When 'Religulous' came out, Bill Maher's challenge struck me as true: "If you belonged to a political party or a social club as tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do anything else is to be an enabler, a mafia wife."
Nonetheless, being a religioholic like so many human beings are, a little sniff or too of the bottle, and I'm very close to binging.
A Beliefnet post, though, concerning the sudden appearance of the vile bumpersticker "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8 ", "May his days be few, may another take his office" on cars in the US, snaps me back to reality. The following verses say "May his children be fatherless, let his wife be a widow."
Ironically, the Psalm opens with "O God whom I praise, do not be silent, for wicked and treacherous mouths attack me. They speak against me with lying tongues. In return for my love, they slandered me, even though I prayed for them. They repay me evil for good, hatred for my love". It's the slanderers who are calling down curses on the man they lie about -- of course this is how the majority of the devout read their Blibel.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Jesus and the Tenth Plague
Jesus predicates his mission on the truth of the Hebrew scriptures, which themselves are full of alarmingly amoral depictions of God. Most of all, the central event of Christianity, the Last Supper/Eucharist/Mass, is considered the fulfillment of the original deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Apart from the many problems accompanying the stories that we keep in the Old Testament, the Tenth Plague, the slaughter of the firstborn because Pharoah refuses to let Moses & the Hebrews go -- supposedly, only into the desert to offer sacrifice -- is morally disproportionate. Christians used to have no problem with this -- the Egyptians were abominable idolators & God was actually showing restraint in only putting to death the firstborn when he had the right to destroy the Egyptians entirely. It poses a problem for those whose societies emerged from a lengthy period of religious warring. Even Vatican II was finally obliged to concede ground to those raised in other religions. Jesus shares the belief of his people that God was just in condemning to death firstborn sons as a punishment & a demonstration of God's power.
So contemporary theocrats get around the compassionate precepts of the gospel, and the non-violent ones, by appealing to Jesus' acceptance of the scriptures as definitive. The liberal or generous advice, then, becomes advice solely on how one is to conduct oneself on a personal level, and then only with relation to people who aren't neo-pagans or idolators or violators of God's law.
It is impossible to disentangle Jesus from the God whom he called 'Father' & from the conflicts between differing versions of Christianity, wars that peristed into this century, even into the present day. If the condemnation of the firstborn at Passover is an act of divine justice & love, then any acts that offend the contemporary sense of compassion or mercy can be given the same character -- this is God's law, which is an expression of love. And the gospels give us no indication of a teaching which changed that. The much-blamed Constantine was not an emperor who kidnapped Christianity; rather, as the Eastern and Western empires became wholly Christianized, they took the whole sense of scriptures, and could not come up with a New Testament Jesus, as we have, who is not in accord with his Father in the Old Testament. The Crusaders were right about Jesus: we are the ones who are wrong.
So contemporary theocrats get around the compassionate precepts of the gospel, and the non-violent ones, by appealing to Jesus' acceptance of the scriptures as definitive. The liberal or generous advice, then, becomes advice solely on how one is to conduct oneself on a personal level, and then only with relation to people who aren't neo-pagans or idolators or violators of God's law.
It is impossible to disentangle Jesus from the God whom he called 'Father' & from the conflicts between differing versions of Christianity, wars that peristed into this century, even into the present day. If the condemnation of the firstborn at Passover is an act of divine justice & love, then any acts that offend the contemporary sense of compassion or mercy can be given the same character -- this is God's law, which is an expression of love. And the gospels give us no indication of a teaching which changed that. The much-blamed Constantine was not an emperor who kidnapped Christianity; rather, as the Eastern and Western empires became wholly Christianized, they took the whole sense of scriptures, and could not come up with a New Testament Jesus, as we have, who is not in accord with his Father in the Old Testament. The Crusaders were right about Jesus: we are the ones who are wrong.
Thinking sex equals having sex, thinking murder equals murder
The very first difficulty anyone in the present ought to encounter on considering the character of Jesus is his view of human nature. Everything that follows Jesus' teaching is based on his assertion that thinking is as bad as doing. Fantasizing about sleeping with someone, even looking lustfully at someone, is just as sinful as the act. Wishing that someone might come to harm is the equivalent, for him, as murder.
At the least, this is magical thinking -- the belief that our thoughts about reality are indistinguishable from the reality. People have thoughts all the time, though, without ever thinking about carrying them out. There can never be any moral equivalence between an imagined act, even one intensely imagined, a fantasy which we take satisfaction in indulging, knowing it to be a fantasy, and deciding to take real steps to making it come true.
The same failure of boundries characterizes the entirety of Jesus' teaching. A large segment of protestant Christians holds that Jesus' moral teachings were only meant to show the impossibility of living by them, which is especially convenient when one wants to do all the forbidden things and then say "I'm not perfect -- just forgiven!" Ironically, one of those who took Jesus at his word, Origen, is considered a dreadful extremist who mistook Jesus' meaning in cutting off the member of his body that made him stumble. Catholic theology even considers such an act, making oneself a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven in that fashion, to be a sin.
Jesus castigated the teachers of his time for finding all sorts of convenient shortcuts or loopholes for themselves, while at the same time making things impossible for others. Then he raised a standard even more impossible to maintain -- or, as one would say as a Catholic, possible only with grace -- because his view of what human beings should be is not based on wide observation or on deep thought.
No one claiming omnipotence could possibly hold this view of human motivation, human dreams, human failings, or human achievements.
At the least, this is magical thinking -- the belief that our thoughts about reality are indistinguishable from the reality. People have thoughts all the time, though, without ever thinking about carrying them out. There can never be any moral equivalence between an imagined act, even one intensely imagined, a fantasy which we take satisfaction in indulging, knowing it to be a fantasy, and deciding to take real steps to making it come true.
The same failure of boundries characterizes the entirety of Jesus' teaching. A large segment of protestant Christians holds that Jesus' moral teachings were only meant to show the impossibility of living by them, which is especially convenient when one wants to do all the forbidden things and then say "I'm not perfect -- just forgiven!" Ironically, one of those who took Jesus at his word, Origen, is considered a dreadful extremist who mistook Jesus' meaning in cutting off the member of his body that made him stumble. Catholic theology even considers such an act, making oneself a eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven in that fashion, to be a sin.
Jesus castigated the teachers of his time for finding all sorts of convenient shortcuts or loopholes for themselves, while at the same time making things impossible for others. Then he raised a standard even more impossible to maintain -- or, as one would say as a Catholic, possible only with grace -- because his view of what human beings should be is not based on wide observation or on deep thought.
No one claiming omnipotence could possibly hold this view of human motivation, human dreams, human failings, or human achievements.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Getting Past One's Faith Without the Sarcasm
For over 30 years, I've been involved with Christianity, with the evangelical version in my teens and early 20s, as a Catholic fellow-traveller and then as a Catholic since 1989. Over the years, I've tried to deal with the many problems with my own faith, with the various churches, and with the problems that arise from the conflict between our modern or post-modern society in the US and the expectations or demands of Christian confession.
I'm not one who dismisses claims of miracles out of hand; one reason for remaining a Catholic for so long is that Rome is much more skeptical about miraculous claims than the evangelicals & non-modernist varieties are. I dislike the snarky attitude of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens towards all religious beliefs. The unpleasant ego-centrism of atheists in my teens was a factor in turning me towards faith; they may well be having a similar effect on others.
The attempt of anti-Christians, whether of the neo-pagan or materialist variety, to treat Jesus as a myth is wrongheaded; likewise, the attempt of professing Christians to blame Constantine or patriarchalism or something else for deforming Jesus' words & life is dubious at the very least. If Jesus had been a myth, then the Jewish people in the diaspora would have been well-informed of this fact; instead, they always regarded him as a false prophet & deceiver.
Many want to hold onto Jesus in some form or another as the center or teacher of their faith; others would like to save him from 'distortions', in the manner of Thomas Jefferson or Tolstoy. Apologists and many theologians want to keep him as the second person of the Trinity, as redeemer, as author and finisher of their faith, which otherwise would be in vain.
Whatever the benefits or the drawbacks of faith, all the prophets and divinities available in the present age are dragging us backwards and downwards. The fundamentalists of the various faiths present themselves as heroic defenders against the depraved and destroyers; moderates present themselves as keepers of the faith & purveyors of hope; progressives as those saving the good of relgion and eliminating the obscurantists.
We can't simply rip religion up from the roots; nor should we really try. Marx was correct: religion is an opiate, which means that it's addictive. As a religious addict myself, I know there is no safe dosage: one sip, and I'm off on a bender of belief. The route to my personal religious sobriety is honesty with myself, honesty with others, and a steady application to the truths which slowly dissolve the links that still grip much of the world's culture.
In the US, this means getting beyond Jesus. He's the center for all the chatter about 'Judeo-Christian values' (something that neither Jews nor Christians had heard about before they were both menaced by the tides of enlightenment). What, in fact, are the values that Jesus expresses in the gospels, and which he approved of in the scriptures he believed to be his Father's own revealed truth? How do we blinker ourselves when we try to hold in some fashion to a tangled 'tradition' whose baleful effect today is to keep believers scanning for an "anti-Christ", which necessarily prevents the vast majority of believers from seeking global solutions. Even non-believers are affected by the notion that there is an "anti-Christ" -- a co-worker told me about his teenage nephew who said he thought Obama was the anti-Christ. "And he's an ATHEIST," said my co-worker, "I told him 'You can't believe ANYONE's the anti-Christ!' "
I'm not very fond of Bill Maher either, but his point at the end of 'Religulous' is impossible for me to forget: that those of us who prefer to believe act like Mafia wives when we know how our religion has been & is being used to promote ignorance & violence & brutality.
John Stuart Mill wrote, in his essay on women's rights, that we're wrong to think that people who hold to an unreasonable position will abandon it once it's been disproven. Instead, they think there must be deeper reasons for belief -- 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing' as Pascal put it. It isn't disproof, then, that we need, but an application of the process that John Henry Newman described as the means by which we come to assent, by convergent probabilities. Not disproof, but many small questions, are the means by which we can free ourselves and our neighbors and our country and our world from both the cruelties of faith and from its often real, but often overstated, benefits.
We have to get on beyond Jesus.
I'm not one who dismisses claims of miracles out of hand; one reason for remaining a Catholic for so long is that Rome is much more skeptical about miraculous claims than the evangelicals & non-modernist varieties are. I dislike the snarky attitude of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens towards all religious beliefs. The unpleasant ego-centrism of atheists in my teens was a factor in turning me towards faith; they may well be having a similar effect on others.
The attempt of anti-Christians, whether of the neo-pagan or materialist variety, to treat Jesus as a myth is wrongheaded; likewise, the attempt of professing Christians to blame Constantine or patriarchalism or something else for deforming Jesus' words & life is dubious at the very least. If Jesus had been a myth, then the Jewish people in the diaspora would have been well-informed of this fact; instead, they always regarded him as a false prophet & deceiver.
Many want to hold onto Jesus in some form or another as the center or teacher of their faith; others would like to save him from 'distortions', in the manner of Thomas Jefferson or Tolstoy. Apologists and many theologians want to keep him as the second person of the Trinity, as redeemer, as author and finisher of their faith, which otherwise would be in vain.
Whatever the benefits or the drawbacks of faith, all the prophets and divinities available in the present age are dragging us backwards and downwards. The fundamentalists of the various faiths present themselves as heroic defenders against the depraved and destroyers; moderates present themselves as keepers of the faith & purveyors of hope; progressives as those saving the good of relgion and eliminating the obscurantists.
We can't simply rip religion up from the roots; nor should we really try. Marx was correct: religion is an opiate, which means that it's addictive. As a religious addict myself, I know there is no safe dosage: one sip, and I'm off on a bender of belief. The route to my personal religious sobriety is honesty with myself, honesty with others, and a steady application to the truths which slowly dissolve the links that still grip much of the world's culture.
In the US, this means getting beyond Jesus. He's the center for all the chatter about 'Judeo-Christian values' (something that neither Jews nor Christians had heard about before they were both menaced by the tides of enlightenment). What, in fact, are the values that Jesus expresses in the gospels, and which he approved of in the scriptures he believed to be his Father's own revealed truth? How do we blinker ourselves when we try to hold in some fashion to a tangled 'tradition' whose baleful effect today is to keep believers scanning for an "anti-Christ", which necessarily prevents the vast majority of believers from seeking global solutions. Even non-believers are affected by the notion that there is an "anti-Christ" -- a co-worker told me about his teenage nephew who said he thought Obama was the anti-Christ. "And he's an ATHEIST," said my co-worker, "I told him 'You can't believe ANYONE's the anti-Christ!' "
I'm not very fond of Bill Maher either, but his point at the end of 'Religulous' is impossible for me to forget: that those of us who prefer to believe act like Mafia wives when we know how our religion has been & is being used to promote ignorance & violence & brutality.
John Stuart Mill wrote, in his essay on women's rights, that we're wrong to think that people who hold to an unreasonable position will abandon it once it's been disproven. Instead, they think there must be deeper reasons for belief -- 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing' as Pascal put it. It isn't disproof, then, that we need, but an application of the process that John Henry Newman described as the means by which we come to assent, by convergent probabilities. Not disproof, but many small questions, are the means by which we can free ourselves and our neighbors and our country and our world from both the cruelties of faith and from its often real, but often overstated, benefits.
We have to get on beyond Jesus.
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