Galaxy Gazing

I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek¹

The Milky Way from my driveway

Tonight, with clear weather and no moon around, I am up late to look at a dark sky with the first decent pair of binoculars I’ve ever owned. The vaguely textured white blur of the Milky Way that my eyes have long admired, unmagnified, now resolve through the 10x binoculars into clusters of countless stars with crisscrossing fuzzy ribbons of black woven in between.

I pan the circular field of view slowly along our galaxy’s long overhead arc, immersed in the depth I sense above me from my two eyes merging a single image. There’s a satisfying tangible connection between the fine motions of my arms and the slow sweeping past of this collection of a hundred billion stars in our little corner of the universe.

A dim smudge near Cassiopeia teases my eyes’ limits of sensitivity and resolution. I think it’s M52, a globular cluster a few thousand light-years away. It was first identified by Charles Messier in 1774. The photons I’m collecting in my binoculars tonight from its 193 or so stars were more than 90% of the way here when Messier peered through his telescope. In the meantime, a nation rose through a rebellion and then quashed one of its own; enslaved, freed, and still long oppressed a large fraction of its citizens; conquered its native peoples and then rescued others from conquest in two world wars.

The smudges are clusters of countless stars.²

These photons had already emerged from their nuclear furnaces by the time some settlements along the river Tiber formed the first humble beginnings of the Roman empire.³ Their journey may even have been halfway underway by then; we’re not sure exactly how far away M52 is from us.⁴

It’s been a little more than two thousand years ago since a citizen of that empire, a gifted poet and philosopher, stood next to some pool or pond beneath the night sky. The skies anywhere in Europe were darker than they are now, even at my place out in the country. I imagine Titus Lucretius Caras (c. 99-55 B.C.) looking at an image of the blazing array of stars overhead, seeing their “images,” which, he muses, must “be able to run through space incalculable / In a moment of time.”⁵

The pointpoints and patterns of the stars are mirrored in the still water before him, “not turned round intact, but flung straight back / In reverse,” with the features thus shown “in reverse.”⁶ He moves slightly to one side along the water’s edge and notices how one particularly bright star near the horizon comes abruptly into view from behind the tree. Its direct image and its reflection both wink on instantly–at exactly the same time, as far as he can tell.⁷

A smooth surface of water is exposed

To a clear sky at night, at once the stars

And constellations of the firmament

Shining serene make answer in the water.

Yet he knows that the “images” raining down from the sky take a longer route when they make the extra trip to the water and back than when they go directly into his eye.

Now do you see how in an instant the image

Falls from the edge of heaven

to the edge of earth?

Wherefore again and yet again I say

How marvellously swift the motion is

Of the bodies which strike our eyes

and make us see.⁸

Those image-bearing bodies are “marvelously swift” indeed. They move 186,000 miles–more than 23 earth diameters–through the vacuum of space every second. Yet the immense vault of our universe is so incomprehensibly vast that it’s taken most of the span of human civilization for them to reach us, from a relatively nearby neighbor within just our own galaxy (there are at least a hundred billion others).⁹

My kind of nightlife

Silent and impassive to all the twitches and ripples in the microscopic biofilm of one ordinary planet, in the hundreds of years since Messier noticed this odd feature among the stars–in the thousands filled with death and wars and tears of joy and sorrow since Lucretius did his ancient poolside musings–the photons from its clustered stars continued their long journey outward. Only now do they finally land on my retinas to collapse wave functions and trigger individual rod-shaped cells to launch neurotransmitters down neighboring filaments of cell-strings along my optic nerves.

In my brain, a little smudge registers. Something’s really up there.

The stars in M52 will keep launching their photons all my life, as they have for 35 million years now. They’ll get lost in the sea of light that covers and warms the daylight half of earth, fall through clear skies over the other half in darkness, and remain ignored almost always, as the earth swings around its own little star a few dozen more times until my eyes no longer see anything at all.

And yet, despite my absence, the earth will stay in its orbit and the photons will stream on.

Notes

---

1. Does it surprise you to see such ringing words of spirituality as the epigraph to an atheist’s essay? Such prose retains its profound beauty regardless of one’s disagreements with its message. And even with no God in the picture, I am still happy to call whatever was behind the Big Bang, or the quantum fluctuation that unleashed the Big Bang, or whatever was behind that, a “power that is unfathomably secret,” even holy, filling me with a sort of reverence as I gave upwards at night. ↩

2. There’s also some light pollution near the horizon, even out here, miles from the nearest city. I’ve tried to de-emphasize it with reduced yellow and green luminance. ↩

3. en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/Ancient_Rome ↩

4. Because “this cluster is in the plane of the Milky Way,” our available “methods of determining distance are too uncertain,” some yielding estimates “as small as 3,000 light years, while others are as large as 7,000” (Ethan Siegel, “Messier Monday: A Star Cluster on the Bubble, M52,” ScienceBlogs. ↩

5. Lucretius, Book IV, line 191. From On the Nature of the Universe, Ronald Melville, trans. (Oxford University Press). ↩

6. Book IV, lines 295-99. ↩

7. It’s not exactly the same time, of course, something I remain well aware of as an electrical engineer with a radio background. Indeed, engineers rely on the known and limited speed of light to do antenna design with all of its resonant and carefully spaced conductive elements. Quarter-wavelength spacings abound. ↩

8. Book IV, lines 210-17. ↩

9. “How Many Stars Are There In the Universe?”, European Space Agency. I’ve seen another dim smudge out there in the night sky from the nearest of those other galaxies, Andromeda. Its photons took millions of years to reach me instead of thousands. ↩

 

Getting Out

“Relax,” said the night man, “We are programmed to receive. You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”

—The Eagles, Hotel California

The world beyond the gate. Can you make that first step and keep going? [Flickr page]

I spent the first forty-odd years of my life in a fundamentalist Christian sect that considers itself “God’s Kingdom,” the exclusive repository of grace on this earth after 2,000 years of Christianity. Leaving it was one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done.

Conservative Laestadianism attracts few converts and retains fewer still of those, with the notable exception of some vibrant missionary activity in Africa. In Finland–where most of its 100,000 or so adherents reside–and in North America, almost all new members arrive at the maternity ward. There are plenty of them, since birth control is frowned upon.

The church safeguards the souls of its new arrivals by instilling into their small brains its doctrines and all the nuances of a uniquely closed and controlling subculture. Its own survival is at stake. These are the innocent little lumps of fresh clay that this religion, like so many others, molds and shapes into the soft living stones of its shaky spiritual house.¹

A substantial portion of them last through early adulthood, until young marriages can start producing their own fresh batches of new members. The cycle continues anew, as it must. These blocks of flesh and blood wear out, sometimes even slip away, and must be replaced if the structure is to stand.

———

Until recently, it was very rare for anyone beyond their twenties to walk away from this “living faith.” The few cases I’d heard about were older singles who despaired of having their nets come up empty in a stagnant little pond of church-approved prospects, and a few spouses who had been faced with or created problems in their marriages. Then a friend of mine left the church, staying happily married and with kids, for reasons that focused on the church itself. That sort of thing just did not happen once you reached a certain age.

Then it happened to me, too, and my wife. And now it has been happening to quite a number of people, both in Finland and North America. Even more than the open defections, there seems to be a lot of private grumbling, questions no longer so easily tamped down. Pressure slowly and silently builds inside the minds of troubled believers–sermon after sermon, baby after baby–and the familiar preaching of forgiveness for “sins and doubts” no longer seems to provide much relief.

But the believing brain can withstand a lot of pressure. Those who make it through all those years of indoctrination and cozy familiarity–of family, friends, and social setting–have strong containers in their heads to keep it all bottled up. Sundays pass, more children are born and taught sound doctrine, and for every person who manages to leave, there are probably a dozen who want to but do not.

Pine Droplets and Webbing [Flickr page]

A Finnish correspondent who did manage to leave describes a web of stuff that he had to cut through before he could finally set himself free. The first strand of it is social dependence.

“My whole life I have been ‘rooted into God’s Kingdom,’” he says. That made him “almost completely dependent on this religious community.” He was taught that most of his “friends should be ‘other believers,’ meaning other Laestadians,” and spent his childhood being brought to services, church camps, Sunday schools, Bible classes, and church youth activities. Molding and shaping the clay.

There was plenty of time for it. He was kept from the “‘worldly’ leisure activities that non-Laestadian kids attend.” No team sports at school, no dances, no TV or movies.

Next is moral dependence. There was little emphasis on any individual conscience. Rather, he was taught about a “community conscience: An individual may be erring but ‘God’s congregation’ cannot.” From childhood, he had been told

that ministers and Laestadian publications are God’s Word. When they say that God is Almighty, and that he doesn’t want us to use birth control, that he tortures the disobedient people infinitely, then I have no other option but to believe. I have also been warned that I can’t make decisions based on my own opinions and thoughts, because I should ask the congregation for advice.

He was also made spiritually dependent on Laestadianism. His “own will and conscience” was “crushed and replaced with a gospel”–a formulaic preaching of absolution central to Laestadian doctrine and practice–“that only this community can provide.” Laestadians preach “the gospel” often, regular believers in private conversation and ministers from the pulpit: Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus’ name and blood.² My correspondent was

taught by these minister-gods that I get my sins forgiven by the absolution gospel. If I don’t go to Laestadian services, I won’t hear this sermon and the gospel, and therefore I remain a prisoner in sin. And if I remain a prisoner in sin and die in such condition, I will be condemned to eternal perdition and torture.

Light at the End of the Tunnel [Flickr page]

“Wouldn’t a smart individual, living in modern Finland, be able to question these doctrines?” he asks. “Of course, but everything is not always as simple or easy as it may seem.” Indeed not. My own process of questioning and eventually rejecting that same inherited faith compelled me to do a year of full-time research and writing, spending “thousands of hours researching seemingly every aspect of Conservative Laestadian history, doctrine, and practice, plus Christianity in general, plus the Bible and the very nature of God,” as I put it in the resulting 700-page book, An Examination of the Pearl. It was “a labor driven by love, but also by the mental anguish of being unable to avoid questioning a doctrinal system that demands firm confession of belief, on pain of eternal damnation.”

Leaving the faith I had inherited and cherished for 40 years was not an easy thing for me to do. Nor was it for my Finnish correspondent. He “had been made dependent on the community in every possible way.” And when he “started to question a small portion of this doctrine,” he “was immediately faced with the alarm mechanisms in the community.” Structural damage, one of the building blocks is slipping out of place!

He got rebuked and heard about people’s worries that he was on the wrong path. “The community that now pressured me threatened to take away all the good that the community was giving me, if I continued to question these matters” (my emphasis). Because of this threat, he says, “most Laestadians don’t let these questions arise even in their own minds: They stifle these thought processes immediately, and ask for their sins and doubts forgiven like they have been taught to do at services.”

Now he happily reports that he’s been able to build a social life outside the church. The old “Laestadian-based network was getting thinner,” anyhow, because of his questioning things. And he’s noticed that he just doesn’t “need the spiritual nourishment in this community” anymore: “I was able to break free from this dependence and obey my own conscience.”

The church social network doesn’t readily extend far outside its narrow confines, and that’s certainly true among Conservative Laestadians in North America, too. One man who left the LLC (Laestadian Lutheran Church) has managed to stay somewhat attached, though only after dealing with a huge outcry from church friends and family. It was, he says, “one of the most painful experiences I ever went through.” But the “constant badgering only reinforced the thought that I made the right decision.”

After a few months of heated arguments and accusations about not loving family, of hearing about people’s prayers “for me to have restless days and sleepless nights so I would see the condition of my heart,” it finally started to get better. “People must have finally realized that I no longer wanted to remain inside the LLC box.”

The same thing happened to a correspondent from another branch of Laestadianism, the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. She got “calls, texts, voicemails, old-fashioned letters, and even emails.” (The Internet is mostly a no-no in the OALC.) “A majority of what I received was genuine concern–for my soul, my life, my eternity.” There was some coercion and manipulation there, too, she says, but believes that was done out of concern. “Though it hurt me then, I understood where they were coming from, and still feel the same today. They know only what they know. I think Maya Angelou said, ‘We did then what we knew then, we do now what we know now,’ or something along those lines. That is all that they know, and I pity them for it.” ³

There are a lot of religious groups filled with people who “do only what they know” and make life difficult for their friends and family who have learned a bit more. I’d like to give some perspective and encouragement to people facing a difficult path out of their inherited religions–Laestadian and otherwise–by discussing two extreme examples.

The Exclusive Brethren

The first of these is a Protestant Christian sect that holds what Wikipedia calls “an uncompromising ‘separatist’ doctrine.” David Tchappat’s fascinating book Breakout (official excerpt available here) describes the difficult departure he made from their midst. This fascinating half-hour audio interview with the author is highly recommended, especially for troubled Laestadians; you will hear a lot of things that sound weirdly familiar.

Social dependence was certainly a factor for Tchappat. Being “born into the Exclusive Brethren,” he says, “ensured that your small following of fellow churchgoers was your society whether you liked it or not. Having a social circle outside of this was not an option.” ⁴

Journalist Michael Bachelard estimates the number of worldwide members at 43,000, Australia being home to about a third of them.⁵ Tchappat provides the same estimate, adding, “Almost all growth comes from births, as conversions into the faith are practically unheard of.” ⁶ It is indeed a “small following,” as Tchappat puts it, at least when compared to most Christian denominations. But that’s a matter of perspective; the closed church society in which I grew up has about half as many members in my country as Tchappat had in his.

The Australian TV program A Current Affair recently aired a scathing documentary, twelve minutes of which you can watch online, about what it bluntly calls a “secret cult.” Bachelard describes the Brethren as having erected “a wall between themselves and the outside world.” Since 1960, he says, there has been a rule against “eating, drinking, or socializing with any outsider.” What that means, he says, is “there are no friendships, no social intercourse whatsoever with outsiders, and sect members are encouraged to behave with an air of being impervious to the outside world and aloof from it.” ⁷

A fascinating book

Tchappat refers to his life in the group as a “fishbowl existence.” He fantasized numerous times about leaving it before finally doing so. But that was a daunting prospect: “I knew no one in the outside world and had no idea how to look after myself. Since birth, every decision had been made for me. My life was regulated by rules and laws set in place by the Man of God, which were in turn implemented and policed by the local priests.” ⁸

Some of the prohibitions he lists are the same as those from my own upbringing: marrying outsiders, physical contact before marriage, contraception, TV, hair coloring, make-up, gambling, and attending “anything that could be deemed as fun or entertainment.” As I did in my childhood Laestadianism, it seems Tchappat felt an urge to confess any infractions of all those rules: “After church when the rest of my family had gone to bed, and my dad was tidying the kitchen, I approached him and told him I had to speak with him. He shut the kitchen door and I immediately broke down, pulling out my list of sins and confessing them to him.” ⁹ And this part sounds uncomfortably familiar, too: “We were told that we were the chosen people and should feel privileged to be born into this group.” ¹⁰

“It was only the courageous and inquisitive minority that ever dared to leave the Assembly of God,” says Tchappat. That is also true in the Kingdom of God, my old group’s informal self-designation, though the number of defectors is growing surprisingly fast. In my own case, the fear was more of eternal rather than earthly consequences. After many dark and bloody centuries under the Church, secular governments are finally forcing Christianity to leave its exit doors unlocked. But most of them still have the awful eternal threat written in fiery letters overhead. Abandon all hope, they read, in a twist from the words inscribed on Dante’s gates of Hell, you who leave from here.¹¹

According to Tchappat’s account, the Brethren are no exception. More than a year after leaving, he “would wake up in the dead of night dripping with sweat and would dream of the burning pits of hell.” Going back, he thought, “was the only way to avoid eternal punishment.” ¹² Though “the Brethren do not officially believe that they are the only Godly people,” in modern times, anyhow, Bachelard says they do “believe that those who leave the sect will not be saved.” ¹³

While still in the group, Tchappat had worried about being excommunicated for having sex with his girlfriend. Those in that position fared no better in the eternity department. They were, he says, “described as being worse than people of the world because they had known the light and turned their back on it. It was considered an eternal damnation to die out of fellowship and only the grace of God and forgiveness of the Brethren would redeem such people from the pits of hell.” ¹⁴ Here is his harrowing description of “massive guilt attacks” he suffered several years after walking away from the group:

I would lie in bed on my days off staring at the ceiling and crying to myself. I was falling apart. I had my [friends] but I could not confide in them about my inner personal turmoil. All my teachings from childhood were coming back to me. I was petrified that I was going to the gates of hell if I did not fall down and repent. I began to read my Bible constantly and could not sleep for fear of dying and entering eternal damnation. I was seriously entertaining the thought of returning to the Brethren. I did not know how I was going to cope with such a life change but I did not care. It was a way of escaping my problems.¹⁵

That is some heavy shit. Eternity has a way of messing with people’s heads. But he also describes dire consequences right here on earth, in this brief life, for those who “enter the world” from the Brethren:

If caught planning an escape, the local priests would place them under house arrest along with their families and have them put under assembly discipline, revoking any rights to attend church or socialise with those in the inner circle of the Brethren. Those over sixteen years of age who made it to the outside world without detection, would be ex-communicated and starved of all monetary assistance and family support, forcing them to return or find alternative methods of survival.¹⁶

Bachelard’s book is full of tragic stories about family breakups occurring because one spouse was excommunicated from or voluntarily left the group, about parents devoid of contact with their children. Tchappat’s own story is much the same–a final letter he sent was “the last form of contact I would ever have again with my family.” His gripping and sad narrative has an upbeat ending of sorts, though: “There has never been a time in my life where I have experienced such inner peace, happiness and satisfaction as the present day.” ¹⁷

Islam

One way. You’d better believe it. [Flickr page]

Leaving the fold is also serious business for the nearly one fourth of the world’s population who are professing Muslims. In addition to social coercion and the prospect of their own version of Hell, there is often a serious threat of physical harm.

Just look at this comment thread on a web forum calling itself “the online Muslim community” to see how real that danger is. Some guy with over 2,000 comments posted at that site states that death is preferable over continued life to people who claim to be of Islam, leave it, and then call others away from it. Presumably, the actual preferences of the apostates themselves are of little consequence. “It’s a mercy,” he says, “for if they continued, their place in hell would be lower, and lower, and lower. We judge law by the belief of an afterlife 100% without a shadow of a doubt. Thus, death is not a ‘bad’ thing if it is done to prevent chaos.”

Another commentator (4,000 posts) clarifies, “The death penalty for apostates is for those apostates that leave Islam then work against Islam in some way.” It’s the same as treason, after all, and the “penalty for traitors throughout history has been death.” Still another commentator (not quite 500 posts) adds, “The apostate should not be put to death until he has been asked to repent three times,” generously allowing him three days to think things over first.

What a disgusting little attempt to defend medieval intolerance and barbarity. And there it is, polished with a veneer of twisted logic, showing up on an Internet discussion forum built by the technology of a more enlightened age. Seeing that sort of thing helps us outsiders appreciate why an American ex-Muslim highly regarded on reddit was moved to post a “Public Service Announcement” on Reddit warning about coming out. If you are considering telling “your friends and family that you are not a Muslim anymore,” he says, you should only do it if:

• You are 18+ years of age
• You are old enough to live on your own
• You are financially independent from your family
• You know where to go if you get kicked out
• You do not live in a religiously conservative country like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

If even one of these conditions is not met, he adds with sober emphasis,

do not tell anyone you are not a muslim anymore. Seriously. I understand how hard it is to live a lie and to put up with bullshit, but in the end, you are going to have a bad time. This can’t be stressed enough. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read self-posts by young, financially dependent ex-Muslims in Muslim countries that want to do this or have done this and felt deeply worried for them. It’s not a rational decision to make, and it’s not gonna do anyone any good if you end up hurt or even killed over it. Don’t put yourself in danger like that. Believe me, it’s not worth it at all. Please be considerate of your safety and well-being, and don’t be a hero unless you’re fully capable of facing the consequences.¹⁸

Those consequences are very real for one high school student in Saudi Arabia. I hope he’s been careful about keeping his identity and IP address well concealed when posting to public discussion forums online. Out of an abundance of caution, I will just paraphrase his comment without a link. He hates living in the closet, he says, but coming out to his parents means that he’ll be shipped off to Mecca to study Islam for the rest of his life or get beheaded. And his parents will grieve about his apostasy. Only if he can become financially independent and move to a country that respects religious freedom will he even consider it.

Reading this stuff does have a way of putting things into perspective. Your family has sent you emails and texts expressing sadness for your soul and offering some self-righteous prayers? You’ve lost most of your oldest and dearest friends? You miss having a place to go see familiar faces every week? Yes, that sucks. But at least you don’t need to worry about being sent to a religious re-education camp or having your head chopped off. Count your blessings.

Heina Dadabhoy

Islamic states are not good places to be when you don’t enthusiastically share the state religion. (Or when you are in the female half of the population, or when you have been accused of a crime, or when you would just like to have a little enjoyment in life, but that’s another blog posting.) These anonymous comments from fearful closeted nonbelievers often express a longing, sometimes even hope, to live in secular countries.

As an American citizen, Heina Dadabhoy had that good fortune, at least, when she told her family she was leaving Islam. They thought she was “turning [her] back on them,” she said in an interview with the New York Times, her parents accusing “her of thinking that she was better than her grandparents and other ancestors.” They “reacted the way they knew how, which was to freak out.” Public defections from the faith are still very rare, and her parents “had never heard of anybody leaving Islam. We were raised with the idea you can’t leave, that nobody can leave. Leaving Islam was something somebody incredibly deranged would do.” ¹⁹

At a conference a few years ago, I asked Dadabhoy if the fear of Hell is also a factor for those considering leaving Islam. It definitely is, she said. Indeed, you can see the eternal fate of the ex-Muslim spelled out in the Quran itself:

Whoso desireth any other religion than Islam, that religion shall never be accepted from him, and in the next world he shall be among the lost. How shall God guide a people who, after they had believed and bore witness that the Apostle was true, and after that clear proofs of his mission had reached them, disbelieved? ... Their recompense, that the curse of God, and of angels, and of all men, is on them! Under it shall they abide forever; their torment shall not be assuaged! ²⁰

Moving On

There are countless other examples of the difficulties people experience trying to get out of the religions that were foisted on them at birth. The stories I’ve read in books and on Internet discussion forums are so numerous and compelling that this essay would turn into a book of my own if I were to venture too deeply into any of them.

Indeed, even thinking about that makes me recall a whole genre of books about Leaving the Fold. That, for example, is the exact title of both Edward Babinski’s fine collection of stories about people deconverting and Dr. Marlene Winell’s thoughtful guide to doing so.

People are leaving these high-control religious organizations–slowly and at great cost, and often thinking they are the only ones going through such a difficult process. Many more stay behind, wishing they too were in the right circumstance to leave, biding their time until they can. Here is a brief listing of a few groups I’ve read about, with quotes from former members who have walked away and told their stories. I recommend every one of their gripping, illuminating books.

• Scientology: “All of a sudden, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. These were things I didn’t have to worry about ... a radical thought formed in my head. Because I am not a Scientologist. It felt good to think it, to say it, to scream it. I am not a Scientologist.... If something is wrong, I can say so, honestly and openly, without fear.” –Jefferson Hawkins, Counterfeit Dreams (2012).

• Non-Denominational Christianity: “When you’re five and contemplating Hell, concepts like ‘proportionality’ exist far out of reach, well beyond climbing range, unknowable. No young child can digest or discern whether such overt sadism is an appropriate punishment for the heinous act of simply being born as a descendent of Adam.” –Seth Andrews, Deconverted (2012).

• Fundamentalist Baptist Christianity: “I had developed some kind of gag reflex for my brain. I just couldn’t think clearly or objectively about my childhood or my surroundings. I felt like if I acknowledged things done to me in my childhood that were negative, I would be guilty of breaking a great commandment. I would be dishonoring my parents or somehow loving them less. Love entailed a lot of denial.” –Timothy Michael Short, Preacher Boy (2011).

• The People’s Temple (Jim Jones, thankfully defunct): “When our own thoughts are forbidden, when our questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts and friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused for an end that never justifies its means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment, and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult.” –Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison (2010).

• Evangelical Christianity: “Imagine what it would cost you to give up your faith tomorrow morning; if it is unbearable even to think of it, then you ought to consider how much the cost of leaving your faith is influencing your ability to judge your faith critically and objectively.” –Kenneth W. Daniels, Why I Believed (2010).

• The Churches of Christ: “I was deprived of showing spiritual compassion to others because I was taught that if they were not in the CoC they were not ‘real’ Christians, and the CoC didn’t seem to have a lot of concern about people who weren’t real Christians in their eyes. I was deprived of the fellowship of my classmates on their religious turf.” –Charles Simpson, Inside the Churches of Christ (2009).

• Mormonism: “I had been taught early on that the only reliable evidence about the Church–in fact the only evidence at all worth looking at–comes from the Church itself. This evidence can be undeniably confirmed, not through logical, deductive reasoning, but by the emotional feelings we were taught from early childhood to recognize as being from the Holy Ghost.” –Jack B. Worthy, The Mormon Cult (2008).

• The Jehovah’s witnesses: “[T]he only way out of this dilemma was to acknowledge my feelings and doubts about the organization that I had suppressed for so long, and what it meant that I was having them. But doing so was extremely frightening to me, because trying to face up to my doubts nine years ago only resulted in panic attacks and anguish, which ultimately drove me back into the organization. This time, though, I knew I would have to see it through, as my body would not cooperate with the charade any longer.” –Diane Wilson. Awakening of a Jehovah’s Witness (2002).

There is a lot to learn and think about for people who are considering the exhilarating but terrifying possibility of leaving their childhood faith. Are you one of those people? If so, let me offer you my respect and encouragement, whatever you ultimately decide. Even without taking another step, you have allowed yourself the delicious freedom of thinking for yourself, in the privacy of your own brain.

Take your time. The church is right to say that this is the most important matter of your life, even if its own web of dependencies–social, moral, spiritual–is what made things that way. Don’t beat up on yourself for acknowledging how strong that web is. Cut through each strand at your own pace, however slow that is, or not at all.

———

And in the process, if there is still a God in your heart that is the object of your private devotion, give him a little more credit than your hellfire preachers ever will. Would you ever torture anyone, for five minutes, even for some terrible crime? You’re better than that, aren’t you?

How about a child who wandered into your office where she didn’t belong and messed up your papers, and, after being scolded, angrily told you she didn’t love you anymore? Would you throw her little body into a pit of flames and watch the smoke of her torment swirl and rise as you listen to her scream? ²¹ For five minutes?

“What kind of a monster do you think I am?” you say. The thought upsets you, and it should. Think about how slanderous it is against anything remotely resembling a loving God. Or an omnipotent one: A God that could stop such horrors but stands aside, unmoved and doing nothing, is no better than whatever diabolical force you might imagine feeding the fire.

How about five hours? Five days? Let her scream and burn for five long days. Disgusting, isn’t it? How about forever? Unrelenting agony, pain without end, utterly pointless suffering with no hope of relief. And for what? For not knowing better, just like everybody outside the particular group you are thinking about leaving? There is simply no way that anyone–person or God–with the slightest shred of decency could do such a thing.

Whatever else you do, take that awful and impossible idea off of your shoulders and quietly put it down. It is not worthy of another moment’s belief.

Incandescent Forest [Flickr page]

Step up from your computer, put down your smartphone. Look at your innocent child, look outside. See the blue sky and the green trees and all the good things that you have joyously attributed to your God. Leaving a controlling religious group does not make all of that disappear. There is still wonder, there is beauty, there is joy. And there is a whole lot less guilt and fear.

———

Thanks to Heina Dadabhoy for her photo and the suggestion to “go with the more modern transliteration of ‘Quran’ rather than ‘Koran.’” Also thanks to my anonymous correspondents. Several opined that there have indeed been more departures of late from the SRK, which added to my own impressions about the recent state of affairs in the LLC. I am grateful to the one in Finland who provided an insightful analysis of the various dependencies established by religious groups, and to his able translator. The two in the U.S. have never heard of each other, and come from different groups that call each other heresies, yet they expressed so well the same difficult experience of leaving.

A note of continued appreciation, too, to my dear friend and mentor Robert M. Price, who helped me stay, and then, when I was ready, helped me leave.

I neither have nor claim any inside knowledge about any of the religious groups discussed here except my own former faith, Conservative Laestadianism, and, to some extent, its rival branches. Everything written in this essay about other groups is quoted directly from various published works or publicly available materials. Those who are seriously interested in particular groups should consult the footnotes, read the sources cited as well as the many others available, and form their own opinions accordingly. Those intrigued by Laestadianism may wish to consult the hefty volume I spent a year researching and writing, An Examination of the Pearl, and its 180 or so references.

Click on (most) individual images to enlarge, or check out their photo pages in my Flickr photostream. All except for the cover of David Tchappat’s book and Ms. Dadabhoy’s portrait are Copyright © 2014 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

---

1. “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). ↩

2. Suominen, Edwin A. An Examination of the Pearl (2012), §4.6.2 (“Forgiveness of Sins” / “The Sole Means of Grace”). Available at Amazon.com and for free online reading at ExaminationofthePearl.org. ↩

3. OALC members are “spiritually dependent” on the proclamation of absolution, too. But the SRK/​LLC considers the preaching of forgiveness in the OALC to be just the empty words of “heretics,” without the Holy Spirit behind it. The person proclaiming the absolution needs to be the correct kind of Laestadian for things to work. That raises an interesting dilemma. One correspondent from the LLC says he’d had church friends come to him countless times with serious sins for absolution, and he preached it to them without actually believing himself. According to Conservative Laestadian doctrine, they are, to use a theological term, shit out of luck. ↩

4. Tchappat, David. Breakout: How I Escaped From The Exclusive Brethren, New Holland Australia (2011), Amazon Kindle ed., loc. 3213. After being known as the Exclusive Brethren for many years, the group has recently started calling itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. ↩

5. Bachelard, Michael. Behind the Exclusive Brethren, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd (2008), p. 2. ↩

6. Tchappat at loc. 3467. Same with my old group, except for 600 or so conversions in Africa over the past decade or so and a handful elsewhere that have stuck around. It’s plenty “exclusive,” too, at least in a spiritual sense. Outside of that one little flock–the correct one of a dozen schismatic branches of a 19th-century revival movement of Scandinavian Lutheranism–you cannot be saved. It’s not a doctrinal tenet that is discussed much in public. ↩

7. Bachelard at p. 49. ↩

8. Tchappat at loc. 105. ↩

9. Tchappat at loc. 300-350, 842. The Brethren seem to go quite a ways beyond even the moral conservatism of Conservative Laestadianism, whose confession expectations have also diminished substantially since I was a kid. Brethren marriages must be pre-approved by their top leader, the “Elect Vessel”? No computers, except, says the documentary from A Current Affair, approved ones purchased from an official Brethren supplier? No domestic pets, including goldfish? The rules make my strict upbringing sound positively libertine. And some of what Tchappat says sounds just bizarre to me: “Cordless telephones and remote control-operated garage doors are also outlawed. Prestige vehicles such as BMWs and Mercedes Benz are not permitted and any vehicle red in colour is banned. Personalised number plates are not allowed and the ownership of a motorcycle is also not acceptable with farmers being the only exception.” Wow. ↩

10. Tchappat at loc. 109. In my own former church, I heard a preacher say that giving up “this most precious gift of living faith” is the worst thing a person could possibly do–even worse than murder. It’s an outrageous statement, and not one that most Laestadian preachers would make–at this point, probably not even the one who originally made it. But it does accurately convey the importance Laestadians place on being “God’s Children.” And the punishment for murder is not an eternity of unspeakable torture. ↩

11. Those still troubled by the Hell idea might take a look at my December 2013 blog posting on the subject, “Healing from Hell Horror.” ↩

12. Tchappat at loc. 2681. ↩

13. Bachelard at p. 56. ↩

14. Tchappat at loc. 2129. ↩

15. Tchappat at loc. 2929. ↩

16. Tchappat at loc. 110. ↩

17. Tchappat at loc. 2602, 3258. ↩

18. reddit.com/r/exmuslim/​comments/2gzm42/​psa_for_exmuslims_considering_coming_out_to_their ↩

19. Oppenheimer, Mark. Leaving Islam for Atheism, and Finding a Much-Needed Place Among Peers. New York Times, May 23, 2014. ↩

20. Quran, Sura 3:80 (J.M. Rodwell trans., Ballantine Books, 1993). Liberal apologists for the supposed tolerance of Islam like to toss around another passage that states, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256). Regarding that, one ex-Muslim on reddit cites the passage I quote here and asks, “If there really was no compulsion in religion, then why does Allah not accept those who desire religions other than Islam? The Quran is one big contorted contradictory mess from which nothing consistent is ever going to emerge.” The same can of course be said about the Bible, Old and New Testaments alike. ↩

21. “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name” (Rev. 14:11). ↩

 

Healing from Hell Horror

The doctrine of hell is infamous beyond all power to express. I wish there were words mean enough to express my feelings of loathing on this subject. What harm has it not done? What waste places has it not made? It has planted misery and wretchedness in this world; it peoples the future with selfish joys and lurid abysses of eternal flame. But we are getting more sense every day. We begin to despise those monstrous doctrines.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, Lecture on Hell, 1878

Detail (lower half) from an early 17th century Last Judgment.

A preacher from my old church apparently has claimed to be comforted rather than just annoyed at seeing criticism from the outside world.¹ From what I’ve heard, he views the impious writing that’s being done by a handful of unbelieving critics as evidence of the critical writers’ own angst about their impending damnation. He seems not to have considered the alternative possibility–that we might have some actual grounds for criticism.²

Having our thoughts and motives invented for us is nothing new for those outside the walls of Zion, of course. My book An Examination of the Pearl shows some of that under the subheading “Caricature and Blame.” But the preacher is not just imagining that many of his former brethren suffer from a lingering fear of hell. It is his church’s doctrines that put it there.

It Pays to (Pretend to) Believe

For the most part, and to their credit, Conservative Laestadian preachers now dwell very little on eternal fear-mongering in their sermons. A 2013 one in Seattle, ³ for example, is full of love and grace and even respect, worlds apart from Laestadius’s crude shouting about judgment and damnation.

But the much-lauded diversity of gifts still includes those who remind the flock about the dire consequences of moving outside the tiny bubble where that love and grace are offered. In his November 29, 2013 sermon, ⁴ a Rockford, Minnesota preacher, after reflecting on how fortunate he and his listeners are as Children of God “amongst the millions of people in this world,” explains everyone else’s unhappy fate:

Even in a temporal sense, we can understand what the pain might feel like of the fires of hell. If you’ve ever burnt the tip of your finger lighting a candle or something, you know how bad that hurts. Imagine living in eternity in that kind of pain and agony, like the Bible describes, “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” So, it pays to believe, dear brothers and sisters. [23:00-24:32]

Lurid detail from Giorgio Vasari’s The Last Judgment (1572-79).

Christianity keeps its followers moving along the narrow way with the carrot of heaven dangling ahead and the stick of hell behind, and the latter is surely the more powerful motivator. I know this first-hand, having suffered the “mental anguish of being unable to avoid questioning a doctrinal system that demands firm confession of belief, on pain of eternal damnation.”

That was indeed a significant part of why I devoted a year of full-time work to researching and writing An Examination of the Pearl. In some sense, examining “this pearl of Conservative Laestadianism was in some sense to cherish and value it.” I was still clinging to the faith, after all. “But I also had a very personal need to confront it, to stare down its threats and dismantle—to my own satisfaction at least—its most outrageous claims” (Epilogue).

I asked Dr. Valerie Tarico, writer of a fine book about leaving fundamentalism and a psychologist who has written extensively about its emotional abuses, about the power of fear over believers and doubters. (Check out her blog at awaypoint.wordpress.com.) She says, “The concepts of heaven and hell tap emotions that are so deep and primal it can be virtually impossible for a doubting believer to rationally assess Christianity’s truth claims.”

It’s not just a metaphor to say questioning your faith is painful. Fear, Dr. Tarico says,

is like pain in that when we are intensely afraid we can’t focus on anything else. Also, like pain, we learn to avoid it whenever we can. Someone who has felt a panic attack or a phobia triggered by anything from dogs to dust may restructure basic life routines to avoid the feeling. They may rationalize the changes—this route to work is more convenient; I just like being at home; clean surfaces are more sanitary. As long as they don’t confront the fear, they can live in the illusion that it isn’t there keeping them bound in place. But when the line is crossed, the fear can become debilitating.

Many readers of this blog have crossed that line or are anxiously weaving back and forth across it. I’ve been there. I know what it’s like. There’s just no way you can stand even the possibility of being wrong with so much–infinite, unending torment!–at stake. Dr. Tarico compares this fearful state in which many Christians are trapped to the physical confinement of an agoraphobic:

As long as they stay within the walls of faith, they feel fine. But when they try to put a toe out they start feeling uncomfortable, and if they should find themselves, even momentarily, looking at faith from the outside, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching panic sends them scurrying back inside.

Stay away from the flames, something we all learn early on. [Flickr page]

Thankfully, with time and a lot of hard work, I have been able to completely neutralize the primal fear of hell. The ancient, primitive fight-or-flight mechanism working in the basement of the brain is what produces butterflies in the stomach, those anxious “what if?” questions whispered in the darkness of sleepless nights. It reacts quickly to threats and disregards them slowly, for good reason: Those ancestors who paid attention to things that might have caused them harm, even to the point of overreacting, are the ones who went on to reproduce and ultimately produce you.

What got immortalized in our genes, Dr. Robert M. Price and I write in our book on evolution and Christianity, is the tendency to play it safe, to make the best bet for survival and reproduction. “You had some prehistoric ancestor, one of many, who was prone to hear rustling in the tall grass and run for her life. When it turned out not to be a false alarm one afternoon, she survived to conceive the next branch on the family tree that night. Her jaded, skeptical cousin did not.” ⁵

Even after my more evolved cerebral cortex had examined and found utterly baseless the doctrines of my church, including the threats of eternal damnation made by it and most of the rest of Christianity, it took a while for the rest of my brain to catch up. But I was confident that it would, eventually, and it has.

Some Hellish History

All the bowing and scraping of fear-based devotion is no different, really, than paying tribute or swearing allegiance to the mob to avoid losing kneecaps or even your life. It turns out that Hell is a product of the same part of the world that brought us the subject matter of the Godfather movies and The Sopranos–Sicily. A fiery underworld is a real phenomenon, there and elsewhere. I’ve seen a version of the lake of fire myself, in Hawaii. I watched its glowing smoke roiling into the night and imagined how easily such a sight could have inspired awe and dread in ancient minds full of angry gods.

The regions around Israel are as devoid of volcanic activity as the pages of the Old Testament are of any mention of eternal fires. Indeed, when the Hebrew Bible does indicate the existence of some kind of afterlife, in the midst of many passages that explicitly deny such a thing, it sends everybody there, good and evil alike.⁶ That follows the lead of the Mesopotamian epics on which some of our oldest Bible writings are based: “The dead spirits in these early stories lead a grim, bleak, dry, and completely egalitarian existence. There is no division yet into privileged or blessed souls versus sinners or common folk.” ⁷

Zoroastrianism may have had an early influence on the idea of a tormenting afterlife, as well as the concept of a miraculously conceived savior (Soshyans) forgiving penitent sinners and reconciling them to God.⁸ Ancient Egyptian mythology seems to have included fiery hazards for the wicked, too, “horrendous sudden perils, if not exactly punishments.” ⁹ But the ancients who really sparked the flames of Hell were the Greeks. Inspired by the volcanoes and fumaroles of nearby Sicily, they invented Tartarus as a place of torment for the wicked many centuries before the New Testament started being written.¹⁰

Hell’s inspiration, the lake of fire. It’s just lava, and no devils or souls are writhing in it. [Flickr page]

Paul said nothing of the topic. For him, the wages of sin were death and the punishment was missing out on everlasting life. The first Gospel writer, decades later, was Mark, whose very spare account of Jesus only has him mentioning “eternal damnation” for blaspheming the Spirit and advocating self-mutilation to avoid being cast into the unending fires of Gehenna.¹¹ It would take Matthew, still later, for Jesus and then Christianity to start warning about some Sicilian mafia hit for those who get on the wrong side of the Heavenly Godfather.

An indefensibly vicious addition to the idea is of the post-mortem punishment being eternal, with no hope of repentance or rehabilitation. That was slow to catch on. Not everyone who was cast into Tartarus was destined to remain there forever, only those “who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes.” ¹² Plutarch’s version of things centuries later had “souls undergoing ‘correction,’ by being hammered and pummeled brutally to get them ‘in shape’ for being sent back to another life.” ¹³

Even early Christianity had some relatively humanitarian voices speaking about rehabilitation, before the grotesque cruelty of eternal, unremitting torment finally took hold. Origen [c. 185–c. 254] proposed that the soul could move up or down in status depending on its behavior in the hereafter. “Eventually, Origen proposed, everyone would choose to repent, even the Devil. If Christ died for all, that would include the angels: the Devil was once an angel. If God is infinite, everything will naturally return at the end of time to be part of him...” ¹⁴

A Mighty Monster is our God

Fundamentalists like to point out how they “tell it like it is,” or “preach sin as sin.” By preaching against such modern-day evils as gay marriage and movie-watching without any beating around the (burning) bush, they illustrate their piety and spiritual backbone. Perhaps, then, they will pardon my own effort to point out what I believe to be the single worst case of evil imaginable, fictional though it is: the idea of an all-powerful God sending a human being to an eternity of screaming torment, pain without end.

God created uncounted billions of human beings with the full knowledge that he was going to damn most of them—or almost all of them, if you subscribe to the extreme exclusivity of Laestadianism, the Churches of Christ, Iglesia ni Cristo, and numerous other sects. It’s like breeding puppies for the sole purpose of slowly torturing them, and making yourself feel better about it by sparing the one or two that manage to find a well-hidden squeak toy. And why? To save face in a grudge match with the enemy of the soul, whom an omnipotent God could just squash underfoot like any other opponent if he really wanted to.

Please stop and ponder this for a moment: What possible justification could there be for blaming those who are innocently ignorant for never even hearing about the only possible way to be saved? And the consequence to them is an eternity of unimaginably horrible torture? It’s not even punishment. There is no opportunity for rehabilitation, ever. It’s not about deterrence, either, because almost all of those being tortured had no idea that such a fate was in store for them, much less how to avoid it. No, it is just the most unimaginably cruel and pointless sadism, from a God we are told is loving and gracious.¹⁵

To emphasize what a monster Christianity has turned its God into with this disgusting doctrine of eternal torment, I’m going to end this post in an unlikely way: with a dog story. We have a country dog who stands watch outside the house and barks enthusiastically (sometimes a little too much so) to let her people know when some animal is roaming around. Whether we like it or not, she often drags some piece of dead wildlife home to gnaw on. No store-bought rawhide chew toys are needed around here.

You lucky dog: exempt from eternal cruelty. [Flickr page]

She got a piece of bone stuck crossways in her mouth this summer. The free country life is one of the best a dog could ask for, but this is indeed a hazard of it. Fortunately, it didn’t take us long to notice that something was amiss. I held the dog down while my wife extracted the bone with a pair of pliers. Neither of us could stand the sight of her suffering, and didn’t want her to remain in that painful, fearful state for a moment longer than necessary.

Now, this is a dog, a soulless animal. It is far from the exalted place in which Christianity places humanity, the supposed crown of God’s creation. And yet that God treats this dog, and every other non-human animal, far more compassionately than he does his prize creation. After death, this dog’s consciousness will simply cease to exist.

What would you think of my wife and me if we had simply watched, indifferent, while this poor animal shook its head and gaped in terror at the painful obstruction lodged in its mouth? What if we were so awful as to deliberately stick the bone in there? How about if we kept the dog alive with a liquid diet just so that its torment could be prolonged, day after painful day? You, a mere human with sin-fallen, imperfect moral values, recoil in disgust at the thought.

Yet this is nothing in comparison to the horrors that the perfect God of (most) Christianity has in store for most of the humanity he supposedly prizes over all other creatures. This is not an entity that can be sincerely loved, only a bullying strongman to be feared.

The Rockford preacher talked about his reservations about sending his children to an all-day event at the local school, “an anti-bully program.” Nothing wrong with the premise, he said–he doesn’t want his children to be on either end of bullying. But, alas, it was “the music and the atmosphere at times through the day that was very offensive, especially to a Child of God” (6:30-7:30). Perhaps he should have attended himself, earplugs at the ready to block out dangerous “music of this world,” so that he could learn a thing or two about bullying. There’s been quite a bit of it from pulpits like his.

———

Photo credits: 17th century Last Judgment, adapted from Thomas Hawk; Vasari’s Last Judgement, adapted from Dan Philpott. Reproductions of public domain works.

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out their Flickr pages for the sources. Mine are Copyright © 2013 Edwin A. Suominen; you may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Notes

---

1. This blog posting originally said, “My old church has taken to editing a few of the recordings of its sermons before putting them on its website. In the censored portion of one sermon whose public version ends prematurely, I’ve heard that the preacher claimed some comfort in seeing writings from the church’s worldly critics.” I did notice a couple of cases where such editing seemed to have occurred. But I have edited the posting to avoid distracting from its main focus–the vicious evil of eternal torment and any deity that would threaten it. ↩

2. Questioning the motives of people who dare to assert dissenting viewpoints is a losing and hypocritical game for fundamentalists, Laestadians included. There are just too many supposed spiritual fathers for whom that particular shoe fits all too well. Catholics could easily view Luther’s voluminous tirades against the Pope as motivated by some repressed awareness that Rome was right all along. And how about Laestadius–did his visions and righteous indignation arise from some fearful subconscious knowledge that those he mocked as “proper Lutherans” really were the proper ones, after all? Perhaps Paul was haunted by how much he had turned his back on pharisaic Judaism, and penned a bunch of wishful thinking about grace and faith to the Romans as a result. ↩

3. archive.laestadianlutheran.org/​sermons/z_Older_Archives/​Seattle/Seattle_2013/​101313_tomms.mp3 ↩

4. archive.laestadianlutheran.org/​sermons/z_Older_Archives/​Minneapolis/Minneapolis_2013/​112913_NMuhonen.mp3 ↩

5. Price, Robert M. and Edwin A. Suominen, Evolving out of Eden: Christian Responses to Evolution. Tellectual Press (2013), p. 200. ↩

6. The God who was constantly making threats of bodily harm against his chosen people and fussing about endless details of their behavior declined to offer a single warning about any eternal punishment until late in the Old Testament, leaving ambiguity about the subject even into the New Testament. He allowed it to appear that there really is no hell at all, not even really an afterlife, with several different parts of the Bible describing the end of human existence in the grave, of good and evil all going to the same place. Thesis #88, Check out these references to the free online version of my first book, An Examination of the Pearl: 4.8.3, 6.8, 6.9, 6.10, 6.17, 6.18, 6.18, 6.19, 6.20, 6.21, 6.25, 6.28, 6.33. ↩

7. Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. Harcourt Brace & Co (1993), p. 11. ↩

8. Turner at pp. 16-18. ↩

9. Turner at p. 13. ↩

10. Price, Robert M. The Bible Geek podcast, August 5 episode, 1:00:50-1:17:30; Turner at p. 30-33. ↩

11. It’s debatable whether Mark’s Jesus is referring to eternal punishment with his warnings about Gehenna. According to Wikipedia, the word means “the ‘Valley of Hinnon,’ which was a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem. It was a place where people burned their garbage and thus there was always a fire burning there. Bodies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed.” For a different view, see The Fires of Gehenna: Views of Scholars by Todd Bolen. ↩

12. Phaedo, as quoted in Turner, p. 32. ↩

13. Turner at p. 39. ↩

14. Turner at p. 77. ↩

15. These two paragraphs are adapted from An Examination of the Pearl, §4.9.2, “Soteriology.” ↩

 

Paradise

Eden was a choice garden in comparison with the magnificence of the whole earth, which itself also was a Paradise compared with its present wretched state.

—Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis

Tropical rainforest north of Hilo on the Big Island.  [Flickr page]

After co-authoring a book entitled Evolving out of Eden and spending three weeks in Hawaii, I’ve given a thought or two to the idea of paradise. For much of our existence on this planet, it seems that humans have been longing for such a place.

Life supporting life, in vivid green abundance.  [Flickr page]

A variation of this theme is that of lost innocence, a time when everything was wild and simple and good. One of our earliest recorded creation myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh inscribed onto Mesopotamian clay tables over 4,000 years ago, describes a primeval superhero who was happy and at home with his friends the wild animals. Alas, this “child of nature, the savage man from the midst of the wild” (Tablet I, line 175) is seduced by a harlot down at the watering hole, literally. After a week-long sex marathon, he was a weakened shell of his former self, a stranger to the gazelles and beasts of the field. “Now he had reason, and wide understanding” (line 195).

The story far better known to us, though almost entirely ignored in the rest of the Hebrew Bible, is the one based in large part on the Mesopotamian epics and set in the same region. Actually, it’s two accounts, written with different agendas in mind. According to Genesis 1, the Gods (whoops, leftover polytheism) create the first man and woman in their image (v. 26), and tell them to get busy having babies and taking over the place, enjoying a varied diet of pretty much everything that grows or moves. (None of the Jewish dietary laws had been invented yet.) The account of Genesis 2-3 is the one where the First Couple munch on fruit in Eden, naked and innocent, until things go terribly wrong, and we get Paradise Lost.

Maui: Green, beautiful, and very humid.  [Flickr page]

The religion of the early Hebrew Bible was just a step away from its polytheistic roots. Yahweh was a tribal war deity who showed favor and displeasure in crop abundance or famine, battles won and lost, loot from conquering and the horrors of being conquered. As this God evolved and became more of a remote abstraction, however, his divine judgment took on less immediacy. Promises of a paradisaical life after this one finally began to emerge.

At first, we see the barest glimmer of eternal sunshine in the gloom of the lifeless, neutral Hebrew Sheol: Job expresses the hope of seeing God even after worms destroy this body, though the rest of the book paints the usual muted and bleak picture. The Psalms provide a few mentions of glory afterward among lots of talk about a dreaded, forgotten nothingness in the grave.

Eventually, Isaiah would offer a clear indication of the dead being resurrected. They, God’s dead at least, “will live, their dead bodies will rise. The dwellers in the dust will awake and shout for joy! For your dew is like the dew of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the dead” (Isa. 26:19). Interestingly, Isaiah seems to hint at the change in viewpoint by contrasting this promise with a statement a few lines earlier about God’s previous disposition of the dead: “The dead will not live, and the departed spirits will not rise. You punished and destroyed them, and imprisoned all memory of them” (Isa. 26:11, both from the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible).

Molokai’s lush east end.  [Flickr page]

As evidenced by the mountain of grave goods that were crammed into King Tut’s tomb in 1323 B.C., the Egyptians had a detailed view of the afterlife much earlier than the Israelites. The Greek pagans were ahead in the Mediterranean afterlife game by many centuries, too: Elysium was their eternal resting place for the gods and some favored mortals. According to Wikipedia, Homer’s Odyssey mentions an “Elysian plain … where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor ever rain, but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind that they may give cooling to men.”

Clouds Over Maui, from Molokai  [Flickr page]

The Old Testament would have to pass to the New before those monotheists along the Mediterranean’s eastern shore would really come to embrace the idea of life eternal. The most famous Jew of all time (whether he existed as an actual man or only in the hazy memories of devotees writing decades later) came along and raised the post-mortem stakes, warning that “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire” (Matt. 18:9). Of course, it was eternal life he was promising. When the penitent convict turned to him on the cross, according to Luke’s account, the words he chose to speak as a comforting response were, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

The new Jesus sect had its main earthly champion in another Jew, Apostle Paul, who promised a wondrous reward for God’s beloved. He could offer no details, though: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor. 2:9).

Clouds Swirling on Maui Mountain Slopes  [Flickr page]

These things awaited the faithful somewhere above the great blue dome of the sky. Mark and Matthew tell their readers that Jesus will come in the “clouds of heaven” (Matt. 24:30 & 26:64, Mark 14:62). It was an unattainable place far overhead. When the writer of 1 Thessalonians assured an unexpected new generation of Christians that their dead relatives also would attain this ethereal reward, along with the living, he was looking skyward. And it would happen, he promised, real soon now. “We which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:17).

The idea had evolved to the point where this life was a mere prelude to the next. It had a certain comfort to it: God would finally wipe away the tears of a difficult life, at last right the injustices of a beggar foraging scraps at a rich man’s table. The rest of Judaism seems not to have paid much attention, though. To this day, they focus much more on how you live your current life than what might happen to you afterwards. That’s surprising in a way: Jews have more reason than most to complain about the way things have gone for them, historically.

Beautiful above the water, and with a paradise of fish and coral below.  [Flickr page]

Even without regard to Rome, Masada, the Pogroms, and the Holocaust, most everybody throughout history had reason to yearn for some sort of better existence after death. Life basically sucked, and for all too many, still does. There is and always has been slavery, famine, disease, and war. In the natural state of things, observed the 16th century pessimist Thomas Hobbes, the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” No wonder the promises of heaven have maintained such appeal.

And no wonder the hereafter was envisioned as a marked contrast with what was being experienced in the here and now. The Revelation of John, written for people in the sun-baked islands of the Mediterranean, promised that there would be respite from the sun, heat, and thirst in heaven (Rev. 7:16-17). Luther’s extensive complaints about paradise lost have the distinct sound of a cranky old man tossing and turning on a filthy straw mattress in late medieval Europe. An obedient Adam, he laments, would have had access to the Tree of Life and

would have eaten; he would have drunk; and the conversion of food in his body would have taken place, but not in such a disgusting manner as now. Moreover, this tree of life would have preserved perpetual youth. Man would never have experienced the inconveniences of old age; his forehead would never have developed wrinkles; and his feet, his hands, and any other part of his body would not have become weaker or more inactive. Thanks to this fruit, man’s powers for procreation and for all tasks would have remained unimpaired until finally he would have been translated from the physical life to the spiritual. [Lectures on Genesis]

The Finns of my own ancestry and Laestadian faith tradition longed for a “homeland shore in heaven.” That has no biblical basis; the closest maritime parallel is the lake of fire and brimstone. But it was a compelling picture for exhausted fishermen out on their boats, and it’s still heard in Laestadian sermons today.

Paradise often looks best with a little trimming…  [Flickr page]

As a mere mortal who has probably lived about half his life already, I do understand the appeal. And having a wonderful life full of light, love, and beauty actually doesn’t change that too much. There is so much to experience, so much to see. Yet someday, as it did for King Tut and Homer and Paul and Luther, it will end for me. My paradise will only remain in these pictures, and the others I take in my remaining days filled with blue and green.

…and mowing.  [Flickr page]

Click on individual images to enlarge, or check out the entire set (and others from Hawaii) on Flickr. All are Copyright © 2013 Edwin A. Suominen. You may freely use them for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.