Tom Harpur

"If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it's better for you to lose one of your one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better to lose one of your members….." Matthew 5:29-30

Johnny Hart, the American humorist, who reaches almost 100 million readers daily in1,200 newspapers with his comic strip, B.C., and his collaboration of the Wizard of Id, is now a Christian fundamentalist, a Bible literalist, he says.

According to a piece from the Washington Post which ran in The Sunday Star June 13, Hart became a born-again Christian a few years ago. He soon began introducing controversial religious themes into his cartoons, especially near major Christian festivals.

I usually don't read the comics in any newspaper having found them increasingly obscure, and/or irrelevant. But, I certainly support Hart's freedom to use his humor as a preaching tool as long as he breaks no laws. Speaking generally, there aren't a lot of laughs in the Bible so the popularity of his work may suffer. But, it hasn't yet.

Since Hart's exclusivist religious views are shared by millions in the U.S., Canada and beyond; and since deep concerns have been expressed by sensitive minorities - Jews, for example, about their "insidious" content - it's important to examine them.

In an interview, Hart told Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten that Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will burn in hell; that homosexuality is the handiwork of Satan; that America was founded as a Christian nation, and should remain one; that moral decline began the day prayer in the public schools was outlawed; that the end of the world is nigh, maybe by the year 2010; and that Johnny Hart is going straight to Heaven.

Though his comic characters are cavemen, he doesn't believe they ever existed. Instead, Hart says he has totally accepted literalism. The Bible story of creation, he believes, makes plain that the cosmos was created about 4004 B.C.

Were there ever dinosaurs? Hart said; "The Bible called them leviathans or behemoths."

But all dinosaurs were eliminated in the great flood, he says, because they were left off Noah's Ark.

"They wouldn't have tried to put a giant dinosaur aboard."

Because he claims to take the Bible literally, he believes all the words in it are the plain, transparent "word of God." They are not metaphors, not parables (even though the Bible text clearly

indicates Jesus taught by similes, metaphors and parables). They are the God-dictated , unique truth. Hart's "Gospel" is that the fundamentalist approach to scripture is the sole path to being "saved" and "going to Heaven."

Unfortunately, Hart and his co-believers can never escape three major flaws in their seemingly foolproof, authoritative, our-kind-of-Christian-alone-are-the-elect mode of interpretation and preaching.

In a pluralistic world, where billions belong to different faiths - some older than Christianity - and where millions belong to no religious group whatever, the claim of one strand of one religion to hold exclusively "the truth" about Ultimate Reality is simply not credible. An allegedly loving God who sends billions to an eternal, fiery hell of punishment - all those "others" who are "different" from the redeemed - is an unbelievable monstrosity.

The fact that Jesus taught by all manner of imagery which is obviously not meant to be taken literally, and the fact that any talk about God throughout the Bible - and still today - must of necessity be non-literal, indirect, or symbolic, destroy utterly the foundation of any literalist theory.

This second flaw gives rise to the third and final one. I have much admiration for the dedication decency and good intentions of the majority of fundamentalists. But, from years of reading and, more important, from decades of close observation, I can say categorically that self-professed literalists are not consistently literalist at all. They accuse "liberals" of being selective in their choice of Bible texts. In truth, they need to look closer to home for that.

For example, the verses quoted at the outset about cutting off hands that lead one to sin or plucking out an eye that looks adulterously on another are not taken literally by any fundamentalist I have ever met. When I remark on the strange absence of people with missing eyes or hands in their church or when I ask how the most recent stoning went, they grow strangely silent. When Jesus says, "I am the door," literalists know he's not discussing a wooden or metal structure of specific dimensions for closing or opening a hole in a wall.

Hart's Bible literalism is not some quaint, pious dogma, however. It's unloving to outsiders. It can be very dangerous.

Tom Harpur    Faith and Ethics Columnist Toronto Star June 27, 1999