Now go, and sin no more

Also on this day, in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham was born.

"Current evangelism is as far as one can go in the pursuit of faith without works. Graham has brought to perfection the notion of a global parish, that is, no parish at all. He is relieved of the need to make private visits, to gather boxes of old clothes in the church basement, to perform weddings, bury the dead, to encourage rummage-sales and pie-suppers. Not only is he relieved, but the saved are also...

"With their salvation kits, they are like patients making a single visit to a clinic and who are therefore recorded in the cure statistics." -- Elizabeth Hardwick.

Cioran 101

E. M. Cioran, a Romanian writer who wrote in French, died on this day in 1995. A sampling of Cioran:

"When we must make a crucial decision, it is extremely dangerous to consult anyone else, since no one sincerely wishes us well."

"Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor."

"To love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?"

"Happiness and misery make me equally wretched."

"Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else."

"Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, what he dreads most is being survived by his friends."

Cioran was born in Transylvania. he said that gypsy music made him "mad with melancholy." His father was a gloomy priest. His mother's last note to him ended:

"Whatever people try to do, they'll regret it sooner or later."

For more by Cioran on death and thoughts of death, visit Farewells

They sometimes make me sick when I eat them, though

Poet Walt Whitman was born on this day in 1819.

"Animals do not make me sick discussing their duty to God," Whitman wrote.

Christ-inanity

Christianity would be OK if it weren’t for the Christians.

A “Christian” woman of my acquaintance, for example – let’s call her Grace – tells me often that she’s praying for me: She knows that I drink, and that I never keep the Sabbath. When I point out to her that Jesus himself preferred the company of wine bibbers and whores and Sabbath breakers to that of respectable people, she frowns.

That’s because the real personage of Jesus is an inconvenience to her.

Jesus was impatient with those who stood on formality – those who designated a day as particularly holy, for instance, or who wanted to forbid certain activities, and mandate others. All the rules and regulations, he said – all the fever to formalize and legislate plain love and respect for one another – obscured the simple truth of what he taught.

And what he taught was as stark and uncompromising as could be. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Turn the other cheek,” and “Give up everything and follow me” are injunctions lovely and splendid as theory, but impossibly daunting in practice. Even Jesus had trouble with them from time to time, what with everyone pulling him in a different direction, doubting him, fearing him and finally forsaking him. He was sometimes out of sorts with even those closest to him, his disciples (“Ye of little faith”).

After Jesus was gone, of course, he became a cult figure, and the imbecilities began to pile up, embellishing and encrusting his austere and beautiful creed and sometimes, down through the years, rendering it almost totally unrecognizable. Jesus would weep anew to know that such thundering absurdities as the virgin birth or the doctrine of eternal damnation or the wiping away of sins by Atonement have been, and are being, inculcated in his name.

The Christians beginning with Saint Paul set out to fashion a Jesus who would be popular and palatable to their recruitment base – a Jesus whose warning, “I come not with peace, but with a sword,” would be modified or ignored, and whose assertion that we must be like children would come to justify the utmost credulity and the most infantile beliefs, instead of a rallying cry for what Jesus meant: That we must cast off worldly desires and become like a child again, full of wonder.

I call this perversion of Jesus’s teachings and the subversion of his spirit and character: Christ-inanity.

Chapter 13, maybe

The American philosopher William James was born on this day in 1842. He wrote:

"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."

And here is chapter and verse from H. L. Mencken:

"No one knows who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely improbable that anything properly described as evidence on the point will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into this world--that is, why the fashioning of man was badly botched."

Holiday of the Month: Christmas

"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, hear what he had to say, and make fun of him." -- Thomas Carlyle.

Funny, then, that he chose WITtenberg

Martin Luther was born on this day in 1483.

"No man with a sense of humor ever founded a religion." -- Robert Ingersoll.


This is also the birthday of Margaret Mitchell (born in 1900), who wrote "Gone With the Wind." And on this day in 1880, Sarah Bernhardt, maybe the most famous actress in history, debuted in New York.

Martin Luther said: "Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children."