CelticBear’s Musings

(I can’t come up with blog titles! Keep reading to find out about Mars and wacky stuff.)

I can’t find the actual quote, nor who said it. It might have been Michael Shermer or Joe Nickell or Robert Price who said something like: “Religion allows many people to ‘legitimately’ believe something that one man would be labeled insane for believing in.” Basically, if something is stamped as being of a religious nature, especially Christian in this country, we’ll turn a blind eye to it or even entertain the idea.

(Of course, this quote is mainly referring to the entire religion in general! If you’d never heard of anything from Christianity before, and some lone guy came up to you and said “I’ve got a message from an ancient book! It says we’re all doomed to hell by merciful God! But himself, in the form of his own son born from a virgin and could raise the dead, was murdered and sent back to himself, to convince himself we should have a chance at going to paradise! What mercy!” You’d probably put a quarter in his Styrofoam cup, mumble “Get a job, ya bum,” and walk on. And yet, because this meme was elevated to one of many official Roman religions by Constantine, and then later forced onto people at the points of spears by later Roman emperors, we’re stuck today with millions of people completely accepting a Bronze Age myth they were raised into about a schizophrenic god and a sadomasochistic murder story that convinces god to have mercy on beings he created to die into damnation for his own glory. Wow. Anyway….)

So, Phil Plait at BadAstronomy has a blog today: Mars is Hell, in which he points to some pastor’s Web site who explains in great detail how the planet Mars is a heavenly reminder of Jesus and God’s sacrifice. (I break for a second to again ask, what kind of sacrifice is it when the sacrifice is an eternal God himself who spent a measly three days of his eternity dead or dying and can simply shrug off death and return to cozy heaven?)

This guy makes some pretty absurd claims like, “The Red Planet has two sides, front and back.  The two sides represent the front and back of Jesus Christ on the Cross.” Well, first of all, Mars is an orb, a sphere. It has no “sides.” If he’s thinking in his 2-dimensional mind about the maps of Mars he has imaged on his site, those are arbitrarily defined malformed representations of a sphere, just like maps of Earth.

He also says: “The name, Mars, came from Satan.  It refers to Satan as the god of war, who was defeated when Jesus Christ paid for the sins of the world on the Cross.  The name, Mars, is blasphemy.  The Romans, who were hoodwinked by the devil, named the planet; and scientists, who are no smarter, have continued the deception.  This is just another lie of Satan, the master of deceit, in an attempt to hide the truth of the Cross.” Wow. I mean, wow. This expert in the etymology of name evidently forgot to also study the etymology of the name “Satan.” The use of the name “Satan” to mean an evil devil didn’t even come about until medieval England. Up until then Satan was believed by both Jews and Christians, to be an angel whose job it was to test people in the service of God. But then, most thinking by fundamentalists is pretty medieval, so I guess it’s no wonder that he should stop there when retrofitting Roman myth to fit his ideology.

What I’m trying to get at, and what Phil says in far fewer words and more eloquently, is that there are Web sites like this guy’s all over the Web in regards to alien sightings and visitation, ghosts and channeling, New Age crystal power, the power of Pyramids, alien civilizations on Mars, faeries, plans for cold fusion and perpetual motion machines using water and match heads, and we consider those guys loons at best. But because this guy is spreading his lunacy under the guise of Christian faith, he’s considered “interesting” at best at worst, a visionary of religious symbolism!

Now, like Phil says, this guy is outside the mainstream of Christian belief. As a former mainstream Christian myself, and as a citizen of nearly rural Bible Belt, I can confirm that most Christians I know would read this guy’s site and shrug and laugh. But I do know some Christians who would consider what he says very seriously and may even adopt some of his symbolism, or at least pass it along to others as “here’s an interesting way to think about X” and then the meme infects another person. And if it were a site about ancient Atlantians most people would ignore it. But because it’s Christian in nature, more people in our culture are willing to “open their minds” to it and turn off their skepticism and reason and allow the crazy to take just a little bit of real estate in their minds.

I know I said earlier that I’m going to be focusing less on trashing people and more on the positive…but I’m making that New year’s Resolution and I need to get some trashing out of my system. =) It’s going to be VERY hard for me to come across scary and potentially dangerous things like this and not comment on them, though. =(