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Ch. 16: Is Religion Child Abuse?

#64: Mar. - May 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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DWill wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:What Jesus is clear about is that salvation is for those who do works of mercy, not those who mouth orthodoxy..... Calvin got Jesus completely wrong in his theology of limited atonement
You need to be selective in what you believe Jesus really said in order to ignore words like those Frank has quoted, words that make it clear that belief was central to avoiding the flames of Hell, and that a "if you're not for us, you're against us" mentality prevailed. I know the Jesus Group has done this kind of selection, but I fail to see the point. They rely on shaky historical grounds, and what is to stop them from selecting the Jesus they want to be real? But also I see you repeatedly saying that this or that figure perverted the real essence of Christianity, when the germ of such views is clearly in the original documents. You have to do a thorough "Thomas Jefferson" on the Bible to arrive at the document that bears out your view of what it means.
We should select the Jesus we want to be real. That is what the scholars in Alexandria did when they invented him. It is about forming a vision of what we imagine a saviour would be like if he lived. A good example of how clearly Jesus was invented is the story of Lazarus, which is really mainly a nod to the old Egyptian myth of Osiris. Also, Christmas on 25 December is the ancient festival of the rebirth of the sun, taken directly from Egyptian and Mithraic religion. The Christian claim that Jesus was a once for all saviour is entirely fictional. However, fictional mythology is often the most meaningful.

The falsity of its historical claims do not make Christianity worthless. As I said before, this is complicated material. For example, looking at DWill's contrast between the sectarian and universal messages in the gospel, it is not contradictory that a God of love is also a God of wrath: logically, if human society ignores love for long enough, and if love is necessary for life, then a failure of life in love will manifest as what religion calls wrath. My view is that the polarised nature of the Roman Empire caused the early church to gradually shift from a focus on love to a focus on wrath, losing sight of the connection between them. So I am not ignoring Frank's comments about texts such as 'I come to bring peace not a sword'. I'm just saying they can be interpreted as supporting the central message of love, even though this was not how they were used by the church.

The question here is whether religion is intrinsically abusive. Christianity has perverted its faith into impossible lies, including the virgin birth, miracles which defy the laws of physics, God as an entity, let alone creationism and the fond dreams of heaven. This false ideology lays the ground for abuse - in Voltaire's mot, who believes absurdities permits atrocities. Belief in the Blessed Virgin Mary, with its gross distortion of real sexuality, is a big enabling factor in the clerical sexual assault scandals.

The atheist response is generally to say lets do without religion altogether. I reject that because the invented Jesus at the centre of the Bible actually presents a sound vision of human adaptation in the texts I have cited. If we can reform Christianity to meet modern needs, turning all its efforts over the millennia to good purpose, that is a much better result than consigning the whole thing to the junk pile.

For example, consider John 3:16 'whoever believes in Jesus will have eternal life'. This can obviously be interpreted in the sectarian way that you describe, as in the teachings on the afterlife in the main history of the church triumphant. However, it also lends itself to a scientifically possible interpretation, that eternal life is understanding of the eternal values needed for human flourishing - love, beauty, justice, truth - and that whoever believes in Jesus will understand these values, bringing an eternal ethical perspective into the fallen temporal world.
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Robert Tulip

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geo wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:This discussion has a neat segue to American Gods where Neil Gaiman argues precisely that this common scientific view of the relation between belief and existence is incorrect. A main theme of the book is that Gods exist in human hearts, and fall out of existence when they are forgotten and ignored. Gaiman's outlook is actually compatible with a key Biblical text, 1 John 4:16 - "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God" - in suggesting that God is not an entity but a quality of human existence. Here we have belief in love serving to make God exist, with a constructed narrative a main part of the nature of an imagined God.
I don't think Gaiman is arguing anything. American Gods is a work of fiction and Gaiman is telling a story, not espousing Christian values except those which are inherently human to begin with. You seem to be applying your Christian worldview to things that have nothing to do with Christianity. The Bible doesn't help us to understand love. As Frank says, it is more likely to show us how to hate. More importantly, the Bible is such a mishmash of conflicting texts that it can be used to argue anything. This interpretation of love = god is no different from using the Bible to, say, condemn homosexuality. Whatever you like. The Bible is open to any interpretation. If anything, one of the themes of American Gods is about the power of human belief, but to equate this story with Biblical parable just isn't very meaningful in my opinion.
Thanks Geo, I will start a new thread on Philosophy in American Gods to respond to this comment.
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