The Nature of Delusion and the B.S. Detector

“No man in the Bible ever received more approval from God than David. No man represents a better model for how we should live our lives. What more could you or I ever hope for than to be called a man after God’s own heart?”
Patrick Morley

Sentiments like this are broadcast, printed, and proclaimed by Christians daily, yet there is no truth in them.

How could well-educated, smart Christians (including me in the past; well maybe not so smart;-) believe in this considering that David actually acted much worse than leaders of ISIS and HAMAS?

When I reflect back on the many years from childhood to middle age that I thought David was a wonderful role model, a great human and man of God, I see so
clearly how we humans can be caught in religious, cultural, or political delusion, thinking the utterly false is the truth and the good.

David actively raided and massacred whole villages of people, slaughtering every single individual, so he could steal their many possessions, and lied about it in the process. (1 Samuel 27: 8-12) The word in 1 Samuel, "raided," in Hebrew means to strip corpses.:-(

David was ethically much worse before he ever committed adultery. His evil actions developed very early, first by abandoning his wife who had saved his life! Hardly, a man after God's own heart. How many people now days would look up to a husband who abandoned his wife? The Hebrew Bible speaks of how she loved him, but nary a word about him loving her. It appears that he only used her to get into King Saul's family.

Notice, he's not doing very good on the 10 Commandments, not at all, (and this is early on in his career). Lying, stealing, murdering, coveting...

After abandoning his wife, marrying other women, becoming a polygamist, he lives as a terrorist out in the desert. But all of this is seldom dwelt on by Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Baha'i. Instead, they focus on the fact that David doesn't assassinate King Saul when he has the opportunity to do so. We were repeatedly told about this growing up, how wonderful that David didn't take revenge on King Saul. What a cruel misrepresentation of the facts...

Finally, even worse, years later, when he has become king, he steals his former wife from her current-husband, but then even worse, treats her horribly.

And don’t forget, though David promised not to get revenge on on a man named Shimei, before he dies David orders that the Shimei be killed after his death! He also orders the killing of Joab. What a tragic immoral way to end your life, planning revenge.

And there's more. But all of this is so negative, despicable, and immoral.

Whew!

How is it that we read over the texts in the Bible (or other literature) and don’t see the truth? I guess it is sort of like editing a book. One can go over your text with a fine-toothed study, watching for missing commas, misused prepositions, repeat words, etc., but still miss a minor error or three, because the human brain reads past the errors making the effort to read what is supposed to be there.

But a meticulous, very detailed oriented individual, like why my wife, can spot at least 3 or 4 errors in most published books, without even concentrating on the task, just catching them, while at the same time enjoying the story.

Hemingway allegedly rewrote some of his novels and stories 30 or more times, trying to get them exactly right (and no doubt also error free).
One of his most famous statements on writing applies here just as well to living, about ferreting out the bad:

INTERVIEWER: “…Graham Greene said that a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. You yourself have said, I believe, that great writing comes out of a sense of injustice. Do you consider it important that a novelist be dominated in this way—by some such compelling sense?

HEMINGWAY: “Mr. Greene has a facility for making statements that I do not possess. It would be impossible for me to make generalizations about a shelf of novels or a wisp of snipe or a gaggle of geese. I’ll try a generalization though. A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook...

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
The Paris Review, Spring 1958
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway

Of course, we know that Hemingway was in some ways a very unethical, destructive person, even committing adultery with the babysitter!

For whatever reasons, he usually had a very poor “built-in, shockproof, shit detector” when it came to living a true life, but his point is well taken even if he didn't use a moral detector in his life.

And in his writing, he did use such a detector very well, was a creative genius, usually getting prose so right.

But let's all of us try to do the same in our lives.

Let us examine all areas of philosophy, religion, worldviews, and politics and keep in constant use a manure/paddy/B.S. detector, to protect us from the sludge, sewer of wrong, and horrific evil that passes for good.

Terrible things get bandied about as true by Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Pagan, and Atheists.

If I had had a good B.S. meter, very early on, way back in the early 1960’s, I would have seen the horrific wrongs of religious falsehoods such as the model of David, and many other wrong beliefs.

At least, I did get upset at 11 years of age in Sunday school when our teacher taught us the story about how Elisha called down curses on a bunch of kids for making fun of him. According to the story, Yahweh sent out bears which mauled the children.

That shocked me and horrified my young conscience. Everything about the story rang false.

And there are so many other stories, I soon found as I read and re-read the Bible. The more I read and studied the more I became despairing. Finally, I did get a B.S. detector working.

But I wish I had learned to use my thinking ability much earlier and I could have avoided a lot of heartache, wrong choices"for the Lord," etc.


Use your own B.S. detector continually to avoid all sorts of bad religion, ideologies (which at first sound so good), and so many unwise beliefs and actions of humans.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Throwing Stones from the Glass House of Christianity

On the anti-Islamic site, the Religion of Peace, a Christian named Bill Warner states: "The political violence of the Koran is eternal and universal. The political violence of the Bible was for that particular historical time and place. This is the vast difference between Islam and other ideologies. The violence remains a constant threat to all non-Islamic cultures, now and into the future."

Then the unnamed author of R.of P.'s essay adds,
“In an article entitled, ‘Throwing Stones at the Quran from a Glass House,’ The American Muslim claims that the verses of violence and war in the Bible can be misread in ‘exactly the same way as some verses in the Qur’an’…In other words, the on-line magazine alleges that, like the Quran, there are Biblical verses with open-ended commands to violence that are not bound by historical context within the passage itself.

The R.of P. concludes, “Our first clue that this probably isn't true is the scarcity of Christian terrorist groups.”

HUH?!

The 30 Years War where Christians were responsible for between 7 to 11 million dead.


Forget about what Bill Warner asserts; it’s not true.

How could the Christians even dare to claim that?

Christian armies have been slaughtering and terrorizing others for 2,000 years! A tragic book not to be missed on this topic is Jesus Wars by Phillip Jenkins.

Christians intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the 20th century.

Of course, sometimes Christians and Muslims don't have a large army. So they fight individually.
As William Blum so poignantly emphasized, “A terrorist is someone who has a bomb, but doesn't have an air force.”

But usually the terrorists do have an air force and they bomb cities killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (as the U.S. and other ‘civilized countries’ have done, in which case they claim they are conducting a ‘defensive just war’).

The Christian leader if he strikes first, and uses smart bombs, still isn't considered to be a terrorist but is called a Christian warrior like Joshua and David and Samson of old. Wait a minute! Those Old Testament leaders were terrorists! Think about Samson. He committed suicide so he could slaughter a whole temple full of human beings. Doesn't that sound like a suicide bomber of ISIS or HAMAS or the Taliban?

Then, however, the author at The Religion of Peace website writes, “Not too many people are losing their heads to fanatics screaming praises to Jesus…”

Evidently, he didn't grow up in the 1960’s. Christian leaders told us that we should go and kill Vietnamese. Everyone--EVERYONE--I knew said I should go and fight and kill for Christ! I still remember so vividly our Christian youth leader telling me personally that it was God's will that
I go and kill.:-(

There was only one exception; another teen at Youth for Christ told me they were wrong, that we should follow Jesus' way in the Sermon on the Mount. She was a lightwave in the Christian pro-war ‘ocean of darkness.’

The author of R.of P. and Bill Warner need to consider other examples from Christian history.

For instance,

Jeremiah
48: 10“Cursed is he who does the work of the LORD with slackness, and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed.”

This verse was quoted by Christians at the start of the Second Crusade to motivate Christians to make annihilation war in the Holy Land! When Christians reached Jerusalem—let’s not deal with the thousands of civilians they slaughtered on the way there in a number of Crusades, including many Jewish persons and other Christians—when they reached Jerusalem, they murdered thousands.

Then the author of R.of P. claims, “The reason is that no other religion regularly kills members of every other faith explicitly in the name its god.”

WHAT? Hasn’t the author heard of the religious wars of France where the Roman Catholics and Reformed slaughtered each other?

Or the invasion of Christian soldiers to the Americas?

Or the Great War?

Or what many millions of Christians say even today?

Why would a sensitive Christian leader in the 1980’s claim that God’s gift to America was the atom bomb?!


According General Jerry Boykin, Jesus said, “'Now that I am going to leave you and you're going to be here to build my Church now, I say to you if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.' That was not a metaphor. What Jesus was saying was not that you will build my Kingdom, but you will build my Church with the sword….”

Then later R.of P. says, “By contrast, Muhammad was a military leader who killed people in battle, executed captives and enslaved women and children.”

Somehow, R.of P. seems to have forgotten about Joshua and Elijah, etc. Or consider the beloved David: “And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive, and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels, and the apparel, and returned, and came to Achish.” 1 Samuel 27: 8-11

Sounds exactly like Muslim terrorists does it not?

And that’s the horrific bad news, “the ocean of darkness.”

How about all humans stop killing each other. Don't kill for Christ or Muhammad, for Jehovah or Allah.

Take a vow of non-violence, justice, and peace, and live in compassion.

Daniel Wilcox

Troubling Thoughts: David, a Terrorist, Thief, Liar...

David of the Jewish and Christian Bible receives much adulation from so many religious people, but I find his immoral actions very troubling. I am confused by his overly conscientious scruples but, contradictorily, brazen violations of some of the 10 Commandments in their essential meaning. This is not even considering or dealing with when he became king, committed adultery and killed one of his own soldiers. His sinful actions started long before that.

As a young adult, he lived as a terrorist in the strongholds of the desert and attacked towns (I Samuel 22:1-2, 27:9). How is he a man after God’s own heart, the apple of God’s eye when he acts like Osama ben Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Surely, David’s more like a rotten apple.

I guess like most of us. None of us are as we should be; certainly, I struggle, too, to live in God’s love to others, and not live in self-centeredness.

But David actions are horrible. He is supposed to be a spiritual example for us. While he feels guilty for a minor wrong action that hurt no one, he brazenly violates essential ethics. He kills two hundred men, mutilates their sexual organs, giving their foreskins to King Saul so he can marry the king’s daughter Michal! (I Samuel 18:26-30). Then the verses say that “the Lord was with David” and “that David behaved more wisely than all the servants of Saul, so that his name became highly esteemed.”

What?! No wonder that the nonreligious and the skeptical have doubts about Christian faith. Ben Laden and the Taliban don’t even act as evilly as this.

How can David be so conscientious, yet commit such abhorrent acts?

When King Saul is sleeping, David secretly cuts a corner of King Saul’s robe. I Samuel 24:5: “David’s heart troubled him because he had cut Saul’s robe.” Seems very conscientious here, does he not?

Yet, David shows no sorrowful guilt for the repeated slaughter of women as well as men (I Samuel 27:9). This wasn’t self-defense; the people hadn’t attacked him; besides, killing women smacks of modern terrorists like Ben Laden who kill not only enemy soldiers, but unarmed women.

Then David steals their possessions to boot! It’s bad enough to kill people in towns, but to then take their possessions while they lay there bleeding! That reminds me what the atheist revolutionary Che Guevara did: stole an individual’s wrist watch after killing him.

Then David lies about his terrorist acts (1 Samuel 27:10-12).

Furthermore, he then takes a widow to be his wife soon after her husband dies. Plus, he marries another woman too, Ahimoam. He thus has two wives (I Samuel 25:39-43), neither of them his wife Michal that he killed two hundred men for. Should he not have waited and tried to get Michal back, especially since she helped him escape (I Samuel 19:11-13)?

It would appear that David also violates the law against coveting too, is into revenge such as telling others to get revenge for him after his own death:-(. Etc.

But let’s stop here…

Now, of course, apologists try and excuse David’s immoral behavior. They point out that standards were different, that this was before Christ, etc. But that is all beside the point. David is supposed to be a shining example, a prefigure of Christ, which he is not, by any stretch of the imagination.

It is not so surprising that later David commits adultery and kills one of his own countrymen. He had violated the most basic of ethical truths early on in his life.
What a very sad commentary.

Don’t look to David; look to Jesus.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox