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BGonline.org Forums
Mini Rant Because I Can
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: Mini Rant Because I Can (mamabear)
Date: Monday, 21 January 2008, at 11:51 a.m.
Ok, ok, he's ranting, you're counter-ranting, but if I were in the mood to participate in the farce of righteously quoting inerrant Word to refute insolent quoting of Inerrant word, I'd see your "Now (emph. added) we live by the commandments of love" Matt 7:12, Mary, and raise you "one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass from the law" Matt 5:18.
And now that I've had my Huckabee moment (he's the candidate who told reporters that he'd had a derogatory campaign ad prepared ... BUT he wasn't going to show it ... BUT he would and did proceed to show it to the reporters) ...
By the way, I fail to see why the so-called Christian Golden Rule, expressed positively ,thereby "presents us with a greater responsibility" than the negative expression of "other" cultures. For example, the formulation that the Babylonian Talmud attributes to Rabbi Hillel (who, like Jesus, was also a Jew and who also died in Jerusalem -- one wonders if the younger knew of the older) : "That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it."
And just as to Hillel the "rest" being "commentary" was not a disparagement of the rest, neither, one might persuasively argue, was Jesus' "summation" in one golden rule a dismissal of the rest of the Law.
One might argue, and one might disagree. So what else is new? You know, back about 1900 years ago, there was a group called the Ebionites who believed that one could not be a Christian unless one was also a Torah-observing Jew. And, about 1900 years ago, there was a group called the Marcionites, who so believed that Christianity was superior in surpassing Judaism that they actually believed that the God of the Old Testament, the one who created the world with all its faults and sin, wasn't even really God! -- but some inferior and out of date demiurge. What the Ebionites and the Marcionites had in common was: they both were very sure they they alone were the true Christians following the undoubtable true word of Christ. And between these extremes countless other groups split different hairs in their own peculiar ways. The folks running the church in Rome, however, disagreed with them all, and the rest, as they say, is history. A history largely untold.
What a quote mine, that Bible, that collective inheritance of ours. With the proper interpretation, it supports near any position. Mohammed, may his name be something, quotes the Testaments Old and New (and not always incorrectly) to show "undoubtedly" that both the Christians and the Jews were wrong! So, Stick, if the Bible's got you down, you might consider Islam. According to the Koran, adultery is wrong, but no stoning! Only 100 lashes. And, get this: you could fulfill your lust to your heart's content with your wives (plural, although limited) and slave girls (plural, no limit).
As it was nearly two millennia ago, the variety of Christian religious experience is still astounding. Which is one reason why quoting here and there from 2,500 or 1,900 year old texts and exclaiming "how stupid!" doesn't accomplish much. Not that there's no place for outrage and ridicule. Both can be effective motivators but not, usually, to dialogue. And there's some irony, is there not, in using outrage at and ridicule of religion to push the very same emotional buttons that seem to have given rise to religion in the first place (and help maintain it). Nothing like telling a body his most deeply held beliefs make him a fool to spread brotherly love and good cheer.
I suppose there is some tiny number of people today who think stoning is still the appropriate punishment for, what was it? "heresy, adultery, homosexuality, working on the Sabbath, and a bunch of other nonesense." But even if God, really, never told nobody to do nothing to nobody for nothing, it's not all nonsense, is it?
Adultery, God knows, there's plenty of. As a species we're not nearly as monogamous as our primate cousins the gibbons. Nor are we as sex-crazed as our pygmy chimp relations. We're closer (but enviously, perhaps, behind) the chimpanzee. And yet in few cultures is adultery considered a thing to be proud of. Not even the adulturers think so, do they? And let us empathize a bit with the poor, ancient stoners: whatever the role of adultery in a huge and heterogeneous and thoroughly modern millie society exactly how understanding do you think people ought to have to been of adultery when the only society anyone knew was the thousand folks in your own village and the few thousand more in the handful of villages and towns you could walk to in a day or two?
Working on the Sabbath. Well, if you follow Dominic "Jesus was a displaced revolutionary peasant" Crossan's analysis, this is not so much an injunction to observe the Lord's day as it is a decree that no one -- not even your slaves ("nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidsevant, nor your ox, nor your ass, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou" (emph. added)) -- should do without at least one work-free day in seven.
You may not agree with Crossan, but if you think his an anachronistic reading, even in that we have an illustration of one of the powers of religion: even written in divine script, it won't stay put. "Religions," as E.O. Wilson writes, "like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners." It's a miracle -- not -- how everybody reading the same book doesn't get the same out of it. So yes, Mary, let us be very wary of all "false prophets" including (if there be any) those who shamelessly demonstrate their confusion of religion with morality (read: "their religion" with "everyone else's morality), claim to have a direct and one-Party line from God's mouth to their ear. and still think they should be President. But no, Stick, let's not just state the obvious, that there sure were a lot of Wrath of God I'm O.K. You're Going to Hell folk a long time ago. I'm more worried about the one's still around today.
And no (and finally) I don't think "organized religion" is essentially simple. It's not at all simple. As a good survey of how it took 400 years for one strain of Christianity to finally to be able to declare itself the true orthodox faith and all other strains heresy, I'd recommend Bart Ehrman's newish book Lost Christianities: the Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and its not essential companion (probably, a translation of most of the texts can be found online) Lost Scriptures: Books that Did not Make it Into the New Testament. It's a fascinating story and, in part only because of accidental discoveries in the last century, one that only now can be (partly) told. Personally, although I've little empathy for Gnostic illusions of secret knowledge, in the Department of Who Said Jesus Said I get more out of the mystical Gospel of Thomas than the mystical Gospel of "Doubting Thomas!" John -- there's a story there, too, only partly told.
As for Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, I haven't read Hitchens' latest; I thought Harris made a good but incomplete argument (and dropped off into loonybin territory with respect to those parts of the paranormal that he thinks deserve serious consideration); and I thought Dawkins' Delusion polemic was entertaining enough but the worst book of his that I've ever read (with the centerpeice "proof" that God (probably!) doesn't exist the weakest portion by far). His books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale I'd recommend to anyone with an interest in humanity.
People do indeed believe and do the strangest and highly ridiculable things in the name of their religions. But I get tired of apreachers preaching to the apulpit. Ok, I laugh sometimes too. So I try to limit my anyone who believes in invisible creatures who care is a deluded fuckwit reading to a few minutes daily. I think it's usually more interesting to take belief seriously.
I'm more interested, first, in why we believe what we believe, indeed, why we believe anything at all, with regard to which recent reads include less diatribal but more, I think, conversational books such as David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral (religion as group level evolution enabling (heh!) individuals to live as a societal unit) Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (religion as arising from our emotional and cognitive processes), and Ken Miller's In Search of Darwin's God which if nothing else, after a very good summary of evolutionary history, gives some clue to how a practicing Catholic reconciles church dogma with natural fact). Also, the collection of essays in D.S. Wilson's Evolution for Everyone is both very provoking and a fun read, probably because it's not about evolution. It's about, well, evolution (imagine, for instance, an evolutionary literary critique of the Iliad, or imagine why you never before imagined such a thing. Wilson could; one of his Ph.D students wrote it).
And second, as Ed Wilson's On Human Nature in part addresses, something I find missing in Harris' analysis: say what you want about religion, but it undeniably creates a believing community whose organization and resources can be harnessed, for better or worse, for societal transformation. If in fact, as Wilson notes, it has become increasingly apparent that we as a species "lack any goal external to its own biological nature," and that in recent years "traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival," and, even so, the "predisposition to religious belief is ... in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature," then ... what in the world could possibly take the place of religion for the majority who still see it as inseparable from very being and human identity? And how and who would work the replacement? On any Sunday you'll find in church many Christians for whom ritual and praise, doctrine and prayer are the least of their reasons for being there. Where else do they or would they or could they or for that matter any of us find as powerful a sense of surely not always destructive and divisive community? "Mere ridicule," if you will, I would submit, is an insufficient answer to "mere" Christianity -- or whichever sole path to truth and light is the religious flavor of the day.
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