support depended on that even more.

When a Republican official’s wife says she is getting divorced for biblical reasons, her financial support probably doesn’t depend anymore on her making that statement, but her social support at church definitely does, not to mention her influence in state politics.

She means:

he’s a cheating bastard
she can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt
and she knows she might have to if she’s going to keep any friends from church.

Or maybe they’re taking advantage of Texans’ faith to collude in mortgage fraud. ‘God’ only knows.

The only reason, in the United States in the 21st century, that a Republican governor’s wife is allowed to leave him and take half his property, is because biblical reasons are no longer the basis of divorce law.

And either way, whether she is covering up mortgage fraud or only getting a divorce, the only reason she has to cite the Bible in divorce proceedings is to maintain the support of people who would fault her for divorce more than they would fault her for fraud.

My mom’s dad had a stepmom. He thanked God for her. And when his daughter told him she had a husband for whom God could not be thanked, he told her for 20 years to thank God anyway and ask God to make her mind right.

More than once a church has split in order to help a powerful man get divorced. When my grandfather’s church split, he followed the pastor he had a crush on.

I can almost see the person he should have been.

As hypocritical as his beliefs were, they were equally sincere.

Christianity depends on sincerity as much as on hypocrisy. It was built at their intersection.

I wish Ingersoll could have seen HBO’s Chernobyl.

Since the US today is less scientifically literate than almost every other country, I wish everyone would read this speech in high school.

Everyone should see Chernobyl, too.

We all should ask, what is the cost of lies?

Because it’s slavery and death.

My grandfather’s education was paid for by the government. He should have known evolution was the unifying principle of biology. He should have known his whole way of life depended on vast professions of people understanding it.

But his social status depended on not knowing he was gay.

And so did his hope of living forever.

And both depended on not understanding evolution.

If he’d wanted to know the truth then he would have been set free in college as I was. Even at a Bible college like I was, the truth would have set him free. But he was bribed by heaven and he was in love with his pastors.

The Apostle Paul made a few reforms that were key to Christianity’s early success.

The most important thing was to degrade penile circumcision. The practice had previously been mandatory, but Paul made it optional. As a result Christians largely stopped circumcising for about 1,800 years before they started again in the United States.

Whether or not their external members are circumcised, all Christians consider themselves circumcised in the heart.

Circumcising his followers’ hearts instead of their penises was apparently required in order to teach the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith alone, which Paul articulates in several of his epistles.

What Paul means by a ‘circumcised heart’ is:

someone believes they have a savior named Jesus
that Jesus saved them from a fate worse than death
in order to pardon any crimes they may have committed
and let them live happily ever after
and if anyone suffers a fate worse than death, it’s their own damned fault; they chose what happens to them, because the savior is not to be blamed, and his almighty, all-wise, all-loving all-father will not accept blame either.

That’s what salvation means in Christianity.

That’s what it meant to Paul’s audience when he spoke to them, and that’s what it meant to his followers when he wrote to them.

Paul seems to have pioneered this idea that people could be ‘saved’ in this way by believing.

That is, that there was one neat trick to live happily ever after, that it was a matter of self-identification and loyalty, and that every counterindicator was a test of confidence.

In other words, Paul seems to have invented the Multi Level Marketing scheme.

This idea that people needed saving was appealing as a solution for pain and had been for a long time.

That’s why the Bible says atonement requires bloodshed.

That’s why it says your happiness comes from someone else’s suffering.

It grooms you to be either predator or prey and says the poor will always be with us until Christ’s return.

As a matter of fact, we do need saving, but the only ones who can save us are ourselves.

We need saving from nature: from the redness, teeth and claws.

We need saving from bigotry, prejudice, systemic cruelty.

And we need saving from Christianity: from the toxic fantasies of chosen people, promised land, holy priesthood, individual salvation, blood atonement and eternal damnation.

We need saving from Nature’s grim reflections in our culture and our selves.

We need saving from the idea that benefit and harm are a zero sum economy: from the fact that our politics are about redistributing pain rather than eliminating it.

All we need to save us is the truth. The fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Background art

Prometheus Bound, Thomas Cole, 1847.
Prometheus’ Liberation, Carl Bloch, 1864.
The Mocking of Christ, Alexandre Cabanel, 1845.
Titanic, 1997.
1823, Mario Lanzas, 2023.
Second Council of Nicaea, Menologion of Basil II, 1050.
Christ in Gethsemane, Heinrich Hoffmann, 1886.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975.
The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, 1656.
Christ before the High Priest, Gerard van Honthorst, 1617.
Galileo Galilei displaying his telescope to Leonardo Donato, Henry-Julien Detouche, c. 1900.
Saint Augustine, Philippe de Champaigne, 1650.
Circumcision of Abraham, Bible of Jean de Sy, c. 1355-1357.
Jesus Christ visits the Americas, John Walter Scott, 1969.
The Annunciation, Fra Angelico, 1442.
Portrait of John Calvin after Cristofano dell’Altissimo, Titian, c. 1563-1600.
Christ triumphant over sin and death, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618.
Escena de Inquisición, Francisco Goya, c. 1815.
Escena de Inquisición, Joaquín Pinto, 1895.
The School of Athens, Raphael, 1509.
Christus geneest de blinde Bartimaeus bij Jericho, Gaspar de Witte, 1671.
St. Jerome Saving Sylvanus and Punishing the Heretic Sabinianus, Raphael, 1502.
Christ, with a sword in his mouth, between seven candlesticks; representing a stage in the alchemical process, Nicholas Flamel, 1772/3.
Ecce Homo, Antonio Ciseri, 1850.
The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp, 1612-1652.
Christ’s Descent into Hell, Follower of Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1525-1550.
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Thomas Cole, 1828.
God Judging Adam, William Blake, 1795.

Back to home