Phuc Luu

I wasn’t expecting to be re-converted to Christianity or whatever, but I was surprised by the extent to which “the Jesus of the East” is apparently just another familiar controversialist, you know. This guy seems like a very Walter Brueggemann-style fire-and-brimstone-on-the-hurting-less-folks, of which I offer the following hostile portrait: “Don’t live your life and be happy, and then try to help people from a position of strength; really ruin your life to mirror the outcastes, by spending all your time attacking the false Christianities and telling them they are wrong. It’s either me or Fox News—remember that! And I keep up on Fox News memes, believe me! Gotta get the daily fix of insanity to chew on. Until we are all poor, my friends—until there is no wealth, only leftist men!” (zooms up into the sky like a superhero).

I mean, you can just multiply the inconsistencies almost as much as you want: people who write “systematic theology” are bad because poor people don’t buy their books (and who could blame them!), but academics are the only people who have ever changed or challenged injustice (academics are often the most conservative, both literally—date of the media they consume—and just in general, and if they could get their heads out of their anus when comparing their books to the books of others, they’d maybe see that non-academic books have changed a lot over the years…. Isn’t that what they get us for? Turnover? Well, and let me ask you something: if we’re so derivative, and lacking in originality: gee, I wonder….)…. And those dastardly theologians don’t get themselves in touch with real life, and that’s bad…. And the Christian psychologists, who can actually heal your fucking life or at least try, at least look on the things you spend your time on—as opposed to ‘history of western theology’—as being worth talking about, DO get themselves in touch with real life…. And that’s bad too! Wow, things must be bad, then! But part of me wants to say, yeah, gut those Christian psychologists and stop them from taking Bible man into the boardroom, and things might turn around. The boardrooms are male and macho enough already; we don’t need the fire-and-brimstone-from-the-desert reform, right….

Because, not only is it all like, “Which Jesus is a sinner”, but it’s like, so partial, you know—if you had to find a country or a century where there was no sinner-Jesus: does anybody really think that the early church, the misogynist, heretic-hunter, Jew-baiter early church, or the tribal czarist Eastern Orthodox Church, would be like fucking candy raining down from the sky, like you’d need for an either-or, good-Jesus-bad-Jesus, good-witch-bad-witch scenario?

This is why I can’t be a Christian, you know. In the end, the Christians will thank me for not reviewing their books and trying to be their friend…. by telling them that they’re garbage, right. To be honest, I just read this because I felt weird having Thich Nhat Hahn being the only person in my library from Vietnam; I have this tic that each country represented should have more than one author if there’s more than one book. But yeah, the “Jesus of the East” can stay the hell away from me, basically.

…. I guess where I diverge from the macho men on both sides is where we start to see poverty as an inherent, immutable characteristic of “the poor” (“those people”/“sellout”), rather than as something which can and should change. Would anyone choose lack if they weren’t tricked or obstructed or delayed? What do we really mean when we say, “the poor”?

…. So yeah, after I’m done with this, I’ll probably read one more book that’s “Christian” or whatever and not Christian meditation or psychology, but I have to put it off for awhile so that I can forget how meeting Bible God again for the first time is going to end up, you know…. Really got to try to minimize the preconceptions, even though we all have them, although there are things I’d like to say….

But yeah, kinda like how in the old days the white men would read pagan books but only if they thought they were written in “good Greek” or whatever—they narrowly constrained and defined their involvement with it; that’s what I’ll do with Christianity. Christian meditation, psychology, and interfaith borderlands I might haunt: the Arthurian Tarot, for example; Arthur was a Christian king for half his life, and Merlin called himself a Christian half the time…. Those Celtic Christians could be severe, though, like fail. They’d make these disingenuous little nature rune poems to deceive the children into believing that their power play was the only thing saving them from Mr. Nefario, and yes they’d write this delightful little koans, like, The snow rests on the pine; the first woman was the author of all evil in the world; or, The snow melts into the stream; my way or the highway, bitches: because this is the highway of the LORD!

I’m just tempted to believe, after having read about Celtic Christianity and then this, that when the symbol of death (the cross) first comes to a culture, they try to clothe themselves in native cultural symbols that they ultimately care nothing for and which even in the beginning mean very little to them and have very little influence on how the Christians operate, and how they rule the folk they have claimed, whichever folk it is. I don’t really WANT to think it’s as bad as That, however. Maybe the Christians ~will, find the light eventually. I suppose they probably will, if all nations come to a good end, if only because their great power makes them “too big to fail”, so to speak. I suppose that’s probably an insult.

…. It’s like he’s saying that if you feel at ease, at home, in the culture you’re born into, in which you participate—it could be any culture—then you’re not a Christian. What a terrible way to live your life. I can’t believe I considered that idea so normal until recently. Could Christianity have ever survived in a world where they didn’t so load the idea of morality as being peculiarly theirs? It seems like otherwise it would be hard to convince the majority of a population—and Christians are always counting heads, seeing if anybody’s missing—that the culture in which they participate~whatever it is, just because it’s there~ is not somewhere where they are at liberty to feel at ease, you know. Perhaps a small “Essene”-like collection of cells of initiates, you know. But the One Way For All Man-kind? You’ve got to be kidding me. What a joke. Have words no meaning?…. Have they no decency, no consideration of others?

…. He is sympathetic to me when he talks about race, but I don’t agree that Christianity is the solution. “Agree with me, and do what you will.” (Augustine). I’m not a Christian liberal. In this insulting way I guess, I pity them; I pity them, the way they pity the poor, you know. I could never find peace as a Christian liberal. Trying to marry the system that created a fat chunk of the social suffering, and the movement to ameliorate it, or fellowship between the most unreconstructed aggressors and the people who noodle and rage about a new world, it’s seriously in danger of being absurd from the word go—like a photo op between the nurse wringing her hands over the cake and the baker who doesn’t measure things at all, you know. “Well, okay—just promise you won’t enjoy it! (Wrings hands)”. Sometimes we must separate, in order to be one. I hear Christians preaching that to Twilight fans, and I guess even writing books, but they don’t seem to get it, you know. That and the mind games, right. “…. So how many eggs do I have left?…. Wrong: I still have all of them!” Liberal Christians usually seem to adapt the heretic hunting script very readily, but it’s just so comic—the Gnosticism question and the dog freaked out by its shadow, right. Persecuting religious opinions not your own is just so not kosher, and throwing in a few paragraphs about American slavery doesn’t make it okay, and that SOME of the people you’re arguing against believe the most fantastic conspiracy theories about basic Black history education in the twenty-first century (Florida, etc), doesn’t make it okay, either.

Really, to be a sinner, to be a heretic or a baddie to Christians, all you have to do is follow your heart—to follow your own conscience, the felt inner sense that you don’t have to do things the way that other people do—at least if you’re not some very rare and extraordinary scary individual with a lot of useless education, you know. That’s ultimately what a sinner is to the church. All I can do is laugh; I laugh at the mind’s dream of a sort of power that could never be, and which could essentially only harm in the shadow world in which it might exist.

To be one, we cannot go on in this way, you know, so I will take the initiative and separate us.

…. I know that (a) life can be hard, and (b) I have a negativity filter like all other humans, but I can’t recall ever laying my concerns or disagreements with a Christian and having them openly and calmly permit that, you know. (At best, there tends to be a sense of anxiety or coldness, rarely a felt sense of, compassion, I guess.) They always launch into a cartoon villain intellectual laugh, I will prove you wrong! I will avenge your slight of my intellectual edifice…. (slam fist) If it’s the last thing I ever do! ~And the intellectual edifice could literally be that Gnostics and Buddhists should come to our Christmas party and have cake, maybe wine, you know: (slams fists) It’s true, dammit! We can’t both be free!

You know, it’s like, illness, basically. It’s like eating food that’s not fit for consumption. I mean, you do what you want, Christian. But it doesn’t impress me….

…. God, and just the only real excuse you have, at the bottom, is that life is hard, but you’re so sure that everyone else is Nefario the Ninth, you know….

…. Just briefly, he basically claims that Denmark would be doing a better job with Muslims and immigrants if people just went back to their white Christian churches, listening to sermons demonizing Gnostics and glorifying Putin’s strange-and-wonderful oriental-incapable-of-sin spiritual fathers, and got out into the streets and demanded that people bow the knee to Jesus, the only god of the post-market future, you know. “Your culture is violence; it’s a religion; EYE have got the religion for you” (punches face). It all sounds strangely like, Biden is a racist; vote for Trump, you know. He’ll just go on and on with lots of commonplace, and incidentally very Western/non-East Asian ideas, you know, good job packaging it, gotta really use some deceptive advertising for our post-market future, right…. And lots of stuff relevant to more or less nothing…. And then he’ll casually throw in a few whopper untruths, you know, like he assumes you’re overwhelmed at that point and aren’t focusing carefully and will sign the contract anyway, right….

…. The book, flawed throughout, is consciously beautifully written for a page or two at the beginning of each chapter, (so like maybe fifteen pages out of almost two fifty), and then lapses into ugliness; it’s almost harder to take that Kantian crawl for his proving that he doesn’t have to talk as though he were an old man from Berlin or wherever if he didn’t want to, and then almost intentionally, almost willfully turns towards ugliness, you know.

And I think that’s kinda symbolic of the book—really of the average theologian or whatever you want to call it.

…. Blah blah blah, Reject abundance AND scarcity—really try to be that median income family…. But be radical, people! Keep your head down, so I don’t bite it off…. And be radical. 😸🥳

…. I wouldn’t try to minimize the role of racism in the United States, but since there’s enough scholarship about that so that you can know about it unless you really don’t want to know, I’d also like to point out that we also have a system where there’s so much wealth that you can be an anti-wealth intellectual with no room for beauty, relationships, anything popular, and all that sort of thing, you can be the king of isolation, and still have a chance to be “middle class” with more money than you actually need to live.

…. Theologians are so dishonest, just so emotionally dishonest. “I can understand your grief if you had a nice house full of nice things and you lost it overnight in a flood, but—haha! Rich boy lost his house; rich boy lost his house! You lost that big house you bought for your woman, rich boy! You were always a little girl, and now you don’t even have that!”

…. And he name drops all the cool liberal theologians that the cool kids like, and the next time I see their names, that’s probably going to be what I associate the cool kids with, you know. “Rich boy lost his house; Rich boy lost his house. Where will your kids sleep tonight, rich boy? Will your car start up to bring you to a nice hotel, will you get another place to stay, maybe a little therapy. Man, therapy’s for rich boys. I don’t want to see you kids darken the door of no goddamn shrink. We’re men in this family, damn it. We’re cool!”

…. And you know, he told this story about a (semi-diverse) philosophy department, and it’s not worth going into all the details, but basically, let me put it like this—I may be a person from a more privileged background than many people, but that’s not all there is to me. It just isn’t, you know; that’s an inaccurate idea. “See my side, and I’ll see yours better; love me back, and I’ll love you better.” I hate to sound the paleface alarm, and that’s not really what I’m trying to do, you know. You make up your own mind, but it’s just that he doesn’t give a shit about me, he gives a shit about his ideas and his boxes, and that’s the shows a lack of compassion which I bet I would also show if I were to follow him and his King Jesus, you know. It’s always somebody with the Christians. Somebody’s always got to be on the chopping block. At a certain point, I don’t care who it is anymore; I’m just done.

…. The anti-penal substitutionary stuff is obviously rather good, but I guess as a non-Christian, from my point of view he’s obviously making it too complicated and not going far enough. Jesus, a god incarnated as a man of wisdom and a healer, is called nasty things and executed by military tyrants and religious authoritarians. This is the muck-consciousness of where society often is. Clearly, the goal should be to do better, so that if our friend the wisdom-healer-god takes a human body again, this time, we don’t call him nasty names and murder him. Now, there is a LITTLE more to this than meets the eye, because how do you change the human heart? How does ANY system or reform, despite Whatever the census figures say, really reach (for the better) the great majority of a population? How do you make people good? It is profound. And yet, compared to hyper-spiritual Christian theology, it’s a pretty simple goal—try not to murder God next time. But is there anything else to the cross than this, in truth? But if this were a gospel, would it be a Christian gospel, or simply another story about Jesus, outside the Christian church? Even if you go ‘back to the gospels’ or whatever, it’s true they don’t spell out Augustine or Calvin, but the inordinate amount of time spent on the last week—what is it, half of Mark, almost—implies that what I am offering you isn’t Christian, even apart from the many influences in the Bible and examples in history and society of Christians spewing blood into their coffee cup rather than doing something different today, you know. If implicitly the cross is the centerpiece of Christ’s life, then you have to build something around it; you almost have to celebrate it. But why celebrate injustice? It’s like God gives people a perfect avatar and the negative Nigel’s snoop around for a negative aspect of the story to plant their ass in, you know. It’s crap.

…. And, for good measure, in a chapter about the non-starter nature of penal substitution, he tosses in that society is in a bad way because of John Stuart Mill, basically. I would expect nothing less from a Christian. “Things are in a bad way because of my sin; imagine if you asked me to change—if EYE didn’t have all the power. Think of the bad things that would happen, if it weren’t up to ME. My bad management would be only the beginning of sorrows, if it were to end, for any reason, and in any way!” “Praise Jesus.” “Amen.” “Wow, what a jerk; I’m sorry, did I say that out loud?”

…. The chapter on death is largely good, at least by comparison. I would not deny that there are these strange things, these dark runes, like death. Like winter really. Odin hung on the tree for the nine nights, the nine months of winter up in the sticks, but I guess that’s a different story…. But, like with the story of the Buddha—which he dismisses in about a sentence—there is the danger that death is preferred, that dark runes are preferred, that they serve a purpose, beyond any legitimate one. The dance of death satisfied us when the dance of flowers will not, when happiness is not suitable, when we will not permit happiness. (What that would mean for a sexual relationship I leave to the imagination, as it’s not safe for work.) He is right that most wealthy churches are more like Pharaoh’s people than Hebrew slaves, and that the old, white wealthy Christians and their husbands usually address this with the path of least resistance—sleight of hand, lies. “We are God’s people, the children of Israel, the Hebrew slaves….” But there is the issue (although they do not even try to be honest or address the problem responsibly—they’re Christian! It’s like the love child of Frank Capra and Charles Dickens, you know!), that the church has denied wealthy people any legitimate image of themselves as servants of the poor and of society, and of science, and ultimately of romance, too. They do do these things—they donate money for a plaque, for instance, because the town or the organization needs money—but they do not think about them, and so they do not do them well, or if they do it is no thanks to the church and its lies that everyone has to be a slave or else one of the damned because there is exactly one human story, you know. In an odd way it has also wronged men; it has wronged women, obviously, by lying to them and getting them to lock themselves up into a patriarchal society and a patriarchal woman’s mind, and hitting them upside the head if they resisted, and sometimes also if they did not—but the church, the few men who actually are the church, have wronged the majority of men who are not; there is a sort of church “music” and art or whatever, 👨‍🎓and “love”—sometimes good, usually pretty bad, but there simply is no playing games in church, you know. You can sing for Jesus, but you can’t pass him a soccer ball. This total indifference, bordering on hostility, to the physically masculine way of life (even for men; we cannot even imagine for girls), just kinda surrenders men, the bulk of men, to the Bad-Other, sorry the ‘world’ outside the circle of frail mothers and the rulers, you know. The brutishness of the ordinary man is probably in no small amount due to the system’s total indifference at best to whether or not he is a brute. And again, the child of wealth in his garden cannot take any pleasure in it if he is to be a child of the church, but must take some sober psychedelic until he sees himself as a Hebrew slave without recourse to the law, you know. Most of these patterns probably exist outside of the semi-Christian West, (it was probably always semi-Christian, since back in the day what people did didn’t matter as much, if they were the majority, but that’s a different story), but Christianity as Church God originally intended it has done nothing at all to help, a pretty poor showing for the One Right Way, although a natural result given that it IS the One Right Way totally without accountability, totally without regard to what it does, you know. You either leave, or you obey: and you’re not supposed to leave; you’re supposed to be ‘good’.

…. He never quite gets that shame is the enemy, and not some cool philosopher, and so he always ends in shaming men or whoever, as not being as good as some pious beaten mother or some pious beaten wife, which is how probably the majority of chauvie men talk, you know. But oh it’s all for you, honey. (rolls eyes) The only good thing is that he’s not a Calvinist, so his whole relationship catastrophe way of being is spared a drumbeat of relationship-training-from-me-or-instant-execution, you know. lol.

…. Basically, real men can only be friends with other real men that they’ve been in combat with, you know, been in the same war together—so for as long as there are real men, there will always be war, death, and misery, because they’re just too useful to give up. Nobody wants to be alone. We haven’t had enough; I’m not done playing with that toy. Give it back, dammit.

…. Christians are not all equally unjust, nor does Christianity totally destroy justice, as that would be impossible. Even if you try, you cannot be completely evil. However, I do not think that Christianity is basically just, allows justice, or is in an any way reliably just. Most Christians are rather negative, and especially the leaders and thinkers, and it is very much a top down brain-led religion, you know. And so intolerant; even on the left, while preaching justice, we have to send off into the dark night of heathendom the philosophers, the heretics, and yes, even the Buddhists. We have to attack the credulous poor “faith healers”, the privileged rich science-only “liberal Protestants”, and if you can think of anybody else who needs to be attacked, you write me a letter and I’ll include their denunciation in my next book, but I think I got everybody.

No, the church doesn’t lead to real justice. At best, it leads to the closest thing to justice that people will accept, you know. But it acts as this stubborn “choke-hold”, you know, on justice, and goodness generally; it doesn’t completely annihilate goodness, since that would be impossible. But it limits it.

…. (before end) Hey, there’s racism. Consider (all the evidence). And Christianity will help end racism, just look at the evidence and the probable outcomes (not good). But hey—I know one word of Korean! Vote for King Jesus, and racism will end! 😉

…. (end) Sometimes I just feel like every Christian theology-or-whatever book I’ve ever read ends with someone asking, So what makes this god of yours good then, if we all have to suffer because of his cross?, and Rumpelstiltskin, (doctor of Divinity), tearing himself in two, and saying (the fairies must have asked you that! The fairies must have asked you that! or), Because I said! Because I said!, and catching his legs, and pulling them apart, until he pulls himself in two, you know.

(coda) But we must not have our revenge upon the Christians; that’s not how the universe works.… (más)