Rewriting Twain

The grade school teacher was reading Mark Twain to us: Tom Sawyer. She organized a play. Tom and Huck were off on the river bank, camping, loafing, fishing. I was appointed to play one of the boys. My instructions were to do the cooking, I complied. Oh, boy, Tom: bacon, beans, eggs: this is gonna be great.

No, no, our imprisonor interrupted. You're not supposed to be enjoying this: you're boys, on a river bank, you're cold, you're lonely, the food is terrible; you miss your mom ...

But I'm a good cook, I protested. This occurred after the incident around the fourth grade where I baked cookies for the class and not only did the teacher not thank me, not prepare time for the class to thank me, but she called me a liar: a boy could not have baked such great cookies. But I had. Teachers, doctors, cops, judges, prison guards: anti-Christian morons, all.

Have you read Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn? Was the teacher's interpretation supported by the text? Or was she making up her own propaganda: that boys are helpless, inept, need their mom? My interpretation too may not be supported by the text: I haven't read Tom Sawyer since then, and don't recall any such situations in Huck: though I've read Huck many times since grade school.

I'm just reading Bart Ehrman on how the assemblers of the Bible read this manuscript of this gospel and that manuscript of a similar story in another gospel, and a later follower's account in one of the Pauline epistles ... and wind up writing their own version in their own gospel, trying to blend different accounts as though one story were being told, in the same way, with the same finite set of facts. Uh: we've got a new gospel for each Christian! I do the same. I know I do it, I admit that I do it. I say that I'm writing the Bible. Everyone ignores me: pretends that they are reading God's MS; that I am simply off the page...

We make up our religion as we go along.

Modern Christianity is premised on an article of faith that God has said nothing new to anyone for two millennia. The Jews had done the same. Old messages count, the ones the priests have total hold of; there are no new messages, we crucify new messengers. School is the same: unless new propaganda is called for: then state trained morons become the new oracles. And God will never get a word in edgewise: not past the perpetually new Nazis: where a Miss Tilly is every bit as good a Nazi as any Herr Helmut or Herr Gerhardt ever had been.