Having caused one fender-bender too many, and his dementia rapidly worsening, 75-year-old Felipe Romero suspected that his gerontologist would soon ask that his driver's license be revoked. So, while still legally and mentally able, he planned to spend the better part of his time driving about in his Ford Explorer, for the sheer pleasure and sense of freedom it afforded him.
That morning after breakfast he was taking a leisurely drive on a side road that led him through a neighborhood of dilapidated shacks and mobile homes, their weed-overgrown yards littered with discarded tires, rusting auto parts, broken kitchen appliances and other assorted trash. At that early hour the only person about was a shirtless man of undeterminable age yawning and scratching his quivering belly on the stoop of a trailer. From the caved-in look of his mouth it was apparent that he had left his dentures inside the trailer, or maybe lost them, or didn't own any. Romero's and the toothless man's eyes met and they waved to each other.
Along the way he tuned to in a Christian talk show on the radio. A Pentecostal preacher had just delivered a sermon in the traditional preachy tone of the profession (Did Jesus talk that way?), and was making it clear to his listeners that he was interested in their salvation only, not in their money, mind you. Yet, he would not dissuade them from making a donation, if the Lord so directed them, to help him spread The Word. And to assure that they knew exactly where to send their checks or, if they preferred, to pay by credit card, he carefully enunciated his mailing address and phone number, not once but three times; and in case they didn't get it, his loving wife of 44 years took the microphone and did the same. Then it was his loving daughter's turn.
Listeners then started calling in, quoting a verse or two from the Bible to support their views, though none of them, it was obvious to Romero, had ever bothered to read, much less study, the entire book.
The old man could no longer remember once familiar names and faces, and he increasingly tended to forget where he was going to or coming from. Yet, minute details from books he had read decades ago he could recall with ease, particularly Biblical passages. Not only could he quote entire passages verbatim, but also cite their reference numbers and, more amazing, pose cogent theological arguments.
Pretending he was the talk show host, he would glance toward the passenger's seat, as if the callers were there riding along with him and, mimicking the preachy tone of the preacher, he would lecture them that they were falsely using the Scriptures to validate their personal hang-ups and prejudices.
To a man recounting the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and quoting from the Book of Leviticus to argue that lesbians and gays should be put to death, he lectured.
"Yes, I realize that some people are repelled by queers. But in the Bible homosexuality per se is hardly an issue. The men who threatened to rape Lot's angelic guests in the city of Sodom were not really gay. They were heterosexual thugs, the kind found in prisons, who rape other men to show their dominance over them—the proverbial 300-lb 'Bubba.' In many cultures, it's accepted practice for a man to demonstrate his masculinity by screwing—if you'll pardon the vulgarity—a weaker man or a homosexual. As a youth in my native Cuba I knew macho men who boasted that they often screwed maricones. As long as there was no affection on the part of the man perpetrating the act, it was not regarded as homosexuality. The film Deliverance offers a good example."
A cat scampered out on the road, and Romero slowed down to let it cross, leaning long on his horn, hoping to instill in the cat a permanent fear of moving vehicles, and thereby spare a fellow mammal the misfortune, not to mention the ignominy, of ending up as road kill.
Romero lectured on: "The Mosaic Law did prescribed the death penalty for homosexuality, but it also did for murder, rape, kidnapping, witchcraft, idolatry, treason, sedition, contempt of court, temple desecration, cursing one's parents, pre-marital sex, adultery, incest, and bestiality—this last sin apparently a nagging problem in the shepherding culture of the Chosen People, not only for the people, but for the sheep and goats as well."
Romero grinned impishly and paused a moment to allow the imaginary caller in the passenger's to register what he was telling him.
"Mentions of sodomy—sexual perversions in general—crop up several times in the Old Testament, but homosexuality as such only twice. In the New Testament, Paul denounces both male and female homosexuality, but Jesus Christ, the ultimate authority on sinfulness, doesn't mention homosexuality at all. So, sorry to disabuse you, brother: God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because the people there were violent and wicked, not because they were queer."
To a woman who held that the government of a Christian nation like United States was obliged to care for the lame, the sick, and the poor, and to rehabilitate rather than punish criminals, as the Lord had commanded, he retorted:
"Wrong, Sister. Acts of charity do not count in the eyes of the Biblical God unless they are voluntary and personal, as illustrated in Book of Ruth. Read the Bible through and you'll see that taxing citizens, under pain of fines or imprisonment, to fund welfare programs, as the government mandates, then spending half the money on salaries and pensions for the bureaucrats running the programs, is not true Christian charity. Legalized thievery, that what it is. Governments, courts, corporations, organizations of any sort cannot have a charitable soul anymore than they can fall in love and procreate. Only individual human beings have that capacity."
Romero's mock preachy tone had gradually given way to a shrill ranting, and as the ranting waxed shriller, his foot pressed harder on the accelerator. The speedometer was reading 85 miles an hour. Afraid of getting a ticket and losing his license sooner than anticipated, he slowed down the Explorer to the lawful 55 mph speed limit and, as he did, the pitch of his voice dropped back down to a normal 60 decibels.
"Nor did the Lord grant the judicial system the authority to turn the other cheek on behalf of citizens by letting criminals run free, as it happens in eighty-five percent of cases in this country. Nor did he endow the pseudo-science of psychology, that latter-day witchery, the power to rehabilitate hardened criminals. That kind of power is the Lord's alone."
To a caller who held that abortion was murder, a blatant violation of the Sixth Commandment, Romero pointed out that this pet abomination of Catholics and Evangelicals, was not even mentioned in the Bible.
"The closest thing to it was the special case in which a pregnant woman caught in brawl between her husband and another man suffers a miscarriage. If the woman was injured or killed, the man fighting with her husband was criminally liable. If not, no big deal. The fetus, obviously, did not mater--Exodus 21:22."
A homemade sign affixed to a light pole, advertising free dirt, caught Romero's attention. He could use a truckload or two of dirt to fill the bog that over the years had been forming in his backyard, but as there was no phone number or address on the sign indicating where to inquire about the dirt (maybe he imagined seeing the sign) he drove on and continued lecturing.
"And as regard the 'thou-shall-not-kill' injunction of the Sixth Commandment, there were many exceptions. The Lord himself prescribed the death penalty for a number of offenses—by burning, stoning, hanging, beheading—and, on more than one occasion, commanded the army of his Chosen People to commit genocide, as in the destruction of Jericho. Nearly every prophet, priest, hero and heroine of the Old Testament either killed or had somebody killed in the Lord's name. So I say unto you, dear brother and sisters, study the Good Book in its entirety, and learn what it really says, before you go around quoting it."
But Romero's lecturing was for his satisfaction alone. Had the callers actually been sitting there in the passenger's seat next to him, he wouldn't have had the heart to refute their un-Scriptural version of Christianity. For most, it was the only glue that held their lives together. Without it, they probably would self-destruct. Besides, who was he to say that they were wrong? Maybe there were Scriptures yet undiscovered or purposely hidden that would substantiate their gut convictions. And even it there weren't any, maybe their gut convictions made more moral sense than the stories of the men who had penned the scriptures served up as the word of God.
Tired of blaspheming, he turned the radio dial from the Christian talk show to a worldly country music station. Between lengthy servings of rapid-fire commercials, the DJ played a song about an unemployed young couple in the throes of a nasty divorce; another one about a woman working two jobs because her no-good husband had left her and their three young children for a honky-tonk tramp; and a third about a waitress and a truck driver who had met one evening in a roadside café, and from there gone to a motel to consummate their chance encounter; but come dawn the waitress stole out of the motel, leaving the truck driver with nothing but an empty six-pack. As a high school student in rural Florida, Romero had learned to appreciate American country music. Those no-bullshit songs about the nitty-gritty of life were the kind he enjoyed listening to, especially now that he had divested himself of all illusions.
On the way back home Romero slowed down for a panel truck pulling into a gas station. The truck's rear bumper bore a sticker that read: "Honk if you love Jesus," and his thoughts again turned to the Bible. Which Jesus did the driver of the truck love? The liberating, forgiving, anticlerical Jesus of the Gospels, or the theocratic, judgmental Jesus of Paul's Epistles?
Romero had always been troubled by the stark disconnect between the Gospels and the parts of the New Testament penned by Paul. He recalled an annotation he once had made on the back leaf of a Bible-study booklet on Paul's Epistle to the Romans: "This contradicts everything that Jesus taught in the Gospels. He clearly did not intend to create a church. The Kingdom of God, he said, was 'within you'--Luke 17:21. So you don't need intermediaries to show you the way to Heaven. All you needed to do is believe in him. His apostles were not professional priests or theologians. Their mission was to spread his Gospel, not by preaching, but by example: 'Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven(Matthew 5:16). Preaching was the Son of Man's job alone, and he had already done all the preaching that was necessary. As described by those who knew him personally, his ministry was largely a condemnation of the organized religion of his time. When he died on the cross, the curtain to the Holies of Holies, the exclusive domain of the high priest, was rent--(Matthew 27:51."
"Now here enter the tentmaker from Tarsus, claiming to have been visited in a vision and ordained by Christ to speak on his behalf, then rebuking the true apostle Peter, preaching out both sides of his mouth, one side praising Christ while the other refuting and confounding his simple message, elliptically telling the faithful that they were spiritually unqualified to comprehend its mysteries, denouncing intellectual curiosity, fomenting guilt, casting us all as born sinners so he could save us, fabricating a new church; in effect, resurrecting the priesthood, restoring the Holy of Holies and thereby laying the foundation for the collective fanaticism that gave rise the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch hunts and other crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of a loving Christ."
The recollection of the tent maker's duplicitous rhetoric was causing Romero to speed up and start ranting again. But he checked himself and, glancing at the truck with the "Honk if You Love Jesus" bumper sticker, now pulling up to a gas pump, he calmly resumed his theological musing.
"In 1 John, the writer, like Peter, an apostle who had known Jesus personally, alludes to a rift that had developed among believers and to the existence of an Anti-Christ that 'is now already in the world' distorting the teachings of Christ. And in Revelation 19:20 the same writer depicts him as a false prophet condemned to be destroyed and cast into the fires of Hell."
Suddenly, as in a counter epiphany to Paul's, it occurred to Romero that this Anti-Christ was none other than Paul himself. "What better way for the Anti-Christ to insinuate himself than by becoming a writer of the New Testament? What better way to keep the faithful duped and disoriented for two millennia?"
But then the epiphany ceded to common sense: "On second thought, Paul may have been right after all. At the gut level, the mass of humankind prefers the security of a well-organized group, however despotic, to the risks inherent in personal freedom—the herd instinct. Maybe by recasting Christ as a leader rather than a liberator the tentmaker from Tarsus saved Christianity from extinction—as I saved that cat from ending up a bloody smear on the asphalt."
Felipe Romero wasn't sure which Jesus the driver of the truck with the "Honk if You Love Jesus" bumper sticker worshipped, but he honked anyway.
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