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December 30, 2005

Who Would Jesus Pop?

The year's end often motivates we humans to opine our fates. It can be a catalyst for navel gazing of the highest order.

During my travels throughout the greater metro area this week, I noticed a bumper sticker with the words Who Would Jesus Pop? pasted across the rear window of a car.

It made me giggle at first...the play on words and the obvious irony. But it also got me thinking about the way religion has changed in this country over the last several decades. The way its wielded over so many. A giant blunt instrument that pushes people into places they've said they hate.

These thoughts came to me again this morning while reading Mannion, who was opining not so much his fate, but the value of mankind in general:

In trying to decide whether life has any meaning at all and if humankind is a vile and noisome parasite uselessly and absurdly struggling to survive and perpetuate its kind without any good reason for what it's up to, so pointless is its existence that mass suicide or a huge asteroid striking the planet could only be considered a favor to the universe, one should not look at natural disasters that cruelly and remorsely wipe out thousands of lives in the blink of an eye with no apparent detriment to the continuation of either the species or the earth, nor should one look at man-made disasters like wars, famines, accidents at nuclear power plants, and smaller-scale mayhem like car accidents and drive-by shootings which, though leaving behind lower body counts, are just as evil and senseless to the individuals involved.

No, all natural disasters prove is that Nature has different reasons and different ends in going about its business than do human beings. That Nature wants a volcano where human beings wanted a city doesn't mean that it was pointless for human beings to want the city, only that Nature was more insistent. Anyway, on the whole, in confrontations between human beings and Nature, human beings win most of the arguments, thanks to things like sun block, central heating, GORE-TEX, and bulldozers.

Were Mannion to sit down for tea with the Reverend Pat Robertson, I'm thinking Rev Pat would write Nature=God with his pretzels or finger sandwiches. After all...we heathen, nonChristian, parasites have been scrubbed from the earth a few times before by the wrath of God/Nature.

The Old Testament is rife with God's pissed off'dness beating down on the hapless humans who didn't do things His way. The God of the Rapture Right is an angry dude who is ready to strike down the nonbelievers through pestilence and war, keeping the cream of the believers to His bosom for all eternity.

So then..is it really humans whose worth we should be measuring? Or is it that vengeful God/Nature that keeps ending humans? And what of the humans who take up against their fellow humans..cheering the beating down of those who don't believe as they do? Where do they fit in the worthiness plan?

Posted by Carla at December 30, 2005 07:41 AM