Religious experts

Posted by Jesus on March 6, 2007

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A person going by the name of Essjay over on wikipedia.org has been outed as a fraud and fired! The matter came to light after Essjay’s claims to various educational credentials, including a Masters Degree and a pair of Ph.D.’s, were discovered to be false, and gained further attention when Wikipedia staff discovered that Essjay had used these false accreditations to support his positions within public discussions. Then there’s talk that he stole pieces of Catholicism for Dummies for an article he helped write on the popular public encyclopedia site.

First off, let’s get the usual stuff out of the way. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. How many of you out there have ever fudged your resume? Sure, it’s unlikely that you’ve claimed to have a pair of Ph.D.’s in a topic to get a job, but in this kind of thing we really don’t like to rank which sin is really worse. What’s important to remember in this case is that this individual was spreading the Good News, which basically allows him a lot more freedom to make such claims than most of you. For you to put an extra month of otherwise nonexistent employment on your application is a lie, which we all know to be a violation of Dad’s commandment regarding false witness. For him to claim to be a highly respected religious scholar, work hard to facilitate that claim, and help convince dozens of individuals to talk to me about the plans I have for them is something altogether different. That we call ministering. Sometimes you have to bend the truth to get your point across, and we in the Heaven business don’t really see that as a huge problem. Whatever keeps the souls coming in, so long as it’s not egregious, says Saint Peter.

It happens every day in every part of the world. Literally one out of every three statement made about me or Dad in the act of ministry is outright untrue, but still we allow it to continue. One of my most basic rules is that you should all go out and bring me more souls to save, and in this task Christians are granted broad authority. We all know how much work it would take for each and every member of my flock to read the Bible, learn to understand it, and witness accordingly. If we demanded that our spokespeople knew the intricacies of Dad’s law we’d never see a new soul out here. In short, you’re expected to take shortcuts to save souls. I’d have to damn virtually all of my flock to the ceaseless pain of Hell if it really were so wrong to speak on my behalf without having researched the topic.

Furthermore, Essjay’s use of the book Catholicism for Dummies is not at all a problem. Because the largely-unread book is basically a complete knock off of the Bible scattered with examples of a few really bizarre rituals they picked up along the way, we look at this incident as him having simply used a secondary source. We would have preferred that he stick to the Book, or at the very least asked me or the Pope for an interview, but given his age and lack of experience in matters of Papal ceremony we consider it a non issue.

And you know, at least Essjay took the time to read and learn the intricacies of both my and my Dad’s words while he fought for your eternal souls. We’ve given him a pardon up here in Heaven for the minor Commandment infraction, and we’d really like to see you all do the same for him down there. With the exception of Pastor Haggart and a few others, no one has done so much to take our message to new markets full of untapped souls these last few years.

Oh, and for the record I don’t have any degrees in theology.

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