In short: I didn’t have to. In time, I recognized the struggle wasn’t with disbelief at all. It took a long time to realize I wasn’t feeling guilt. None. Guilt was being handed to me by the church, leaving me holding it and struggling with what on earth to do with it. My struggle was never between disbelief and faith – it was between my skepticism and the church’s inability to make it fit within its tidy system of belief.

It took a long time for me to realize that the negative responses and rebukes to my questions and skepticism weren’t reflections on me; rather, they were reflections on the  church as a whole. Skepticism appears to many to be a lack of faith, and yet it stems from the minds that the church claims to be created in the image of God. Even as a child I felt insulted for God when my questions were stifled. Rebuke seemed unfair not only to me, but to God. While I was too young at age 6 to appreciate the frustration that the teacher must have felt by dealing with my questions, I still was able to recognize that I wasn’t the one having a problem. I was creating a problem, but I wasn’t experiencing one. (Today, I still think “instigation” is a spiritual gift.)

From the age of 6, I was told by the church, “This is what real faith looks like, and if you have it, you’ll find peace.” Yet, trying to practice their version of “genuine faith” by stifling my questions left me struggling with guilt and the opposite of peace (whatever that is). Since that day as a child in Sunday school, I have spent decades trying to find my place within the church. I’ve attended or been a member of nearly every Christian denomination. It still shocks my friends who didn’t know me years ago when I tell them I am a seminary graduate and former minister. But, after years of trying to fit within the church and always struggling to conform my faith, I finally chose to leave the church altogether. At the time, family and friends worried about my “crisis of faith.” And yet…once I left, I finally found real peace. More than ever, I know now that the peace I feel today is because I no longer have to deal with explaining to the church the peace I always had.

If today I could go back and tell my six-year-old self sitting in that hallway anything, I’d say:

“Your questions are your faith. If there is a genuine, loving god, it has to welcome your questions because it has to welcome you. Being skeptical isn’t the same as disbelief, and if a genuine god is out there – it doesn’t need your belief to exist. Keep your awe at the stars. Keep questioning. You are just fine.”

What does faith look like? If you ask me, real faith looks like feeling content with your questions, your skepticisms, and your doubts. Anything less is evidence to the contrary, and reveals one’s insecurity with their uncertainty. Today, most religious persons would consider me an atheist or non-believer (this is one and the same for most). The truth is that I feel at peace with no longer striving to believe. If that isn’t genuine faith, then I’m not sure what is.

Whether you want to call it the “open source church,” “emergence,” the “inventive age,” “a new kind of Christianity,” or just “postmodernism,” something is happening. More and more people care less and less about the Church and religion. This is troubling to many religiously faithful, and yet they have a strong desire to offer the Grace and Peace of Christ to others.

Enter PLGRM.

PLGRM will shine a spotlight on the lives and interests of those no longer satisfied with Modern Christianity as they search for a more authentic spiritual expression. PLGRM will be bold and principled, unafraid to take firm stances on dicey issues. PLGRM will explore inter-religious/inter-spiritual ideas and practices, the work and convictions surrounding creation care, and in the pursuit of peace and equality (with particular focus on combating violence, poverty, and oppression).

Read more and support PLGRM at their kickstarter.

Felicia Day, creator of The Guild and now her own network of awesome, Geek and Sundry, has joined a venerable tradition of vengeful songstresses with the release of the music video “I’m the One That’s Cool”. The cast of The Guild perform as their characters, players in a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) based on World of Warcraft. The music video depicts them through flashbacks in High School being bullied by the stereotypically cool kids for their geeky past-time while the lyrics celebrate the fact that the tables have turned: Geek is now Chic. Those who were formerly at the bottom of the social ecology are now at the top.

It’s a fun cathartic song for people like me who lived that junior and senior high hell and is proud to still be GMing my weekly GURPS campaign, cosplaying at cons, and be in possession of screenshots proving I maintanked the Lich King. (Yes I realize that entire sentence was nonsense to many of you – that’s because I’m the one that’s cool). What Day and Jed Whedon almost certainly weren’t thinking when they wrote this song is “let’s write something Biblical” – nevertheless that is what they have done.

Perhaps the oldest words in the entire Bible are the lyrics to Deborah’s Song, who triumphantly touts the violent work of another woman, Jael, in killing Sisera, the enemy of Israel, by putting a tent stake through his head. Deborah addresses her song directly to enemy Princes and Kings, the way that Day, singing as her character Codex, addresses all the ass-hat jocks and prom queen bitches. “You’ll all end up like Sisera,” Deborah says, but we will “be like the sun when it rises in its strength.”

Equally ancient are the words that Miriam sang with her brother Moses right after God sent the Red Sea crashing down on the heads of the Egyptians, “Sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.” The people who were formerly slaves had been set free and walked safely over dry land while the ones who were their masters were all destroyed.

The theme of God’s preference for the downtrodden is all through scripture and it flourishes especially in the musical voices of the women who sing with joy (and a bit of schadenfruede) to recount the ways that God has reversed the fortunes of the weak and the strong. Hannah laughs at her enemies because she delights in deliverance. I imagine her belting the following lines in a powerful contralto, “The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength!”

But if we read these songs as mere gloating, Biblical teabagging if you will, then we misunderstand them. The secret to really understanding these songs is that they all take place in a liminal space of “now, but not yet”. These ladies sing out of their vulnerability. Though they’ve all experienced God’s deliverance they remain in a precarious place. Deborah gloats that one of Israel’s enemies has fallen, but she addresses her song to the many many enemies Israel still has. Miriam exults in having escaped Egypt, but it is a long way till the promised land. Hannah’s prayer for a son has been answered, but all the mighty deeds she says that God will do are still in the future. While these songs are inspired by something in the recent past, they are really about something coming in the hoped for future.

A young girl from Nazareth once sang that “God has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” Only when she sang it God hadn’t done any of those things for her. She proclaimed as present reality something which we are still waiting for. They are words of hope more than anything else.

As Day’s song continues we see footage of the various Guildies being tormented juxtaposed with the triumphant lyrics. Tink has a ball thrown at her head. Vork is pantsed. Bladezz is given a swirlie. Zaboo is slammed against a locker. Clara has a carton of milk poured over her head, and Codex is pushed into a pool. The juxtaposition creates a tension between the now and the not yet. The audience is invited to identify with the victims either because they can remember similar situations in their past or because this is true of their current experience.

Then the tension is heightened as the two worlds of the uncool past and the cool present begin to overlap. Tink, while she is laying on the ground after being hit, mouths the words, “I’m the one that’s cool.” She looks directly into the camera smiling as she does as if saying to those geeks out there right now being bullied, “You. You’re the one that’s cool.” This repeats with Zaboo while his face is pressed against the locker. He defiantly flips off his assailants as he falls. The future has somehow invaded the present. He is still a victim, but already he can see his redemption.

The song is supposedly celebrating a recent victory over past suffering, but in truth it is celebrating a future victory that is more complete. Bullying is still a serious problem and this song is telling all the kids out there currently targeted for humiliation and abuse by their peers – the day of your comeuppance is coming.

The climax is Codex being pushed into the pool which overlaps with her stage-diving into a crowd of fans, and being held up. The moment of her affliction and the moment of her redemption are mysteriously linked. She is cool, somehow, because she was picked on for her geekiness.

Without realizing it Felicia Day has given us a modern Magnificat. These are words that geeks everywhere can claim as their own: From now on all generations will call me blessed – I’m the one that’s cool.

We did not even scratch the surface of the ethical, theological and interpretive work done to contend against the doctrine of eternal Hell. What we did is draw from our own thoughts as well as places where arguments accumulate, particular debates around the issue of Hell and some of the books we have read and are reading.

Obviously, we are hearkening back to Luther’s 95 Theses. We have no expectation that our tweets will have anywhere near that impact. On the other hand, we agree that the doctrine of Hell is far worse than indulgences could possibly be. We want to fire the equivalent of grape-shot into the doctrine of Hell and sink it forever, so that no one ever has to feel it is necessary to believe in Hell ever again. Over-ambitions, we know, but it’s a start.

Ethical/rational

#95Tweets #E1: Eternal Hell is not in any way restorative – it eternally severs relationship and eternally prevents redemption

#95Tweets #E2: In fact, eternal Hell is the teaching that there are people and things that can never be redeemed, even by God

#95Tweets #E3: Eternal Hell is vengeance made infinite, and is therefore even less noble than vengeance

#95Tweets #E4: Eternal Hell lacks the sole moral underpinning of punishment, which is correction

#95Tweets #E5: Eternal Hell is beyond disproportionate – eternal Hell cannot be an earned punishment, no matter what a finite being does

#95Tweets #E6: Humans perpetrate horrific, incomprehensible evil – eternal Hell is infinitely worse than any human (finite) evil

#95Tweets #E7: Punishment in an eternal Hell would even be unfair to Hitler, who committed incomprehensibly evil but finite crimes

#95Tweets #E8: With the effects of poor information, bias, culture, neurobiology, psychology and so on, we do not make free decisions

#95Tweets #E9: This amounts to a situation where human fallibility, not even human misdeeds, can result in eternal torture in Hell

#95Tweets #E10: As eternal Hell is traditionally understood, mental illness could easily be an absolute bar from salvation

#95Tweets #E11: Fear of (eternal) punishment is the most brutal, crass and callous way to seek to encourage good

#95Tweets #E12: Fear of punishment is not effective in encouraging good, it only prevents overt misdeeds while being watched

#95Tweets #E13: Whatever happens after death, there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that anything like Hell exists

#95Tweets #E14: Eternal Hell is the worst possible story ending – for the vast majority, the end is an infinite and insurmountable tragedy

#95Tweets #E15: It is morally untenable to expect any person of conscience to enjoy Heaven knowing that others are in Hell

#95Tweets #E16: Eternal Hell makes Heaven look a lot like North Korea – worship the ruler or else, and ignore the suffering around you

#95Tweets #E17: Believers in eternal Hell must either be hypocritical, saying they believe but not behaving as if they do (1/2)

#95Tweets #E18: Or believers in eternal Hell must be callous, understanding the infinite stakes but not caring proportionally (2/2)

#95Tweets #E19: The doctrine of eternal Hell encourages either hypocrisy or callousness by necessity

#95Tweets #E20: A reasonable person’s response to any possibility of eternal torture in Hell would be constant panic and desperation

#95Tweets #E21: A doctrine of annihilation is morally preferable to eternal torture by every conceivable measure

#95Tweets #E22: A doctrine of universalism is morally preferable to annihilation, given that God is both powerful enough to save and good

#95Tweets #E23: Since Aristotle, we have a strong case that good is not good simply because God says it is

#95Tweets #E24: For God’s actions to be good, they must actually be good, not just called good; eternal Hell could only be “good” by fiat

#95Tweets #E25: The only crime that might justly warrant a punishment of eternal torture would be…eternally torturing people

#95Tweets #E26: Yesterday, 100,000 human beings died. In traditional Hell theology, we must conclude that the majority are in Hell

#95Tweets #E27: That’s at least 18,250,365 human beings to be tortured for eternity in a single year – the pop. of Shanghai or Mozambique

#95Tweets #E28: Given that being in Hell is to burn, and scream, and beg, and weep for eternity, 1 human being in this condition is too many

For all of these reasons and more, eternal Hell is an ethically unjustifiable belief.

Theological

#95Tweets #T1: Eliminating a doctrine of eternal Hell does not mean eliminating justice, judgement, punishment, and so on

#95Tweets #T2: Eternal Hell is entirely unnecessary to any traditional view of salvation, no matter how exclusivist

#95Tweets #T3: Eternal Hell does nothing whatsoever to glorify God, unless the powerful torturing the weak is glorious

#95Tweets #T4: Eternal Hell is about vindication of an exclusive, violent orthodoxy even at an infinite cost to those left out

#95Tweets #T5: Eternal Hell renders God’s love meaningless – no definition of love could include allowing infinite torture

#95Tweets #T6: Eternal Hell renders God’s justice meaningless, unless God’s justice is infinitely more retributive than human justice

#95Tweets #T7: Eternal Hell renders God’s mercy meaningless – there is eternal punishment which will never abate

#95Tweets #T8: Eternal Hell renders God’s sovereignty meaningless if God is good – God is impotent to save the vast majority of humans

#95Tweets #T9: Eternal Hell renders God’s power meaningless, since God’s plan to restore all creation can be foiled by human sin

#95Tweets #T10: Eternal Hell renders God’s omniscience meaningless, since God just can’t figure out how to save most people

#95Tweets #T11: Eternal Hell renders God’s holiness meaningless, given that evil and sin and torture would be eternal

#95Tweets #T12: Eternal Hell teaches of a God with finite patience but an infinite capacity for retribution

#95Tweets #T13: Rather than a “day of wrath”, Eternal Hell means that a trillion trillion trillion days of wrath are just the beginning

#95Tweets #T14: Eternal Hell means that whatever else God is, God cannot be good by any reasonable definition of the word

#95Tweets #T15: Eternal Hell annihilates meaning of all kinds – what is the point of doing anything but fearing eternal torture?

#95Tweets #T16: Eternal Hell means we know God primarily as monster – monstrous judge, monstrous father, monstrous savior, etc.

#95Tweets #T17: Eternal Hell is far beyond even the most evil we could visit upon our children – and are we not God’s children?

#95Tweets #T18: Eternal Hell cedes eternal victory to sin, evil and suffering

#95Tweets #T19: In contrast to scripture, Eternal Hell promises eternity to unrepentant sinners

#95Tweets #T20: Eternal Hell ascribes infinitude, eternity and finality to pain, horror, despair and terror

#95Tweets #T21: A doctrine of eternal Hell puts torture at the heart of the Gospel

#95Tweets #T22: Eternal Hell makes a mystery of horrific evil – it is beyond comprehension, rather than limited and destined for defeat

#95Tweets #T23: Eternal Hell teaches of a God who is incapable of empathy – an image of God the sociopath

#95Tweets #T24: Eternal Hell ascribes to human sin the power to overwhelm and defeat Jesus’ incarnation, life, death and resurrection

#95Tweets #T25: If there is an Eternal Hell Jesus’ incarnation, life, death and resurrection accomplish nothing definitive

#95Tweets #T26: Eternal Hell breaks God’s covenants – ex: it is infinitely worse than a second Flood

#95Tweets #T27: Eternal Hell means that God calls “good” a creation in which flawed beings can err so greatly they are tortured forever

#95Tweets #T28: Eternal Hell means, in justification theology, that First Adam’s sin is more powerful than Second Adam’s obedience

#95Tweets #T29: Apparently Jesus descended to Hell, as in the Apostle’s Creed, but left it intact, only saving himself – cowardly

#95Tweets #T30: Eternal Hell, if you believe in the Devil, ascribes to him victory in the vast majority of human souls

#95Tweets #T31: Eternal life contrasted with annihilation more fully fits the themes and teachings of both the Old and New Testament

For these reasons and more, eternal Hell is an unnecessary and destructive theology.

Biblical

#95Tweets #B1: The overwhelming majority of Bible verses support some form of annihilation; more support universalism than eternal Hell

#95Tweets #B2: Gen 3:19: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, not dust to eternal conscious torment. Death, not eternity, is our default end

#95Tweets #B3: The Bible never mentions Hell in the original languages. We (mis)translate Sheol, Hades, Tartarus and Gehenna as “Hell”

#95Tweets #B4: Sheol, the realm of the dead in the OT, is nothing at all like Hell, but is clearly where they thought the dead went

#95Tweets #B5: Tartarus, translated as “Hell”, is a prison holding the Greek titans after the Olympian gods defeated them

#95Tweets #B6: Gehenna, or Ge-Hinnom, translated “Hell”, was the smoldering garbage-dump outside Jerusalem

#95Tweets #B7: Hades, translated as “Hell”, is imported from Greek mythology, and is simply the realm of the dead, or the god of death

#95Tweets #B8: Hades, while still not Hell, is thrown into the lake of fire and destroyed at the climax of the book of Revelation

#95Tweets #B9: Genesis and the Gospels compare Satan/sin to a croucher or devourer, never an eternal torturer

#95Tweets #B10: In Job, Satan is clearly an ally of God, or at least a colleague, and is busy going to and fro, not torturing anyone

#95Tweets #B11: In 1 Samuel 28, “Sheol”, elsewhere translated as “Hell”, is apparently where the prophet Samuel is. Prophets in Hell?

#95Tweets #B12: Psalm 139 – God is everywhere, even Sheol, elsewhere translated as “Hell”.

#95Tweets #B13: In Psalms, sin = death, perish, consume, destroy – examples are Psalm 5:5-6, Psalm 37:38 – no eternal torture

#95Tweets #B14: Sin = death in the Prophets: Jer 12:3, Isa 1:28; 33:12, Ezek 18:4, Nahum 1:2-13, Zeph 1:14-18, Mal 4:1-3

#95Tweets #B15: Isaiah 25:6-9, God swallows up death forever, and everyone rejoices. Except the billions screaming in Hell, right? No.

#95Tweets #B16: The NT dichotomy is clearly between life and death – Luke 20:34-38, John 3:16; 6:48-58, Rom 6:23

#95Tweets #B17: Matt 7:21-23 Jesus contrasts those who enter into his kingdom and who do not – no eternal torment mentioned

#95Tweets #B18: Matthew 10:28 Jesus threatens Satan’s power to destroy, not eternally torture

#95Tweets #B19: In Matthew 24:36-51 the sinner is cut to pieces, destroyed, not tortured for eternity

#95Tweets #B20: Mtt 18:34; Luk 12:58-59 Jesus implies that the unreconciled receive finite, proportional punishment

#95Tweets #B21: The rich man & Lazarus is not literal – if literal, then all in Heaven will hear people begging from Hell for all eternity

#95Tweets #B22: Sin in John = death, die, perish – John 6:50, 8:51, 10:28, 12:25 – no eternal torture

#95Tweets #B23: Sin = death – examples are Matt 3:10 and 13:40, and then Luke 9:25, and Acts 3:23

#95Tweets #B24: Rom 2:7, 1 Cor 14, 2 Tim 1:10 – the NT message from start to finish is rescue from destruction, not eternal torture

#95Tweets #B25: Paul says nothing about Hell – kind of a big thing to omit from every single letter, because like all Biblical authors he did not believe in an eternal Hell

#95Tweets #B26: Romans 6:23 Paul says the wages of sin is “death”, not “eternal conscious torment” – an important distinction

#95Tweets #B27: In 1 Corinthians 15:22 the grammar and context are clear that all are made alive in Christ

#95Tweets #B28: Galatians 6:7-8 – Paul is pretty clear that there is destruction or eternal life, not eternal conscious torment

#95Tweets #B29: Phil. 2:9-11 says every knee will bend and tongue confess, not that most knees and tongues will be tortured forever

#95Tweets #B30: Col 1:18-20 – God reconciles with all creation through Christ…or fails miserably to do so if eternal Hell exists

#95Tweets #B32: More in the Epistles – 1 Cor 1:18, 2 Cor 4:3, Phil 3:19, Thess 5:3, Heb 10:27, 10:39, 12:29 – still no torment (2/3)

#95Tweets #B33: And more – James 1:15, 4:12-14, 5:20; 2 Peter 2:6, 2:10-12, 3:7 and 10 – sin = death and destruction; not torment (3/3)

#95Tweets #B34: The Bible writers’ worldview does not have a place for the default immortality of a disembodied “soul”

#95Tweets #B35: The NT culminates in a new Heaven and new earth where there is no longer suffering – where is the torture exactly?

#95Tweets #B36: Almost every verse taken to refer to “Hell” talks of destruction very clearly, and not of eternal torment at all

For all of these reasons and many more, the Bible clearly does not teach a Hell of eternal torment.

The Tweeting-Room Floor

Those are all the tweets as we posted them, put back in their categories. What follows is what we called “The Tweeting-Room Floor” – ones that we cut for various reasons. One of the challenges, particularly in the Biblical section, was combining texts and arguments so that we could be more efficient. Taking each passage that we wanted to use individually, we could easily have had 95 tweets based only on Bible verses.

Some were cut because they were weak, or weaker than ones nearby, or could be combined, or didn’t fit with our ultimate plan for putting them out there. If you would like to argue some of these, and we’re sure many of you will, please stick to the ones listed above.

In the Epistles, sin = death and destruction, not eternal torment – Rom 1:32, 2:12, 6:23, 9:22 – no eternal torment (1/3)

Nor can we account for those who hear a ‘false’ Gospel, or who unknowingly have wrong beliefs or practices

Eternal Hell is far worse than the worst human calamities: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Soviet labor camps, etc.

With a doctrine of eternal Hell we cannot really account for those born before Jesus

Eternal Hell cannot really account for those who never hear the Gospel, which is almost entirely an accident of birth

This means that a vast number of people supposedly tormented in Hell were doomed at random

There is nothing in the mostly-apocryphal story of Satan to explain how he would become such an avid torturer

Jude 1:6-11 “everlasting” is defined as “until final judgement”; then sinners compared to animals who simply perish (1/3)

Jude continues 12-13 with imagery of emptiness, futility, twice dead, fruitlessness, etc. Not eternal torment (2/3)

Jude 1:7 compares fate of sinners to Sodom and Gomorrah – no eternal torment, just destruction (3/3)

Eternal Hell makes all of God’s talk of salvation in the OT into nonsense at best, lies at worst

Adam and Eve are not warned about Hell – seems like a big deal, and something they’d want to warn us about

Neither Sheol, Tartarus, Gehenna, or Hades are the Hell of popular imagination and theology

Jesus uses the example of the tower of Siloam in Luke 13:3-5 – the example is of perishing, not torment

“Hel” in Norse mythology, presides over a realm of the same name, and receives a portion of the dead

In the Gospel of John 10:24-30, God’s judgement looks like death rather than life – not eternal torment

Conclusion

We’ve already said a lot. If we were convinced that the doctrine of eternal Hell was necessary to Christianity, or even strongly supported, then we would have to become misotheists. We cannot possibly worship a God who permits an eternal realm of torment to exist, and would actually have to do all we could to undermine belief in that God.

Fortunately, the doctrine of Hell is merely an infection that has been spreading corruption throughout the Body of Christ for a long time. It is indefensible on ethical, theological or Biblical grounds, and it is time to lance the wound and heal.

Thank God, and good riddance.

Death is at the top of a long list of scary things. This list doesn’t include spiders or public speaking or showing up late to take your exam in your underwear. I’m not talking about things that give us the heebie-jeebies. I’m talking about the kind of fear that threatens our ability to make meaning. The kind of existential threat which turns lifelong convictions to Jello.

We are all going to die, of course, and I can say that here without you running off screaming into the night because we are all very well psychologically insulated from this existential fear. We have beliefs, even if we’re not conscious of them, that serve as a bulwark against the pain of mortality, borrowing from Ernest Becker let’s call this bulwark your “immortality project”.

An immortality project is a psychological construct that you participate in that gives you the comforting feeling of having some ability to survive death. Your legacy. Your heroic contribution. Your guarantee of being remembered, or making an impact that will endure past your death. Many of us are realistic enough to know that there will be no statues of us in front of important looking Neo-Classical buildings, but we can still have more modest immortality projects.

Heaven is an immortality project. By many people’s understanding all you have to do in order to get into heaven is to believe the right things about Jesus. It isn’t a very demanding immortality project, but it works.

In order for an immortality project to serve its function of keeping us from experiencing existential anguish we need some sort of guarantee; a sign that our immortality is secure. Perversely this means looking around us to compare ourselves with other people and to determine who in our vicinity is doomed. So we draw up lists of criteria for achieving immortality and measure ourselves and others against this mental list. In the case of heaven criteria may include:

• accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior
• believing correct doctrine
• being a good person
• being baptized
• avoiding any unforgivable or mortal sins
• being elect

From looking at this list and seeing examples of people who don’t meet the criteria we believe are necessary we comfort ourselves that we, unlike them, are going to move on to everlasting life. Our immortality assured we can live our lives like normal people without worrying about our own impending death. Of course, most of this process was unconscious. I doubt many of you ever actually said to yourselves – ah, good my immortality is assured.

Immortality has a dark side though. The process of denying death is what we call “repression” and like any repressed thought it tends to surface in situations of anxiety. Lots of things can cause this anxiety – noticing that someone we love doesn’t meet our criteria for immortality, becoming aware that we ourselves have slipped from our position of security, realizing that someone we dislike has a better claim to immortality than we do etc…

When repressed thoughts start to surface we either push harder to keep them down, or we “project”. Projection is taking the repressed fear and externalizing it, placing it onto another person or group in order to remove the anxiety. So when our immortality is threatened we tend to react defensively by projecting our fear onto someone else. I’m going to Heaven. That person over there is going to, you guessed it, Hell.

Mentally assigning other people to Hell becomes a necessary part of our defenses against existential doubt. The more anxiety creeps into our lives the more necessary it is that we are sure other people are burning in Hell so that we can experience the comfort of believing we are going to Heaven. Our immortality requires that others suffer.

Enough amateur psychology.

A guy named Jesus had this to say about the connection between our internal world of thoughts and our external actions, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sisterwill be subject to judgment… You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

The implication is that our thoughts are not so innocent. Following this logic: if you have wished for anyone to go to Hell, you are guilty of torturing them for an eternity.

Of course we protest that this is too extreme, that Jesus is engaged in a rhetorical tactic here to demonstrate to his audience that there is no position of moral purity and we are all in need of grace. We’re right to make a distinction between thought and action. I would rather you think horrible things of me than that you actually enact them on my person. Action is more determinative of who we are than what we think. Christians should really be called “practitioners” and not “believers”.

So let us do a little thought experiment.

Suppose we develop the ability to digitize the human mind and to create virtual environments where your mind can be stored. Suppose we begin using this technology to create a sort of afterlife for ourselves. After your physical body dies your mind can simply be placed in a virtual environment where your conscious existence can continue. At first these virtual environments are all a variation of heaven. Why not, they’re virtual?

But then… a debate arises. What about a murderer on Death Row? What about a war criminal? A traitor? A terrorist? When they die do we put their mind into a virtual environment and if so would it be fair for it to be heavenly? Or would we be party to actually creating Hell, even a virtual one?

To answer this question consider that there is a high correlation between belief in Hell and support for the Death Penalty. A significant number of people believe that when we execute a human being for their crimes we are sending them to be tortured for eternity. Consider the various ways we’ve already created Hell on earth. Consider war, poverty, and slavery. Consider Auschwitz.

The point here is not merely that we are capable of horrible things: that is established. What is important is why. Protecting our immortality project requires more and more elaborate criteria for determining insider status and more severe projections on those deemed outsiders. The more anxiety in our lives which threatens our Heaven, the more we demand proof that others are bound for Hell.  This includes manufacturing Hell if necessary.

Ultimately if you believe in Hell you are betraying the truth about yourself – that if the gavel was in your hands you would condemn certain people to eternal torture. We have a name for the beings that would engage in the torture of souls – demons.

When I looked more closely at the things people said about this God – in the hymns we sang in church and the things people said on TV and the radio and in conversation – I had a lot more trouble.  Here’s an example – the story of salvation from the point of view of a rational (if snarky) person: God made this garden, and put two naked people in it, and told them not to eat from the tree that would magically give them knowledge of good and evil.  Obviously, they’re gonna eat from that tree, as anyone would, and as a result there is work and pain in childbirth and something about men lording it over women (Genesis) and then a thousand pages later it is a justification for telling women to shut and mind their own business (Paul).  Because of this fruit we all are cursed to sin and die.  And also go to Hell.  Or maybe just be destroyed.  No, to go to Hell to burn and scream forever.  We can’t resist sinning, but God can’t forgive us for some reason, and He has this ridiculously high standard that obviously no-one can ever live up to.  As a result, God has to become Jesus, be born of a virgin, travel around doing miracles and preaching and sometimes losing his temper, be betrayed and tortured and executed, so that he can rise again from the dead, teleport around like a ghost or a wizard, and then float back up into the sky.  This is the only way that God can forgive us for the things he made certain that we would do, and that we could not resist doing no matter how hard we tried (sinning).  To tap into this magic-Jesus-power and stay out of Hell, you have to pray the Sinner’s Prayer, vote Republican and go to church.  The end.

I have to say, the usual way the faith is presented, which is some version of the above, is completely stupid.  I mean, merely ridonkulous is a compliment.  You’ve got to do some serious mental gymnastics to believe that.

So I stopped believing that, because I couldn’t anymore once I’d thought it through.  Fortunately, I happened upon progressive Christianity, with it’s Spong and Borg and Karen Armstrong and Diana Eck and post-colonial criticism.  Awesome!  Now I can keep believing in God, I’m just in this kooky minority of Christians who are critical thinkers and don’t vote Republican.  I can still accept evolution and anthropogenic climate change and women’s equality, but also continue in the habits and community I was comfortable being part of.

Only here’s the thing.  Given the progressive view, the various critical methodologies and so on, there is no reason to organize our lives by the Bible rather than, say, The Hobbit or the Bhagavad Gita or the Iliad.  The distinction is just one of habit, which we call “tradition”, so that our habits sound more impressive than other people’s habits.  You can delve into any of these works, or a thousand others, and find timeless and powerful stories, meaning, direction for your life, wisdom and so on.

Meanwhile, this is what Christianity is to most people: misogynistic, anti-science, anti-intellectual, neo-conservative, capitalist, authoritarian, arbitrary, hypocritical and boring.  It leads to preposterous stupidity like refusing women contraceptive coverage in their health care, the Creation Museum and young-earth creationists, xenophobia and telling people whose communities are ravaged by AIDS that they can’t have condoms.

So is it easier to say “I’m a Christian, only when I say ‘Christian’, I don’t mean anything that is associated with that word, but instead entirely different things that I have to spend all this time explaining to you”, or maybe to say, “I believe in God, but without the substitutionary atonement, the vengeance, Original Sin and the Fall, the existence of Hell and maybe of a literal Heaven, divine intervention and literal inspiration of the Bible”?

Or, can we just admit that we’re atheists with some Christian baggage?  We do not believe in any God that the authors of the Bible or most of our ancestors in faith would recognize.  We do not believe in a God or practice a faith that is shared by the vast majority of Christians on Earth right now.  We have more in common with Wendell Barry than we do with the Apostle Paul, and I think we’re lying to ourselves to say otherwise.

So, this Fool says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14).  But I am not corrupt, I do not do abominable deeds (well, not many abominable deeds), and I do in fact do some good in the world.  Like everyone who doesn’t believe in God, or believes in another god, I am ethically indistinguishable from Christians.  I mean, is there any more proof that you need that God isn’t real?  People who believe in God, who go to Church and pray prayers and sing hymns and fast and tithe, those people do no more good than agnostics and atheists do.  Loony beliefs aside, that right there is enough to settle it.

But I’ll go further.  Have you ever noticed that God only miraculously intervenes in the lives of really impressionable people?  I mean, have you seen the faith healer on TV?  How can anyone buy into that stuff?  But if we take the apparent evidence, then we’d have to conclude that God exists, and deeply loves ridiculous fundamentalists, and wants them to prosper.  Because you know who doesn’t have any magic powers?  Progressive Christians, that’s who.  Critical thinking seems to be inversely proportionate to God’s miraculous interventions.

Now I go for the throat.  How many people pray for healing or deliverance or answers in a given day, do you think?  Thousands?  No, probably millions.  Maybe tens of millions.  Faithful, good people, anxiously awaiting some sign, some help – far less than they are promised by Jesus in the Bible, but dammit, something!

And how many of those prayers are answered by anything but silence?

Unfortunately, while everyone (including me) mimics these cool kids in our talk the actual structure of the church and even those external structures which support the church are still mired in a mode of operation that does not reflect this fresh wind of the spirit.

Fundamentally, the idea which these authors and speakers elaborate on in different ways is not complex. We want to participate. It is not enough for us to be consumers. We want to generate the content. We want to be involved in the creation of church, not just “members” of a church. But go to most any church conference and you can passively sit and listen to the latest “expert” tell you how to revitalize your old-school congregation with a lack of ironic self-awareness that builds monuments to cognitive dissonance.

It isn’t adequate for us to change our philosophy and our terminology without also changing our methodology. Cool clothes and a bitchin’ forearm tattoo like mine will not make you a new kind of pastor/elder/christian. The vision of a participatory church can only be realized by participating.

This is why Unco is the stuff. What those of us wrestling with how to be church need is an open-space where we can actually enact these ideas. A place where everyone is regarded equally as an expert. A place where the subject matter, flow, and conclusions are determined entirely by the participants. Most importantly, a place of action, where things are not merely discussed but actually real-ized. Unco is such a space.

In Joel, God promises “I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on slaves, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”

Everyone. Slaves. Free. Young. Old. Women. Men. They’re all speaking God’s Word. They’re all participating in the mission of God. This was the vision that originally animated the church at Pentecost and it is a form of it that animates what we do at Unco.

Two Friars and a Fool is helping to sponsor Unco12. Join us in May in Stony Point, New York or in July in San Anselmo, CA and witness a bunch of crazy people prophesying, dreaming, having visions, and making those visions a reality. Join us in practicing Pentecost.

So I am a hunchback, with such characters for company as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant Igor, and Shakespeare’s character King Richard III, who described himself in words I echo:

“I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
and that so lamely and unfashionable
that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”

I don’t hear many dogs barking, but I do hear insults shouted from passing cars. It is always a temptation to lash out at the world as Richard, who is “determined to prove a villain,” does.

I am also ordained to ministry, although Leviticus 21:18-23 states that no one who has an imperfection may serve in God’s sanctuary, including anyone who is a hunchback. People have reminded me of this verse in the past, even though this whole part of Leviticus is tied to ideas of purity and impurity that no longer hold.

Other, kinder, folk have asked me if I find inspiration in the story of Jesus healing the woman who was bent over for 18 years (Luke 13:10-17). I do, although I confess that when first struck with this disease I wondered why Jesus couldn’t heal me too. But the key biblical image for me is John 9, Jesus healing a blind man. Jesus and his followers see the man, and they ask him, “Who sinned that he was born blind, him or his parents?” This idea of disability of punishment for sin was common in biblical times, and it remains today. I’ve heard it applied to me, and recently read on Twitter how God punishes women who have abortions by causing children to be born with disabilities.

But Jesus tells his followers that neither the blind man nor his parents sinned. I find myself returning to the start of this chapter in John, to read again how Jesus breaks this link between sin and disability, and then brings a person with a disability into full participation in the community.

Jesus also says in this passage, “This happened so that God’s mighty works might be displayed in (this man).” I wonder about this. If I don’t believe that God inflicts disability as punishment, could God still cause disability as part of the divine plan? I suppose God could. But perhaps God uses disability that results from genetics or accidents for God’s purposes, so that somehow the power and love of God can be shown. I hope that’s the case for me, “that am not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass.”

This is the polite question asked by strangers, their consternation that I am not something normal like a teacher or an accountant plain on their faces. I could tell them about the process of going to seminary, my reasons for going, my wish to make a difference with my brief life. Often I do. But it is not the story I hunger to tell. The story I would tell is not about what I did or how I did it. It is the story of why. It is the story of the fire in my bones.

I made the decision to become a minister in the wake of 9/11. But it isn’t the bombings, the horror, the towering inferno and its collapse that compelled me to give my life over to the Great Story. It is the third day after that sad, somber morning.

For about three days after 9/11, it seemed as if we all held our breath. In the smoke and the rubble, much had been stripped away, and something revealed. People spoke eloquently of seeing with absolute clarity what was truly meaningful in life. We listened tearfully to recordings of loved ones saying final farewells on voicemail and answering machines, to their love-drenched voices intoning what, finally, life is about. We stood hand-in-hand with strangers at vigils as a thin, fragile hope rose that perhaps, just maybe, there would be a response to this born out of all of that love and grief and solidarity. But that hope was shattered when on the 14th, from Ground Zero, the President declared that it was our responsibility “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

For three days, we met one another soul to soul, trying a new way of being together, tasting new words in our mouths. Community. Solidarity. Service. Love of Neighbor. But as the drumbeat of war rang out over the land, and joined hands were replaced by a sea of foreign-made flags, our souls fled again. On the third day, the cries of retaliation and domination rose, and the fragile spirit of interdependence we had barely tasted was entombed.

We should hardly be surprised. Our culture has not been a friendly place for the human soul for a long while, now. The cries and songs and longings of human souls are drowned out by the thousands of messages that assault us each day listing the ways in which we are not enough, and assuring us that we can purchase a solution for that. We no longer know the truth of our own names, because we are called consumer and demographic and human resource. Our worth and value as human beings is reduced to commentary on our productivity and economic agency. Corporations are treated as though they were made in the image of God, and human beings are treated as widgets to be evaluated in terms of usefulness, and ultimately disposable. We assuage any discomfort we might feel with the nightly parade of bread and circus on 500 channels, most all too happy to show us “reality,” do our critical thinking for us, and interpret our culture on our behalf so that we need not trouble ourselves. People will spend millions at the box office to watch The Hunger Games pit Empire against humanity, without recognizing how our own Empire leaves millions literally hungry every day.

Is it any wonder fewer and fewer people go to church or engage in religious community? The act of deliberately seeking out a place where one’s soul can be recognized and affirmed, can speak and be heard, is a profoundly counter-cultural act. And yet, the need to live in our full humanity, to live authentic lives can not be refused. It is repressed day in and day out, but it cannot be extinguished. It surfaces with an insistent cry in city parks filled with tents, in streets lined with people raising their voices in protest, in people gathered to reclaim an abandoned part of their city, in lawns being ripped up to make space for food. It surfaces in the courage to speak truth to power, the compassion of being present with the forgotten, the strength to swim upstream day in and day out–to live with deep integrity and authenticity so that others may be awakened into life.

Ministry of any kind in today’s world is urgent business. We are in the business of not saving souls in the old way of thinking, but in making sure the people keep their souls and engage them. Our mission is that people stay deeply human in the face of being reduced to statistics, voting blocks, subjects. In the face of this increasingly soulless culture of ours, the task is nothing less than to re-ensoul the people, so that their souls may rise up out of the ashes left by the fire in their bones.

That is the complaint that I often hear when questions arise as to whose relationships should or should not be recognized by the state and – more importantly to me – the church. It is, as a matter of course, generally directed toward the more liberal side of the debate.¹ More often than not, the responses I hear from liberal churches and pastors is an emphatic, “No, we aren’t changing anything.”

Here’s the problem – to everyone else in the world, it looks like we are. Because, you know, we are. Sort of.

Bear with me for a minute. We have to start this conversation someplace. Let’s take for granted that the definition of marriage has been historically and culturally fluid.² Let’s also take for granted that none of us really want to uphold most of the Biblical marriages as models (women as chattel, no marriage for love, rape as a property crime, etc). You might not buy in on these premises, but hang in there.

Given these things, we can say that the definition of marriage within our cultural setting has been relatively stable for the last 200-300 years. And at the heart of that definition was this: The primary purpose for which God instituted marriage was procreation. For example, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer said that marriage should only be entered into “duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained. First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.”

The relatively stable definition of marriage, the one that so many are all fighting to defend, is rooted in procreation as the primary and preeminent purpose for marriage. So what?

This means no marriages between any couples who have no intention of ever even trying to have children. It means no marriages between couple who are unable to have children. By the traditional, stable definition of marriage, these are unnatural marriages – regardless of the gender of those getting married.

Now, as a culture, have rejected procreation as the preeminent purpose of marriage. Turning again to the Book of Common Prayer, this time in its 1979 American version: The union of holy matrimony “is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord.” Of all the reasons for which God instituted marriage, procreation appears only at the end – and then almost as an afterthought!

Yes, the definition of marriage has changed! Not because of the debates over same-gender relationships, but decades ago.

Marriage is about mutual joy. Marriage is about help and comfort given to one another. Marriage is about living a shared life that reflects the truth that God is love. It is time to quit pretending that the definition of marriage has not changed, and call out those who are “defending marriage” while still rejecting the “traditional” understanding of marriage as a vehicle for procreation.

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1) A google search for a variation on the phrase led to a post with the title: “America Hating Liberal Activist Judges Change the Definition of Marriage.”

2) Some of my most interesting conversations about marriage recently have revolved around Brother Martin Luther. He advocated that if a spouse refuses to provide sexual satisfaction, one ought to go to one’s neighbor and enlist their … um … services. That was a short 500 years ago, and within our Western Christian cultural setting. And yet, that is not what most mean by the “definition of marriage.”