THE GOSPEL OF JOHN (PART II)

Continued from THE GOSPEL OF JOHN – PART I

JOHN AND I are sitting at a Starbucks – it is impossible to drive half a mile in St. Louis without passing a Starbucks – flipping through the Riverfront Times, the city’s alternative newsweekly. John looks very much like a corporate soldier as he reads: a Starbucks cup clutched in one hand, a Blackberry in the other, and the keys to his Volkswagen Jetta splayed on the table between the two of us like an advertisement. I momentarily consider asking him what Jesus would think of our modern world, but I know John’s days of bearing witness are through. Instead I think about engaging him in an entirely different conversation than the one we’ve been having for the last few days – a conversation about the possibility that he might be wrong. After all, the strongest convictions are not just those that hold up against argument and scrutiny, but those which have their reasoning and rationalizations reinforced by intense challenge.

“What if you are wrong about your atheistic epiphany?” I ask John out of the blue.

The space suddenly grows dead between us. John’s forehead wrinkles as he grapples for the right answer. So far he has considered me to be nothing other than a champion of his cause that he could not have expected this unforeseen curveball.

“Why is Satan called evil?” John asks me after several seconds of searching. “Was it Satan who caused a worldwide flood, pestilences, famines and murder of Egypt’s first born, or was it some other deity?”

I see that John is offering one of the oldest arguments in the book favoring God’s nonexistence. I have heard the argument worded many different ways, but the basic gist is always the same – that how can a God who is so merciful and loving allow and condone (and sometimes even cause) so much earthy evil and suffering?

“It’s not up to me to say whether God is evil, but don’t you think He’s probably a little bit detached just like all parents are,” I declare trying to sound optimistic. “I realize that God’s only Son suffered a human death and went to hell for us,” I add, “but he must have a busy day and can’t honestly be bothered with all the people who die every second.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” John practically shouts at me. “You make it sound as if God keeps His distance and never looks over our shoulders. Fine, if that is what your version of religion taught you. But in my world God wasn’t only in your heart and in your soul, but He was behind your eyes and inside your thoughts, He knew what you were going to think before you did. He told you not to think about your dick when you weren’t even thinking about your dick – yet.”

“Okay,” I allow, “But as for God allowing terrible death to occur, try this analogy: if I painted a picture and everybody said it was valuable and worth millions of dollars and should be preserved so that it will last for a very long time, and then I tore it up and burned it and people got angry – well, I have the right to do whatever I want with it because it’s MY painting, right? Nobody can say I’m a philistine because I tore up my own painting. I might well be judged for my actions (which will no doubt seem cryptic and mysterious), but nobody can say I was wrong for what I wanted to do with my own creation. Similarly, if God is the giver of all life, than He has the power to do what he likes with the lives of all living things, right? In this way it shouldn’t seem like such a violation if he kills us or inflicts us with disease or simply fails to intervene to spare us, right?”

John stares at me. “I can think of a million scriptural verses to discredit your very plausible theory. Your theory is plausible because you go outside of the Bible to justify God’s actions and inactions, but born again Christians are locked into a scriptural programming that doesn’t allow them to think any independent thoughts. When it comes to God and life there is an answer for anything and everything, and it’s in the Bible.”

“So this type of argument is healthy,” I ask, “because you couldn’t argue like this if you were still under the grip of religious dogma?”

“Of course not!” John answers. “When I was a Christian I was, like –.” He slaps his hand to his forehead to indicate a gesture of hopeless stubbornness, or more appropriately, to demonstrate how reason would have bounced right off his thick skull.”

“Cafeteria Christians are the ones who always say God is loving and merciful. If they actually read their Bibles every once in a while, however, they would find more than enough evidence in there which shows that God is nothing but a spiteful, wrathful and merciless deity.”

The sun is now shining brightly on us, the midday trickle of Starbucks drinkers oblivious to our heresy.

“Why do you think God and War fit together so perfectly like a hand and glove, the Middle East, republicans and homophobia?” John asks. “If you take a Christian and a Beatles fan, 9 times out of 10 the former is going to be a hatemonger whereas the latter is going to be a sensible liberal. I mean – is it just some accident that all the narrow-minded people flock to Christianity?”

John’s passion is convincing, but I wonder if I can’t challenge him further on the matter.

“Is it shortsighted to hate Jesus simply because you don’t like his fan club?” I ask. “Is there another way around it?”

“Don’t even get me started on Jesus,” John begins. “Before we can even agree to take Jesus seriously, we have to ask ourselves why he never left us with an inspired written work as a guide. If Jesus was the son of God, than obviously he was able to read and write, and if he was able to read and write, why wouldn’t he write down what God wanted out of us himself? Instead he placed his historical fate in the hands of fallible humans who didn’t even bother to write down a narrative of his life until a generation after his death and resurrection?”

“Are you saying that Jesus never existed?” I ask.

“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to state that the historical Jesus never existed,” John says, “but there certainly are a lot of questions and conveniences to the story, especially when one takes into account the historical context it occurred in. What would you say to these things?”

“What would I say to these things?” I repeat the query. Suddenly I realize how much easier it is to ask a probing question than it is to answer one. After a short pause I say, “Well, I guess I would say we have certain instincts and we are highly perceptive beings in terms of our auditory, visual and tactile senses and higher order thinking skills. Often we can sense our way through life based on these built-in functions. God must have thought, in addition to scripture, that this would be sufficient for us to go on.”

I don’t consider whether I believe these words as I utter them other than to conclude that they seem plausible enough. I am not trying to convert John back, I am only aiming to keep the argument alive.

“I often like to figure things out and I enjoy the challenge of a mystery,” I say, “but I don’t like to gamble. If you think Jesus left us at a disadvantage by not bequeathing to us a personal written record, I guess the way you interpret spiritual faith would determine the extent of how much this vexes you. (I.e., do you require a certain amount of evidence before you can make a spiritual leap of faith, or do you enjoy the intellectual stimulation of knowing certain things exist and are real without seeing them.)”

“Born again Christians,” John says, “see things both ways. They believe strongly in faith, but they believe the existence of their faith, and the existence of God and Jesus, can be historically and scientifically proven.”

“I read a book once which sought to historically and scientifically prove the existence of Jesus,” I reply. “It was 500+ pages and it didn’t contain a single convincing argument.”

“Exactly!” John beams. “That is what Christians are good at – making things up. If you’ve ever been to an evangelical church, the minister just paces the stage and makes stuff up for half an hour. Other professions and fields of study depend on something solid and substantive, but not religion.”

“What about philosophy?” I ask.

“What about it.” John says.

“Well, philosophy believes that thoughts and concepts are real, so if God is a concept that started in some man’s brain millennia ago and grew and grew into something so large and huge, then can’t God be real?”

“God is only real in this way as a projection and manifestation of our thoughts,” John responds. “But the big man in the clouds with the beard isn’t actually real, He is not going to judge us when we die, this is what we need to get over.”

“This ‘getting over,’ is this what atheism strives for?” I ask.

“Maybe,” John says. “Atheism is not organized like religion is. I am an atheist but I don’t speak for all atheists. There is no atheistic creed. I am sure, however, that many atheists would no doubt agree with me.”