This column may eventually get posted at Knoxville Voice's Web site, but in the meantime you can go visit there (http://www.knoxvoice.com/) and check out Julie Auer's blog or Steve Dupree's guest commentary or something and pick up a hard copy for my column. Or, of course, read it here.
A Modest Proposal Toward a More Rational Religion
by Scott McNutt
A while back on a local discussion board, someone proposed forming a church of fundamental humility and inquisitiveness, whose evangelism would consist of asking people what they thought about stuff. So taken with the concept was I that I’ve decided to resurrect it – with just teensy tweaking and fleshing out. What follows is my modest proposal for the formation of a church whose beliefs and practices would conform entirely with those of the United States of America’s military rules of interrogation. It would be called the Church of Rational Inquiry for Truth (adherents would be called CRITters for short).
The Church of Rational Inquiry for Truth would be dedicated to the quest for the True Truth, naturally. We’d ferret out the Truth no matter where It was and no matter who was hiding It. All CRITters would do is ask questions of people. We’d calmly ask rational questions of anyone whom we suspected of harboring Truth.
If those suspects provided us with answers we believed were half-Truths or unTruths, we’d ask them some more rational questions – still calmly, but more forcefully. Our Pastors of Gentle Persuasion might, for instance, strap the unTruthers tightly into chairs in contorted, perhaps even painful, positions, and say to them in very even tones, “Tell us the Truth.”
And if the unTruthers still refused to be Truthful, we would use even more persuasive techniques to squeeze the Truth out of them. We would do this not because we derived any pleasure out of causing pain to the unTruthers, you understand, but only because we were dedicated to finding the Truth. But anyway, Our Deacons of Diligent Inquiry would have to force the unTruthers to stand naked on one foot in a dark, cold, wet cell for up to 72 hours without food or water, periodically telling them, “Tell us the Truth,” until, at last, the Truth was told.
At this point, we might even believe they had given us the Truth. But if we believed they had told us only a small “t” truth, or that they had maybe told us the Truth, but not enough of the Truth, we would even resort to still more forceful measures. And we’d only do this with great sadness, not because we wished ill on these pitiful unTruthers, or because we took joy in their misery, but because the higher cause of seeking the Truth sometimes requires extreme measures. So our Bishops of Really Forceful Inquiry would repeatedly hold the unTruthers heads’ underwater for up to two minutes at a time to be sure we had the real, unadulterated Truth.
Of course, after the unTruthers converted and became Truthful, we’d still have to test their faith. You follow that, don’t you? The unTruthers have been unTruthful in the past. We must take care that there is no backsliding.
So to be sure that the Truth the converts had provided was actually True, our Archbishop of Actively Ensuring the Truth would take our new converts’ families to an isolated place, and over closed-circuit TV, threaten to execute their families and even pretend to do so off-camera. That way we’d ensure the Truth they had told us was in fact, the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.
Of course, if our Pope of Pure Truth had doubts about the converts’ sincerity after this, we might, in very rare circumstances, stage actual executions of a convert’s family. We would hate that they’d forced us to this extreme, but what else could we do? The Truth must be known. So we’d execute their families. And then we’d be satisfied.
We’d have to deal with splinter groups, of course, every religion has them. There would be those who would claim that the search for Truth cannot be constrained by concerns for mere decency, and that any and all measures, including torture, must be allowable in pursuit of the Truth. They’d give themselves some noble-sounding name, like the Church of the Thorny Crown of Absolute Truth, Inc., to make themselves appear more reasonable and their methods more palatable.
But we True CRITters would know that they were wrong, and we would denounce their methods as barbaric. We’d tell them there was a line, a humane line, and that they’d crossed it. All the while, we’d still love our splinterer CRITters and their quest for Truth, misguided though it was. And such would be our love forour misguided fellow CRITters that we would use only humane methods, like brainwashing, to return them to the True path of Truth.
Then there would be those who would deny and denounce us, saying that the True God was a God of love. Their God, they’d say, would never countenance the methods we used in our search for the Truth. They’d say Jesus would tell us that if a man struck you upon the cheek to turn the other one to him. They’d say Jesus would tell us to love our enemies as our brothers. They would say, “Ask yourself, ‘What would Jesus Do?’”
However, through the doctrines of the Church of the Rational Inquiry for Truth, we’d already know the Truth about Jesus: that he’d brought, not peace to earth, but a sword, to fulfill his mission. He says so himself, does Jesus, right in Matthew 10:34. Jesus, we’d be confident, would approve our mission, too.
So when the deniers and denouncers asked us “What would Jesus Do?” We’d tell them “He’d hold our Ipods for us while we stoned this guy. Not to death, that would be wrong – but he’d hold our Ipods while we stoned this guy to Truth.”
And that’s the TRUTH. So help me, God.
Posts
