Fun video of a song I recorded and mixed for my brother-in-law's band

I mixed this song for my brother-in-law (the singer) and the other guys in his band.  Then my bro-in-law edited the bits of vintage dance moves into it.  I like the effect.

Does Having British Ancestry Make It Harder To Take American Christianity Seriously?

This has been pointed out by many:  Americans and Brits dream different dreams.  Consider their science fiction:

American: Lost in Space, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Trek, Star Wars.  

Good-looking, heroic people in amazing spaceships blast hither and thither across the universe, with gleaming technology which does amazing stuff.  Good people are good, and bad people are bad.  Good people are good-looking, and bad people are ugly and weird looking.

British: A Clockwork Orange, 1984, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, Alien (a British director's vision), Blake's 7, Doctor Who.

Weird people try to deal with a messed up world.  Robots break down or go rogue or turn evil.  Spaceships do not always work.  Heroes may turn evil.  What exactly needs to be done is usually complicated and solutions are imperfect.  Morality is ambiguous.  Heroes tend to be weirder than the villains, who are often handsome or ordinary-looking, bureaucrat types.

There seems to be a British inability to believe in good looking happy people uncomplicatedly doing good stuff, with political systems, vehicles and technology that tend to work quite well most of the time.  You have to put a bit of (imported from America) Terry Gilliam's Brazil into things.  You need some crazy old street people.  You need stuff that's dirty, or that breaks down when it's serious, rather than when it's cute or funny.  Stuff that can't be fixed by smacking it with the edge of one's hand, like Han Solo or the Fonz.

The book of Psalms, and most of the bible, has the two mixed together.  The transcendant with the nitty gritty.  The mount of transfiguration and the lepers.  The voice of God from on high, and the whores.  The holy spirit coming down in the form of a dove, and demon-possessed pigs leaping off a cliff into the sea.  

We know what reality is like.  Things could be good. God wants things to be good.  But there's bad stuff and bad people and it's not quite getting fixed right this second and we have to deal with that.  The good can be persecuted or asked to sacrifice themselves and never see a reward, while the evil can persecute, despoil, extort, exploit and desecrate, and never suffer a negative consequence.  (At least not right now, and we have to live right now.)

I grew up with a mother who was born in England, and a British grandmother in the house.  My father is a pessimist.  Maybe that's why I always prefer British stuff to American stuff.

So when I try to read an American Christian book, or hear American Christian music, or anything American which is all about how Life with Jesus is all great!, I don't buy it.  I need to feel reality in it, and I know right well what reality is like.  It's not magic.  I'm just not an American Christian, any more than I'm an American patriot or music fan.  My favourite music is British people getting inspired by the descendants of black slaves abducted and enslaved in America.  And Canadians appropriating those kind of influences and doing outsider's views of American stuff.  "Not Ready to Make Nice" is the Dixie Chicks responding as outsiders, having been sidelined in America for not being on board with the pep rally.  That's why it has heart.

I am a high school teacher, and when the Students Council concocts themes the kids are supposed to dress up according to, without consulting said kids, in a tired old parade of themes which changes but little from year to year, and kids don't care, and they set up a competition among the grades to see which grade has the most "school spirit," and they come around counting compliant students and get entire rooms with not a single kid who felt like wearing pyjamas to school in January in Canada, I feel like shouting "Wake up!  You're in Canada!  School spirit isn't real!  It's just you trying to wield power, and set your mark upon the masses in the form of arbitrarily decreeing conformity!" 

I like some Canadian music.  I don't like all of it, and I don't like much Canadian literature, though I am a Canadian English teacher.  To me, too much of Canadian literature has the same feeling to it.  It is the feeling we all get when we look out the window.  It is a feeling of cold, sterile, emptiness.  Not many people, nothing much going on.  A feeling of waiting, knowing that very little is likely going to happen, for good or for ill. Too much of Canadian literature is an all-too-accurate expression of that, all-too-familiar feeling. For me, literature is supposed to broaden me, to allow me to take trips to other places.  And not America.  I'm sick of it.  I'm sick of almost every movie and TV show in America being set in New York or L.A.  What about Memphis?  What about New Orleans?  What about Chicago?  What about Boston? (way to go "House" and "The Office."  You had to steal from England to get your show made, but it paid off.  That's why Simon Cowell and Sharon Osbourne and Russell Brand and Ricky Gervais work in America.  They're actually kind of real, genuine people who aren't nice to everyone all the time, not respecting the celebrities just because they're in the room and so on.  Or so my Mom says.)

Maybe the aboriginal people were right that if you film a person enough, you take their soul.  Because California is the most photogenic state, filled with some of the most photogenic people, and with all the filming going on, there seems to be a dearth of souls left to trade for celebrity.  They have to import people from Toronto, Kansas City and Minneapolis to devour. 

My cousin asked me today to listen to an inspiring song written to be inspiring during the Winter Olympics.  It really touched her.  Someone commented under it:

Being Canadian is believing, and no one can really understand the power and meaning behind this song unless you are true Canadian.

Vancouver 2010 was an unforgettable experience, for Canadians, for everyone around the world, for the volunteers on the scene, the families watching their daughters and sons. The athlete's heart racing in their hearts. The unforgettable, circumstantial faith in our Canadian athletes. This is what being Canadian is all about.

And I realized, that's NOT what being Canadian is all about. That's what being American is all about. That's what "not asking what exactly putting the words "circumstantial faith" together adds up to" is all about.  That's what losing track of your "one" and sliding it into a "you" is all about.  That's what writing in sentence fragments is all about.  That's what writing crap and then asking the reader if he's a true Canadian if it doesn't "inspire him" is all about.  It's an American attitude.  We Canadians just aren't into flowery, highflown rhetoric.  We are British enough that it either makes us cough uncomfortably and look solemn just to be polite, or it makes us sneer and snicker a bit at how tatty it is.  "Who do they think they are?" we want to know.

I mean, to me, the words of stuff like that just sounds like "Blah blah blah, so happy, blah blah proud, blah blah lovely, blah blah majestic" and so on.  Like crap, in other words.  Like propaganda selling its own empty self. 

And then I thought about another song which was sung at the winter Olympics.  The song "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen.  It's about the experience of cathartic ecstasy, whether achieved religiously or sexually.  And mixing those two together, and seeing the connection, and God's hand behind and heart in both equally?  Makes me able to believe in them.  In way that "lovely, lovely blah blah honour pride and majesty, blah we all feel it blah blah the world united as one"  doesn't.  I mean, John Lennon wrote a song about the world being one, too.  But his song "Imagine" was about imagining it, seeing it and trying to make it happen, not fantasizing over it and changing nothing.  I can feel "Hallelujah" and I can feel "Imagine."  So can a lot of people.

Backwards

A lot of people raised in Christian homes reach adolescence and young adulthood and simply find they've lost their belief in Christ and God, if they ever really believed in the first place.
  They will tell you "I have so many fond, happy memories of growing up in that kind of environment.  I think it's really good for kids, you know, to learn about morality, and how to treat other people.  But you know?  I just don't have that faith.  I'm sure they find it comforting, which is great, and I wish them all the best, but it's just not for me."  They don't feel like they've "lost" it, though.  They feel they've seen through and outgrown it.

  As usual, I have done things backwards.  I reached adolescence and found I'd lost my belief in other Christians, and in being raised in an insular church setting, if I ever really believed in the first place.

  I will tell you "I have many horrible, upsetting memories of what can go on in those kinds of environments.  (Child molestation, money laundering, addictions, spousal abuse, suicides, murders and the like.  All of which it isn't viewed as Christian or "constructive" to mention or try to work through emotionally.  They so need to be anomalies, and not symptoms.)
  All human communities have those things going on in them, of course.  It's how rigorously Christians seem to unthinkingly deny that these problems are serious ones in Christian communities too (and how much less fairly, dependably and effectively they are dealt with there) that I can't drop.
    I think it's not safe for kids to learn (in the unspoken lessons that daily go on) that they, as Christians, are just better than nonChristians and that the people in their group are better taught than people in other Christian groups, and that they can go ahead and just ignore others unless one is "helping" them by preaching at them.  I think it's not safe for them to learn that they are never to say what they feel, nor feel what they feel unless the feelings are good, Christian ones.  I think it isn't safe them them to be taught not to be who they are, for that matter.  I think it isn't safe to teach children "Don't be who God made you, be who others need you to be.  Right now I need you to be more cheerful and to not talk about That Thing and how it bothers you."  But you know?  I still have, and have always had a relationship (often stormy) with God.  I generally find it challenging and troubling, and I'm stuck with it.  It's real, whether I want it or believe in it or not."

  But I don't think I believe in Christians anymore.  Or church.  And I don't mean "the Church" (ecclesia) as a concept put forth in the bible, of course.  I mean what the average person on the street means by the word.

  I grew up believing that I needed the church community to keep me from sinning, to keep me believing in God and the bible, to keep me from substance abuse, to give me a social community in which I actually belonged, to provide me with social interaction (right from Friday night activities, up to and including a spouse), to teach me what God wanted, to tell me what the bible said, to keep me reading the bible and praying.  The community was supposedly essential, I was told, to make sure I was ok and protect me from spiritual attack, to comfort me in times of trouble, to be healthy for me in terms of my emotional health, to help out with money, to help me find work, to keep me away from other Christian groups who had inferior understandings about religious matters, and host of other unstated things.

  What I found was this:
The community didn't keep people from sinning so much as it defined the precise shape and manner of sinning in which they indulged.  And they indulged.  I feel I believe in God and the bible very much despite the church community, and not because of it.  The church expected complete abstinence from all recreational substances as the only real way to ensure there were no substance abuse problems.  That's overkill in my case.  Drinking a beer with friends is something valuable and worthwhile to me.  In some cases, substance abuse happened with pharmaceuticals in churches.  Or people just took in ridiculous amounts of sugar and caffeine.
    The church community was completely ill-equipped to provide me with any social interaction with creative people, with thinkers, with artists.  (I didn't ask to be born with a streak of that through me, but I was).  I found I had to increasingly ignore what I was being told in the church community in order to learn anything God might be wanting to say to me, particularly if it was something which in any way involved the church community.  Because it was contradictory.
   I found that the church community was so determined to argue that the bible clearly meant they should just keep on doing what they did, that they were unwilling to discuss openly or deal with what it straight out said, much of the time.
   I read the bible and prayed despite, and about, the church community.  As a threat to my being who God created me to be, oftentimes, as that was simply a fact.  The church community proved itself completely inept at dealing with spiritual vulnerabilities they had, and was not safe from malicious, backstabbing, bigoted, anti-thinking, anti-feeling contemptuous spirits of arrogant malice.  In fact, they routinely ran everything.  It was troubling, maddening and downright bad in there, rather than a comfort.
   When I needed money, no one gave me any, despite there being many rich folk and many people who ran businesses and owned a lot of property.  It didn't generally help me find work.  Living the Christian life and attending all the stuff and giving it lip service made me want to be dead.  My connecting to other Christian groups, much against the wishes of the community, taught me that people from other groups were a striking mixture of valuable alternative perspectives on things, and having all the exact same problems, equally not dealt with.

In my life sometimes individuals, Christian or otherwise, have eventually let me down.  Communities of all kinds (Christian and otherwise) have though, and that quite early on, consistently screwed me over, sidelined me, shut me, ostracised or sanctioned me and otherwise generally proved themselves to be about some theoretical collective, and not actually about any person who formed a part of it who wasn't "in a position of leadership."  Communities are for "people managing."  For herding sheep.  I have a Manager, and a Shepherd already.

So I believe in God and I believe in people.  Two or three at a time.  And I do not believe in the modern approach to Christian community and consciously make a decision to wilfully avoid it.

Taking Song Requests By Email Now

I was just thinking today how that I keep writing things and recording songs and putting them up here, and how I never really know if anyone is looking at/listening to them or whatever.  I realized today that it would make my day if I just had report of anyone listening to anything I'd done more than once, or downloading it and keeping it in their  hard drive.  I have a hit counter on my main site, which surely and steadily goes up, but I don't actually know who's checking what out, nor what they think.  (I get a tirade of abuse and personal comments a few times a year, but that hardly counts as constructive or friendly feedback or affirmation.)

And then a friend of mine emailed a request for me to record a Johnny Cash cover, of a song I, oddly, hadn't heard before.  I did it anyway.  Lit some candles, yelled at the cat to stop wrestling around with lyrics papers in my guitar case a few times, put a googled set of the lyrics up after having learned the song by looking at Johnny and June do it as a duet on YouTube, and here it is.

I'm trying to do a song that needs Motown or soul vocals, and that's a stretch for my voice.  This country/folk cover, meanwhile, is the sort of song that my voice is much more suited to doing easily.

Hello, Down There

This is all by way of explaining this song.  In 1988, I was 18, and deeply in love with an out-of-town church girl.  She was red-haired, and I was writing letters to her and getting poised for a serious romantic relationship, fresh on the heels of the guilt I'd felt from falling for a curly-haired, tiny doe-eyed brunette with a big, white smile, of no fixed faith, who went to my school.  I wrote poems and songs (none of which I shared with Ms. Ginger, of course) and drew pictures and sculpted things.

There was a bible conference at the local college at Easter.  I felt/feared her interest slipping away, long-distance, and carved and painted a little wooden chickadee with pewter legs and feet.  Her birthday was around Easter time, so I was going to present it to her at this spring bible conference, which events were hotbeds of fertility-god-style teenaged tumescence.  It soon became clear to me at the event that she was avoiding me like the plague.  Her sister kept denying it, but it was happening.  Every time I entered a room, across it I saw flaming red hair darting through a different exit.  I felt like death on legs.  I went and leaned on the wall outside the cafeteria at supper-time, numb with shock, a buzzing in my ears, overcome with amazement that a person could feel this messed up.

As I so leaned, a 19 year old walked by with a small child on his head.  You know how you give a kid a piggyback ride on your shoulders?  Like that, but on his head.  And, shortly behind him followed his brother, a smaller, ginger teenager, with an even smaller small child on his head.  There was something deeply surreal about the experience.  The younger, more ginger teen released his child to run off, and soon started up a conversation.  He was a jolly, friendly, sunny type who was clearly intelligent and artistic, which combined traits I had never before encountered in a church attending person.  We started a friendship.  He liked quaint, Broadway/opera/classical/oldies music.  Stuff I thought was cheesy.  I was just starting to branch out into harder and harder rock.  I'd been taught that all rock musicians were Satanists recruiting for their Dark Lord, and was starting to learn that this was a bullshit lie and I was angry.  Not angry enough to listen to metal at that point, but this soon followed.

What also soon followed was that my new ginger friend started dating Ms. Ginger.  They put their ginger heads together and seemed bent on producing a ginger family.  My ginger friend was all guilt, as he'd only befriended me to try to get close to Ms. Ginger.  You see, he'd heard that she and I had been a bit of a thing, at least by church standards, so he'd insinuated himself strategically.  I found this out when I went to a distant bible conference (Toledo Ohio) to hang out with him, and he was with her, holding ginger hands.  He braced himself for my ire, and though I felt tricked by him, I realized that I really didn't want to be saddled with her.  Seen from the vantagepoint I now had, I wondered what I'd ever seen in her to begin with.  She was kind of befreckled and vacant-eyed, and she spoke in a sing-song voice, wore befrilled Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ashley dresses with lacy collars, and was affecting carrying a tin bucket as a purse that year.

All was not well in Gingerland, though, and the dating didn't last.  Despite the admission of why he'd befriended me, somehow, starting out with guilt and perceived friendship obligation due to his dubious behaviour at the start of things, we two remain friends to this day.  Years ago I sat down with him and tried to write a song about how we became friends, to form part of a concept album of mine in which emo me has dug a giant, deep hole (rather than built a giant wall) and is being invited to come on out and be friends (by a jolly, oldies-loving guy) when I am in a darker, angry place.  We got a bit of something, but mostly the song sprang into my head later, and I have since recorded it several times.  This latest one represents me trying to push the envelope on how heavy the "me" part is.

A big problem with my singing heavy songs is that I have a mellow baritone voice.  When White Zombie came up on my iPod shuffle on time, I realized that I couldn't really sing like him at all, but that I sure could shout "YEah!" in a raspy voice.  In this song, I do that a lot.

On a side note, by way of epilogue: at a later bible conference, I fell head over heels for a Hispanic girl from the Dominican Republic.  We wrote a bit, but she then married my cousin.  Her brother, though?  Married Ms. Ginger.

Tron: Legacy makes a point about the nature of evil

Saw Tron: Legacy.  Like the reviews say, it looks pretty cool (for about 20 minutes) and the music is even cooler, but it really fails on the story level.  You don't care about the characters at all, or like them much.  And nothing they say sounds natural or convincing.  And their success or failure doesn't mean anything to you either way.  Also, Hollywood?  Every villain can't just be Adolf Hitler.  That's getting very old.  There are many flavours of evil, and many evil people to draw inspiration from.  The throngs of people in perfect rows, shouting and wearing black suits with bits of red?  Seen it.

But I could watch a movie with Olivia Wilde's eyes in it for quite a while(d).  And her freakishly wide, alien-beautiful face. Some of God's best work.  (even in a "1920s flapper hairstyles are so futuristic!" wig)

One thing that interested me is that they got The Nature of Evil down perfectly.  From Milton and Dante on, the motivations for characters like God and the devil and angels and so on have made no sense at all.  In the bible, it is very clear that God is the source of all creativity, the spirit which inspires (inspires: gives ideas, gives life/a spirit, breathes in) and is the source of all creativity.  He is the Creator with a capital C, who makes enough kinds of butterflies, beetles, berries and fruit, that Dylan Moran said in his standup routine "fruit is just God showing off.  Saying 'Look how many colours I know!' "

In the bible, God creates, and He destroys.  He destroys stuff that's been created and which is not working out, isn't growing, is going in a bad direction.  He does this so He can replace it with other, newer and better stuff.  The bible suggests He's already got His plans together for Earth Mark II, once we've fully wrecked this one, because we're dumbasses and because He's always coming up with new ideas.

Equally clear is the role of Satan in the bible.  He is from Accounts, from the bean-counting division.  He delights in meaningless time-wasting, traditional, bureacratic, systematic ritual orbiting an empty core of nothingness.  He tattle-tales, accuses and lies about people.  He tries to make God give up on people through his "Oh, that guy's not so great.  If you hadn't made him rich he'd be a right bastard.  Can I take away his wealth and prove my point?" nonsense.  He does not have the best tunes.  He does not improvise fun, innovative and unique riffs on the fiddle better than a human being.  He does not create Hollywood blockbusters, heavy metal and Harry Potter "to lure children."

No, he's the one saying "Oh, you can't call it Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  Kids will never read a book with 'philosopher' in the title.  No kid will ever read a book this size anyway.  Give up.  Kids these days don't read.  They're all retarded.  And you're just not good enough.  Who do you think you are?  You're wasting your time and will never connect to anyone.  Doubt, doubt, doubt.  Be realistic."

He's the one telling Kevin Smith "Moby...which?You can't have a character reference Captain Ahab in this movie's dialogue.  It's about teenagers.  No one knows who that guy is.  I have an MBA and I don't know who that is.  And we need some tits in the film as well.  See to that. And get a token black character to say 'Sheeeit.  This just got real' and a funny gay sidekick."  In the bible, Satan doesn't so much destroy people and things as he gets other people and things (or the people themselves) to do it for him.

The slow erosion of health, sanity and functionality seen in demoniacs portrayed in the bible?  Shells of people left empty by parasitic things which slowly wear them down to nothing?  We'd recognize that in anyone who is addicted to something like crystal meth or crack.    You take a perfectly sane, healthy, living, breathing, thinking, feeling creature (a creature is a creation of a creator, of course) and turn them into an inert wreck that's not long for this world.  (the picture seen here is of the "Bob" character from the show Twin Peaks, which is partly about how this parasitic spirit erodes Laura Palmer by childhood trauma, molestation, drug addiction, promiscuity and so on until eventually the erstwhile prom queen becomes a worn down, soon-to-be murder victim who finally seeks death)

And yet, in the work of Dante and Milton and other idiots who can't get their character motivations to add up, Satan is actually God's trusted employee, stationed in Hell where he's in charge of things, and job #1 for Satan is making sure that sinners are properly punished, because We All Know how much the devil hates sin and the people who...wait?  What?  That makes no sense.  At all.

In the bible, of course, Satan is wandering around free in our fucked up world, making sure it's getting increasingly fucked upper, which it looks to be getting.  He doesn't seem to need a ouija board or talisman or that kind of thing to exert influence here.  He is here personally.  And there are a myriad people doing his work, appearing as pious, religious, successful, upstanding people, who then screw up other people's confidence, self-image, dreams, health, sanity, welfare and lives.  This voice can be heard every time someone says "Be realistic.  You can't do that.  And besides, you're a weak person, and a bad person whom no one likes.  You'll never amount to anything."  (Satan's work is certainly being done in classrooms across the country.)  Some people succeed anyway.  The message to them is a bit different: "You don't have to help other people, because you're better than they are.  Also, somehow, you are worse than they are.  Have fun.  You deserve it.  Also, you deserve to lose everything because you're a bad person.  This makes you miserable.  Try heroin.  And hookers."

The message is also "If you want to be OK, you need to be more or less like us.  Lacking originality, creativity, imagination, empathy and hope.  Being idealistic is cute, but ultimately fatal in the end."

In Tron: Legacy, Jeff Bridges has (partially) created a virtual world.  He makes a digital version of himself while still young, foolish and ambitious.  He calls it Clu.  Eventually, Clu goes all Hitler and starts enacting genocides and trying to stamp out impurity.  Jeff Bridges' character tells his son something I remember as "Clu can't create.  He can only destroy or re-allocate existing data and programs."

C.S. Lewis said something like that too in his sci fi trilogy.  Good isn't just the counterpart, the opposite partner of Evil.  Evil isn't Good turned inside out.  It isn't a case of Good creating good stuff and Evil creating evil stuff.  It's Good creating, building and destroying and rebuilding, and Evil not creating a damned thing, but instead corrupting, warping, eroding, inhibiting, nitpicking, accusing, judging, backstabbing, devouring and trying to make doubt win out, all while Good is at work trying make things that can last.

So, the bible does not present a black/white, yin yang universe with good and evil, creativity and destruction needing to both exist, being equal complimentary opposites.  In the bible, good actions and intentions can create or destroy (or both), while evil intentions are not well-rounded like that.  In movies like The Matrix and Tron: Legacy, Creator/God figures are always dressed in white and live in big white featureless rooms and zone out a lot when they're not saying enigmatic things with a little smile.  Good is passive, gentle, inactive, boring, uninvolved and "zen."  It has no real capacity to destroy, or even to get involved, except in a purely advisory capacity.  Evil, on the other hand, is witty, sardonic, exciting, fast, active, mobile, innovative, charming and dangerously cool.  It is completely involved. In everything. Tends to wear cool black outfits too.

But in the bible?  The guys dressed in white (the "angels of light"), shining nobly and pointing the finger at people screwing up and judging them to be failed, guilty screwups?  A common guise of the devil (and his minions), walking around seeing who he can get to listen to him and fostering feelings of entitled superiority (and closed-hearted judgmentalism) in the rich and successful.  Evil devours the innocent and makes sure the guilty get no forgiveness.

By contrast, walking around with dirty feet treating whores, drunkards, homeless people and thieves like human beings and listening to their stories while dissing the religious establishment?  Jesus.  He doesn't judge adulteresses, thieves and drunkards.  He judges religious leaders only.

Characterised by "thick blackness," fire, smoke, a sword that leaps out of His mouth and cuts people to the quick if necessary, terrifying eyes that devour in flames everything they see?  God.  God, it seems, is far more "heavy metal album cover" than anyone wants to depict.

In the bible, God is, obviously, behind all creating/creativity/creative expression. Some people's efforts fall a bit short, but He wants them to succeed.  God is a creator and a destroyer.  Creations are usually to express something deep that was in the heart of the Artist.  We are no exception.  Satan is only a defiler of good stuff, a poisoner of wells, an accuser of people who are trying to get by, Grima Wormtongue whispering your own inadequacies in your ear, a cancer, a rot.  He tries to tempt God to repent of having made people and things, and get Him to make/let entropy flood back in and make chaos of it all.  God, for His part, likes good things to last.  Even with music and movies, stuff that is any good at all, tends to last.  No matter how hard they market the shit out of utter crap, no one's even going to remember to try to keep selling it fifty years later.  And stupid little shows that people loved and no one wants to sell anymore? They last.

There are four books of the bible about Jesus walking around just being a guy.  When he wasn't helping people out, he was repeatedly pointing his finger and disapproving and judging.  But it was always the same guys he was pointing at: the pious, religious folk who judged everyone and made them feel guilty and demanded accolades for their piety (which is what they were really in it for), and the exploitive rich, who had the law on their side like trained attack dogs, keeping them rich and protecting their ill-gotten gains from poor people who the law will keep poor.  He and fictional characters like Robin Hood would have agreed about a number of things.

Chistianity: Is It All Pretend?

To the average atheist (and many an agnostic), Christianity is all pretend.  That is to say they feel it's simply about people pretending stuff that isn't true, and isn't real.  Don't kid yourself.  To them that's what it really looks like.  To me too, much of the time.

Christian communities can be absolutely about people who, without even being aware of it, are unthinkingly trained to pretend:

-not to have any serious doubts about things that, if they thought freely about them, they would find important doubts that need to be explored

-to smile when they don't have any real urge to smile.  A lot.

-to like people they don't really like.  Also fairly often.

-to care about stuff they don't really care about, because they care enough (about seeming like caring people) to fake it.

-to feel whatever religious feelings the others around them are claiming to feel, whether they are, or not.

-to be at peace and not have unanswered questions they aren't getting answers to.

-to be offended by things they really aren't offended about at all.

-to enjoy things they don't like.

-to not be angry when they are.

-to be humble when they aren't.

-to be hopeful when they aren't. 

-that God told them to do various things.

-that the bible told them not to do various things that it didn't.

-that the bible is full of nice things, and that Jesus was nice and went around being nice and not saying anything much that wasn't nice. 

The really bad thing about this pretending stuff thing is that it gets very competitive, and it's also tied into shame.  This adds up to something pretty serious. Among other things, it adds up to people being willing to settle for pretence, or to give up on real spiritual growth.  It adds up to people making an idol out of  "nice."  It adds up to people unable to deal with true, real people or things, getting together into groups to play let's pretend.

And it doesn't have to be like that.  If God and Christianity needs us to pretend stuff, then they aren't worth anything.  But they are.  Don't take my word for it, either.