Body and Soul

Today it occurred to me that I forgot to tell you about this part: Most people believe that, when you die, your soul goes to Heaven or Hell while your body rots in the ground. Rev. Al told us that idea came from the Greeks, not the Bible. The Apostles' Creed says "I believe in the resurrection of the body", and I think that's pretty much what the early Christians believed. The whole idea of the Resurrection is that the dead will rise up from their graves, body and soul, not that their souls will return from heaven and re-inhabit their bodies. That's the way Jesus arose on Easter morning, but He hadn't been dead for very long, and His body had not been embalmed. Some time later, when Jesus ascended into Heaven, He did it all in one piece. One of the few, maybe the only one, in the Old Testament who did that was Elijah, and he was carried up to Heaven in a golden chariot, from whence cometh the hymn "Swing Low Sweet Chariot". I think most fundamentalists still believe in the resurrection of the body. I asked one of them once how that could happen when there is not much left of the bodies of most of the people who have died throughout history. He told me that God would restore their bodies to mint condition, minus any infirmities they had picked up throughout their lives. I don't remember asking him where it says that in the Bible, but I should have. It might be in there somewhere, but I don't remember coming across it.

Armageddon is a big battle in which the great powers basically kill each other off. Then Jesus steps in and takes charge. The Antichrist is a fake Christ, or maybe a fake prophet whose job it is to lead people astray. Some say he is Satan, some say he just works for Satan, and some say he is some other kind of demon. Doesn't matter, though, the Antichrist gets casted into the fiery pit with all the other bad guys at the end of the story. When the Antichrist appears on the scene, the good guys can take heart because it means the tribulations are almost over, that is, unless they get hornswoggled into siding with the Antichrist, in which case they're going down with him. In some versions, the Antichrist is a composite character that symbolizes all the people who reject Jesus. For 2000 years or so it has been fashionable to cast influential people who you don't like in the role of the Antichrist. Sometimes it's just a way of insulting them, and sometimes it is taken as a sign that the End is near.

I have the same problem with this stuff that I had with my experience with "democracy in action" in the Sawyer Student Council. If you want to teach kids about communism, fine, but don't tell them you're teaching them about democracy. If you want to be a Christian, fine, but don't say you are a Christian when you don't believe in the fundamental principles of Christianity, or even know what they are. As I began to conclude that I didn't really believe in the fundamental principles of Christianity, I became more and more uncomfortable passing myself off as a Christian. The thing is, I still believed in God. For awhile I thought I might make a better Jew than I would a Christian, but I didn't support all the laws of Moses either. When I found out about Deism, it was a match made in Heaven.

I wasn't mad at the good people at Elsdon, I just didn't feel like I should be one of them anymore. I wasn't mad at the people of Chicago, I just didn't like living there. I wasn't mad at my family and friends and, yes, I would have been happy to take them all to Alaska with me. Alaska wasn't very crowded, and still isn't. There would have been plenty of room for all of us. It's not people that I dislike, it's crowds. I remember, soon after I first met my hypothetical wife, we were driving down Main Street and there was much more traffic than I had previously seen in Cheboygan. My hypothetical wife was thrilled that there were so many "people" in town. I told her, "That's not people, that's traffic." We talked it over and concluded that they were people to her because she knew most of them, and they were traffic to me because I didn't know them and they were just impeding my progress down Main Street. By the way, I flew to Alaska and drove back to Chicago four months later.

The "catholic" in the Apostles' Creed is spelled with a small "c". I was told that it means universal or worldwide, which is why the Catholics with a capital "C" took the name unto themselves. They think they are the only real church, you know.