Truth
Christianity in Practice
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999
Who is in Church?
People anxious to pass for more than they are curry favour with the middle classes, because they have clout and there is safety in numbers. Such people will do anything thought to be generally approved. People who are honest and true to their convictions and principles may not be well received by the middle class—they are not noted for their own convictions but for their prejudices.
To secure the good-will of the bourgoisie, the first rule is agree with them. Or rather the first rule is to be one of them, but assuming that is not possible, the first rule is to agree with them. They will be disdainful of people who are not one of them, but they like people to agree with them, so by doing so, their support can be won. A key strategem is to win their favour by adopting their faith—Christianity.
Now Christianity seems to be a demanding religion. Its supposed founder, Jesus was poor, almost a beggar. He wanted everyone to be poor. He had no house, no home. He seemed not to see the good of such things. He did not tell his disciples to work and try to improve their earthly condition. There is nobody in the middle classes who will consider this sound, sensible advice for somebody to follow, who has to live and perhaps support a family. The New Testament ought not to be a rich man’s gospel.
Have the rich in the pews read the gospels? If they had, surely they would see they were in the wrong place. Jesus never said a kind word of the rich. Jesus did not enter the temple court to thank the money changers but to drive them out. The rich do what Jesus told us not to do. They live lives opposite to the life Jesus endorsed. If they refuse to do what Jesus commanded how can they claim to be his disciples? Rich people in Christian pews do not, and cannot, respect the person to whom they attribute the salvation of their souls. The gospel of Jesus is the gospel of the poor.
A wealthy person cannot be a Christian. It is impossible. Jesus himself told us so.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
How easy is it for a camel to go through the eye of a needle? It is not easy at all. In fact it is impossible, and that is Jesus’s point. If the wealthy truly wanted to follow Jesus they would sell what they have and give it to the poor. Jesus was advocating economic equality by sharing everything.
So it should be hard—indeed impossible—for middle class people to be Christians and remain middle class. It is easy! The middle classes do not care a jot or tittle about Jesus’s precepts. They attend church for the same reason that some social animals roll in dung—they like to smell the same—it provides their social cohesion. Practising Christianity is of no consequence—professing it is what matters.
They believe that by loving God there is no need to love anything else. They like to offer prayers in church for the poor and sinners, to offer blessings to the suffering and to offer up hymns of praise to God because they are absolved by so doing from offering up any practical or financial help. God hears their sentiments in church and they are blessed by the minister and they leave knowing they are good. They have invited God himself to bless the poor and needy, and that is sufficient—why should they want more? Worship of God is not helping your neighbour.
There is nothing more inconsistent than for the rich to praise Jesus. There is dishonesty in every word that the wealthy speak in approval of the poor Galilaean. The churches stink of hypocrisy. Either the rich are hypocrites or the minister receiving them into the church is.
The minister may preach from a Christian pulpit to a congregation of the nouveau riche, but by so doing demonstrates the hypocrisy of them all. The bishop that welcomes a millionaire into the Christian communion has more reverence for money than for the bible.
The Beggar in the Pulpit
Christian churches should be filled with beggars not bankers, with streetwalkers not stockbrokers, with paupers not princes, presidents or prime ministers. Jesus did not rail against the poor, but the rich. He did not condemn Lazarus, but Dives. The natural place of the poor should be the church of him who had no place to lay his head.
Beggars are an injury to their own cause. They offend people. They might be dirty, ragged, gin or cider sodden, or they might seem aggressive. They might be worthless characters, but they ask for little. A few coppers of small change satisfies them. Nevertheless, they are usually turned away.
Yet people happily open their doors to another beggar, treat him with politeness and respect, and honour his appeals for cash. He frowns on small change, preferring pound coins, and appeals to God as his ultimate sponsor. This beggar is a worse enemy to society than the poor beggar. The priest, not the tramp, should be scorned. The hungry man who asks for food makes an honest appeal to our generosity, but the man who begs in the name of God is dishonest. The tramp’s appeal is the truth—the priest’s is a lie. God never yet sponsored a human being to beg for him, and the person who pretends he did is worse than a beggar.
Poor Christians ought to take pride in their old clothes, to glory in their poverty, to feel proud that they honour Jesus by being poor as he was. They should have utter contempt for the well dressed in church because they are plainly the hypocrites that Jesus railed against. If the priesthood followed the tenets of their lord and master, they would drive rich worshippers out of the church dedicated to the poverty-stricken Nazarene. But poor Christians are just as big hypocrites as rich ones.
The reason is a religious man is not always a good man. The most contemptible scoundrel can march up the aisle of the church with a sanctimonious demeanour. The wretch that mugged a widow could be serving at the alter looking like an angel. The confidence trickster would shine in a prayer-meeting where silken words veil baseness. Religion is often the cloak of corruption. Virtue is independent of religion. People professing faith in any god or none are good. Righteousness is not the child of religion, nor does prayer distinguish the virtuous from the vile. Righteous people have no need to proclaim their rectitude in church—their daily life demonstrates it.
When someone says they believe in God, they might be lying—who can tell? Those who regularly attend church might be blackguards. When someone points out a righteous person, they might also be lying—but you can tell. Righteousness is not merely attending church. The righteous are righteous because of the way they live their whole lives. They are righteous because they do not think only of themselves but help others. And they do this habitually, not just ostentatiously to impress. We judge virtuous people on their actions in life not on self-proclamations.
Wealth and Charity
A rich man died and left his millions to the church and its subsidiaries. The bishop, the local priest and several of the leaders of charities that benefited sang his praises. The newspapers devoted obituaries, character studies, potted biographies and every type of article possible. Television ran a special feature. Here was a good man!
But was it his saintliness or his wealth that led to all this laudation? Was he a benefactor in life as well as in death, or did the hand of avarice open only in death? The charity of the rich often comes when they die. Aware as death approaches that their material wealth will not travel with them into heaven, they decide that they can at least use it to buy an insurance policy—an endowment everlasting life policy.
Now if all this wealth could be given away at death it could not have been doing much in life. Money that is being used is tied up in factories, machinery or capital. If this is withdrawn at death, some part of the economy is damaged. In securing a first class ticket to heaven, is it charitable to throw someone into the dole queue by giving away the capital which employs him? True charity must not come out of capital but out of current accounts. The giver must then forego something for themselves when they give.
Someone could have all the virtues that make for wealth but yet be poor when they die. The reason is they were giving continuously throughout their lives to poor widows and their children, to the sick and to the unemployed, had no publicity at all, and did not they seek it. By giving they denied themselves the riches they could have accumulated.
Accumulation of personal wealth is cupidity, it is avarice, it is greed and it is miserliness. None of these were ever considered good, though today accumulation of wealth is thought a virtue. So, therefore, must be avarice and greed.
Obsession with personal possessions makes people unpleasant. They are selfish, they are unsocial, they neglect their families to work longer, to make more money, they begin to think that only people like them are virtuous, they begin to despise the less well off, blaming them for being lazy, stupid, inadequate and unambitious, they come to believe that other people have to be made to change, to be forced to work long hours, to be punished for idleness, to be forbidden their pleasures. They end up wanting to make slaves of us all and form a political party to do so.
They could have been better people and had a better life themselves had they curbed the vice they thought was a virtue. Rather than being a benefactor unwillingly at death, they could have been willing benefactors all through their lives. They could have given back a little, rather than grasping everything.
Better still, they could have taken less—they had more than they needed. Instead of forming a political party to enslave people they could have formed one to free them and guarantee their freedom, to give them justice and guarantee it. The human object must be to live in symbiosis with all else in the world. That means harmony with Nature and harmony with other human beings.
The Call of God
Why do men preach the Christian faith? Preachers and ministers say it is to their personal material disadvantage to do so. It is not true. Ministers are not martyrs. They enter the church because they have an easier living by preaching than by doing anything else. The work of the minister is light, and the pay is at worst adequate, at best huge.
Brains are not the capital of the pulpit. A young man who has a taste for reading and loafing, and no genius for work, can employ what talent he has by studying theology. Nine out of ten candidates for the ministry enter the profession from mercenary motives. The salary makes the priesthood attractive. They preach for money, and where the highest salary is there will the ministers be most anxious to go. They earn more money and enjoy more fame than they could get in any other calling. The Lord does not pick out preachers. They pick themselves out.
New-fledged preachers like to say they are going to work for the Lord, when really they are going to work for themselves, the best they know how. They enter the priesthood not because they love their fellow-men but because they love a comfortable and easy life with easier and more comfortable prospects. The motive for preaching today is the pay. The religion of the pulpit is to say nothing that will cause a panic in the pews, lest the contributions on the platter disappear.
Why should man worship God? Why should he build thousands of costly churches all over the earth, and pay priests and ministers large salaries to preach and pray in these churches? Can anyone, particularly the poor, respect men who preach in palaces as followers of the man of Nazareth? The thing is too ridiculous. The world may in time become indignant. There will then be occasion for ministers to be alarmed.
The Bible and the Child
The founder of the order of Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, wanted control of the child until the age of seven. Thereafter he did not need control—the adult was his. The reason is that few adults would accept the Bible as God’s work if they had not been conditioned that it was, as a child.
The technique of the big lie has always been popular with demagogues, and rightly so for it is astonishingly successful. If you need to tell a lie make it a big one, then repeat it as often and loudly as you can. People will then belief it. Lies become sacred by repetition. The bigger the lie, the more sacred it becomes. Unprejudiced, mature adults would be more likely to be appalled if the bible was introduced to them as a holy book. The authority of the bible has always depended on the indoctrination of the young.
Even parents who have discarded religion themselves often condone their own children being taught the divine origin of the bible. By their neglect or thoughtless liberality they allow their children to be taught that ignorance is holy, myths are sacred, gruesome atrocities and vice were part of God’s plan for mankind—in short that lies are the foundation of morality. Teaching this is considered saintly but it is demonic.
Any religious instruction is an injury to the young. It is wrong to instil unproven ideas into the immature mind. God, a future life, heaven and hell, angels and devils are all fanciful concepts that no one has been able to find objectively. All that we know about God is what we don’t know. Parents owe it to their children to save them from being taught the false and foolish dogmas of Christianity. False education is the bane of humanity, and the falsehood that is learned in Sunday schools poisons and deforms the life of human beings as long as they live.
Parents should be honest and firm about the bible. They should tell their children that it is a primitive work drawing upon even more primitive works, and written to convince ignorant peasants that a particular caste of people—the priesthood—are doing the work of God. And that today the priesthood still remain in a privileges position in society even though the supposed founder of Christianity warned everyone against them.
They should tell their children that no god ever wrote a book or even subliminally dictated one. Indeed that the evidence offered that there is a god is that he wrote the Bible. Children must be protected from this nonsense and might then grow up concerned for the whole of Nature rather than their immortal souls. No faith in God is as sacred as love of Nature.
There is no mystery so shallow as a theological mystery, because it is founded on deception. The only mysteries that the human mind can contemplate with real wonder are the sublime mysteries of Nature, the mysteries of life and death, of sand and star, of flower and feeling. Before these great, overwhelming mysteries, that everywhere surround us, the petty ideas of Gods and devils, of saviours and mediators, of heaven and hell, are trivial and cheap.
Nature unlike God is never partisan. Nature unlike God is not omniscient She is too big to notice small events. A flood or earthquake will kill the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, the wise and the ignorant alike. Que sera, sera. Nevertheless Nature’s apparent indifference should never be extended to mankind. Human beings should not take it as a signal that they too can be indifferent to events that they set in motion.
Some people don’t care what they say or do. They don’t care what people do in the world. The don’t care what people inflict on the world. They don’t care what people suffer in the world. These people are often those who have been blessed not to suffer themselves. They regard it as a vice or weakness of character that people can be less fortunate than they are. They have never felt the slap of injustice upon their cheeks, the shock of deception or the pain of disappointment, who have been evicted from their homes, downtrodden and enslaved.
The laws of Nature led to our evolving brains and we must use them in harmony with Nature, not to destroy her. That is a definition of Right. To continue as a species, we must do what is right. It is not right that a human being should cause another of Nature’s creatures pain and anguish. It is not right to make one suffer unjustly, to treat one cruelly, to deprive one of life. It is not right to perjure another of our fellow species, to abuse another, to slander or malign another.
It is often said that we are competitive animals—usually by those who consider they have won, or are winning. But had competition been our principal quality we would still have been competing with chimpanzees, at the edge of the forest. Human beings have been able to build civilization and great cities because we have been able to help each other. What person however competitive he was could have built anything substantial without the help of others? Helping is cooperating and cooperating is harmonizing.
Poverty and the Poor
What makes a man poor? No single thing. He might be the victim of his own follies, vices or laziness or his poverty might not be because his business collapsed through famine, depression or a welching customer. Is society responsible? If the answer is positive then society must make sure no one is poor. If the answer is negative then it can blame the poor for their own plight and feel no guilt. It is not so simple. Even if poverty is the fault of individual people, it is not in the interest of society to allow it. The reason is that society is not independent of the individuals in it but is made up of them.
If a man gambles his income and impoverishes his family while the man who wins the bet becomes wealthy, society is worse off. The poor family have to beg for bread but the wealthy man will not buy twice as much but instead goes on holiday to the Bahamas. The baker and other suppliers to the poor family loses income but are unlikely to make it up from the rich family.
When large numbers of people are impoverished all at once, as in a famine or the Great Depression, the whole of society suffers. There is a knock on effect and people who thought they were comfortably off find their businesses collapsing.
Nature links everything in subtle ways and there seems little more complicated than the working of economics. A disparaging joke a few years ago was that if you have a gathering of a hundred economists, you have three hundred economic opinions. In other words not even the experts know how economics works but certainly it is better for everyone if everyone has some money to spend—sufficient at least to keep their dependants.
Roosevelt realized that the poor had to be given money somehow to get the economy rolling. The New Deal worked and for long nations worked on this basis, but it became unfashionable and unemployment has returned.
Prosperity is the accumulated efforts of mankind. Nobody reaps only what they have sowed. Wealth depends upon adding value and only the poorest people add value alone. The rich have taken part of the value added by many people. They might take credit for organizing the business, saving to get it started, and being thrifty to allow it to grow, but others have helped them get rich. They never give credit to good fortune without which no one ever gets rich. The converse is true when a business goes into decline. The faults are always someone else’s and what cannot be blamed onto someone is put down to bad luck.
Poverty is a curse if it means total absence of means. Everyone must be pledged to drive this degree of poverty off the earth. Everyone is doing what they believe to be right when they are working to get out of poverty and degradation, when they are trying to better their condition in society, when they are improving their home and giving their family more blessings, more enjoyments.
But Jesus, the Christian God, in the teaching most ignored by the Christians and the materialistic West, did not bless poverty but the poor. To be poor but not poverty stricken is a blessing because poor people are not unnecessarily robbing the earth. In other words, poverty is relative, like most things. People must reject fulfilment in having superfluous material things and instead find fulfilment in enjoying life with just sufficient.
Swearing on Oath
The law does not trust anyone to tell the truth unless they swear an oath on the holy bible. It assumes that unless someone swears to tell the truth they will tell a lie. If they do not swear they might be inclined to lie, especially if they are dishonest, but if they swear they seem no less inclined to lie.
Perhaps there was a time when the priesthood had put the fear of God into people and to lie having sworn an oath on the bible filled people with the dread of hell fire. It is no longer the case and it is doubtful that even Christians will not lie under oath.
Today the oath is positively harmful for it gives a false appearance of respect for the truth. Swearing is a blessing for perjurers. It predisposes the jury to believe them. It does not insure truth-telling but dignifies falsehood.
It pleads that a rogue is a gentleman. A jury might well discount the oath sworn by rough looking people, so it does not so much benefit them. It is the elegant, the well-dressed, the well groomed who juries trust when they have sworn. Devils seem like angels. An uncouth lout will not be believed even if he is telling the truth but a member of Parliament will be believed though he tells lie after lie. We know this is true because occasionally Parliament becomes embarrassed by its own liars and exposes them.
On the other hand, honest people are insulted when asked to swear on oath. The court implies that they are not to be trusted unless God is breathing hell fire down their necks. People can tell the truth without being menaced by God, and those who cannot tell the truth are no more likely to do so while God is menacing them. The honest man is made to look like a liar and the liar is made to look honest. Swearing on oath is a counter-productive custom, an anachronism, a throwback to times when the God was feared as a monster.
No judge or jury can have a jot more confidence in witnesses because they have sworn in God’s name. A better way to make sure people tell the truth in court is to make perjury the most serious of crimes. No system of justice can work when witnesses cannot be trusted and that is reason enough for perjury to be harshly treated. If anyone lies in court and know that, if they are found out, they will get an assured prison sentence then witnesses will be more inclined to honesty and swearing will be unnecessary.
It is perhaps just as well that the bible itself does not have to swear on oath that it is true. There is scarcely a true word in the bible. A Christian sworn to tell the truth would be mute.
There was never a place called Eden, the place where Adam committed original sin and made sinners of the whole of mankind. The best that can be said of Eden is that it is a metaphor for a stage of development of human society—hunter-gathering. There never was an Adam and there never was original sin, a serpent, an Eve—it is all a fairy story—a simple tale made up to convey a moral point. There might be truth in the moral point but the story is a story—it is not true!
Heaven and hell do not exist. The Christ is Superman in the days before comic books. He arrived on earth with supernatural powers to fight crime—or sin as they called it then. Superman and Christ are fictional people.
Why should a loving God demand a human sacrifice to atone for His own mismanagement? Atonement is a lie, human sacrifice is barbaric and should not be accepted by civilized people, even as a metaphor—if that is what it is. A metaphor is an illustration. It is not true. These words of Christian truth are lies. Yet they are the foundation of the Christian religion. Remove them and the two thousand years edifice of Christianity would wash away overnight.
The church knows its holy book can be shown to be false. Should any Christian begin to question the truth of the bible, the priest warns them that their faith is wavering. Though they know the bible is full of lies, Christians are obliged to believe them to show they have faith. Faith is the biggest lie of all.
When the minister wants to frighten his congregation he draws a picture of the pagan or the infidel. The infidel has been used for years to scare weak-minded people into accepting Christianity. The world is warned that the pagan is not what they seem to be but is a fiend in human shape, a moral monster. We do not wonder that a minister paints the infidel in black. They hurt the minister’s business, and so must suffer for what he has done. An infidel would never be known if they did not disclose their own character. To conceal thei infidelity they have only to keep still, to hide behind silence. An infidel is too honest to disguise their real thoughts and convictions. Had the infidel not been honest they would still be in the church, hypocrites, to be sure, but this could not affect their religious status at all.
Sources
Aletheia, M D, The Rationalist’s Manual; Floyd, W, Mistakes Of Jesus; Magee, M D, The Mystery of Barabbas; Magee, M D, The Hidden Jesus; McCabe, J,The Story Of Religious Controversy; Washburn, L K, Is the Bible Worth Reading?
