June is bustin’ out all over in my garden. So are the incarnadine roses, the sumptuous peonies and the prolific cherry-tree. “C’est le temps des cerises” – it’s cherry-time, as the song says, and birds of all sorts are zooming into my Garden of Eden to take their pick.
Cherry-picking was one of Martin Luther’s many talents. His Protestantism is the remains of the Catholicism he abandoned, with a few other morsels like “faith without works” thrown in. But what amazes me about all religions is that their founders all got it wrong. Why did they put in all that stuff about a vicious, vengeful, bloodthirsty tyrant, flooding His children off the face of the earth, commanding His chosen henchmen to hack to death His and their enemies – men, women and children and every last sheep they owned – and threatening eternal torture to His wayward, beloved children ? Such horrors fill the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran. Not to worry. Bring on the cherry-pickers !
I’m sorry, “moderates”, “progressives” of every stripe of religion. You can’t have it both ways. Either you accept the God revealed in the “divinely inspired” sacred texts, or you don’t. You can’t pick and choose the cherries you like and explain the others away. The whole thing is a fabrication, and no amount of exegesis will justify your accepting only the acceptable bits. Cherry-picking is for the birds.
RIDENDA RELIGIO
