Of Dawkins and Isaiah
A friend writes ...
The Christian Tradition goes back at least 3,500 years. We find ourselves at one particular point in its unfolding history. Because it is the very nature of "religion" to pretend that it is the guardian of eternal truth, the historical nature of its dogma is routinely swept under the carpet. Ordinary people often assume that current dogma is the same as dogma of 2,000 years ago and will remain the same for the foreseeable future.
This is far from the case, as I will illustrate in a moment.
The other thing that people often fail to appreciate is that most of us in the Western democracies are born into the Christian Tradition. We have no choice about this. We absorb the assumptions and priorities of the Tradition with our mother's milk. We dig ourselves more firmly into the Tradition as we grow up, even by our choice of the elements of the Tradition that we chose to reject.
My dear friend assumes that her skeptical attitude toward God excludes her from the Christian Tradition. Not so. The idea of God was certainly the central idea in the Old Testament and it still looms large. However, it has long since lost its central importance in the history of Western thought.
Personally, I regard belief in God or doubt about His existence as totally unimportant. Readers of this blog will have no problem determining what I do regard as important, but I digress ...
Our idea of God (as opposed to the one in may other worthy traditions) appears in the Old Testament as an innovation in many respects:
When, for many, the New Testament overshadowed the old, the importance of Israel was also demoted in the grand scheme of things. It is sometimes missed that the God of the Old Testament is imagined to be the creator who holds special regard to Israel. In effect, the fact that Israel regarded itself as special among nations created the God of the Old Testament (see Truman Show for more about this idea). The New Testament imagines man (in general) to be in centre stage and, not surprisingly, God as the supernatural being who looks down upon the stage and cares about what happens to human beings, especially individual human beings. As our ideas about what is important in the Universe shift, so do our ideas about what, if anything, we mean by God. These days, we see ourselves as a tiny phenomenon appearing in a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale. It is not surprising that our image of God is undergoing a corresponding adjustment.
During the past 2000 years, there have been many twists and turns along the way, such as the ongoing attempt of the Catholic Church to substitute itself for God and the attempt by the Reformation to substitute worship of the Bible for worship of God, along with the slaughter of millions of innocent people in the last 3,500 years who found themselves praying to the wrong God. I have also skipped over the important influence of the Greeks and Romans, but this is not a history lesson.
The point here is that, out of everything that has happened on the planet, we select a certain thread of history as "ours". "Christian" is not a bad name for the thread I was born into. You may pick a different name for your thread. The most significant event in my history was the arrival of Jesus. There are still a lot of people who cannot really accept that He was a human being like the rest of us. Although it has taken a long time to sink it, He signalled the beginning our our realization that, for better or for worse, we are on our own.
But THIS realization is also part of our tradition! Dawkins and Darwin are as much part of our tradition as Moses and Isaiah. Hiroshima is our Jericho Our tortured attempts to answer the ultimate questions of life continues beyond the New Testament into the history of Europe and our painful attempts to confront our needs for justice, wisdom and purpose as the ideas of the "Book" became less and less relevant.
I sometimes fantasize that at some time in the far distant future, somebody will add a history of America to the sad tales of the Old Testament. This nation was born squarely in the centre of our tradition and had a chance to re-think all our values and assumptions from the ground up. In spite of this, its Constitution recognized no individual human rights whatsoever but did recognize the property rights of slave holders to their human farm machinery. Like Israel, the people of this nation see themselves as "exceptional". Like Israel, they inflict terrible harm on others for the crime of not being American. Americans themselves have paid a ghastly price for their inability to find the moral footing they had every right to expect in their Christian Traditions.
There is no "right" and "wrong" in history. There is only participation. We can only make the attempt to grasp how we got here and what we can do to shape our future. If we refuse to see ourselves as fellow travellers along this particular journey, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past instead of facing up to the unique circumstances we face. Our traditions should teach us that wrong choices can be lead to terrible consequences. Even if everybody has the best of intentions, catastrophe may lurk around the next corner.
You know that I am an atheist, or at best, an agnostic, ...I should like to go back to the simple belief I had in childhood, ... I am a product of a 'church' primary school, and the knowledge base, plus the experience of ritual is there. Nevertheless, I find that my mind has rejected Christianity, along with organised religion en massBecause I place myself in what I call the "Christian Tradition", my readers often assume that I'm obligated to defend "Christianity" and they expect me to attempt to "convert" them. This is very far from the case. I was born into this tradition. I cannot change that any more than I can transform myself into a zebra.
The Christian Tradition goes back at least 3,500 years. We find ourselves at one particular point in its unfolding history. Because it is the very nature of "religion" to pretend that it is the guardian of eternal truth, the historical nature of its dogma is routinely swept under the carpet. Ordinary people often assume that current dogma is the same as dogma of 2,000 years ago and will remain the same for the foreseeable future.
This is far from the case, as I will illustrate in a moment.
The other thing that people often fail to appreciate is that most of us in the Western democracies are born into the Christian Tradition. We have no choice about this. We absorb the assumptions and priorities of the Tradition with our mother's milk. We dig ourselves more firmly into the Tradition as we grow up, even by our choice of the elements of the Tradition that we chose to reject.
My dear friend assumes that her skeptical attitude toward God excludes her from the Christian Tradition. Not so. The idea of God was certainly the central idea in the Old Testament and it still looms large. However, it has long since lost its central importance in the history of Western thought.
Personally, I regard belief in God or doubt about His existence as totally unimportant. Readers of this blog will have no problem determining what I do regard as important, but I digress ...
Our idea of God (as opposed to the one in may other worthy traditions) appears in the Old Testament as an innovation in many respects:
- The number of Gods is reduced to just ONE
- The One God is responsible for everything including what we would now call physics, cosmology, biology and even human morality
- God appears in history in contrast to other gods who appear "once upon a time"
- God is chiefly concerned with the doings and fate of Israel
- Gods favors are dispensed and punishments meted out to Israel as a whole because of the special relationship God has with Israel. God does not concern himself with private morality except possibly in the case of Kings. Entire societies are viciously punished by God for the simple sin of not being Israel.
- Israel's relationship with God is the number one priority. THE most important thing going on in the Universe. Appeasement of this God has a lot do do with ritual sacrifice -- an idea we will find in may other traditions, including the Aztecs, who thought that the gods required massive human sacrifice.
This would have been just one more crazy tribal idea except that the Israelites started writing everything down in about 1,200 BC. There is good reason to suppose that the stories we read in the Bible are much older, with echoes all the way back to the Babylonians in 2500 BC, but I digress ...
In the subsequent 3,500 year history of the tradition, all of the above ideas have been thrown overboard.
- The number of Gods has been reduced to zero or, in some cases, a tiny shadow of a spirit that hides in unexplored places.
- God has been successively kicked out of responsibility for everything. Galileo tossed the Church out of Astronomy. Darwin kicked the Church out of biology and relegated Genesis to "once upon a time" and so on. When it comes to His authority over moral conduct, His mention has been flushed out of the legal codes that govern our conduct.
- Jesus expanded God's concern from Israel to all mankind and made it personal. This completely revises the theory of morality in our Tradition.
- The God of Jesus was no longer interested in ritual sacrifice or rituals of any sort. He was interested in calling forth the best in each individual. Of course, many people just could not let the idea go without one last, big sacrifice.
- Those who now regard their personal relationship with God as their number one priority are now regarded as a quirky minority by the rest of us. God is no longer important.
During the past 2000 years, there have been many twists and turns along the way, such as the ongoing attempt of the Catholic Church to substitute itself for God and the attempt by the Reformation to substitute worship of the Bible for worship of God, along with the slaughter of millions of innocent people in the last 3,500 years who found themselves praying to the wrong God. I have also skipped over the important influence of the Greeks and Romans, but this is not a history lesson.
The point here is that, out of everything that has happened on the planet, we select a certain thread of history as "ours". "Christian" is not a bad name for the thread I was born into. You may pick a different name for your thread. The most significant event in my history was the arrival of Jesus. There are still a lot of people who cannot really accept that He was a human being like the rest of us. Although it has taken a long time to sink it, He signalled the beginning our our realization that, for better or for worse, we are on our own.
But THIS realization is also part of our tradition! Dawkins and Darwin are as much part of our tradition as Moses and Isaiah. Hiroshima is our Jericho Our tortured attempts to answer the ultimate questions of life continues beyond the New Testament into the history of Europe and our painful attempts to confront our needs for justice, wisdom and purpose as the ideas of the "Book" became less and less relevant.
I sometimes fantasize that at some time in the far distant future, somebody will add a history of America to the sad tales of the Old Testament. This nation was born squarely in the centre of our tradition and had a chance to re-think all our values and assumptions from the ground up. In spite of this, its Constitution recognized no individual human rights whatsoever but did recognize the property rights of slave holders to their human farm machinery. Like Israel, the people of this nation see themselves as "exceptional". Like Israel, they inflict terrible harm on others for the crime of not being American. Americans themselves have paid a ghastly price for their inability to find the moral footing they had every right to expect in their Christian Traditions.
There is no "right" and "wrong" in history. There is only participation. We can only make the attempt to grasp how we got here and what we can do to shape our future. If we refuse to see ourselves as fellow travellers along this particular journey, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past instead of facing up to the unique circumstances we face. Our traditions should teach us that wrong choices can be lead to terrible consequences. Even if everybody has the best of intentions, catastrophe may lurk around the next corner.
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