never too old for bible study

I think I was somewhere around the age of twelve, when I was sitting through one of those splendid summer mornings stuck in that awful boring dusty Elsdon Methodist Church, when it first occurred to me, that they lied to me about Santa Claus, maybe they are lying to me about this too. I looked around at the congregation, the way these days I look at the stewards when I am riding on an airplane and there is a sudden mysterious bump, and then if there serene countenances are untroubled then so am I, and likewise the countenances of the congregation didn’t appear evasive, like they were just going through this exercise of listening to the deadly dull sermon and singing those long lugubrious hymns, just to kid the kiddies. But they all appeared sincere, they probably believed it.

But it was all so nonsensical that I could no longer abide it, and I submitted it to my celebrated crucible, and it evaporated like the morning dew, and I was glad, glad to be shut of it. Some religious folk, mostly Catholics, talk about losing their religion as some kind of epic battle with storms of disillusionment and quaking early mornings of doubt, but for me losing my Methodist religion was like taking off a light jacket on a warm summer day.

And even better than knowing I could now dismiss all that preachy cant out of hand, was knowing that I never had to go back into that awful building, and I no longer had to wear those awful Sunday clothes which were not only uncomfortable, but when wearing them I could have no fun because I was expected to bring them back unwrinkled, unmuddied and untorn.

And that stupid book with its thees and thous and begots that too I could leave by the side of the road.

But now fifty seven years later I find myself subjected to bible study by Beagles, who doesn’t believe it either, but I guess he went through the Methodist experience all the way, and even now still reads it for reasons that are way beyond me, and I guess he wants somebody to share the burden with him.

And I just want to argue.

How about this then? If you accept Jesus and all your sins are washed away, then why would you ever sin again? Can we not safely assume that if your baptism took you would have remained pure, so if you sinned then the baptism didn’t work? Somebody did something wrong, so of course you are entitled to another baptism. But then there is that nagging worry that maybe this one won’t take either.

Of course guilt was around long before religion. Current Christian guilt begins with Augustine connecting that damn fruit with Jesus about the year 400, basically pulling it out of his ass, but a big boon to the church because now you had to go through the guys with funny hats to get salvation.

The communal way of life was practiced by the hunter gatherers long before Jesus slipped His sandal into the doorway. I don’t think Marx ever claimed to have invented it. You know there are these simple ideas floating through, oh the universe, and sometimes someone plucks one of them and the critics will say he must have gotten this from this other guy who plucked it before him.

It was probably the Greeks who first sorted them out, and more importantly wrote them down, but of course they did not invent them. You can invent things like radios or automobiles but ways of thought have been around forever. There is nothing new under the sun. Now where did I read that?