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Would you still like him if his name was Bubba? How to worship God without the baggage by Larry Hallock Try this. Download the Old Testament from the internet, so that you have a copy of it that can be edited. Using your word processor’s Find & Replace function, substitute every occurrence of the word “God” with the word “Bubba.” Now read it. What do you think of this guy Bubba? No doubt you find him utterly disgusting. He considers women to be the property of men and he allows each man to own as many women as he can afford. He leads religious crusades into neighboring countries to wreak massive genocide, sparing neither child nor pet—except he does spare young virgins as a treat for his men. He has a cruel sense of crime and punishment, executing people at the drop of a hat for the most trivial of offenses, even unruly children. He severely punishes innocent people for the crimes of their parents, grandparents and even their great-great-grandparents. He turned loose a couple of hungry bears to devour 42 children who annoyed him simply for behaving like children. He openly admits he’s jealous with a vengeance, even to the point of requiring others to treat him exactly like a pagan god. People must be willing to slaughter their own children as human sacrifices to him. He has non-believers brought before him to watch them slaughtered in his presence. Others he requires to smear human feces on their faces and cook it into their food. He’s obsessed with kinky sex, admiring men who are hung like donkeys and ejaculate like horses..., smiling on incest and various love triangles.  And oh, Bubba is one of the world’s biggest purveyors of slavery—not just managing the purchase of slaves, but even organizing their brutal capture by force. We could go on. And you thought no one could be worse than Hitler and his ilk! You momentarily forget how you got this book that so glorifies evil, and you wonder how it ever got published. Its character development is abysmal, with many direct contradictions of what various characters said or did. But that’s not the worst part. The main premise of the book is not supported throughout, but directly contradicted—again and again. The author states as a factual given that this guy Bubba is a good guy, the very essence of perfection, the epitome of ultimate love and goodness—yet his behavior is criminal! He’d get life in prison or execution if he did those things today. Finally you get it. It has to be a joke, a literary spoof of some sort, and for a moment you start to admire its cleverness. But then you consider how off-the-wall the plot is and how poorly it's written, and you wonder how such a work could have been accepted by any reputable publisher. Not even fiction gets a pass on incoherency, contradiction and implausibility. As a novel, clever as it tries to be, this book would be rejected by any publisher without a second thought. Then someone breaks your train of thought and announces that Bubba (not his real name) is actually the Great Almighty, Creator of the Universe, God! It is God who did all those horrible, inhuman things. Now that certainly has to be a joke, you think. But in such poor taste! Although you figure God has a sense of humor, you question the appropriateness of anyone making God out to be your basic Bubba. After all, we don’t even tell Hitler jokes. Some things are just inappropriate. You feel this writing is insulting and blasphemous toward God—whether or not in jest. You don’t think it’s funny. - - - That puts you in the company of Thomas Paine. He didn’t think it was funny either. Thomas Paine was a firm believer in God, and he felt it was supremely disrespectful—blasphemous, even—to suggest God would behave anything like Bubba. Paine was a creationist. He believed God created the universe and that nature is God’s primary revelation of himself to humankind. In this revelation are all the tools we need, to understand, to behave, to treat others with respect and kindness, to stand in awe of the Creator and worship him. Thomas Paine did not appreciate anyone belittling God by suggesting he behaved as “revealed” in those old writings of men who did evil things and then justified their behaviors by claiming God told them to do it! Paine could see that Bubba was created by the same people who created all the other pagan gods of the day. (Christianity was not the first to have a virgin birth, resurrections and blood sacrifices.) With no written description of God, and only the creation to go on, Paine was in the uncommon position of actually having to think for himself about what God must be like, what he expects of us, how we should behave. Thinking is work. But like most work, it can be invigorating and rewarding. Written descriptions are severely limited, confined to the words used. But one’s own imagination is limitless. (Similarly, the more literally one takes something, the more limited its application—a fact fundamentalists don’t seem to understand.) Those of us conditioned to getting our description of God through written material might at first think Paine to be at a great disadvantage. How silly, we might think, to imagine our understanding of God could be complete merely by looking around us. How could we possibly figure out that God wants us to have slaves, honor the notion of women as property (as ensconced in the Ten Commandments), kill animals as sacrifices, flatter God more on Sunday (or is it Saturday?) and burn witches—all merely by observing nature? Then it dawns on us, and wow! If we believe God is good, then without these writings our imagination about his goodness is limitless. Throughout our lives, no matter how much we mature and grow in understanding, at any given moment we push the limits of God’s goodness to the extremes of our imagination—never fully comprehending it, only approaching it. We are filled with awe and we are drawn to emulate that goodness. How silly all this stuff about a touchy Bubba-god who throws his weight around killing people at the drop of a pin if they don’t offer the right sacrifice begins to look! How petty! Thus Thomas Paine was offended by the pettiness and absurdities of man-made religion. By observing God directly, he did not find himself in the awkward position of having to create excuses for God’s evil biblical behaviors, his weird fascination with blood sacrifices, his horrible temper or his morbid approach to punishment. Paine wasn’t saddled with the burden of explaining why the deity he worships doesn’t want women in pulpits or gays in love. He’s not stuck with having to defend fantastic promises that are never kept, and prophecies never fulfilled. Ironically, the only thing he ever had to defend was God’s reputation—which Bible writers had dragged through the mud by attributing their own wicked behaviors to God. All of which makes sense to me. Paine’s respect and adoration for God was pure, unadulterated by human contamination. He worshipped God without all the baggage—and all the while, Christians called him an atheist for not helping them carry theirs. It’s worth noting that Thomas Paine’s contemplation of God was not some kind of nebulous feel-good meditation. He was moved to action. In addition to defending God’s reputation, Paine personally worked to end slavery, particularly with his 1775 essay, “African Slavery in America.” That makes Paine a better person than Bubba, and not by a little; Bubba wasn’t even neutral, he heartily encouraged slavery. And while Paine worked to end slavery, his biggest obstacle was Christians who defended the practice on clear biblical grounds (they had Bubba’s word on it). They got their understanding of God through a written description, while Paine got an entirely different understanding of God merely by contemplating God’s real revelation, the creation. Written words limit our ability to see God as infinitely good. Would Paine still believe in God today? Who knows? When Paine died, Charles Darwin was but four months old. In that day, there simply was no plausible explanation for the origin of species.* Nearly everyone, including Paine, chalked it all up to God—the creator of all things existing, just as we find them. Things of mystery have always been the affairs of the gods. But for the fact that Paine was not an atheist, one might consider The Age of Reason a foreshadowing of today’s popular works by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others. They and Paine all easily demonstrate how the writings that eventually got voted into the canon that is our present-day Bible could not be a revelation from God. But unlike the others, Paine’s purpose was to defend God, not doubt his existence. ______________________ Copyright © 2007 by Larry Hallock *It is a common misconception among Christians that evolution attempts to explain the origin of life, but in fact it only addresses the origin of species. Thus one can still believe God created life while accepting the evolution of species. This of course requires seeing the two biblical accounts of creation as metaphor—which shouldn’t be difficult, given that they are contradictory (just one of several hundred documented biblical contradictions) and thus cannot both be literally true. Return to Religion articlesReligion_-_main.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0

Given the vitriol with which Christians have denounced Thomas Paine for more than 200 years, you may be under the impression that he was an atheist. He was generally denounced as such, and Theodore Roosevelt's reference to him as a "filthy little atheist" was hardly atypical. But as shown in his famous tome, The Age of Reason, he was in fact a devout man of God. It was Christianity he had a problem with, and that’s what raised the ire of many Christians—apparently, anyone who didn’t believe in their version of God didn’t believe in God at all.


Let me show it to you this way....  Brace yourself.