A tribe of early humans sits around the communal fire.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
“What’s that, mate?”
“Let’s believe in god.”
“God? What’s that?”
“Hmm, God. Yeah that’s even better. God is the one creator of the universe, who controls everything that happens from outside of time and space.”
“Hey, cool.”
“Yeah.”
“But … why only one. Shouldn’t there be dozens, each one in charge of some natural phenomenon?
“That’s heresy. There’s only one God.”
The heretic leaves the fire.
“While, maybe not dozens. How about three.”
“There’s just one, I tell you.”
“How about three who are one.”
“One-third gods?”
“No, just three that are one.”
“Well, you can believe that, if you can. I’ll stick with one.” The speaker leaves the fire.
“About these three, who are they?”
“Well, one should be a father, and a son and a ….”
“Mother?”
“No. A … uh … ghost. A holy ghost.”
“Oh, sure. But there must be a mother somewhere.”
“Well, the son must have a mother. She’d have to be a virgin. And conceived without sin.”
“She’d have to be a virgin, of course. But not conceived without sin. That’s ridiculous.”
The Catholics leave the fire.
“But, what’s in this God business for us?”
“Everlasting life, of course.”
“You mean we won’t die.”
“Not exactly. But your soul will be saved.”
“Hmm, how does that work? If we do good things?”
“Do good things? That has nothing to do with it. It’s only if God chooses to save you – and He’s already made up His mind.”
“Well, that sucks. I don’t believe in this predestination nonsense.”
The Protestants all leave the fire. The rest of the tribe look at each other.
“What dolts.”
“Wow, how could they believe that?”
“We know that there’s no god.”
“Well, I don’t know about ‘know.’”…
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6 comments:
Like I said, what human practice has been more divisive than religion?
Irreligion, apparently.
I've got a joke too.
English tourist is driving around Ireland and stops to ask a farmer the way to the local inn. Farmer thinks for a moment and says: "Oh I wouldn't start from here if I were you."
Nice try, but secularism has a long way to go to match the sheer profligacy of Christian schismatics.
The Englishman is undaunted, though. At length he finds the inn, which has no room, but as luck would have it is next to a wee pub, the Pot and Kettle. The Englishman goes in, receives a well-earned pint, and finds a seat between an Irishman and a Scot. Now this is a proper Irish pub, with proper cloud of Irish flies. One fly soon descends and settles in the Englishman's beer. He makes a long face, pushes it back, and orders a dry sherry. The next fly lands in the Scot's dram; the Scot shrugs his shoulders, flicks it out, downs his drink and orders another. The last fly lands in the Irishman's glass. The Irishman's face fills up with thunder; he spins his glass around so he and the fly are face-to-face, reaches in with thumbs and forefingers, hauls the fly out by the wings, lifts it up and bellows: Spit it out, damn ye, spit it out.
There are many subtexts of Judeo-Christian 'theology' that go hand-in-hand with the irony of David's little vignette, but the one that always get me is when God walks between the dead animals in Genesis 15, to confirm his commitment to Abraham. And what Abraham sees is a smoking pot and a flaming torch. Why not a mighty winged creature, or a blazing star, or an endless swirling glow of energy? No, he saw a pot a match.
The narrative(s) about God in the Bible are curious, because one would expect that a "book" of purely human origin would read more like the Koran or the Vedas.
Joe - I haven't heard that in years. Good one.
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