fundamentalist christians – Just the Tarot

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Ages, The Hierophant Card, and Eschewing Sheep

The Bible as an anachronistic guide for living.

The Bible was really the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, at least for a big chunk of Western history.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams invented a sort of a tourist’s guide book that could be used while visiting various sections of outer space. No matter what bizarre planet or dystopian nebula a traveler might be visiting, she could simply consult the Guide to Galaxy to determine what in the hell was going on.

Now imagine, if you will, a world in which the inhabitants were so thoroughly stupid and ill-informed that they thought that the planets they saw in the night sky must be living creatures because, after all, they moved around instead of standing still. Inhabitants who believed that their own planet was, in fact, flat as a board, and that you might fall off of the edge of it if you sailed your ship too far in any given direction. People who believed that if a man had a wet dream it was because his, “vital fluids,” were being drained by a succubus. People who believed that witches had secret teats that they used to nurse black cats.

To use the scientific nomenclature, people who were just as dumb as a bag of rocks.

For such people, life would seem very puzzling and, indeed, very frightening. They were constantly surrounded by threats and mysteries. Where does lightning come from? Do demons live in trees? Why do we sneeze? What’s a clitoris and where do you find one? Well . . . never mind that last one . . . that’s still going on.

Fortunately, when confronted by this bizarre, evil, scary world, they had a book they could turn to for guidance on nearly any subject. And not just any book. This book was written by . . . God. And, since God actually MADE the bizarre, evil, scary world, he’d be the one who’d have the answers about what in the hell was going on, wouldn’t he? All of that secret God-knowledge was contained in The Christian Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Ages, also known as the Bible.

Unfortunately, there were very few copies of the Bible in existence, they were enormous, and those few copies were mainly kept locked away in castles and monasteries. To make matters worse, even if the common folks were somehow able to get hold of a copy of the Bible, they didn’t know how to read it because . . . you know . . . ddumb as a bag of rocks. All that they could do was to sit there and hold the Bible and try to guess what it might actually say, which didn’t work out too well.

And so they invented a special class of people who actually COULD read and actually HAD copies of the Bible and they called them, “priests,” and sometimes, “monks.” We see one such person in the Tarot card, The Hierophant.

The arrangement that the common people had with the priests was really quite simple. When they – the common folks – were confronted with a problem or a conundrum in life, they would go to the priest and give him money, or some eggs, or perhaps a goat. Maybe an eggplant. In return, the priest would bring out an enormous copy of the Bible, flip it open, read a bit, and then tell the common folks what God had to say about how to solve their problems.

We can imagine that this exchange might have gone something like this:

“Yes, hello Father Flanagan. Top of the morning to you. We’re here because our well has dried up and if there’s no water we don’t know how the village will come down with giardia this summer. We can’t decide if we should dig a little deeper or maybe just start a new well, so if you could look in your giant book and tell us what the God person says, we’d appreciate it. By the way, here’s an eggplant.”

The priest, for his part, would mutter a few incantations, heave open the big, fat book to a random section, and trace a few lines of the Holy Scripture with his finger.

“Ah, here it is, my children. The Lord saith, “Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,.” Leviticus 19:14.

“Oh. Um . . . begging your pardon, your holiness, but what does that mean?”

“It means, don’t trip blind people.”

“Ah . . . yes . . . and that’s very good advice, Father. I personally try to avoid tripping blind people as much as possible. Anyone here who trips blind people?”

The common people glance around at each other, shaking their heads.

“Nope, none of us trip blind people. Well, there was Fred, but that was years ago. Still, your honorableness, that doesn’t hardly tell us whether to dig a new well. Could we maybe give it another try? Here’s another eggplant.”

“Oh, very well. Let’s see . . . um . . . “You must not lie carnally with any animal, thus defiling yourself with it; a woman must not stand before an animal to mate with it.” Leviticus 18:23

“Uh, what does THAT mean?”

“It means don’t have sex with your sheep.”

“Eeeeeewww! Gross! Jesus. I’ll have a hard time getting THAT out of my head. Anyone here sheep fuckers? No? Even Fred? No? Sigh . . . now, about that well, your priestliness.”

And so on and so on, until the priest had all of the people’s eggplants and the people had, verily, nothing but a dry well to spit in.

The problem, of course, was that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Ages, aka The Bible, wasn’t really designed for the Dark Ages, it was designed for the Stone Ages. While knowledge such as how to kill a giant with a slingshot or how to plug up the Nile River with frogs might have been interesting, it hardly solved the more complex problems of the Dark Ages. People of the Dark Ages were facing more technologically intricate matters, like how to fight dragons or what charcoal worked best when burning heretics at the stake.

The Bible simply didn’t have the answers, no matter how many eggplants they threw at it.

Now, in the very same sense, it’s entirely possible that the Bible doesn’t contain the answers to the questions we’re facing today.

How do we fight a worldwide pandemic? And the Bible says . . . nothing about that subject.

How do we stop this horrific gun violence? Nothing.

Should abortion be legal? Nothing.

Why is Donald Trump orange? Nothing.

Is Marjorie Taylor Green an alien life form? Nothing.

Why have we been cursed with the Kardashians? Nothing

It may very well be that the Bible isn’t just a very, very, very old book that lost a lot in the translation. It may be that the Bible is totally irrelevant to most of what we call daily life. That may be why the number of people who self-identify as christians has fallen from 90% in the 1950s to a mere 64% today.

It’s difficult to deal with fundamentalist christians. They’re still waving The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Dark Ages in the air and screaming that the earth is flat and we might fall off of the edges. Nonetheless, it may be time to look for a different paradigm and different answers.

At least we’ll get to keep our eggplants.

If you enjoyed this post, please remember that my book, JUST THE TAROT, is available on Amazon for much less than the cost of a Bible and doesn’t contain one single word about sheep.

The Magician, The Devil, and the Habit of Evil

Have you ever had someone in your life who was truly evil? I mean, beyond our usual descriptors of, “He’s an angry person.” Or mean. Or disturbed. Or selfish.

I mean, really, genuinely evil. Someone who consciously inflicts as much pain as they can, knowing that it’s wrong. It can leave you wondering about the world and about everything you believe in.

For most of history, human beings have been using a sort of, “argument from nature,” to excuse their worst behavior. They point to the world of animals where fangs and claws seem to rule, and pronounce that it’s either kill or be killed, the strong survive and the weak die, and, since we’re animals, too, those rules apply to us, as well. We HAVE to be cruel because it’s our nature.

Even leaving aside their totally disregarding all of the love and nurturing that we ALSO see in the animal world, it’s a bogus point of view. They are deliberately ignoring the fact that good and evil are choices and that where no choice exists no concept of evil can exist.

We might feel pretty squeamish watching a cat torture a mouse but we don’t think that the cat is evil because of it. We recognize that it’s the cat’s nature and instinct to hunt and kill and that the cat hasn’t made a conscious choice in the matter. There’s no evil because there’s no choice between good and evil and where there’s no choice there can be no morality.

In The Fool card, we see pure energy entering into the world. In The Magician card we see a human being directing that energy and choosing how it will be used. He or she can use it for benefit or harm, for good or for evil, and that’s the point where morality is born.

To a certain extent, those of us who have embraced the New Age movement are guilty of being a little goody two-shoes about the existence of evil. We try to live in the affirmation of love and caring and we try to NOT let negativity, malice, anger, and hatred into our lives or our consciousness. But, as Louise Hay said, “If you are going to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.” Pretending the evil isn’t there doesn’t make it go away.

The good news is that there’s probably a LOT less evil in the world than some religions would have us believe. If we recognize that true evil involves a conscious choice to hurt and cause suffering we can eliminate all of the animal world because they operate on instinct, not choice.

Psychotics – even serial killers – can’t really be called evil in the pure sense because they can’t make rational choices.

Serious alcoholics and drug addicts can’t really be called evil – no matter how much damage they do – because they’re driven by their compulsions and disease.

Sociopaths and narcissists get us into an interesting – and scary – gray area. Sociopaths actually recognize that other people make moral choices between good and evil but they have no internal moral compass themselves. They recognize the concepts but they just don’t care about them.

Malignant narcissists also recognize that other people make moral choices but they think we’re stupid to do so. They delight in manipulating people who have a sense of right and wrong and use those deceptions to enhance their own sense of being superior to everyone else. “See how I charmed you and lied to you and you were too stupid to know the difference?”

And that’s a strange thing to wrap your head around. If someone knows the difference between good and evil behavior on an intellectual level, but has no heart, no compassion, no empathy with others, are they actually capable of understanding the hurt and pain they’re inflicting? And if they don’t really understand it, are they evil or just very flawed humans?

I dunno.

Sadly, it seems that a lot of the evil in the world and in ourselves is a matter of plain old habit and rationalization.

The Devil card is very dramatic. We see two humans in chains with a literal Bat Out of Hell glowering above them. The riff on this from fundamentalists christians would be that there is evil everywhere and if you’re not careful The Devil can reach out and SNATCH you up, just like that!

But – again – evil is not something that is external to us; it’s an internal choice. In fact, it’s a series of choices. Despite the theme in horror films, no one is born evil. We just get comfortable with it. We CHOOSE to act wrongly, to react with anger instead of compassion, to indulge our rage instead of finding our love, until choosing to be a curse in the world rather than a blessing is a habit.

So the people in The Devil card aren’t just wearing their chains. They made them, one link at a time.

“Little by little a person becomes evil, as a water pot is filled by drops of water… Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.” – Buddha

Even Hitler was once someone’s beautiful baby boy. Choose carefully.