Cazenovia Curmudgeon: What would SHE do?

By Donald Krueger

One of the more depressing things for us older folk at the end of a decade – do we call the one just past the Anxiety Decade? – is that the news magazines and TV networks run names and photos of all the famous and semi-famous people of more or less our age who did not make it through the decade.

Thanks a lot, guys, for reminding us we may be next, famous or not. In the meantime, Happy New Year!

And so that we’ll feel guilty while we wait, newspapers – so far not the Madison County Courier – offer lists of New Year’s resolutions, same as the ones we didn’t keep last year and won’t this one: lose weight, save more, spend less, reduce stress, stop smoking tobacco. No way I could at the same time stop smoking and reduce stress. But I’ll make a deal with you: fill my pipe with that controlled substance the young folks call pot, and I’ll guarantee a stress-free year. Happy, too…at least a lot of giggles.

What I do instead of making resolutions is compose ‘what-if’ questions. I know we can’t time-travel, yet, but it’s great fun to imagine what might have been.

What if I hadn’t dropped out of the university to attend art school?

What if I’d taken the offer of a job with the U.S. Information Agency when I was living in Ecuador, to learn later the USIA was a CIA front?

What if George W. Bush’s Higher Father, he says, hadn’t told him to undertake a Crusade to Iraq?

There are a lot of what-if questions connected to that Higher Father business. I recently came across an item in the New York Times: “In a particularly horrifying development … the African nation of Uganda is considering a bill that would impose a death penalty for homosexuality … fueled, in part, by a visit to the country by three American evangelical Christians … (who) gave a series of talks about how homosexuality can threaten a society and how homosexuals might be ‘cured.’”

Christians, huh? Well, history shows us gods don’t choose their people; people choose their gods. What if, back in a time when homosexuality was common and accepted in most cultures,. Those early Hebrews had chosen a different god from the many available in the polytheistic environment of the time?

What if, now in a more enlightened time, we were to exchange that dogmatic, uncompromising, seemingly hot-for-death, less-fearsome, less guilt-producing Christian – and Jewish and Muslim – god for a more relevant, more humane, more understanding one?

If the early Hebrews could do it, after all they started the whole “Judeo-Christian” thing, why can’t we?

Theirs was the one, you recall, that was recorded as telling his “chosen people,” that’s what they said, to “kill all the Amalekites.” Or was it the Amorites … or both? … along with the Bushites – Bush-ites? – the Midianites and any other people who stood in the way of their march to what they said their god told them was the promised land.

“Kill them all … let non escape … destroy every living thing … kill all the Midianite men…” But spare the 32,000 Midianite virgins for your own use!

Nothing about Iraqi women and children.

What if, instead of the genocidal, not very nice, really guy-god, a Higher Mother? Nothing in the rule book says gods must be of the male gender. In their small arena of play, there were a lot of perfectly suited, way less belligerent and bloodthirsty women gods available for the taking … and surely saving in the process a few thousand Midianite virgins from whatever the Hebrew men had in mind for them.

There were Earth Goddesses, Mother Goddesses who wouldn’t have told the Hebrews to subdue the earth – exploit it, rape it, ravage it, pillage it – and have dominion over all its creatures, who, from the record, seem to be all human creatures other than themselves.

An Earth Goddess certainly would not have let us bring the environment to its present state; no need for Copenhagen conferences. Al Gore could write novels.

Of course, for them to consider a she-god would have required a change in their misogynistic culture, which, too, might have made a difference today … in the misologistic culture, as well. Just as the church fathers today, the Hebrew elders didn’t want the common folk feeling free to think for themselves. They might have questioned the choice of the god they were told to obey.

The elders missed a really good bet when they passed over Lady Wisdom, she who had been their god’s consort (some say wife) from the beginning. Wisdom, goddess or fact, was really scary to those guys, pretty much the same today. They divorced her from their god early on. Hey, get rid of all the smart women…

Do you suppose the New Atheists would be tolerant of an environmentally friendly Earth Goddess today in place of the he-god they reject? Reading Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, I’d vote for her. That is, if old-fashioned atheists are allowed to vote.

Another what-if questions for the New Atheists: What if we were to relieve Jesus of all his supernatural and theological baggage? Son of God, virgin birth and all the other stuff laid on him by the Gospel writers. You know, second-century philosopher-historian Celsus said that Jesus was fathered by Roman soldier Pantheus. His miracles? Cicero did say that miracle stories “may be necessary for the piety of ignorant folk.”

Without his trappings, we’d have a real person Jesus, much more believable than the Jesus of the Bible, sort of a Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Israelites. We could celebrate his birthday as a real person, in the spring where it likely belongs, the Bethlehem story being fiction. We’d still have Dec. 25 for a modern version of Saturnalia, minus the orgies (?), but complete with Santa Claus – those Cazenovia second-graders who write letters to him seem to think it’s his birthday – celebrate the return of the sun, that is if…

What if these questions were topics of discussion for the youth and young people’s groups of Madison County churches? What say you, Mr. Burgess?

Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.

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Cazenovia Curmudgeon: What would SHE do?

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