God evolves

Bruce Gerencser has a new installment of Christians say the darndest things that might be the best one yet.

It seems that some church recently had something called a “week of prayer.” The local Baptists have occasionally done that, too. The godly go to the church every night and pray for something. They pray that He will feed the homeless, they pray that their children will get good grades in school, they pray that the Trump administration will enable them to seize control of their neighbors’ gonads and reproductive life, et cetera, et cetera.

So: This guy is at church with his wife, eager to get to the serious business of petitioning Our Invisible Friend, when it is discovered that — GASP!! — his wife doesn’t have a head-covering. Oh … N-o-o-o-o-o! What to do?

When she came upstairs to the prayer room, I noticed she didn’t have her covering on. For those who don’t cover all day, it’s an easy mistake to make. So I quietly got up to let her know she had forgotten. She placed a hand on her head to confirm and said “oops”. We’re prepared for situations like this, and store a couple extra coverings in the glove box of our minivan, so she headed out to grab one. A few minutes later she came back to let me know, the back-up coverings were gone. I figured they were as the previous week we had forgotten as well. So on Sunday we used the back-up coverings in the glove box and forgot to replace them. So here we are, at church, about to spend some focused time to prayer and my wife doesn’t have her covering. What should we do? I’ve thought about this situation before, but this is the first time it wasn’t just hypothetical. There are two options 1) My wife sits in the foyer and doesn’t join us for prayer or 2) she comes in and joins us uncovered.

Just reading that makes me want to smack this nuisance. Just so’s you know, the li’l woman was allowed to pray uncovered, and the husband has added replacement of the emergency backup scarves to his to-do list.

What makes this story worthwhile is that it reveals the painfully childish conception some people have of the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe. Abraham’s god, the god of the Old Testament, is a sort of supersized human being with a few magical powers. He is discomfited by the heat of the day, for instance, and prefers to take his strolls around the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening. He doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are hiding when he drops in for a visit on that fateful day when they stole the bad piece of fruit. He has a butt, and permits Moses a glimpse of it.

He gets peevish when a woman immodestly displays her hair. That’s who this guy is praying to, the god of the Old Testament.

The god of the Old Testament is absolutely not the ‘ground of all being’ now so popular amongst theologians. The god of the New Testament, and the ‘ground of all being,’ have seen this schmuck’s wife … naked! Yes — NAKED!! That god isn’t foiled by a head covering, and knows that the men in the congregation have all seen a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and their imaginations aren’t foiled by a head covering either.

Seriously: What is it like to go through life imagining oneself under constant surveillance by a testy supernatural being who cares about a head scarf? To feel that one must apologize for not having an emergency backup scarf? That’s the world an awful lot of people think they live in. As The Orange One would say — SAD!

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