Failing basic religion

Posted by Jesus on March 8, 2007

Jesus A few readers prayed about a new study which suggests that many Americans today are failing basic religion. This is of course exactly the kind of thing on which my flock should be working. If Americans don’t know enough about me and my Dad how can we be expected to continue to bless America? We go where the prayers are, and if another nation is willing to step up and commit more money and time to us than America we’ll just have to move along. It’s simple economics, people. You’re already dangerously close to the limit of minimum acceptable standards in your prayers, and if your knowledge of me and Dad gets any worse we might just have to reroll the place again and try with even more stringent rules.

Excerpts from the article:

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn’t laughing. Americans’ deep ignorance of world religions ? their own, their neighbors’ or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir ? is dangerous, he says.

“If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you’ve been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote the Bible or the Quran, do you know it’s so?” [says Prothero]

“We’re impoverished by ignorance,” says the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, former general secretary of the National Council of Churches. “You can’t draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings.”

But if people don’t know Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities destroyed for their sinful ways, Campbell blames Sunday schools that “trivialized religious education. If we want people to have serious knowledge, we have to get serious about teaching our own faith.”

Fascinating. Simply fascinating.

You see, here’s how this works. When you were created your plan was laid out and your every decision made for you. We knew when you would mess up, we knew which of you would go to Hell and which to Heaven, and we even knew that the whole “free will” thing would give you a false impression of choice. We accounted for all of that. It’s under advisement. You are not behaving any differently than you should, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the right. Part of my daily interaction with each and every one of you, my followers, is helping guide your decisions to those you will make anyway, and I take that responsibility seriously. If you didn’t feel like you had the element of choice, or if we didn’t bother to ensure that our master plan was working perfectly, this would be a really terrible ride. Imagine a world where you didn’t get to go through the internal struggle before you stepped on a coworker for a promotion, or where there was no fear of getting caught with your secretary because the very thought of a hot night in the equipment closet is one which your minds couldn’t synthesize. We could have made you moral all the time. We could have created you with all of the knowledge of me you’d ever need, and we could have hired out another billion billion contractors to develop the extra real estate all of those souls would need in Heaven. But we didn’t.

What we gave you was the ability to think for yourselves, to some limited extent. You will all do exactly as you’re supposed to do in the end, but how you go about that is left to the smallest bit of chance. Sometimes we whisper into your ear to move you in the proper direction. Sometimes we just eliminate options. Sometimes we put up websites. In the end it’s all designed to further our plan, and this precise moment in our plan has things exactly where they are. I am not at liberty to say where they’re going, but I will continue to play my part, which of course is to push all of you toward decisions that you will make anyway. If you read this and it helps you make a decision then we are in harmony on the matter, regardless of your decision. That is to say that, yes, sometimes we allow bad things to happen to good people, and sometimes we are directly responsible for bad things happening to good people. Furthermore, sometimes we are responsible for good people doing bad things to good people because of things done to them by bad people, which of course we also facilitated. So do you sort of understand? You really don’t have much of a choice in the end except to do what you’re going to do and let things land where they’re going to land.

My job will be to use as many of you as lessons and examples as I can, at times pointing out instances of individuals who have been preordained to spend an eternity in Hell and instances of people who either have or will get their ticket punched to the sky. There’s not a lot you can do about it either way, and I know that’s a lot to swallow, but that doesn’t mean that you should stop trying - unless you do, which means that it was always determined that you would.

Now, on to the matter of the article. I am hereby commanding all of you to read the Bible. We knew that many of you wouldn’t know what Sodom and Gomorrah were, but it’s still appalling to see that in print. Right now Americans are running about a 1 in 26.6 million chance of getting into Heaven, and it’s mostly due to this kind of ignorance. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t expect you to be able to cite specific passages if you get into an argument over gay rights or capital punishment, to use an example from Mr. Prothero’s quotes in the article, but we do expect you all to know that Mohammad’s claims to be a prophet are thoroughly discussed in the Book. Prothero’s whole concern regarding the Shia versus Sunni matter is unfounded, really. We in Heaven don’t even care one way or the other, so neither should you. If you’d take the time to read 2 Peter, Matthew, 1 John, Revelations, 2 Timothy, and 1 Corinthians, then took all that you’d learned from those volumes and rolled it up with the knowledge you should already possess from Numbers, Issiah, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Micah, you’d see that there’s really no reason anyone should follow Mohammad in the first place (hint, hint, followers, Jesus just gave you a reading assignment). Don’t misunderstand me, I know Mohammad, and he’s a really, truly great guy. I wouldn’t blow myself up for him or anything though.

Finally, I’d like to touch on the last little bit of the article I quoted above. Rev. Joan Brown, with whom I regularly enjoy a good conversation, seems to believe that, and I’m quoting here, “you can’t draw on the resources of faith if you only have an emotional understanding, not a sense of the texts and teachings.” While academically this may be true, in the sense that it is difficult for one without proper knowledge of the Text to react properly to, say, a child who is misbehaving, we in Heaven do understand that there is simply so much Bible and so little time. It’s not that we don’t encourage reading the Bible regularly and for hours and hours on end, as such is certainly a mandatory point if one wants to enter Heaven along a traditional path, but we don’t expect one to be fully versed in all of the intricacies of both the Old and New Testaments. It is indeed possible to draw on faith without a foundation in the Word, a point which I have yet to get across to Joan. Many of my most favored followers have never read the Bible, can not argue one lick about evolution, gay rights, slavery, sex, or capital punishment, but they still manage to get as many things right as they do wrong simply by refusing to believe anything not told to them by their local priest. It’s not my favorite way to keep most of you on path, but it was a lot easier to put the majority on auto-pilot and really tweak out the individuals we would use daily. Our master plan would have been huge if we took the time to set up the hierarchies of knowledge you’d need to possess within your individual and perfect brains to all be true scholars of the Word. One model of that scenario had you drowning shortly after birth in anticipation of the flood.

In the end it’s just a whole lot better for both you and me if most of you do follow advise given to you by your preachers and me. It may look like the master plan is slipping a little bit right now, what with most of you barely able to get through half of the Commandments, but rest assured that nothing is out of place. This is how we planned it all along.