A Ten-Foot Pole

Or:

A New Perspective on Christianity

By: Speaker

            Growing up Catholic, I absolutely hated, and I mean hated, going to church.  All that standing and kneeling, kneeling and standing, it was enough to make a pre-adolescent whine a lot![1]  I never understood why there was so much ritual in church and I never understood why I even had to go to church at all.  All they would ever talk about was God did this and Jesus said that and that we worship them and the Holy Spirit above all else.  I knew all that, why did I have to listen to it every week?  Finally, after a few years in middle school, my parents became really busy and their only rest-day was Sunday, so we stopped going to church.  I was the happiest seventh grader in the world. Finally I had an extra day to sleep in!

            I pretty much stopped thinking about religion for the remainder of middle school and high school.  It was one of those things I didn’t have to think about because it just was.  It was like how I didn’t have to think about my parents and their roles.  They just existed and performed their “duties.”[2]  Finally college started and I didn’t have my parents around to remind me of my “faith” any more.  I put “faith” in quotes because now that I look back on it, I don’t really think of it as my faith.  It was other people’s faith that I just took as a given.  I began to wonder what I thought.  Was I a Christian because I actually was a Christian, or was it because I was always told to be a Christian? And if I decided that I was a Christian, which of the numerous Baskin-Robinsesque flavors of Christian would I, as a Christian, be?  After about three years of soul-searching and church hopping I decided that I indeed was a Christian.  The problem was, in that three years I began to form my own opinions on numerous different issues that many Christians think differently on, because “the Bible says so.”  I mean, a lot of the friends that I met in that three years happened to be Japanese and either Shinto or Agnostic, and to hear it told by many Christians,[3] they would simply just go to hell, and I’d never see them again was upsetting.  I consider myself a fairly tolerant man, and I just didn’t want to believe that my friends would go to hell just because then didn’t grow up the same way I did.  Those other Christians must be wrong, even if the Bible does say so!

            One night when I was spending the night with my friend, Moses Katz, I was thinking and worrying about this situation.  I asked Moses what he thought the right answer was.  His answer to me was a story.  He said that on the day that Gandhi died a Southern Baptist minister died also, because there are so many of them.  They both arrived at the pearly gates at the same time and along with Peter, Jesus was also there waiting.  The minister was so excited he was shouting at the top of his lungs, “Lord Jesus, I’m here Lord!  I have lived my life a good Baptist and I’m ready to stride into the kingdom of Heaven!”

            Jesus looked at him and smiled as he said, “Good, you shall enter, but, this man shall enter first.”

            The Minister was appalled, “But Lord Jesus, this man is a Hindu, he did not follow in your footsteps, he is a sinner!”

            Jesus turned to Gandhi and asked, “Good sir, did you love me?”

            Gandhi looked at him and replied, “I did not know you, personally.”

            Jesus again said, “Did you love me?”

            “I loved every man.”

            Jesus smiled, “You may enter.”

            I thought about that story for days, and every time I heard it, it made me happy.  It made sense to me. This was a story about my God, about my faith.  I was right, so everyone else had to be wrong.  How in the world could so many people be wrong?  The answer is simple.  People aren’t looking at Christianity from the right perspective.  Moses and I have theorized about this and come up with what we believe is the best perspective.  The basis for this perspective is everywhere.  It’s in prayers, songs, and even in the book that has all the answers itself, the Bible.  God is our father.  We are his children.  The analogy has been made over and over again but people never think about it.  They take it as God made us, therefore he is a father figure and we are his children.  I take this more literally.  Look at our species’ lifespan like that you would of a normal person.  In the Old Testament we were babies and pre-adolescents, in the New Testament we were teenagers, and now as a species we’re adults. 

Now, reexamine the Old Testament from the point of view that we are children and God is our Father.  Creationists and Evolutionists argue constantly.  There are a few people who try to compromise and say that a day back then may not have been what a day is now.  Think of it this way, what do parents tell their kids when their kids ask them, “Where do babies come from?”  “Well little Billy, you see, Mommy kissed Daddy, and the angel told the Stork, and the Stork flew down from Heaven and left a diamond under a leaf in a cabbage patch and the diamond became a baby (Addams Family Values, 1994).”  If they told little Billy, “Well, son, first Daddy started rubbing the back of Mommy’s neck because Mommy likes a lot of heavy petting.  Then Daddy had sex with Mommy.  Daddy’s tiny little sperm went into Mommy and found Mommies little egg right below Mommy’s fallopian tubesy wubseys,” little Billy would probably become disinterested and go find a toy.[4]  It’s much too scientific and complex for a three year old to grasp.  So, when we as a species, during a time when we are not very advanced scientifically, and aren’t able to grasp very complex ideas about the world, ask God where we came from, what is he going to say?  That there were these terrible lizards before us, and we actually were much hairier first and evolved complex thinking to come down from the trees?[5]  No, he’s going to say he created a garden and pulled Adam’s rib out to make a female.  We were young as a species and didn’t know anything so we had to have God tell us, “Only eat meat that’s kosher!”  He told us this because it was dangerous at the time to do otherwise.  Also we had to have God tell us, “Don’t be homosexual!”  This of course was because we were young as a species and we needed to grow.   We needed to produce lots of offspring.  Homosexuals simply can’t procreate, no matter how hard they try.  Also God was around a lot.  He made his presence known.  What do parents do to their kids at a young age when they disobey?  They spank them!  So when we disobeyed God, he whooped us good!  He slapped his leather belt all over Sodom and Gomorra until their asses were red.  Some time later, Jesus came.  It was the New Testament, and we were finally teenagers.  We were too old to be spanked.  We were old enough to be talked to and to learn reasons behind some things instead of just having the law lain down,[6] but we were still growing and had restrictions.  We had more freedoms but still couldn’t swear and we had a curfew. 

Finally both Jesus and God left. They sent down the Holy Spirit, and said, “See ya’ll at the second coming!”  This was our 18^th birthday.  We were finally adults.  We’re on our own now.  We’ve come a very long way.  My Father who is in Heaven is a lot like my Father who is in Alabaster.  Both of them pretty much stay out of my life but they’re still there for help if I need them.  Also, I’ve learned a lot of lessons from them both but I don’t think either of them care too much about the specifics, they just hope I got the basic message across.  Love all, hate nothing, and judge nothing.

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