Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
And so it happens every year -- all year actually -- but most appallingly and undisguisedly around the time of Mithra's birthday. You know, Mithra, the son of god by a virgin mother and member of a holy trinity whose cult competed with Christianity for hundreds of years and in large part was the furnished apartment the Christians moved into when they went Roman. So who can be surprised that "Liberal" CNN would trot out another snotty attack on disbelief today, embedded in an interpretation of that mawkish box-office failure It's a Wonderful Life.
The annually erupting movie is a fitting metaphor for a nation absent Christian belief, author Larry Taunton says. Those wanting to do away with the faith should be careful what they wish for. 'Doing away with the faith' of course, means dissuading the faithful from running your life; dictating according to their own set of religious laws and demanding special exemption for their actions. They're sure as hell not equating faith in Indra or Thor with their equally unsupportable beliefs.
No, faith is good when it's Christian faith even when the faithful can't agree with what that is or whether angels are part of it or whether Quakers are heretics or just who it is the god of love hates most. Any other faith is simply satanic, regardless of content, else ol' Larry here would be giving the Zoroastrians with their strict sense of morality a free pass to heaven. And he doesn't.
Of course if there is a nation absent Christian belief, or more repellent, absent that cobbled together self-contradictory chimera they like to call (the Judeo-Christian ethic) it's not the USA and the conclusion that our waning belief is deadly to morality and stability and all other political, economic and tectonic woes including that "general malaise," is part of the same belief package. It's circular. To see that decline, one has first to believe in it, which is to say, if you believe it, it's true. If you're a Christian of the correct sort, it's true; which again is to say, nothing is true but what the Church tells you is true and Après nous le déluge.
Yes, indeed, it would be a sad day for America if people stopped questioning the notion that democracy ( which used to be held as evidence for decline and condemned by nearly every church ) universal suffrage, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the end of slavery and a more modern sense of morality that includes frowning upon child abuse, torture, spousal abuse and the torture of animals -- all things fine and dandy in the heyday of ecclesiastical tyranny -- were signs of the end times that Christians have been awaiting for 2000 years and which will never come. Why, insinuates this obnoxious Nosferatu from his ancient grave -- we might become savages in the moral vacuum departing Christianity leaves behind: wild and murderous barbarians like the French, Danes, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, English . . .
Face it, without faith that everything is going to hell, Christianity would long since have died out or at most be another kind of Judaism, and people like Larry Taunton would be lying to the empty air and raving to the bats in some secluded cave far away. As Nietzsche said: "The Christian determination to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad"
What the movie is trying to say, is that faith in ourselves will save the day and that's hardly what this damnable deceiver in his contempt for sanity is selling. In fact it's the very opposite and they just can't get through a December without spitting in the face of human values, denying their own bloody history and claiming to be the only rightful leaders of the world and insist they're right because they've made everything worse.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteI believe it was Wilde who said that Jesus' greatest misfortune was that so few of his followers understood anything he said. I'm astonished at phenomena such as "the gospel of prosperity" being preached as if it had anything to do with the teachings of Jesus or of the Bible more broadly. No "prosperity doctrine" could survive even a cursory reading of the relevant texts, yet such nonsense thrives and thousands flock to it.
If Christianity is to mean something to decent people, I think it has to acknowledge the basic imperatives of compassion and charitable action towards others. It should not be an option to impose a strict world view and judge others harshly by that view. How we get from The Gospel According to St. Matthew to "the Christian Right," or any of that narrow-minded bigot-stuff, is beyond this lizard's walnut-sized capacity to understand.
Perhaps this comment misses the point of the post. However, if I may... As I see it people should be a bit more focused on the spirit and reasoned thought that personified The Age Of Enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteReligion, as opposed to Christianity or spirituality has always been about power and or control. Until the Great American Experiment of 1787. It is unfortunate the new age right has forgotten history.
Oh, I almost forgot bloggingdino, you are I believe correct in stating, "How we get from The Gospel According to St. Matthew to "the Christian Right," or any of that narrow-minded bigot-stuff, is beyond this lizard's walnut-sized capacity to understand." It is also beyond this bi-pod's ability to understand.
The Age of Engligtenment.
Oh Bull! as in go sacrifice one with your dad to ensure you are a man!
ReplyDeleteGrung_e_ Gene - You do yourself proud. Please feel free to continue the insults.
ReplyDeleteBy the way... Belated Merry Christmas.
It may well be that, as Dom Crossan makes such a good case for, that Jesus was not quite the man of peace we make him out to have been, at least not when it comes to insurrection against the Romans. Perhaps he only meant to be a bystander, perhaps he meant it when he advised his crew to buy weapons, but I have to think of the line in the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus tells Thomas he would be totally astounded if he know who he really was: an ordinary man perhaps? I'm sure we would be astounded too.
ReplyDeleteMatthew didn't have a good command of Hebrew, is very likely to have been far too young ever to have met Jesus and seems to have based his writing on other, older texts containing quotes, as Thomas does -- and on the early version of Mark (Ur-Marcus) which was later added to and redacted in the 4th century.
Was Matthew's Jesus the same as Thomas' or John's written several generations later anywhere near the same as the fellow who told you to hate your family, pay your taxes, ignore the biblical commandments and get yourself pure for the coming destruction of Rome so God will restore the Davidic dynasty? Who knows? Not me anyway.
We'll never know and I think the search for the historical Jesus is ultimately doomed as no less a worthy than our own Jefferson said. What we call Christianity is a palimpsest so frequently overwritten and with pages removed and pages added. The great crime of Christianity, said our founding father, was to have made Jesus forever obscured and unreachable.
He is what anyone says he is and what was made up yesterday often seems more valid to people than what we dig up in ancient texts or deduce from what there is of historical records.
So I think it's misleading to speak of Christianity as a religion rather than as a loose family, the roots of which become more manifold as we go back in time as do the branches when we go forward.
One thing I'm fairly confident of after studying religions for so long, is that syncretion explains much of the history of religious evolution. Jesus would look different today, if we remembered him at all, had it not been for Mithraism, Zurvanism, the cult of Attis and the sun god of which Constantine was the high priest. The Jewish roots were already dead before the New Testament was compiled by converted pagans and Jesus was dressed for his new role as a Roman god.
As there is no unbroken thread of recorded history going back to the man from the Galilee and his words, I have to wonder if the real Jesus has a different reality for everyone who thinks about him. Perhaps one's view is a mirror. To those rolling on the floor babbling denominations, it seems that what Jesus can do for you is all that really matters. It doesn't really matter what you do or how you treat others. You can't be worthy of heaven without saying certain words no matter how good you are and face it, you're a miserable sinner living in a miserable world.
As certain schools contend, you aren't saved by good works and getting "saved" is what it's all about. So why not "Jesus wants you to be rich" and why should we worry about rich men and the eyes of needles? Anything you say about Jesus is true to someone who wants to believe it.
Christianity is a set of separate universes that may intersect in some places but as with real universes, they contain different realities and one may never be able to get from one to another.
Elaine Pagels said that one can't explain it all by politics, but I disagree. I don't think you can explain it without politics, which is of course power and control -- and money too of course. God always needs more money.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteAs that Dickens character says, "it's all a muddle." No doubt. I'll just run with William Blake's Jesus: the principle of imagination, something with which to carry on intellectual and passional conversation, lest the self collapse back in upon itself and be consumed. In other words, Blake seems to have thought we need to spin mythoi in an active, imaginative way lest we become the slaves of nature and society; yet at the same time, we have to avoid becoming enslaved by the productions of our own imagination: or else we'll end up being eaten by that famous "Tyger Tyger burning bright, in the forest of the Night," so to speak.
RN and all,
ReplyDelete“Religion, as opposed to Christianity or spirituality has always been about power and or control.”
If you mean what I think you mean – that institutional forms are usually wielded to serve the interests of power –dinos everywhere would probably agree. Besides, when we try to go to church, they just throw rocks at us. It’s un-Christian of them!
The reason why I don’t run with today’s most vocal atheists is simple: while I’m not myself a believer (except in the Dinosaur Gods), I’d like to preserve the possibility that some people who call themselves “religious” in a non-institutional sense are asking legitimate questions about life and how to live it. That’s an ancient and honorably philosophical thing to do, not a sign that a body is crazy or hopelessly befuddled and naïve and insufficiently appreciative of the gift of reason.
People get themselves into trouble, I believe, mainly when they go to “religion” (I’m using the word broadly for convenience’s sake) looking for quick answers to timeless problems. In my view, a genuine spiritual quest wouldn’t be about arriving at the metaphysical equivalent of the military’s Meals Ready to Eat, it would consist in enlightened seeking, done in the knowledge that there may not be easy answers, or answers at all, to mortality or to other of life’s substantive problems. Too many people run to religion out of fear, and they demand from their new home a solid ideological edifice, an exclusionary world view that lets dwellers therein settle things once and for all. Religion, done that way, is probably the most potent tool of oppression humankind has ever devised: more effective even than physical brutality.
Spiritual enlightenment (of whatever sort) may not let us slay our dragons, but it may at least allow us to face them with dignity. Reason and science (handled well) would be another path in the same direction, and it’s understandable that many prefer it. I retain my regard for both paths.
By the way, I should have mentioned that I believe the forms of institutional religion would be perfectly fine so long as one had a healthy relationship to them and was genuinely "seeking" in the manner I reference above. Otherwise, I suppose, Oliver Cromwell's dour Saints would be right to mutter, "'Tis idolatry!"
ReplyDeletebloggingdino - Yes, I meant institutionalized religion. I should have provided the clarity.
ReplyDeleteYour words... "Spiritual enlightenment (of whatever sort) may not let us slay our dragons, but it may at least allow us to face them with dignity. Reason and science (handled well) would be another path in the same direction, and it’s understandable that many prefer it. I retain my regard for both paths."
Well said. Perhaps one day this will be universally understood and accepted. But I won't hold my breath until the religious right finds the wisdom in your words.
What passes for spirituality these days is what I like to call "religiousity". I have no idea if that is a real world but for me is projects a sense of how some pervert the concepts of faith, spirituality and righteousness to uphold their blinding hatred and malicious ignorance.
ReplyDeleteI am not an atheist but a deist who rejects most all of current religious dogmas and doctrines.
What disturbs me so much is not the merry celebrations and the throngs in churches on Christmas Eve but the rabid intolerance shown to those who believe differently or not at all.
My doctrine has always been to each his own if it gets you through the night. Each person seeks their own inner self and it is a journey meant for one.
The one thing we are so lacking is respect toward the beliefs or nonbeliefs of others.