Happy, er, Blasphemy Rights Day
Oct. 1st, 2011 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerWeird. The right to blaspheme against a religion in which you don't believe seems to me kind of pointless--freedom of speech is a precious right, but surely there are more meaningful things to do with it. But then, I come from a country where the church has been kept firmly under control, not set free to sack and pillage at whim, so insulting it isn't nearly as important to us as it seems to be to others.
Anyway, in the spirit of blasphemy, I thought I'd share some thoughts that came to me at Vera's funeral.
In considering Christianity seriously, something I have always tried to do, it seems to me important to separate the facts from the flannel; or to put it another way, for the benefit of those among you already bristling at my cavalier use of words like "fact", to separate the events that Christians believe took place from the things they think, and even more importantly the things they say and write down, about those events. An awful lot of what one might call the outer shell of Christianity, for instance, consists of absurdly fulsome flattery of a being who can't possibly either need or believe it. It's dog-love, in fact, and while it can be very nice and all to be wordlessly assured by a dog that you are the all-powerful ruler of the universe and your word endureth for ever especially if it happens to be "walkies," it doesn't mean much, because the dog doesn't know.
So, the facts (for certain values of the word "fact"): God saw something in the world that needed sorting out, which we call "sin." He separated out part of himself, while retaining close contact, and sent it into the world as a human being, who did various things, was tortured and killed and then came back to life, thus in theory achieving the intended purpose, whatever that may have been.
Why (to get personal for a moment) does this story continue to engage me? Why does it feel different in kind from tales of Thor drinking an ocean, or Hercules cleaning out a stable?
It's because it feels like a kludge.
It feels desperate. It feels frantic. It feels like a last-ditch attempt to solve a problem which can't be solved any other way. In fact, if it wasn't for the unfortunate death aspect, it almost feels...Nyrond.
There is a lot of talk in Christian doctrine about God's vast eternal plan, but that is, I fear, more flannel; to suggest that he planned to have everything go so badly wrong that the only solution was a form of suicide is ridiculous. You don't put in your recipe "mix the ingredients well, pour the mixture into a pan, bake for two hours at regulo 5 and then chop off your hand and throw it in." Whatever the author of the Desiderata may think, there is plenty of doubt as to whether the Universe is unfolding as it should. I don't think it is, and I don't think it's always gone the way God expected or wanted it to; otherwise, I can't imagine he would have done what we are told he did.
Having abandoned the flannel part of Christianity, I have absolutely no difficulty in conceiving of God hampered, God constrained, God surprised by an unforeseen and fatal bug and forced to an unpalatable extremity. It doesn't even have to be because he couldn't do otherwise. It's no stretch at all to imagine a situation in which to do anything rather than this one horrible thing would render the entire endeavour, everything that had gone before, null and void and pointless. Yes, of course God could have appeared in glory and thunder, surrounded by armies of mean-looking angels, and commanded us to stop sinning. Yes, he could have taken over control of humanity, turned us all into sock puppets and edited the capacity for sin out of our brains, or something. He could have done anything other than put (in one sense) his son and (in another sense) himself among us with the fixed intention of getting killed. The fact that if he had done any of those things the whole purpose of creating a universe of self-willed sentient beings and letting them develop on their own would have been blown to smithereens should be obvious to anyone. There are a hundred reasons why a person may be forced into a less than ideal course of action. "Omnipotent" and "omniscient" are just words. If we actually knew that God knew everything, then we would have to know what the everything he knew was, and then we'd be omniscient too.
So. The life and death of Christ was, then, in this interpretation, a kludge, a desperate shot at fixing the apparently unfixable. On that basis, the story makes perfect sense to me, and the (self-)sacrifice becomes not only understandable but perhaps even admirable. Against that, though, has to be set the manifest fact that (from the point of view of someone who hasn't died yet) it doesn't actually seem to have helped much. There seems to be no less sin in the world, per head of population, than there was before. The one certain consequence of the Resurrection is that now there is a thing called Christianity in the world, and the results of that, on present performance, seem decidedly mixed.
Two possibilities exist, as far as I can see (though I'm sure some well-intentioned person will now bring to my attention the possibility that there is no truth to the story at all; I haven't forgotten that one, but it falls outside the scope of this argument). One is that, after all, it didn't work, and God, having shot his last bolt, has nothing left to try. Th experiment is compromised, the cake is dough, and he's either moved on, or is just watching in case something worthwhile can be salvaged. Not pleasant, but certainly credible. The other possibility is that it did work, but in a way that, from this side of the veil, we can't see; that the patch, as it were, upgraded our software in a way which becomes apparent at the next stage, whatever that is.
One more thought arises from that possibility, and then I'll stop and await the usual responses. If the story of Christ means anything to us that has a bearing on this life, it proves (again I use the word in a particular sense that has nothing to do with scientific or mathematical proof) that not only do we go somewhere when we die, rather than simply winking out of existence, but that we can--and shall--come back. A criticism often levelled at Christianity in general is that it regards this world and this life as unimportant compared to the next, and certainly grounds for that belief (as for many others) can be found in the Bible, and some extreme forms of Judaistic or Christian belief do or did maintain that this world is an illusion to be transcended as quickly as possible (as, I think, do some forms of Buddhism). To judge the whole by the most extreme parts, however, is a common mistake, often committed these days with regard, for instance, to Islam. Christians in general, according to the Creed, "look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come" (and don't we all?), and in the meantime, behave themselves in this world according to what they believe their God wishes of them. That hardly indicates indifference to this world. If reality is an illusion, then it can't matter what you do to any part of it.
I can imagine, however, in Roman-occupied Judaea, a certain cosmopolitan cynicism creeping down, a feeling that perhaps, yes, all these gods are the same really and as long as you worship at least one you'll be all right. A feeling that religious worship is of course very valuable as a tool for social cohesion and for reinforcing (or overturning, in the case of the zealots) the status quo, might even be an interesting philosophical game, but isn't really true in the sense that we understand truth.
And if that was any part of the bug that the Christian kludge was meant to fix--if Christ came down to prove to the comfortable cynics and the cosmopolitan philosophers, to the desperate revolutionaries and the downtrodden outcasts, that God and the afterlife were realities of the most urgent and palpable sort, and that there was more to being godly than going to the religious observance of your choice once a week and reading holy books--then, sadly, we have to conclude that as far as humanity in general is concerned, it hasn't worked. And he's unlikely to try it again.
Okay, that's it.
Anyway, in the spirit of blasphemy, I thought I'd share some thoughts that came to me at Vera's funeral.
In considering Christianity seriously, something I have always tried to do, it seems to me important to separate the facts from the flannel; or to put it another way, for the benefit of those among you already bristling at my cavalier use of words like "fact", to separate the events that Christians believe took place from the things they think, and even more importantly the things they say and write down, about those events. An awful lot of what one might call the outer shell of Christianity, for instance, consists of absurdly fulsome flattery of a being who can't possibly either need or believe it. It's dog-love, in fact, and while it can be very nice and all to be wordlessly assured by a dog that you are the all-powerful ruler of the universe and your word endureth for ever especially if it happens to be "walkies," it doesn't mean much, because the dog doesn't know.
So, the facts (for certain values of the word "fact"): God saw something in the world that needed sorting out, which we call "sin." He separated out part of himself, while retaining close contact, and sent it into the world as a human being, who did various things, was tortured and killed and then came back to life, thus in theory achieving the intended purpose, whatever that may have been.
Why (to get personal for a moment) does this story continue to engage me? Why does it feel different in kind from tales of Thor drinking an ocean, or Hercules cleaning out a stable?
It's because it feels like a kludge.
It feels desperate. It feels frantic. It feels like a last-ditch attempt to solve a problem which can't be solved any other way. In fact, if it wasn't for the unfortunate death aspect, it almost feels...Nyrond.
There is a lot of talk in Christian doctrine about God's vast eternal plan, but that is, I fear, more flannel; to suggest that he planned to have everything go so badly wrong that the only solution was a form of suicide is ridiculous. You don't put in your recipe "mix the ingredients well, pour the mixture into a pan, bake for two hours at regulo 5 and then chop off your hand and throw it in." Whatever the author of the Desiderata may think, there is plenty of doubt as to whether the Universe is unfolding as it should. I don't think it is, and I don't think it's always gone the way God expected or wanted it to; otherwise, I can't imagine he would have done what we are told he did.
Having abandoned the flannel part of Christianity, I have absolutely no difficulty in conceiving of God hampered, God constrained, God surprised by an unforeseen and fatal bug and forced to an unpalatable extremity. It doesn't even have to be because he couldn't do otherwise. It's no stretch at all to imagine a situation in which to do anything rather than this one horrible thing would render the entire endeavour, everything that had gone before, null and void and pointless. Yes, of course God could have appeared in glory and thunder, surrounded by armies of mean-looking angels, and commanded us to stop sinning. Yes, he could have taken over control of humanity, turned us all into sock puppets and edited the capacity for sin out of our brains, or something. He could have done anything other than put (in one sense) his son and (in another sense) himself among us with the fixed intention of getting killed. The fact that if he had done any of those things the whole purpose of creating a universe of self-willed sentient beings and letting them develop on their own would have been blown to smithereens should be obvious to anyone. There are a hundred reasons why a person may be forced into a less than ideal course of action. "Omnipotent" and "omniscient" are just words. If we actually knew that God knew everything, then we would have to know what the everything he knew was, and then we'd be omniscient too.
So. The life and death of Christ was, then, in this interpretation, a kludge, a desperate shot at fixing the apparently unfixable. On that basis, the story makes perfect sense to me, and the (self-)sacrifice becomes not only understandable but perhaps even admirable. Against that, though, has to be set the manifest fact that (from the point of view of someone who hasn't died yet) it doesn't actually seem to have helped much. There seems to be no less sin in the world, per head of population, than there was before. The one certain consequence of the Resurrection is that now there is a thing called Christianity in the world, and the results of that, on present performance, seem decidedly mixed.
Two possibilities exist, as far as I can see (though I'm sure some well-intentioned person will now bring to my attention the possibility that there is no truth to the story at all; I haven't forgotten that one, but it falls outside the scope of this argument). One is that, after all, it didn't work, and God, having shot his last bolt, has nothing left to try. Th experiment is compromised, the cake is dough, and he's either moved on, or is just watching in case something worthwhile can be salvaged. Not pleasant, but certainly credible. The other possibility is that it did work, but in a way that, from this side of the veil, we can't see; that the patch, as it were, upgraded our software in a way which becomes apparent at the next stage, whatever that is.
One more thought arises from that possibility, and then I'll stop and await the usual responses. If the story of Christ means anything to us that has a bearing on this life, it proves (again I use the word in a particular sense that has nothing to do with scientific or mathematical proof) that not only do we go somewhere when we die, rather than simply winking out of existence, but that we can--and shall--come back. A criticism often levelled at Christianity in general is that it regards this world and this life as unimportant compared to the next, and certainly grounds for that belief (as for many others) can be found in the Bible, and some extreme forms of Judaistic or Christian belief do or did maintain that this world is an illusion to be transcended as quickly as possible (as, I think, do some forms of Buddhism). To judge the whole by the most extreme parts, however, is a common mistake, often committed these days with regard, for instance, to Islam. Christians in general, according to the Creed, "look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come" (and don't we all?), and in the meantime, behave themselves in this world according to what they believe their God wishes of them. That hardly indicates indifference to this world. If reality is an illusion, then it can't matter what you do to any part of it.
I can imagine, however, in Roman-occupied Judaea, a certain cosmopolitan cynicism creeping down, a feeling that perhaps, yes, all these gods are the same really and as long as you worship at least one you'll be all right. A feeling that religious worship is of course very valuable as a tool for social cohesion and for reinforcing (or overturning, in the case of the zealots) the status quo, might even be an interesting philosophical game, but isn't really true in the sense that we understand truth.
And if that was any part of the bug that the Christian kludge was meant to fix--if Christ came down to prove to the comfortable cynics and the cosmopolitan philosophers, to the desperate revolutionaries and the downtrodden outcasts, that God and the afterlife were realities of the most urgent and palpable sort, and that there was more to being godly than going to the religious observance of your choice once a week and reading holy books--then, sadly, we have to conclude that as far as humanity in general is concerned, it hasn't worked. And he's unlikely to try it again.
Okay, that's it.