God Squad!

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellows,

I like history very much. I think you all know this. I still spend a lot of my time listening to history podcasts and audiobooks. 

One of my favourite subjects is religious history. This disturbs Caro. Sometimes she will come in when I am listening to something about the life of St. Paul or the concept of the Trinity.

"You're not turning all GOD SQUAD on me, are you?" she asks, nervously.

I think she worries she will come home one day to find me dressed in a white smock, speaking in elevated tones about the rapture and trying to give her pamphlets about the End Times.

I have reassured her many times that this will not happen. I just find the subject fascinating. And besides, it illuminates history. I don't think you can understand European history without understanding the Great Eastern Schism*, or the Great Papal Schism** or Martin Luther's chronic blocked bumhole problems***.

It is often this subject that I listen to when I fall asleep at night. One of my favourite lecturers is a chap named Bart D. Ehrman who was a former fundamentalist, now atheist and Biblical scholar.

It is strange, actually. He's the 2nd former-Fundamentalist I enjoy listening to. The other is a very funny fellow named Dale Martin. I think the fact that they were brought up to believe the Bible is the indisputable word of God makes them excellent scholars. They were both taught to be able to recite this stuff by heart, but subsequently realised, "Hey! This doesn't make sense!"

If you have any interest in this stuff at all, I'd recommend Dale's lectures on YouTube. He intersperses his lectures with songs from "Jesus Christ Superstar" and explains that Revelations is like a stage show, made to be performed live. He then forces his students to chant "WORTHY IS THE LAMB THAT WAS SLAIN"  over and over to prove his point. He is really very funny.

"How did that make you feel?" he asks the students after the chanting. "Do you feel WEIRD? It's supposed to make you feel WEIRD."

The other thing Dale makes his students do, is to learn the phrase, "De Omnibus Dubitandum". Which means, "Doubt Everything".

"I'm gonna LIE to you during this course," he warns us. "De omnibus dubitandum."

I like that. I think that's quite a good philosophy with which to go through life, lying lecturers or no. And perhaps even if you do not share my obsession with religious history, you can doubt everything anyway. Doubt is good for the soul, I think. And there endeth the lesson.

S.

* Caused by a complete dickhead called Cardinal Humbert, who was the only senior Cardinal in Rome who spoke Greek, but who also hated the Greeks. Things didn't end well.

** They were seriously into Schisms, back in the day.

*** Apparently he did a lot of thinking on the khazi. If only he'd eaten more bran, we could have avoided a LOT of trouble.