Category Archives: Tanach and Sacred Text

Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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Is there a liberal Christian theism? II

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I am going to cruise straight on, even though some very good questions (and answers!) were provided in the comment stream of “Is there a liberal Christian theism? I.” I do not want to look closely at those questions and answers here, for in a sense they anticipate and pre-empt many things that I want to say now (as I supposed, when I let the first instalment go without this conclusion, they might).

I want to begin, then, with the oft-quoted passage from Augustine’s commentary on Genesis, part of which I uploaded and linked in my first instalment of this post on liberal Christian theism. The importance of Augustine for my purposes (and for the purposes of those who wish to deny that scripture is to be read literally) is simply that, in his commentary, Augustine suggests that, where the facts are known to be otherwise than they are depicted in scripture, it must be that scripture was intended to be read symbolically or figuratively. Thus, it is suggested, even those who first accepted the authority of the Bible were aware that it does not aim at the truth of science, but at religious or theological truth, and the Bible’s errors of fact are not justly held against the Bible as a source of religious enlightenment and truth.

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Congratulations, Jerry Coyne!

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This post is now available in Polish translation here. Thanks, as always, to Malgorzata at Racjonalista.

Jerry Coyne has just finished reading through the Bible (the Christian Bible, or at least one version of it — the Ethiopian canon, for example, contains 9 extra books, not included in the Western canon, and the Western canon includes 11 books (depending on how they are counted) not included in most Protestant Bibles), and he has some comments about the experience over at Why Evolution is True. I have done it myself about four times. The last time I tried, some fifteen years ago, I gave up after finishing the Torah, or the five books of Moses, because it became so oppressive and unintelligible, so Jerry deserves our congratulations for persevering to the end, though, to be frank, the only reason for doing something like this is to be able to say that you had actually done it.

It’s a bit like climbing mountains. Edmund Hilary, the first white man to climb Mount Everest (he was accompanied in the feat with his Sherpa guide, Tenzin Norgay), once said that the reason for climbing mountains is “because they’re there,” and the same, I suppose, could be said for reading the Bible, or any other supposedly holy book. Because they’re there. And scaling the mountains of words — or (perhaps a more appropriate image) descending the cliffs into trenches or rift valleys towards the nadir of human thought – is almost as treacherous as climbing real mountains, because anyone who has read through the Bible, and, perhaps, even more so for someone who has scaled the treacherous depths of the Qur’an, with its unremitting hatefulness, is bound to be a poorer person for the effort. If reading changes you, reading these texts can only change you for the worse, for to confront human evil sanctified by centuries of blind adulation is a risky business, to say the least.

At least now, though, when the issue of the value of such ancient texts is more frequently raised by critical voices, the danger is much less than it once was, for now it is possible to forget the patina of holiness and read them as the irreducibly human works that they are, with all their blotches and wrinkles. One of the things that should be clear to anyone who has read the Bible or the Qur’an straight through is how uneven these texts are. Perhaps I should qualify that, because the Qur’an is not as uneven as the Christian or the Jewish Bible. There are at least high points of literary achievement in the Bible, and this cannot be said for the Qur’an. I’m told that in Arabic the resonance of the language can reduce a person to tears. It is hard to believe that the thoughts themselves can do so, the Qur’an containing, amongst holy books, the most stultifyingly constipated thought ever to enter the minds of men, and being so unremittingly boring and repetitious that it is hard to stay awake, let alone retain what little intellectual content is to be found in it. How anyone can think the thoughts and call them holy is simply beyond reason and the most fertile imagination.

The Bible, though, has some genuine treasures, amongst them the Song of Songs, a lively erotic work of some subtlety, and the book of Job, perhaps the most unrelentingly searching study of the problem of evil ever written. The book ends, of course, on an entirely false note, as though lives can substitute for lives, or wealth for suffering, but the poetic heart of the book is an ageless and so far unanswered challenge to the justice of any imaginable god. Another text of some value is Ecclesiastes, the author of which was almost certainly not a true believer, who provides as convincing a case for atheism as any of the new atheists. It’s fundamental message is that “shit happens.” The world goes on in its accustomed way without any sign of design or purpose, and so one should live stoically, drifting with the tide of change, accepting the goodness that may come one’s way, and enduring the suffering without complaint.

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