What Would the Man in the Sky Say?
On YouTube, I have a variety of video clips from my various educational DVDs. The short segment that gets the most attention is entitled “A gay man and a fundamentalist Christian were on a plane.” The comments left behind by viewers range from “Thank you” to “Being homosexual is immoral,” and “This fag reminds me of Jimmy Carter.” (The latter was left by “Jesus4mankind.”) I replied that Jimmy Carter reminded me of Jesus.
The comments need my approval before they are posted. Usually, I let the back-and-forth between readers flow without interruption, but I nix the most vile messages. It would curl your hair and break your heart to read what some people are capable of thinking and writing, especially in the name of God.
In the recently-released film The Invention of Lying, God is referred to as “the man in the sky.” He is created by an imaginative man who lives in a world without lies. He makes up God to comfort his dying mother and to satisfy the hunger of the millions of people worldwide who heard the man had the answer to life’s meaning.
Had I seen that film in the late 1960s as a young man attending a Catholic college, I would have been horrified. Jesus was my best friend. My reaction to the film forty years later is one of glee. That’s not to say that I don’t still have a special place in my heart for the character Jesus that is described in the New Testament of the Bible, but the idea of the man in the sky determining who gets cancer and who wins the lottery is as ridiculous as believing in the Hogwarts School of Magic (with apologies to fellow Harry Potter fans.)
Yet, since I don’t live in a world without lies, I find myself frequently committing them by not speaking the truth when people seek comfort in God. Just yesterday, as I had my hair cut, the stylist explained that the man pictured with him in the photo was a dear friend who had committed suicide. “He’s in a better place now,” he said. “No more pain.” I know that he was imagining his friend in a place called “heaven,” and though I think such a notion is wishful thinking, I also don’t question someone who at the moment needs to believe in it in order to deal with the grief of a senseless death.
Ray heads into the hospital tomorrow for surgery on his back. His L3-4, and his L4-5 need serious work. Had he needed such surgery thirty-four years ago when we met, I would have prayed to the man in the sky for a successful operation. It’s not that I don’t believe in the power of positive thinking but I spend more time now asking questions about the surgeon’s qualifications than I do begging God to make things okay. It’s not that I don’t believe in a unifying and ultimate life force. I just don’t imagine it as a personal consierge.
In this morning’s New York Times, it was reported that Pope Benedict XVI is working on making it easier for Anglicans who share his negative biases about women and gay priests to join the Roman Catholic Church. Do you think that idea came from the man in the sky?
Do you think the man in the sky likes “Jesus4mankind” to call people “fags”? After such a person dies, will he go to a better place? If there is no “better place,” why do the people in government give people who lie about such things so much credibility?
It seems to me that all persons should be allowed to believe what they choose to believe, be it Santa Claus or the man in the sky, but that no such beliefs should be given deference by the state so that churches that promote the man in the sky pay no taxes but writers of children’s fantasies such as Where the Wild Things Are do. I wonder what Jimmy Carter would think about that.
