Chapter 3:  Demons

Adam and Eve have gradually evolved into metaphors.  There’s the good news.  Moderate Catholics recognize evolution.  They have learned to reconcile the Genesis story with history by relegating its passages to what can readily be described as poetry.  Even the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church is gradually coming to grips with Darwin as they did with Galileo.  

They have finally stopped demonizing science.  They are gradually coming around to the truth.  The problem starts with Adam and Eve.  Once we agree that the creation story is a lovely myth...once we realize that Adam and Eve never existed...we must make the necessary adjustment to our core beliefs.  We must admit that the Bible was an oral tradition passed down by primitive people.  (Bob’s religion is not that far off.)  Although there is wisdom and truth permeating those pages, there is also absolute idiocy.  Leviticus is rife with outrageous commandments.  A farmer who plants two different crops in the same field should be executed.  Really?  

Not only is the Genesis story a myth, it is wrong minded.  It creates a god who is petty and egotistical;  a God who creates humans and then immediately tempts them and exacts disproportionate justice upon them.  This god is seriously flawed and imperfect.   He is not worthy of worship.  But for millennia humans have been afraid to question the personality traits assigned to God by our primitive and misinformed ancestors.  Our concept of God has long been dominated by our allegiance to those woefully uneducated people...a people whose concept of God was molded by their observations of their own earthy tyrants.   

Early monarchs were the model for early gods.  They were all too human.  The early Jewish God did not escape that model.  In fact, the Greek and Roman mythologies invented gods who epitomized the passions and frailties of humankind.  It seems probable to me that early Jewish ideas about God were influenced by those myths.  

But of all the ancient stories of the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac is the most damning
evidence that the early authors were mistaken about God’s true nature.  

The story goes like this.  God wants Abraham to prove his faith and love.  God tells Abraham to take the life of his son, Isaac, killing him on an altar of sacrifice.  Abraham reluctantly obeys but at the last minute, God stops Abraham before the death blow.  

It reminds me of a scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”  Brian is in a line of prisoners waiting to be executed.  A man sits at a small table organizing them into different groups.  He asks each man the same question, “What is your sentence?”  Each man says, “Crucifixion,” and is told to move on to the right.  One by one, each man is told to move to the right.  When Brian arrives at the table, the bureaucrat asks, “What is your sentence?” and Brian replies, “I’m to be set free!”  with a big grin.  Without hesitation the bureaucrat says, “Move to your left.”  

Brian starts to walk away, then says, “I was just kidding.  I’m to be crucified.”      

It was the funniest line in the whole movie for me.  And now, every time I read the story of Abraham and Isaac, that line pops into my head.  Just as Abraham raises the knife to kill his beloved son, God grabs his arm and says, “Just kidding.”  And God and Abraham enjoy a good laugh.  

Jewish Rabbi Yoseph Ibn Caspi, writing in the 14th century made an observation about the story. “How could God command such a revolting thing?”  But to this day, Catholic clergy continue to preach the idea of the ultimate sacrifice; the ultimate act of faith and love.  Imagine what would happen if people were allowed to act on such nutty delusions today!  Do you see what I mean when I say that Catholics should read the Bible more critically?  

Can you imagine a priest who points out the flaws in this story from the pulpit?   Do you think such a priest would be able to speak out freely?  Well if you thought so, you would be wrong.

The old Testament God simply does not pass the smell test.  His lack of compassion, his refusal to take responsibility for his own creation, his utter lack of humility;  these are not the traits of a loving God.  My fundamentalist brother is quick to remind me that I should fear God.  I say bullshit.  I can understand why he disagrees.  Fundamentalist Christians voluntarily place themselves into a straight jacket when they try to profess the idea that every word of the Bible is literally true.  Their arguments about carbon dating are laughable to anyone who understands the process.

So instead of worrying about people who cannot differentiate between well intentioned poetry and actual historic fact, we need to move the Catholic Church into the 21st Century...even if they kick and scream all the way.  

We can do this by speaking truth to power.  But now I am getting ahead of myself again.  

I was talking about demons.  Let’s see now.  Demons.  Demons.  What other demons do I want to talk about here....hmmmm.....  Oh yeah!  Satan!  

The whole story of the angels and Satan is the most unbelievable fairy tale ever perpetrated on the faithful.  Many of the traits we now attribute to Satan came not from scriptures but from Dante’s Inferno, a piece of fiction.  It just goes to illustrate, yet again, that a juicy story passed down from generation to generation will evolve from fiction to lore and eventually to accepted fact.  If you ask the nuns or priests about all of that, you will almost always get an educated, informed answer.  The problem is this.  Those facts don’t get put into the sermons.  So Catholics go on thinking the old doctrine is Bible.  

In fact, if you had the time and the money, just about any Divinity school in America could easily disabuse you of the nonsense that has pervaded Christianity for centuries.  I once heard a Baptist preacher say he tried to forget everything he learned at Divinity school because if he tried to pass what he had learned to the congregation, he would be fired.  

Recently, Catholic seminaries across the country found a solution to the problem.  They stopped teaching the truth.  They handed control back over to the conservatives and the conservatives cleaned house.  Liberals and intellectuals were replaced with obedient ideologues.  So now the priests coming out of seminary school have no problem reconciling what they have been taught with traditional Catholic theology...and modern Catholic theology is simply ignored.

To put it succinctly, the most pernicious and dangerous demon will always be ignorance.