My Conversion to Moderate Christianity

I hit 50, and suddenly I took an interest in death, figuring I should start reading up on it to make as sure as I can that I'm good at it. I'm a bookish kind of guy, in spite of spending most of my life in Third World shit-holes as a lingering war tourist. Books, libraries, museums, art galleries, fields of corpses, burnt cities, fleeting relationships, emotional distance and an ingrained suspicion of strangers. The usual stuff of long-term travellers. So, engrossed in a book on death, sitting quietly alone in soft and clean, sweet-smelling surroundings of Modernity, a fabric chair without a hint of blood-stains, painted walls with no papered-over bullet holes, electric lights that shone continuously and bright, I sat turning pages, turning ideas over in mind, turning like the unhappy deceased in their ditches. Life is so good.

And then, cutting through it all, came the invasion a reader so much hates: the sense of People Around Me. Tense, ready if need to lunge, to plunge, to stab with pen in hand the nostril, the ear, the eye of a foe who could well have come to kill, I raised up my eyes from the page and saw-- a half dozen wide-eyed teens, kids baring their teeth at me, skinny, scruffy boys and girls, the leader of whom, the druggiest looking of all, lilted and wafted a question at me that to this day has my mind agog: "Do you know J'EEE-zuz?"

Like you, dear reader, my first thought too was, "What the fuck?"

It was clear to me the kids wanted something from me, but I didn't know what; and given that caution keeps me alive, that a wrong answer spoken in the right tone can sometimes save a man a few pints of blood, I said, softly, "I've heard of him." To which a girl who looked like she slept outside full-time asked me if I'm a Christian. I said no. She, or maybe another girl, all of them shuffling in front of me in a frantic state, I tell you, said, "If you're not a Christian, what do you do at Christmas time?"

Let me pause here, dear reader, to explain that though I live in a hard world of hard men in hard times, and that times have seen some horrors, in spite of all that I have a soft spot for the weak and the silly, those so often tormented by the rough and vicious, done for sport. I don't like it, my softness, their unwarranted torments. I, (and this might be rare,) I took a deep breath and told them all, though I seldom tell anyone anything, telling being a betrayal of the self that can lead to death, a pointless sentimentality that others can use to do one evil, and I was weak and I told about myself to strangers: that I didn't celebrate Christmas as an adult, though as a child I had. I told them that when I was a child my family, Trotskyites, had allowed me and my little brother to go onto the balcony of our high-rise apartment in the deep of winter so we could drop down conical paper water-cooler cups, the water freezing on the way down, punching holes in the concrete sidewalk below.

One of the kids milling about me mentioned about killing people, but I figured they were too silly in the head for talk like that, those kids, so, being weak, I pointed to my stack of books on death and offered to talk about that instead. Kids. They get bored so quickly, so easily. Not me; I can-- in fact, I do-- I think about death all day and into the night for days and days without end without thinking of anything else, and I'm not bored at all.

All this converges just about here in that I'm thinking of moving to a small town where no one knows me, where I have to meet people who've known each other all their lives, a place where they might not cotton on to strangers, where I have to make myself a fellow they'll admit to their community as a man of some Good Quality.

A friend of a friend, some guy, who knows, told me that to fit in as a citizen of a small town I should go to church and make myself known to the locals. I get it. I get that church is about J'EEE-zuz, and that J'EEE-zuz is dead. I know a fair bit about death and the dead; but J'EEE-zuz? that's not so much on my list. Till recently that is; and being a bookish guy, I looked into it. I'd heard that Christians were and are violent crazies and bigots, the latter type of whom I've known many; and I felt that even if this is true of Christians, I, as a man retiring and hopeful of a quiet place in a small town of stolid, if moralistic, violently bigoted, neighbours, would pride myself on not being anything out of the ordinary, no part of any tiny minority of extremists among them, but a man of the moderate middle.

I asked around about J'EEE-zuz, and eventually, not knowing much about this religious field, I met a man who told me that he knows the story true. OK, he looked like a fucking hippie. His hair was long, he had a beard, and he dressed like a bum. I figured it's authentic, so I listened, and this is part of what he told me:

That 'Jesus was born to a virgin, Miryam, who was expelled from her village, accused by the local women of being a slut. She gave birth to her baby under a palm tree, and when this happened, the ladies of the village surrounded her and attempted to stone her to death. They were stopped when the baby, Jesus, called out to them and told them his mother was not a slut, and that he, Jesus, was the slave of Allah.'

I just want to get along. I nod and smile. I think about death. If this is what it takes, then I'll be a moderate Christian. I'll say what they say. I just want people to like me.

That: 'When the sacred months are over, we should kill the unbelievers wherever we find them, smite their necks, and cut off their finger-tips.'

And: 'Slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]...and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.'

'Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah heareth and knoweth all things.'

'Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.'

'Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority.'

And so on for hundreds of verses in the Bible. I'll get to it in detail maybe later, when I finish getting good at thinking about death. For now, I leave the details about J'EEE-zuz to the experts.

I heard this, though my mind wandered in the hearing, wandered to the time I met a guy like Jesus who was having sex with a nine year old girl, to the time the guy I met was found shot to death in the jungle behind his house. When the villagers found him he'd been dead for a few days, so I can say his missing parts were due to animals feasting. If Jesus had sex with a nine year old girl, well, I guess religion is a sick thing. Maybe that's why some girl whose family Jesus' death squads had killed poisoned him. Maybe it was a lot of things, given the nature of the man. I've met some like him, though frankly, dear reader, none so successful as killers. I'm just going to get along, nod and smile, be a reasonable guy with no deep opinions expressed about it. Christianity is a religion of peace, which I find attractive, given the life I live, and I want to settle in and live a quiet life with my neighbours. When-- and that is, if-- they ever ask me about if I know J'EEE-zuz, then I'll be able to say yes, that he's the man with the gun.

Then they'll maybe leave me to return to my books about death and decomposition. They'll probably like me, and I'll like myself, me being a moderate Christian.

Do I know J'EEE-zuz? Yeah, I know J'EEE-zuz. Man with a gun. Religion of Peace.

Texas, here I come. They're gonna like me. Dag. Moderate Christian.

Death be not Proud

The dead are laying down in morgues, and in their graves forever. I see some too who walk and talk and put in waiting-time. I see the light of day and I breathe. Death be not proud, though some think it so. Not so. It's too banal. It's common, as one might say of shop-keepers and lorry drivers. The uncommon, the bred, take my mind to far away places. Stepping over, or in one case around, the dead these recent days, I step into realms beyond, and I live in a state of awe and amusement. Five down, face down. The living, should they so choose, gaze like God to the end of infinity: Hubble shows us All. Or we find the same gazing Sphinx looking no further than Hell, ourselves made. Not dead nor lifeless but Hell-living. And Eternity just around every corner.

Bio-mechanical medicine will save us all forever and we will never die again. No dead, no babies-- money, brain power, and fetal tissue keeping us alive for all of time.

Neil Postman quotes Freud's Civilization and its Discontents:

"And finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?"

Quoted from Covenant Zone, " Past is Prologue." 18 May 2006.
http://covenantzone.blogspot.com/2006/05/past-is-prologue-1.html

Yes, Freud had cancer and had seen the Jews of Europe destroyed in their millions. Why would he want to carry on living? Forever.

John Donne (1572-1631) "Death Be Not Proud"

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

First we must live, and living isn't enough. I see the dead lie down, and I walk around them. I walk around. I see. I lie down. I sleep. I wake up each day. I see the dying walking in their sleep, driven to Hell by the sight of what they see. I sit by the fire in this cold place and listen to music sometimes. I think it's living.

Don't know if Savoy Brown will turn out well here.

Death

In these Modern Times in the West I can go for months, sometimes even years without encountering a dead person. Often it seems that death is something alien to our kind, something that does happen, but something so rare that it bears no thinking on. Yes, death happens, and no, we usually don't like it much. It's there but we don't give it any real thought. Why would we? Aristotle sums it up nicely: he writes that hedonists want the good in life, and they want lots of it. One thing they don't want any of is death; therefore, if those who want the good don't want death, then death is a bad thing. Good point, huh. Death? Shhh.



We in the Modern West avoid death as much as we can; or if we do attend to it we transform it into entertainment of a sort-- if we feel the need to examine death at all. It's not even funny the things we do to disguise death as other than it is; but it is, and we need it. Sometimes we need a lot of it, and sometimes we need a lot of it urgently. Sometimes death just can't wait.

Death? Look, let's face it: Death is not the end of the world. Some will argue that it's the end of ones personal existence; others will argue that it's a portal to another kind of beingness; and some will be completely oblivious to the question, not caring at all, what is death.It is those latter we might care to question if we are to find some sense of our worldly experience and the further telos of Humanity. Ask those who just don't care.



What if they are us? What if we have an attitude toward death that we assign it a neutral value? "Is/Is not." It's like this, see: "Was not, was, was not." I forget who is the Roman who coined that phrase. suffice it to say he is no longer with us. He cares not, and we care less. Care or not, we do what we do, we die when we die, and life goes on regardless. But the hue and cry one hears when a body dies! One would think the good of the world had passed. That attitude, and it is nothing more than attitude, is a serious sickness of the mind of our Modern Times.

Death is sometimes a good thing, and a very good thing when it happens to ones enemies. When it happens to ones own, not such a good thing. But even then, lie goes on. (Sometimes we should-- death-- grasp it.)

The writer following is a favorite of mine, though he's a bit strange in the spelling and punctuation department; aside from that he's not a bad writer.

"Death Be Not Proud"

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

John Donne, (1572-1631)

We in the Modern West, especially in the past 50 years or so, we seem cut off from the everyday ordinariness of death. We seem often to react to death with a maudlin hysteria, an unrestrained grief so far beyond proportion that one might be surprised to find the witness to death didn't himself expire from the shock and distress of the witnessing. Of course only the slightest few actually die form witnessing the death of others, most getting over it pretty damned quick and no mistake. Theory aside, in practice most people just keep on living like they've always done, though the expressions of horror get bandied about like shuttle-cocks till one or the other tires or attention wanders and life intrudes, like lunch-time or a toilet break.



Death. Most people make too much of it.

Death. It's something we should make more of.

Personally speaking, of course, I'm not ready just yet for death, (thanks for asking) and were anyone determined to make me so it's an occasion I'd rise to resist. And then I'd live with the outcome, all else being equal and mutatis mutandis.

Death. It's not an encounter many of us are in a hurry to experience, but hey, shifts happen.

Not being enthused about having death for ourselves, perhaps we wouldn't wish a lot of it on others. But wait. But wait a minute. But what? What do we think we think if we think we shouldn't wish death on those who would rather we die? Ah, some folk want to kill us. Yes they do. There are those who want us dead. They are those we cannot be satisfied with if they merely leave us alone. There are those who do us no particular harm at all, and still would we, if only could we, hunt them down and kill them dead. Who? Our gratuitous enemies. Folk like us but different: they ain't ours, they be the enemy. It would be the right thing to kill 'em. It's nothing personal, and we'll all get over it. And it's the right thing too that in the process of killing our enemies we might-- God preserve us-- we might die too. such is life. Life makes me smile.



Life is good, but it has an end, which might be known as purpose. Death? It's easy, though the dying can be a bit hard on some. Death is not the end of the world as we know it. Death is a good thing, a needed thing, a thing we must give aplenty to our enemies.

What? Is this all? But this is so abrupt. It's not done yet. There should be more....