My United States of Whatevah... - April 23rd, 2006

CHRISTIANITY HAS STRUCK A BUMPY PATCH – by Donald Kaul

It has come to my attention---belatedly, as most things do---that a group of Kansas Christians is traveling around the country picketing funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They carry placards saying things like: THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS” and “GOD HATES AMERICA.” The other day a demonstrator at Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital, where so many of our wounded and maimed servicemen and women are, carried this sign: “GOD BLEW UP THE TROOPS.”

Nutcases? Perhaps. Christians? Absolutely.

They are members of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas and they believe that God is angry with us for tolerating homosexuality and that the casualties of war are His way of punishing us.

The pastor of the church, 76-year-old Fred Phelps, told the “Washington Post” that our fallen troops:

“…are not heroes. They chose to fight for a sodomite nation…God almighty has killed these soldiers to inflict pain upon an evil nation, a severe stroke of divine judgment, retribution and vengeance.

“I am delivering a message from God Almighty to this evil nation, and at your peril do you ignore it.”

He’s wrong, of course. As everyone knows, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are God’s way of punishing us for electing George Bush president---twice. (If God is consistent about one thing, it’s that when a democracy makes a really bad mistake in an election it gets punished, really bad. Making the same mistake twice? I tremble for the Republic.)

But that aside, I’m glad these people are doing this.

They are a reminder to devout Christians that merely because you profess Christianity doesn’t mean you have found an exclusive avenue to the truth. It also doesn’t mean that you are not capable of hideously stupid acts of cruelty, as these Kansas yokels most certainly are.

And it might serve as a useful reminder to conservatives that people on their side of the line can commit egregious acts with the worst of them. They might remember it the next time the anti-global economy people or “eco-terrorists” stage a riot. Movements should not be judged exclusively by the actions of their fringe groups.

This Kansas group should even embarrass anti-gay groups, although I doubt it will. Those people have very little shame.

And, speaking of the Word of God, did you see where they’ve just released the first modern translation of a new book of the Bible, “the Gospel of Judas?”

That’s right, Judas, the villain of the Greatest Story Ever Told. Only in this version, he’s a hero.

The manuscript, a third or fourth century transcription of a second century document, was discovered by looters in Egypt in 1970 and translated only now. It suggests that Jesus singled out Judas as a special talent among the disciples and instructed his follower to betray him to Roman authorities.

In doing so, he tells Judas, he “will exceed” the other disciples. Judas followed orders and the rest, as they say, is history. Or something.

This is ground similar to that plowed by Dan Brown in “The Da Vinci Code,” which makes reference to a gospel of Mary Magdalene.

The Judas gospel is the work of ancient Gnostic scholars who did not believe that the world was created by God but by a lesser spirit who had fallen away from God. The earth and its inhabitants were too evil to have been the work of a good God, they thought. Which makes a lot of sense, actually.

Jesus then, was God’s intermediary, sent to put us on the right track.

The point of all of this---Judas and the Kansas loonies both---is that there is no single Christian philosophy. It is a religion that throughout history has been famous for various, often contradictory, interpretations and subject to a variety of cultural influences.

So while you devout believers out there may think you’ve got the Word of God right there in your pocket, that doesn’t mean you’re right.

That’s a good thing to remember.

Feeling like: okay