Christmas: Bad news for the dying
Christmas is bad news for the dying. Not only because it is a day when there is a kind of false light-heartedness in the air, because it’s a day for family gatherings and generosity. Of course, any joy can cut across the trajectory that dying people are on. The world simply goes on. That’s the hardest part of dealing with the loss of someone deeply loved.
But that’s not all. No, there’s a special bad news for the dying. If you were, like me, someone who spent years celebrating Christmas from behind the altar, recollecting, even on the day that we celebrated the birth of Jesus, Jesus’ suffering and death, you’d know that there’s another side to this story.
I celebrated Christmas for several years as my wife Elizabeth’s life was increasingly compromised by very aggressive MS. It was at Christmas 2002 that she told us, as we gathered together for our usual Christmas festivities — after all the masses and the prayers and the homilies were done — that she might not be with us the next Christmas. But she lived another five years, during which she suffered more than I hope you can imagine, much more than a few hours hanging on a cross, torturous and horrible as that must have been. Even as the loss of bodily function continued unabated, Elizabeth was often in pain, or suffering from the medications we hoped in vain would help her. She had decided early that she would not live to be a prisoner of her own body. But still she did not go, and fought bravely.
But one thing, during all those years of increasing disability and loss and pain, became very clear. Though we celebrated Jesus’ suffering and death at Christmas time, even as we sang carols about his birth, people did not want to hear about suffering, real human suffering and loss. As I mourned the dying of the light, watching someone I loved so dearly disintegrate before my very eyes, no one wanted to hear about real suffering at Christmas. They did not want to be reminded that people still grew sick and died, amidst the tinselly joy of Christmas time. Some were even offended if I mentioned it, even though they could see, year by year, Elizabeth’s abilities degrading more and more.
At Christmas we remind ourselves that Jesus was born for this
Christians think they know about suffering, because they talk about Jesus’ death on the cross all the time. The mass, or eucharist, or holy communion — call it what you will — is at the centre of Christian worship, and each time the suffering and death of Jesus is memorialised – even, as I say, on the day that Christians celebrate his birth, Christians think they are taking suffering into account. There is reason to believe that the cross is somehow foreshadowed in the manger of Luke’s Christmas story, though this is seldom mentioned. But still Christians think that they have dealt with suffering, and know what pain and death is all about.
But Jesus’ suffering is not real, and never was. Mel Gibson’s sado-masochistic extravaganza, The Passion of the Christ, is surely enough to show that, in the Christian myth, suffering is just a stage prop. It doesn’t do any real work. What work could it do?
Let’s listen to the pope pontificating. This year he did the BBC Christmas thought for the day. In it the pope talks about human liberation, not the usual liberation we think of, political liberation, the freedom of a free people in a free land. No.
…it was not a political liberation that he brought, achieved through military means: rather, Christ destroyed death for ever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross.
Richard Dawkins was offended. More shameful than the death is the thought, says Dawkins, that it was thought to be necessary — needful to bring about good. And, I agree, that is shameful. It is shameful to imagine that the only way that the creator of all could forgive us (supposing we are in need of such forgiveness) is through torture and death. As Dawkins says, with considerable animus and repugnance:
The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed.
But there is something, to my mind, even more shameful. It is the claim, made without the slightest apology, that death has been destroyed and life has been restored. Like the meaningless mumblings of all religions, this is a scandal, to tell someone who is suffering and dying that death has been destroyed, to say that the misery, the pain, the humiliation, the disintegration that happens to people as they die, has been already destroyed, that the torment and torture are past and the horror gone.
That’s why people don’t want to be reminded, at Christmas time, that people die, even on Christmas day, when so many people mourn, as the world around them pullulates with brittle joy and once-in-a-year generosity. And it is because that joy is hollow, and does not spring from the deep well-springs of life, where it must share with pain and sorrow, that the religious imagine that the suffering of those who die can be ignored, because death, after all, has really been destroyed. How bad, then, can it be for the dying?
…my friend died on Christmas Day 21 years ago … I spent almost every evening after work with her in the 3 months before she died – I would not desert her as had everyone else because they were too upset with her for dying – my reasons were selfish, I knew I would find her absence almost unbearable … we did what we always had done, played cards or board games and talked about anything and everything until she couldn’t do much more than lay on the couch and then we sat in silence … no one should die without someone to care and someone to sit silently with them when words are no longer possible… the sharp pain of her dying eased after a few years but I still feel the loss …
Lorraine, thank you for your comment. No, no one should die alone. While my wife Elizabeth did not die at Christmas time, the first time she really mentioned dying was at Christmas, and so there is always that connexion.
This was the day on which Elizabeth began to think of dying. After that, Christmas no longer had the same meaning for her, and at the end, it was our love we celebrated, not some far off irrelevant event, which had no meaning for our present, and which the church has made sure cannot mean anything to those who seek to die instead of accepting the misery allotted to them by an imagined providence.
I too still feel the loss. I’m afraid that feeling never will go away. It is the price of love.
I visted my mother (a registered nurse) for Thanskgiving some years ago and her cancer had retuirned with a vengeance. As a trained EMT, I moved in and cared for her – giving injections every four hours around the clock. She died on Dec. 22nd.
The 30 days that she suffered and I cared for her are short-term compared to both Eric and his wife and Lorraine and her friend. The only place where the three stories compare is that they all resulted in the end of one human llife.
I am a life-long atheist. She was a life-long searcher for TRUTH. So, we did not agree on any details, but I saw my duty as helping her to die in the way she thought best. She had well-developed ideas on how she wanted to live and die. I knew what they were and helped her follow them- and prevented others from imposing their own standards. Some relatives were quite insistent that they were RIGHT, but I held my ground and maintained that i would support their right to die as they they chose when their time arrived, but this was my mother’s turn, not theirs.
My wife and I went to see The Nutcracker on Dec 22nd and some friends of my mother, all nurses, spent the evening with her.
After the show, I recieved a call from them that she had passed. All the arrangements had long been made, so there was no difficulty with her remains.
I didn’t speak of it for years, but I am convinced that my mother chose not to die in front of me and her friends managed to help her coose that day and time.
I still support her decisions, my actions and those of her friends (if my guesses are correct). That month was one of the hardest times of my life, but I would do it again for her or anyone else I cared about.
This is such a sad post, but also a wonderful and true one.
You say:
But Jesus’ suffering is not real, and never was. Mel Gibson’s sado-masochistic extravaganza, The Passion of the Christ, is surely enough to show that, in the Christian myth, suffering is just a stage prop. It doesn’t do any real work. What work could it do?
Ok, so maybe you don’t believe the Christian myth, as you call it. Or maybe you do. Regardless, you either take the “myth” on its own terms or not. “In the Christian myth,” suffering is not a stage prop – it is the “myth’s” acknowledgment that God, who had become human, could not understand the human condition without suffering. The suffering, in other words, is the entire point. Had Christ – God – not died in violent (earthly) shame, there would have been no point for God to become human in the first place
So you can not accept the ‘myth’, and that’s fine. But you should take the ‘myth’ on its own terms if you are going to characterize it.
John, I’m not sure why I am required to accept a myth on its own terms. After all, theologians like Paul Tillich think that, before we can accept the Christian myth of sacrificial suffering, death and redemption, we have to break it, acknowledge that it is just story, and then try to live in the light of the broken myth, now, in some sense, transformed into narrative metaphor.
The problem with the Christian myth, the idea that God had to endure suffering in order to “understand” it, is very strange. I can understand why a prince might choose to live as a pauper in order to understand what it was like to be poor — although, knowing that he could return to the palace at any time makes his “understanding” somewhat attenuated. But God doesn’t need to do this, being, in some sense, infinite intelligence and understanding already.
However, the Christian myth doesn’t say this. It says that God chose to share our lot, including a terrible form of suffering and death, not in order to understand it, but to redeem us from it. One of the eucharistic prayers of the Anglican Church speaks of this act of redemption as ‘destroying death and making the whole creation new’. But it doesn’t, and I see no reason why I have to accept the myth on its own terms, before I can criticise it, especially since the criticism is that in its own terms it doesn’t make sense and is destructive. It’s a lie, and the suffering of Jesus as understood within the myth, even supposing him to have undergone it, is just a stage prop to underwrite the lie.
The problem is that this leads Christian theologians to speak in truly objectionable ways about suffering, as something that we should share with Christ, as, in Paul’s words, to make up for Christ’s sufferings yet to be endured (Col 1.24). This is, in turn, imposed on Christians as an obligation, and, derivatively, on those who, while they do not share Christian beliefs, are governed by laws based on Christian principles. So, no, I won’t accept the myth on its own terms. This would make it impossible to cricitise it, and that is what I want to do. It is bad news for the dying.
See, you say that suffering of Christ is a “stage prop” to support the lie. But that’s the entire point – if you are going to say that the suffering “does no work” in the Christian myth, you simply must approach the myth as it stands. Which you still do not.
Jack Miles does this to great effect in “God: A Biography” and “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.” He calls it a “literary” approach. Making no assumptions about whether the Tanakh and the New Testament are historically true, or whether they are advisable moral systems, what do the stories -say- about the character of God, and the message he imparts to the other characters in the story (Israel/Earth/individuals/himself)?
The suffering of Christ can be understood (and is defensible) in many ways in the context of the Bible itself. God understanding in the the suffering of his people. Christ taking the worst of the Roman oppressors and coming out victorious. A thematic “sequel” to the book of Job, where Job forces God to confront the injustice of God’s wager with Satan and subsequent appeal to power. A sequel to the story of Abraham and Issac, where sons are offered for bloody sacrifice. Jesus’ attempt to protest the Roman dominance of Israel (like a monk lighting himself on fire to protest Vietnam). A presaging of the sack of Jerusalem 70 years later. Etc.
This notion that you can say “I hate what this myth stands for,” on the one hand, and “I hate how this myth constructs itself,” on the other…. it’s two different things. You can say that you hate the Christian myth’s effects on the world in which we live. Fine. Lots of people do. But this notion that Christ’s suffering is some sort of worthless snuff (“does no work”) IN THE CONTEXT OF THE BIBLE STORY ITSELF is not only (I think) utterly incoherent, but against the vast weight of scholarly, literary, and historical consideration.
John, you said:
No, you still miss the point. If the myth “works”, that is, works in its own terms, “in the context of the Bible story itself”, then the criticism that I want to make cannot be made. I don’t think it works in its own terms. In order to do this, it must make sense to speak of a God who, in order to turn his anger away from humankind, actually sends someone (his “son” — and it’s not clear that this makes sense either) to suffer and die. Now, all sorts of people have tried to make sense of the “atonement”. I don’t think they have. It is, in itself, incoherent. It is theologically incoherent.
In other words, I don’t think it can be used even as metaphor. There is no reasonable way in which the story can be understood, and Tillich’s attempt to break the myth, it seems to me, simply doesn’t work, which I would argue too if I thought it would be worthwhile to read the Systematic Theology over again after so many years. It doesn’t make sense in its own terms, and Christians have suffered for this incoherence for something like 1920 years, let alone others upon whom they still impose it. Someone like Jack Miles may think he has understood it in literary terms. I am not interested in the story as literature. It either makes sense in theological terms or it does not. I hold that it does not. I also hold — and I daresay you would agree — that, even if it did, and Jesus’ sufferings are more than just a stage prop for a failed theology, Christians would have no right to seek to impose the consequences of this theology on those who do not subscribe to it.
I think we’ve reached the crux of our disagreement. You may (or may not) be right that Christ’s suffering does not make sense in a theological sense. But that, I think, is a very different question than whether it makes sense “in the Christian myth” itself, which to me is a clear statement that it doesn’t make internal sense in the story. It absolutely does for a number of reasons, which people have been explicating for 2000 years.
But if you don’t think so, so be it.
Dawkins, as always, hits the nail squarely on it’s head re the Christian atonement theory:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf…ht-for-the-day
A shameful Thought for the Day
“But there’s something else for which the pope should go to confession, and it’s arguably the nastiest of all. I refer to the main doctrine of Christian theology itself, which was the centrepiece of what Ratzinger actually did say in his Thought for the Day.
“Christ destroyed death forever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross.”
More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here’s Thomas Aquinas:
“. . . the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle(Romans 5:12): “In whom all have sinned”: whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child.”…….
The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven’s sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.
Ratzinger has much to confess in his own conduct, as cardinal and pope. But he is also guilty of promoting one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22).”
To assume, as Christian theology does, that this is what the gospel crucifixion story is about, betrays not only moral depravity but also imputes such to the gospel writers themselves.
Well, we’ll have to disagree, then, won’t we, John? I don’t think it makes sense in the story. Theology has been wrestling with the story from the beginning, and I don’t think it’s managed to do that. If it makes sense in the story, then it should be possible to make sense in the theology, because that is just an explication, if you like, of the story. Theology is, in a sense, literary hermeneutic. But it doesn’t make sense. If you try to live within the myth — as I have done — it turns out that it is unintelligible. It does not make human sense. And trying to make sense of it has been very destructive, in my view. And Christmas is bad news for the dying.
This post, and Dawkin’s rant, both make the assumption that the Substitionary Atonement proposed by St Anselm is the only explanation for Christ’s suffering and death. But that is not the case. The Eastern Christian churches never bought into that theory, and other models also exist in newer Christian churches. Without becoming unduly didactic let me note something that is getting lost here: as soon as God became Man it was inevitable that God should also die as we do. Not necessarily on the cross, that was an accident of history; it might have occured from any number of causes. But die Christ would.
When someone we know suffers a loss, we say “I’m sorry”, we sincerely feel for them, we even recall our own losses. But do not (because we cannot) partake directly of their loss: we are not they. Yet Christ did the next closest thing; he did share our mortality and the loss it imposes on us. Thats not something to be dismissed as a cheat.
If I may play devil’s advocate, as it were…
There are commonalities between the Christian and the evolutionist narratives. They agree that we are all genetically flawed from birth, and that we suffer as a result. Both predict that our descendants will have a better time of it, and both posit that suffering and death are key parts of the process.
The two narratives differ in that Christianity promises personal redemption, conditional upon God’s will; whereas evolutionism predicts collective progress, as an mathematical consequence of natural selection.
They also differ in attitude. Christianity calls us fallen from a high state; evolution calls us risen from a low state. Christianity promises a fore-ordained redemption, as decreed by God; evolutionism is less certain, as extinction is always possible.
The two narratives concur that we are a transitional species; missing links between the brutes that we were, and the truly human beings that we might become.
Some people, myself included, believe that Christian theology took a wrong turn a long time ago by turning to a theory of atonement that celebrates violence, which is fundamentally at odds with the non-violence of the Gospel. I have not yet investigated them in any depth (and, as a Quaker, tend to be skeptical of theological systems, anyway, as “airy head knowledge” as opposed to “saving heart knowledge”), but the various flavors of “non-violent atonement” seem to make a lot more sense to me.
I don’t know, however, if they’re any help with your fundamental complaint.
JonF
Fair enough. It is true that Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo is not the only theory of the atonement. I don’t think other theories are any more successful, but that’s neither here nor there. This is the theory that was implicit in the pope’s “thought for the day”, and was therefore the appropriate target of Dawkins’ response. It is deeply rooted in Western Christianity.
And even if that were not so, it would not follow that, as the atonement has been understood, especially by the Western church, Christmas has not been bad news for the dying. For suffering is still at the centre of the atonement as traditionally understood in the West, and this has left its imprint all over how we understand human suffering. And even if we accept other interpretations of incarnation-and-atonement (if we think of that somehow holistically), it is still difficult to see how it works without suffering.
That’s why I would have to disagree with paradoctor. If, for example, Jesus had died peacefully in his sleep, how would his sharing our lot have been in any sense exemplary? In some sense, even in the Eastern churches, who think primarily of Jesus becoming human so that we might become divine (theosis), the suffering of Jesus is the sign of his humanity, and sharing in that suffering is a sign, therefore, of our sharing the hope of everlasting life (of theosis). This is very clear in much Eastern Christian spirituality. The eucharist would not make any sense otherwise. It may be true that Eastern Christianity puts its emphasis on Easter, rather than on Good Friday, but recall that, even so, the liturgy of Easter goes through darkness (the cross/the human condition) to light (resurrection/theosis).
Dave. Thanks for your comment — and that goes for other commenters too. This has turned into a more lively discussion that I had expected. But I do have a question. Do you really think that the gospel is fundamentally non-violent?
That seems surprising on the face of it. If you do a computer search of the Bible, you will find that hell only turns up when you come to the gospels. Jesus, though somewhat milder than the Qu’ran in this respect, often threatens hell fire and the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Recall that he says the fate of Chorasin and Bethsaida will be worse on the day of judgement than the fate of Tyre and Sidon, because they did not believe in him. He curses the fig tree which did not bear fruit out of season, and tells his followers that they must hate mother and father, etc. These are not the words of a peaceful man, and I have often been troubled by them. The intolerance of the gospel, as Gerd Lüdemann points out, is written in bold letters, if not on every page, often enough to be worrying.
Christmas – that ‘miracle’ birth in Bethlehem of a man who eventually walks that road to Calvary and the cross; a cross that has brought forth what is possibly the most anti-humanitarian theology in history. Celebration be damned…
I don’t think the choice is between the crucifixion viewed as some sort of absurdity of human existence, as though human life is futile, some sort of cosmic joke – and the only way to make sense of such absurdity is to believe that somehow god has a plan with it all. And thus view the crucifixion of a historical man as being part of that grand design for humankind. Thus, our confession of Christ becomes the ultimate public display of our two knees bending in submission to our own irrelevance.
The choice we do have when interpreting the crucifixion storyline is to seek an interpretation that does not compromise our moral sensibilities.
The problem is, for the sake of argument, that if the crucifixion was historical, it would mean that the early Christians would have used a miscarriage of justice as the central clarion call for its atonement theories. Bizarre to say the least. Such a theory betrays a complete lack of any moral compass….Hence, we do them an injustice to presume that that is what they did. Much rather take the crucifixion story as being non historical – and that they were proposing a spiritual/theological/intellectual context not a historical flesh and blood context.
That old saying, we all carry our own cross, perhaps has a little insight here that could be considered with regard to interpreting the crucifixion storyline. Basically, the self-sacrifice that is involved in the crucifixion story cannot be related to any human, physical, sort of self-sacrifice. Our flesh and blood bodies are part of our human nature that we should be honouring not sacrificing. But there is a part of our nature that does welcome the idea of self-sacrifice. And that part is our intellectual nature. It is within that area of our life that self-sacrifice has a role to play. Intellectual evolution is no different than material evolution. Life, death and re-birth are the mechanism of both material and intellectual evolution. Ideas are born, they die (we often have to kill them off as ideas do not age well and seek to retain the glory days of their youth…..) and they are re-born in some other form. Nothing new under the sun, the new always has its roots in what has gone before.
Thus, Paul and his spiritual construct of the Christ figure, is, as it were, shifting the focus in human evolution from our literal flesh and blood and turning inwards to where human identity is perhaps best observed – in our intellectual/spiritual nature. Indeed, the Gnostics would have been quite happy to stay with that scenario – but we do have the gospels to remind us, as if that were necessary, that without our physical nature our spiritual/intellectual nature is lost anyway. Its basically a question of priorities for different concepts. In any concept dealing with our physical reality then moral considerations hold sway. In intellectual/spiritual concepts its free fall – anything goes because the intellectual, the spiritual, is a renewable source.
So, bottom line for me – a literal crucifixion of a human man has no moral significance whatsoever. Any atonement or salvation theories based upon such an immoral premise deserve all the ridicule and shame that can be brought upon them. Their apologists need an urgent appointment with the nearest mental hospital…
The only way out for Christianity if it wants to present a humanitarian face to the world – is to ditch the claimed historicity for the gospel Jesus – thereby ditching a historical crucifixion along with all the anti-humanitarian theology that has been based upon it. Anti-humanitarian theology that looks human suffering in its face and finds glory in it – time, surely, for Christian atonement theology to be hung on that cross it so brazenly hangs around its own neck…
The gospel is troubling (what good would it be if it weren’t). But unless one takes the scriptures as the inerrant word of God (which I don’t), one is left with deciding how it coheres and whether all its parts point authentically to God, since it is the work of fallible men. My sense of the gospel is that on balance, it makes more sense to assume that much of the “hellfire” and vengefulness was later read into the life and teachings of Jesus in light of the destruction of the Temple. So much of what the gospels tell us about him point in the other direction.
Of course, that leaves me open to the charge of adapting the gospel to my own beliefs, rather than the other way round, and I have no answer to that, other than what George Fox (“founder” of Quakerism) said long ago, as reported by Margaret Fell upon first hearing him preach:
And so he [Fox] went on, and said, “That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God,” &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, “The scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord”: and said, “Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” &c. This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, “We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.”
Maryhelena, I shan’t comment of your long post, other than to say that it quite adequately represents itself. My comment is not needed. Thank you for that eloquent refutation of the idea of suffering atonement. I especially like the point that it is really an adoration of our own irrelevance.
Thank you Dave, for that response. I am quite happy that you can find in the gospels, as many people have, a message of peace and non-violence. That is, however, as you are aware, based on a selection. I guess my problem comes in when you say that you don’t believe the scriptures to be in any sense the inerrant word of God. Many people do. The question is, once you have rejected them as the word of God, why should we go on giving them the significance that we do? As for them being troubling, and being of little use if they were not: I’m not quite sure that’s the kind of ‘troubling’ I have in mind. They are morally troubling, morally questionable. Jesus in the gospels, though we can certainly work around this selectively if we want, is not a particularly attractive figure, and so I wonder why we should want to select around this particular bit of ancient literature.
For instance, I’m very fond of the Epic of Gilgamesh (in a version first recommended by PZ Myers: Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative rendered into English verse by Herbert Mason). I have no idea whether it is faithful to the original, but as a myth it is far more humane than the myth in the Old or New Testaments. I suspect there are many other gems like that awaiting our discovery. Why do we confine ourselves to the canonical myths? I guess I don’t understand that, since it seems to me that they are inadequate as humanising narratives. We need better.
I think you all should go back to the drawing board and reread the Bible… there are so many mistakes and misunderstandings in these posts…
I wish you all peace and a better understanding of the message of Jehovah and the meaning of life as found in his word… please take time to reread, meditate and study with fellow believers, you might find a very different perspective on suffering,death and Christ’s sacrifice..
Thanks
“The question is, once you have rejected them as the word of God, why should we go on giving them the significance that we do?”
All I can say in response is that I can’t see the world through any other metaphor. I’ve tried, and I keep coming back to some version of “Christianity”. (I much prefer the traditional Quaker formulation “Friend of Jesus”, BTW.) If I’d been raised with the Epic of Gilgamesh as my central explanatory myth, I’d undoubtedly make the same answer about it.
I suppose that, as a Quaker who believes in “that of God in everyone,” I’d have to say that, in the end, we’re better than our myths. We will, if we struggle with them, always end up being selective, based on that “Inward Christ” or “Inward Light” the early Quakers spoke of. That’s the real polestar of morality; our myths are just the framework we use to incarnate that deep insight.
That’s a fair answer, Dave, and I certainly don’t want to argue you out of your convictions. I guess my concern is that, while you struggle with the text, and come, through compassionate selectivity, to discern a positive message of compassion and care — the Inward Light — others too use the text selectively and come to quite different conclusions. The privileging of texts seems to me to be dangerous, especially when the messages in the texts are so conflicted. This is why atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens find it so hard to cheer on liberal forms of religion, because they leave the sacred texts in place, which, while patient of a compassionate reading such as yours, are often used to underwrite illiberal conclusions too. Indeed, I suspect that they are more often used for this purpose, than to uphold humanity and compassion.
I understand your concern, and agree with your suspicion.
I only privilege the text for myself. What other people do with it may be tragic, but I have no control over them. God only tells me my own story.
I would say that privileging a text is inevitable; what is not inevitable, I would hope, is insisting on privileging it for anyone but oneself. Perhaps too much to hope for.
BTW, I’m very happy to have discovered this blog (via Sullivan, IIRR). Lots of thought-provocation on a very important subject.
Your website is great! This post really caught my eye when I was searching around. Thanks for sharing it.
The only problem is that you’re talking about a fairy tale, Jon. You should try waking up to adulthood.