Jesus, God and Facebook

   There is no shortage of inspiration on Facebook these days. There are inspirational videos, inspirational songs, inspirational posters and, on my Facebook screens lately, inspirational Bible quotations.
   We have a friend who occasionally posts Bible quotations as her status at any given time. If you are used to the usual omg's and wtf's on Facebook statuses these days then a Bible quotation really does grab your attention. One can only imagine that if they'd had Facebook a couple of thousand years ago then these kinds of statuses would have been de rigueur. Nowadays, they kind of stop you in your tracks.
   Our friend is a fairly recent born-again Christian and her religion has become an integral part of her life. She attends church, Bible study classes and prayer groups on a regular basis so she does not just give lip service to her new-found faith.
   Apart from Facebook, she invokes God and Jesus (and probably the Holy Ghost, although I am unable to recall a specific occurrence of this) on a pretty regular basis in her daily travels and in a variety of settings. She is not bashful about her religion and I have a hard time faulting her for this--any kind of a strong belief system is a valuable commodity these days.
   If you know me or have followed this blog consistently for any length of time (okay, I am talking to all three of you now) then you are likely aware that I don't believe in deities, the Bible, or organized religion. I am also of the belief that there may not even have been an historical Jesus. So when I see a Bible quote used as a Facebook status or when I hear proclamations that God and/or Jesus is responsible for the occasional nice thing that happens to us, buzzing starts inside my head.
   It's not the kind of buzzing likely to make my head explode. But close.
    More than a lot of other statements people make, comments which are religion-based always make me want to sit down with whoever made them and have a talk.
   What I need to find out from them is why they believe what they believe. I need to find out what they heard or what they read or who they listened to that made them believe so totally in a faith that they then feel empowered to freely interject references to it throughout their daily interactions with people.
    Here's how the dynamic works for me. It can be a beautiful day out and our friend will come along and say something like, "It's a beautiful day out! Thanks be to Jesus!" At this point, my day becomes slightly less beautiful and here's why. I was already enjoying the same beautiful day and subconsciously was giving credit to the change of seasons, the high pressure system, the prevailing westerlies, and whatever meteorological forces there were at play. My friend comes along and essentially tells me I'm wrong, that Jesus made the beautiful day.
   Now, I don't mind being wrong about a whole multitude of things but I hate being beholding to Jesus for anything, let alone the state of the weather. And if Jesus/God is responsible for the great weather then we can only assume that he is just as responsible for the blizzards and typhoons which kill thousands of people each year.
   Some day I would like to sit down with our friend and simply ask her why she believes so strongly. I would actually like to sit down with anyone who is strongly religious (regardless of faith) and ask them what happened to produce this fervour. I would like to find out if it was something they read, was some person influential in their lives, was there something written somewhere which produced this faith or did they witness some act which then made them strongly believe.
    Unless you've witnessed some verifiable miracle, it strikes me that if you've based your faith on something you've read or been told then you're doing nothing more than taking some other person's word for it. That other person could be extremely eloquent and utter things which are uplifting, supportive and make total sense but it is still that person's word for it you're taking (grasping desperately, in some cases).
   In researching for this blog post, I found reams of Bible quotations popping up on the screen, one right after the other. As you scroll down, they take on a very soothing cumulative effect. The fact that they're all from the Bible almost seems irrelevant after awhile. There is such a plethora of uplifting material on the internet these days you could just as easily be scrolling a screen of uplifting quotations by Maya Angelou, Gandhi or Helen Keller and a whole bunch other anonymous persons. Yet, we don't worship these people as gods. And some of these people verifiably existed, much more verifiably than Jesus.

Lewis Black, with a slightly angrier religious quote.

   I consider the Bible to be no more than the words of men; men who have passed on stories from other men, men who have transcribed those stories they heard and men who have transcribed other men's transcriptions. If there is a God, he may have entered into it somewhere as well but what we got was one man's interpretation of his interaction with God, or the gods. There are newer versions of the Bible these days which have done away with the stiltedly formal language of the Bible our generation grew up with (I'm almost sixty) and you can imagine that some day there will be slang and street language in there, as well. All because humans wrote it and it will be humans who re-write it.
   There is a well-known communications exercise which involves a group of people sitting in a circle. The leader of the group whispers a brief, scripted story to the person beside them. This person then tries to whisper the same story to the person beside them. Eventually, this story gets whispered all the way around the circle. When the last person has heard the story, they are asked to repeat their version of it, aloud, to the rest of the group. This person's story is generally almost unrecognizable from the original. What happened along the way was that people would use slightly different language, perhaps language they felt more personally comfortable with as they passed the story on. A part of the story might have seemed more significant to one person than the other so it got emphasized a little more. The more times this happened, the more disjointed the story would become. One of the things to remember is that this also happens within the space of maybe ten minutes. Bible stories have been rolling around for thousands of years! How do you think the original stories might have changed, in the intervening years...?

   So I want to ask my friend what she bases her faith on. I want to find out whether it is blind faith or a faith constructed on any foundation of  evidence. When she tells me what she bases her faith on, I want to ask why? I don't want to know in an inquisitional kind of way but people who put their faith right out there for others to experience should be prepared for the experience to become interactive. In fact, I think they should almost want it to be.