THOUGHTS FOR THE MORROW

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity saith the preacher

UPDATE:  Since this blog was published the Catholic Church has made a response of sorts.  It's confidential, but John Menadue has published a link: 
03 FINAL Southern Cross Report 010520 Single Page – Copy

This is god’s busy time. Non-stop adulation. The weekend is Idul Fitri marking the end of Islam’s fasting month. Yesterday was Ascension Day when Jesus floated up to heaven 40 days after crucifixion.  

The idea troubled me muchly as a kid fidgeting on a pew who’d learnt a little about gravity, meteorology and space.  Religions are full of contradictions defying reason, but one needs to be settled:  If god can lift up a man why didn’t the deity put down Australian Cardinal George Pell, or at least squeeze his heart till he publicly screamed for forgiveness?

Let’s be blunt: What and where, in heaven’s name, is the link between Jesus of the gospels and Pell, 79, once the third most powerful man in the Vatican?

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been asking why Pell and his fellow priests didn’t call the cops last century on their devious criminal colleagues – but moved them to other parishes and virginal victims.

The commissioners found: ‘It is inconceivable that the consultors (including Pell) did not know by this time (of the perverts) given the usual practice and the general knowledge in the community.’

To the non-legal reader that 23-word opinion could be boiled down to one:  Liar.

A well-used photo of the prelate shows him gorgeously robed and holding a richly carved crosier.  He stands in a soaring cathedral surrounded by priests in costly cassocks.  All are men. All look severe, soulless, unreachable. This cabal of the grave acts out contrived rituals never laid down by the founder of their faith.  

If this is the welcoming Christian message of joy and salvation, then it’s time to find the exit. 

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are pseudonyms. The biographies they and others wrote between AD 66 and 110 long after Jesus died rely on tales passed down among the colonised Jews.  

They were yearning for liberation through divine intervention and prayed a messiah might dash down through the clouds on horseback and do the trick.  When none appeared stories about Jesus were embellished and became hagiographies. 

The gospels are wildly different. The virgin birth – and there were plenty as singletons tried to explain their pregnancies – isn’t common to all accounts.  Nor is the resurrection. So it’s impossible for an open-minded post-Enlightenment reader to work out what was real and imagined.

One fellow has tried. US scholar Dr Bart Ehrman checked more than 5,000 New Testament manuscripts and discovered no two were exactly alike.  So he asked the obvious: ‘If (god) went to the trouble of inspiring the text, why didn’t he go to the trouble of preserving the text? Why did he allow scribes to change it?’

The Bible has been translated into 438 languages. All with nary an insert, deletion, error, dropped line or correction?  Believe that and your earth is flat, which is should be so flying saucers can land.  As Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote:

‘And do you think that unto such as you / A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew
‘God gave a secret, and denied it me? / Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!’

Indeed – what matters it?

Evidence that Jesus existed is slight.  Although the clues are few and some fabricated he probably did live, was a charismatic preacher and got a following. His fan club included women, which would have been arousing.

Heaven forbid the man was normal and lusty like the rest of us, but Catholics shrink from that story.  They’d prefer him to wander around with a bunch of blokes, which is pretty weird as they weren’t bouncing a ball.  Maybe they were having a gay time.

Whatever, it set the scene for the unnatural and devastating bifurcation which has traumatised millions: Celibacy is holy and sex sinful, yet the parents of us all indulged and hopefully enjoyed. I like to think of JC in a loving consensual relationship.  He might even have had a wife and kids.  

The Jewish establishment and Roman authorities labelled the upstart a revolutionary to be put down.  Had they been smarter he’d have been exiled and never heard of again.

Instead, he became a cult figure through a brutal execution which also provided a striking logo, but didn’t get traction until the fourth century.  That’s when Roman emperor Constantine stopped the persecution of Christians, became one himself and promoted the faith.  So Christianity became the state religion and with it a vast commercial business that thrives today.

Protestantism might never have flourished had the Catholic clergy not sought riches on earth.  Want to enter heaven?  Try an indulgence (a letter forgiving sins). Half-price specials - this week only.  

Not much has changed. Protestants started as rebels but right-wing charismatic cults have barged in, preaching prosperity as though this was the Jesus message.  Charlatans claiming to know God’s will exploit the gullible to explain that following Christ means getting rich.

Left behind was the guy who started it all by overthrowing the money-changers in the temple and promoting the Golden Rule found in most religions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

For New Zealand theologian Sir Lloyd Geering ‘Jesus is not someone to be worshipped as the divine Son of God, for that sort of language belongs to the world of ancient mythology. 

‘Jesus was not even a prophet after the Old Testament model. Rather he was a wise man, a sage, walking in the footsteps of Ecclesiastes.’  

Written by many Anons over two to four centuries BC, and the inspiration for the last century music hit Turn, Turn, Turn, the gospels are more books of universal wisdoms.  Here’s a couple.  

‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’

So if Geering is right Jesus, like a good journo, modernised and interpreted these old sayings in plain speak and parables.

Unfortunately that explanation’s too simple.  A down-to-earth chippy’s son finds he’s got the gift of the gab.  That threatened the Jewish clergy who demanded unquestioning adherence to their complex teachings and confused explanations.

Then, now, and in-between, it’s all about alpha-males hungry for power and protecting their patch.  William Tyndale translated the Hebrew and Greek Bible into English to make it accessible to all, undermining control of the scriptures by the educated elite. 

Tyndale explained his motivation: ‘I wyl cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he (the Pope) doust.’ In 1536 the English scholar was strangled and burnt for heresy, but the printing press had been invented and the words had flown.

Theology is not science.  In the early 17^th century Galileo Galilei proved the earth circled the sun though the Bible said otherwise.  Whoops – does this mean the creator didn’t know about heliocentrism?

The Italian astrologer was charged with heresy and forced to recant. In 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged the church was wrong.  He should have said the Bible was faulty.

No wisdom could come from a humble commoner without a PhD and uni tenure, so Jesus had to be re-written as a Jewish royal from ‘the house of David’.  That gave him the quals to be a proper prophet. 

We need scholars like Geering to toss in their interpretations and have these tested in free inquiry, not recycled as untouchable everlasting verities. The pandemic has shown us office towers are redundant.  Likewise churches.  We can mass online and when the plague has shrunk, meet in parks.

The formal places of worship are prime real estate ripe for sale, the proceeds used to lift the poor and compensate those so cruelly treated by the vile ‘men of god’.

What manner of cleric is Pell? An editorial in The Saturday Paper claimed the Royal Commission revealed an image of ‘a man who took little interest in the plight of parishioners who confided to him about the abuses they suffered. 

‘He feigned ignorance, cried deception and failed to agitate for action to be taken against clergy who preyed on children, even as his own power in the church grew.’

Journalist David Marr writing in The Guardian says no pity should be spent on a “deceitful” man.  He’s wrong. Have pity on the fallen prince of the church. That’s a Christian response.  

Pell has a doctorate from Oxford.  His supporters say he’s intelligent though that’s doubtful.  That quality is identified by inquiry, doubt, wonder, scepticism and forever seeking knowledge.  Pell either didn’t exercise those talents when he and his vile colleagues moved the crims, or chose to shield the church from scandal rather than pre-pubescents from the predators’ probing fingers.

In the deepest crevasses of his soul Pell knows his failure to ask ‘what’s going on?’ and protect the littlies was a cardinal sin.

Once Pell rejected a football career and in 1966 became ordained he took on more than the fancy clothes, veneration, grand titles, paid international travel and free membership of the oligarchs’ club where he became mates with leaders like former PM Tony Abbott.   

Pell was burdened with a duty not just to follow the teachings of the founder of his faith, but practise them and lead by example.  His failure to do so will gnaw him to the grave.  

Pell would understand this worryingly cruel and unchristian quote in Matthew: ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’

Had Pell been in Jerusalem two millennia ago that might have been his fate. He’s fortunate not to live in a theocracy but a secular society.

He should thank god the shrewd writers of the Constitution distrusted a religion that had strayed so far from its founder’s ideals.  Duncan Graham