Since I moved to the Freethought Blogs network, I have a bunch of new readers who aren’t familiar with my greatest hits from my old, pre-FTB blog. So I’m linking to some of them, about one a day, to introduce them to the new folks.
A nifty pull quote:
Yes, the Jesus character in the Gospels spoke of love and respect and humility, healing the sick and taking care of the poor. But he also spoke of the wickedness of thought crimes, and the sinfulness of divorce; of the value of surrendering rational thought, and the nobility of abandoning family and responsibility to pursue a religious practice. He spoke with approval of the calm acceptance of evil and oppression in this world. And he spoke — over and over like a broken record — about the all-importance of believing that he was God, and obeying his commands. He spoke again and again about how there was just one right way to practice religion, and how doing this was a far greater priority than being a good person in the world.
If you believe that it’s normal and healthy to think about things that you would never actually do; that expressing anger is often useful and healthy; that good people should resist evil and oppression; that people’s sexual and marital lives are nobody’s business but their own; that people of different faiths, perhaps even of no faith at all, can still be good people; that you shouldn’t just believe what you’re told; that women and men should have equal marital rights; that actions speak louder than words and beliefs; that religion shouldn’t divide people; that fact-checking is a valuable skill; and that it’s more important to treat each other well than to have the exact right religious doctrine… then good for you. I think so, too. But if you believe that the Gospels reflect the reality of his life and teachings, then apparently Jesus didn’t.
The Jesus of the gospels is a one-dimensional mouthpiece character for the authors’ sectarian theologies. The problem, as I see it, with progressive Christianity, or any other modern form, is that the controversies and social situations addressed in the texts are utterly irrelevant to modern attitudes and lifeways. The bits about hating your mother and brother, not burying your father, and general deprecation of traditional family structures is exactly what we would expect (and still see) from a sectarian religious minority: making a virtue out of necessity, basically. But is Christianity a marginal sect? Are there major social costs to affiliating with a church? Is there an entrenched religious system hostile to the practice? Quite the contrary.
Greta: While I’m not attesting to the ‘correctness’ of this view, having spent a long time as a liberal Christian, I can answer two of the running themes within your list of quotes, the way they usually did if someone raised the question with them:
1: “Only through me”. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the stomache to read much Christian apologetics. That said, C.S.Lewis’ The Great Divorce encompasses this one pretty well via an allegory. The core idea is that EVERYONE ‘goes to Hell’ when they die. But some are then released from Hell by following Christ out (this was also Lewis’ solution to the then-debate about the existence of Purgatory–for him, Purgatory was what you called Hell after you left it). You spend awhile setting aside those bits of yourself that keep you from accepting Heaven. Post-mortem salvation, in other words. Being a Christian in life, for Lewis, wasn’t a guarantee of salvation, and he explicitly stated he would likely be surprised by the people who had an easier time getting into Heaven than he, himself would–skeptics might even have an easier time, since, as empiricists, once they were actually shown the truth, they would be more prone to agreeing that the issue was settled, after all.
In this view, Christ’s death (and ‘descent to the dead/Hell’) was necessary in order to show the souls of the dead the way out of Hell. In addition, because of the notion of “eternity” as a state of timeless being that all spirits exist in, once outside the material world, the ‘showing the way out of Hell’ thing (usually referred to as the Harrowing of Hell) is an ongoing process, not one confined to the three days between death and ressurrection.
2: “Thoughtcrimes”. This also ties into the notion that we all go to “Hell” before possible salvation. The thought-crime verses are essentially meant to show why humans can’t get into Heaven on our own–even if we abstain from sinning with our bodies, the thoughts are still there, and hold us back. (Remember, you’re dealing with a dualist worldview, so the ‘soul’ exists independently of the body, and can be polluted by thoughts as readily as actions.) Since just about no one can actually claim to have never had an impure or unjust thought, it becomes impossible for anyone to claim to be pure enough to actually enter Heaven on their own.
So those verses pertaining to the above two points aren’t likely to persuade any liberal Christians of the ‘messed up’ nature of Gospel teachings.
Oh, I also read at least one fellow who suggested that several verses of the ‘turn the other cheek’ variety were actually admonishments to practice passive resistance against Roman rule, based on forcing the Romans to be confronted by their own hypocrisy. I can go into that in detail if you’re actually interested; it’s an amusing interpretation, at least.
@freemage
Surely you see that this just proves Greta’s point. All this sophistimacated
theologyhand waving is due to the fact that what the Jesus character actually says in unpleasant to modern ethical sensibilities.“Thoughtcrimes”. This also ties into the notion that we all go to “Hell” before possible salvation.
A notion found nowhere in the New Testament.
The thought-crime verses are essentially meant to show why humans can’t get into Heaven on our own–even if we abstain from sinning with our bodies, the thoughts are still there, and hold us back.
In context in Matthew, it has more to do with positioning nascent Christianity as a morally superior version of Judaism. Judaism faced hostility on a number of scores in the Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman era, but there was also admiration for the conviction of Jews and their commitment to a code, as arbitrary and bizarre as its provisions seemed to many gentiles. Jewish Christianity, which Matthew represents, sought to go one better and appealed to many gentiles on the moral plane. The era was one of a shift in religious consciousness generally toward a concern for personal ethical conduct, and one of the notable features of early Christianity to contemporary observers was its adherents’ strict views on topics of ethical concern: care for the sick, reverence for marriage, abstention from excess. These comported well with Stoic philosophy’s ethical maxims also, and the author of Matthew appears to wish to make the impressive-to-outsiders moral rigor of the new faith a key component of the legendary founder’s ethos via this epitome of the Jewish ethical law.
Greta’s point about a conflict between these fragments of NT and the contemporary ethical sensibilities seems valid indeed. From the times when I was still a Catholic, I remember a lot of inconclusive discussions about passages like Matthew 5:27-28. One of the interpretations was: “looking at a woman lustfully” doesn’t denote a mere desire for her, but an inner acceptance (i.e. your free decision) to indulge in this desire. In effect it is not the desire which is a sin deserving a punishment – you are not punished for mere ‘thoughts’, but for your free (and wrong) decisions.
Don’t tell me that this interpretation is far-fetched. I know it is. I give it as an example of the maneuvers which are necessary to avoid the conflict mentioned by Greta. I give it also to indicate why the believers are usually unmoved by this sort of criticism: the ancient text is a plastic material and they can always mold it to their liking.
In short, Jesus said that life on earth is not the point. The point is to get into heaven. To the extent that doing good to others would improve one’s chances of going to heaven, do so. Otherwise focus on him and heaven to the exclusion of everything else.
Were heaven to exist, and were it to be as wondrous as it is portrayed, and were we to know this, then we would all pursue heaven like zombies on speed. Jesus’ admonishments serve as a surrogate for knowledge humans are unable to attain in the hopes of inducing heaven-seeking behavior.
That there is no heaven affects only the premises of the argument and not the conclusion.
Given that the gospels were written decades after his death, the teachings of Jesus are anything but clear. The blunt truth is that we can’t say with any confidence that he taught anything at all.
How did the gospel writers (arbitrarily designated as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) come up with what they wrote? Remember, there were no written records of any kind. No Wikipedia, no newspapers, no TV tapes, no books about him, nothing except the decades-old memories of those who were actually eyewitnesses, plus the testimony of those who merely claimed to have known him.
I suppose, to be fair, we should include the epistles of Paul (Saul of Tarsus), some of which are genuine. But, of course, Paul never even claimed to have known Jesus personally, and was arguably given to delusions, as witness his conversion story.
Given the evidence, how could we have any confidence in the detailed reports of what he is purported to have said? Did somebody faithfully record the Sermon on the Mount? Is it possible for the story of his three temptations by Satan to be factual? Who witnessed it?
It is much more plausible that he never existed than that the gospels are accurate.
An easy target. That’s not a criticism of hitting it, because the targets need to be hit again and again by our best critics like GC. Ease and clarity and obviousness elude most believers.
The difficulties for believers in making sense out of the contradictions and breathtaking inanity of the Bible and Jesus are inherent in their embrace of incoherent bronze-age babblings by a group of random ignorant and superstitious authors.
The criticism of embracing a faith full of beliefs that are “immoral, bizarre, profoundly troubling, or just flat-out fucked up” leads directly to a common phenomenon: the nasty behavior of so many believers, and particularly of interest, that of christians in the US. It’s commonly questioned why they act so “un-christian” but the reality is that their nastiness and evil is precisely christian. Why do they behave that way? The Bible tells them so!
http://everythingelseatheism.blogspot.com/2010/11/stop-asking-christians-to-be-more.html
On the “How To Really Infuriate A Christian” end of this form of criticism is the “Jesus never existed” tack. If what passes for evidence of his existence fits on the back of an index card, and the guy probably didn’t exist anyway, then chritians might just as well debate how many angels fit on the end of a pin. Oh….wait….they have debated that.