Paul Brandeis Raushenbush writes: Christians Are a Cause of LGBT Oppression So We Have to Be a Part of the Liberation! And it's great when anyone stands up for the human rights of any oppressed group. It's good when anyone speaks up against the homophobic policies of Uganda and Kansas and Russia and Nigeria, as Raushenbush is doing. He even admits that Christians are involved with the homophobia, which is almost enough to make you fall down in shock, a leading "progressive" Christian admitting such a link.
The thing is, Raushenbush doesn't trace the origins of this Christian homophobia back for more than a few years, when the plain fact is that until a few decades ago, homophobia was the UNANIMOUS official policy of ALL Christian groups. One reader actually responded to this story by bragging about how his Christian group, the Unitarians, had been pro-gay for "an especially long time." All the way back to 1970! Wowser. Around 1900 years of homophobia, and then, for the last 40-odd years, some Christians have begun to roll back their hostility to LGBT's in certain respects. Sorry, Unitarians, but once again, jazz musicians and gangsters have trounced you in the tolerance race, having accepted gays for decades before any Christians did.
As long as well-meaning, pro-rights Christians continue to deny that their religion was 100% homophobic in its official statements for around 97% of its existence, I don't see how they can expect their present tolerance to be anything more than a Band-Aid compared to the deep wound of the full extent of Christian homophobia. The plain fact is that the pre-Christian Roman Empire, as well as many other cultures taken over by Christianity, completely lacked homophobia as we know it.
But Christians never have been so much with the facts, have they. Well -- except for those of us who have become ex-Christian atheists. Raushenbush makes no mention whatsoever of the homophobia which characterized the vast majority of Christian history. Instead, he and the other pro-LGBT-rights Christians accuse the homophobic Christians of not being true Christians, of misinterpreting the Bible and thoroughly missing Jesus' message. Exactly the same things of which the homophobic Christians accuse them. Exactly as many, perhaps most Christians have always denounced other Christians. Some of the pro-rights Christians declare that the homophobes are not really Christians; conversely, some pro-rights Christians say that they are not Christians, but rather followers of Christ. "Followers of Christ," of course, is precisely what the term "Christians" means.
It's all just so very depressingly stupid. The ignorance of certain statements is just appalling -- and I'm talking about the pro-rights Christians, who are by far the more intelligent of the two Christian groups in conflict here. The utter lack of historical knowledge. One reader, a pro-rights guy, one of the good guys, claimed that before 1971, no-one ever referred to him- or herself as a Christian. I'm not making that up. And furthermore, that comment was posted for days before anyone thought to challenge it. Well -- unless the Huffingtom Post didn't publish any of the replies challenging it. (Surprisingly, they published my reply. I don't expect an intelligent answer, but at least someone is on record as saying something to the effect of, "WTF?! You don't realize that people called themselves Christians before 1971?!") The majority of the comments on Raushenbush' story and stories like it are from pro-rights Christians and homophobic Christians arguing over WWJD? -- What Would Jesus Do? -- and what did Jesus mean? and how are we to interpret this or that Bible verse. And very little discussion of what Christians have actually tended to do over the course of the past 2000 years. Well, again -- perhaps the majority of people who are not homophobic and who have looked into the history of Christianity are in fact no longer Christians. If they had, how could they still want to belong to such an outfit? And by looking into the history of Christianity, I mean looking at primary sources, and not relying solely on the piping-hot ahistorical bullshit served up in the sermons they hear and in the writing of popular "progressive" Christian theologians, in which they hear that Christians of earlier eras were basically identical to 21st-century progressives.
Showing posts with label cognitive dissonance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cognitive dissonance. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Sunday, July 7, 2013
"Contemporary Progressive" Religion
A new edition of some of the hadiths, the sayings of Muhammed, has been published in Turkey, intended for the use of "today's average Turk." Apparently the publication is causing some hoopla.
I don't know a lot about contemporary Islam, and I don't know how common such efforts are to edit core Islamic texts "for 21st-century Muslims." This effort in Turkey reminds me of what is advocated by many present-day Christian and Jewish theologians: efforts to make their religions "contemporary and progressive." I'm using quotation marks because I don't think there is any such thing as progressive 21st century religion. There are intelligent progressive people who are religious. And there are plenty of dimwitted atheists too, just look at the readers' comments in HP Religion. But even the dimwitted atheists are right about religion being make-believe (you don't have to be brilliant to see that), and an intelligent and well-informed religious believer, no matter how intelligent he or she may be on other subjects, is living in a world of make-believe whenever he or she talks about religion. He or she may be extremely well-informed about the names, dates and places of early Christianity, whereas a maddening number of atheist numbskulls insist on talking about such things without having first obtained a clue, claiming, for example, that Constantine re-wrote the Bible (there no evidence he ever even read it) at the Council of Nicea along with the Pope (the Pope wasn't there) in the year 400. (The Council of Nicea took place in 325, and Constantine died in 337.) But when it comes to the actual faith, suddenly the dopey atheist and the learned believer switch places: the atheist points out obvious things such as that it is absurd to build one's life around ancient or modern - religious texts, and the believer says ridiculous things such as "God's plan for us[...]" or "The timeless wisdom of these holy books[...]"
"We don't live in the 20th century anymore," said Mehmet Ozafsar, who oversaw this new publication, which involved more than 100 scholars in all, referring approvingly to the new edition of Mohammad's sayings. Of course not: a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Muslim lives simultaneously in the 21st and 7th centuries, just the same way that a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Christian lives simultaneously in the 21st and 1st century, and a contemporary, cultured, enlightened practicing Jew lives at one and the same time in today's world and in some various eras BC.
"We needed a new work with Islamic beliefs in the perspective of today's culture," Ozafsar went on. What they needed, I think, was some help in blurring the differences between today and 1400 years ago. I believe that theology consists more and more in the effort to help people fight off the impulse to think about certain things. The sad simple fact is that progress is made, and that while people of earlier ages may now and then have said something which we today still can find beautiful, or sometimes even wise, we cannot accept wholesale any worldview from centuries ago expressed in a form amounting to more than a couple of pages of prose, because any dimwit living today will have come to conclusions surpassing some of the conclusions of the wisest sage from then. Hume and Mohammed and Ezra are not to be despised for this mundane fact of life, any more than a 14th-century horse breeder would be mocked because any moped would beat any of his horses in a races of more than 2 miles.
What any atheist has grocked that any believer has not is that any text written in a time when it had not yet occurred to anyone anywhere that the institution of slavery might be wrong, not that this or that individual slave here and there had merited being freed but that the entire institution was wrong, along with institutions of misogyny and tribalism and superstition, IS NOT TO BE USED AS A GUIDE TO LIFE, AS ONE'S LIFE'S CENTRAL TEXT. That we can do better now. That religious believers misuse the term "superstition," that "religion" is synonymous with it, and does not refer, as the religious believer maintains, only to religions which conflict with his or her own.
As an amateur historian, naturally I'm interested in ancient texts -- and the more ancient the texts are, in every written culture I've encountered yet, the more religious they are -- and naturally I think it's great when other people study them too. As I hinted above, I wish many atheists would either become much more familiar with certain people, places and things from long ago OR FOR THE LOVE OF SHIVA STOP PRATTLING ON ABOUT THEM ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY AS IF THEY SUPPOSED THEY HAD A CLUE. And as I said, many believers do study ancient texts relevant to their religions. Now if they could only drop the blinkers which make them pick a certain range of texts and study them with no critical faculties and declare that they are "holy" and/or "imbued with timeless wisdom." Timeless wisdom? I'd say there is no such thing. Hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors were worms, tens of millions of years ago they were rodents, thousands of years ago every war was a total war and lasted until everyone on one side was dead or enslaved, hundreds of years ago the notion that women were as intelligent as men was not yet very widespread -- among men. Starting to see a pattern here? Good! Don't yet see how religion belongs back in the past with those other things? Keep thinking. Please. Because it's really not yet as if the human race were burdened with an overabundance of good sense.
I don't know a lot about contemporary Islam, and I don't know how common such efforts are to edit core Islamic texts "for 21st-century Muslims." This effort in Turkey reminds me of what is advocated by many present-day Christian and Jewish theologians: efforts to make their religions "contemporary and progressive." I'm using quotation marks because I don't think there is any such thing as progressive 21st century religion. There are intelligent progressive people who are religious. And there are plenty of dimwitted atheists too, just look at the readers' comments in HP Religion. But even the dimwitted atheists are right about religion being make-believe (you don't have to be brilliant to see that), and an intelligent and well-informed religious believer, no matter how intelligent he or she may be on other subjects, is living in a world of make-believe whenever he or she talks about religion. He or she may be extremely well-informed about the names, dates and places of early Christianity, whereas a maddening number of atheist numbskulls insist on talking about such things without having first obtained a clue, claiming, for example, that Constantine re-wrote the Bible (there no evidence he ever even read it) at the Council of Nicea along with the Pope (the Pope wasn't there) in the year 400. (The Council of Nicea took place in 325, and Constantine died in 337.) But when it comes to the actual faith, suddenly the dopey atheist and the learned believer switch places: the atheist points out obvious things such as that it is absurd to build one's life around ancient or modern - religious texts, and the believer says ridiculous things such as "God's plan for us[...]" or "The timeless wisdom of these holy books[...]"
"We don't live in the 20th century anymore," said Mehmet Ozafsar, who oversaw this new publication, which involved more than 100 scholars in all, referring approvingly to the new edition of Mohammad's sayings. Of course not: a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Muslim lives simultaneously in the 21st and 7th centuries, just the same way that a contemporary, cultured, enlightened Christian lives simultaneously in the 21st and 1st century, and a contemporary, cultured, enlightened practicing Jew lives at one and the same time in today's world and in some various eras BC.
"We needed a new work with Islamic beliefs in the perspective of today's culture," Ozafsar went on. What they needed, I think, was some help in blurring the differences between today and 1400 years ago. I believe that theology consists more and more in the effort to help people fight off the impulse to think about certain things. The sad simple fact is that progress is made, and that while people of earlier ages may now and then have said something which we today still can find beautiful, or sometimes even wise, we cannot accept wholesale any worldview from centuries ago expressed in a form amounting to more than a couple of pages of prose, because any dimwit living today will have come to conclusions surpassing some of the conclusions of the wisest sage from then. Hume and Mohammed and Ezra are not to be despised for this mundane fact of life, any more than a 14th-century horse breeder would be mocked because any moped would beat any of his horses in a races of more than 2 miles.
What any atheist has grocked that any believer has not is that any text written in a time when it had not yet occurred to anyone anywhere that the institution of slavery might be wrong, not that this or that individual slave here and there had merited being freed but that the entire institution was wrong, along with institutions of misogyny and tribalism and superstition, IS NOT TO BE USED AS A GUIDE TO LIFE, AS ONE'S LIFE'S CENTRAL TEXT. That we can do better now. That religious believers misuse the term "superstition," that "religion" is synonymous with it, and does not refer, as the religious believer maintains, only to religions which conflict with his or her own.
As an amateur historian, naturally I'm interested in ancient texts -- and the more ancient the texts are, in every written culture I've encountered yet, the more religious they are -- and naturally I think it's great when other people study them too. As I hinted above, I wish many atheists would either become much more familiar with certain people, places and things from long ago OR FOR THE LOVE OF SHIVA STOP PRATTLING ON ABOUT THEM ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY AS IF THEY SUPPOSED THEY HAD A CLUE. And as I said, many believers do study ancient texts relevant to their religions. Now if they could only drop the blinkers which make them pick a certain range of texts and study them with no critical faculties and declare that they are "holy" and/or "imbued with timeless wisdom." Timeless wisdom? I'd say there is no such thing. Hundreds of millions of years ago our ancestors were worms, tens of millions of years ago they were rodents, thousands of years ago every war was a total war and lasted until everyone on one side was dead or enslaved, hundreds of years ago the notion that women were as intelligent as men was not yet very widespread -- among men. Starting to see a pattern here? Good! Don't yet see how religion belongs back in the past with those other things? Keep thinking. Please. Because it's really not yet as if the human race were burdened with an overabundance of good sense.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Christianity, Version 25.34
Brandon Ambrosino writes, "A friend emailed me that I was reading the Gospels wrong, and that the resurrection was best interpreted metaphorically. To relegate the resurrection to a purely physical phenomenon was to read the Easter narrative in the most primitive way, at its lowest common denominator."
Yes, and to say that the two-thousand-year-old stories in the New Testament are primitive, even compared to other stories that old and much older, is potentially insulting to Christians, even if it's obviously true. Ambrosino's Christian friend is vulnerable to that insult, and so denies that Christians have meant what they said for 1600 years or more. He, and many other contemporary Christians like him, insists that the stories about Jesus were written metaphorically. Which means that for most of the existence of Christianity, virtually all Christians were engaged in a whopper of a ding-dang dilly of a misconception. Now, that also could be embarrassing. But only if you acknowledge the plain facts of the history of Christianity. It seems that, in the absence of a remarkably childlike simplicity, massive denial is called for in order to be a Christian: either you deny all sorts of common-sense assumptions and believe literally in the traditional stories about Jesus, including the Virgin birth, walking on water, miraculous healings and so forth, up through the Resurrection and beyond -- or you deny that Christians have traditionally believed the things which the historical record clearly says they believed, and instead believe this immense whopper currently being told by "modern" theologians (There is absolutely nothing modern about any theology.) and their fans: that believing Bible stories literally is a recent error introduced into Christianity by evangelical fundamentalists in the 19th century. Which requires ignoring an amount of evidence comparable to the amount of evidence one has to ignore in order to believe that God made the Earth 6000 or 7000 thousand years ago.
Now I know that I study the history of Western Civ much more energetically than yr average Schmoe, who has all sorts of other things on his mind -- but the theologians asserting that literal readings of the bible are less than 200 years old? Don't they have to study theology for years in order to get their degrees in theology? What on Earth is going on in those seminaries? How can they possibly believe what they're saying?
Perhaps I just massively underestimate the ability of many people -- of most people, perhaps? -- to ignore what they know whenever it conflicts with what they choose to believe. I suppose that widespread, deep-seated cognitive dissonance was required in order for Christianity to get off the ground to begin with, let alone to have lasted this long and still have billions of adherents. We really can't attribute it all to stupidity, cowardice, dishonesty and bad luck, can we?
But I keep talking about what people believe, and of course many religious -- or spiritual, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to -- people remain religious by keeping their beliefs vague. And this may be the case with Ambrosino: "Now did Jesus bodily rise from the dead? That's not my question here. I'm simply asking, 'Did the early Christians believe that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead?' And when we read the Easter stories within their first century political and religious contexts, I think the answer is emphatically, 'Yes!" So, okay then, Ambrosino and I agree about that. Ambrosino self-identifies as a Christian. So does that mean that he also believes in the bodily Resurrection? That's "not his question here." Also, unsurprisingly, he doesn't provide a link to some other place where it is his question. It's not at all uncommon for religious people, when pressed about their beliefs, to give several different answers at different times which are quite at odds with each other, and ultimately to seem greatly annoyed at the attempt to nail the blob of mercury which is their religious belief, not just because they ultimately don't know what they believe but because they don't want to know. They're floating in a cloud of vagueness, and your Hey-buddy-what's going-on-in-there line of questioning threatens to rouse them from blissful slumber, so of course they don't like it. Ambrosino self-identifies as a gay, Orthodox Christian, and gay Christians often prove to be judo black belts of vagueness about their beliefs. How could they not?
So, you deny that earlier Christians believe what they clearly believed, or you ignore the foolishness of those beliefs, or you ignore what's going on inside your own head. Or you simply wake up and stop believing, because you can't stop seeing anymore how far it all comes from adding up.
I don't relish robbing people of bliss. I wouldn't try to do it if I didn't think there were enormous compensating benefits to be had. And I believe that enhanced clearness of mind is a wonderful thing. Potentially of tremendous practical use in very many ways..
And we can still keep every bit of those thousands of years' worth of beautiful Christians art and music and literature. I love all of that stuff even more than most Christians do, I daresay, having studied it intently for a long time.
Yes, and to say that the two-thousand-year-old stories in the New Testament are primitive, even compared to other stories that old and much older, is potentially insulting to Christians, even if it's obviously true. Ambrosino's Christian friend is vulnerable to that insult, and so denies that Christians have meant what they said for 1600 years or more. He, and many other contemporary Christians like him, insists that the stories about Jesus were written metaphorically. Which means that for most of the existence of Christianity, virtually all Christians were engaged in a whopper of a ding-dang dilly of a misconception. Now, that also could be embarrassing. But only if you acknowledge the plain facts of the history of Christianity. It seems that, in the absence of a remarkably childlike simplicity, massive denial is called for in order to be a Christian: either you deny all sorts of common-sense assumptions and believe literally in the traditional stories about Jesus, including the Virgin birth, walking on water, miraculous healings and so forth, up through the Resurrection and beyond -- or you deny that Christians have traditionally believed the things which the historical record clearly says they believed, and instead believe this immense whopper currently being told by "modern" theologians (There is absolutely nothing modern about any theology.) and their fans: that believing Bible stories literally is a recent error introduced into Christianity by evangelical fundamentalists in the 19th century. Which requires ignoring an amount of evidence comparable to the amount of evidence one has to ignore in order to believe that God made the Earth 6000 or 7000 thousand years ago.
Now I know that I study the history of Western Civ much more energetically than yr average Schmoe, who has all sorts of other things on his mind -- but the theologians asserting that literal readings of the bible are less than 200 years old? Don't they have to study theology for years in order to get their degrees in theology? What on Earth is going on in those seminaries? How can they possibly believe what they're saying?
Perhaps I just massively underestimate the ability of many people -- of most people, perhaps? -- to ignore what they know whenever it conflicts with what they choose to believe. I suppose that widespread, deep-seated cognitive dissonance was required in order for Christianity to get off the ground to begin with, let alone to have lasted this long and still have billions of adherents. We really can't attribute it all to stupidity, cowardice, dishonesty and bad luck, can we?
But I keep talking about what people believe, and of course many religious -- or spiritual, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to -- people remain religious by keeping their beliefs vague. And this may be the case with Ambrosino: "Now did Jesus bodily rise from the dead? That's not my question here. I'm simply asking, 'Did the early Christians believe that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead?' And when we read the Easter stories within their first century political and religious contexts, I think the answer is emphatically, 'Yes!" So, okay then, Ambrosino and I agree about that. Ambrosino self-identifies as a Christian. So does that mean that he also believes in the bodily Resurrection? That's "not his question here." Also, unsurprisingly, he doesn't provide a link to some other place where it is his question. It's not at all uncommon for religious people, when pressed about their beliefs, to give several different answers at different times which are quite at odds with each other, and ultimately to seem greatly annoyed at the attempt to nail the blob of mercury which is their religious belief, not just because they ultimately don't know what they believe but because they don't want to know. They're floating in a cloud of vagueness, and your Hey-buddy-what's going-on-in-there line of questioning threatens to rouse them from blissful slumber, so of course they don't like it. Ambrosino self-identifies as a gay, Orthodox Christian, and gay Christians often prove to be judo black belts of vagueness about their beliefs. How could they not?
So, you deny that earlier Christians believe what they clearly believed, or you ignore the foolishness of those beliefs, or you ignore what's going on inside your own head. Or you simply wake up and stop believing, because you can't stop seeing anymore how far it all comes from adding up.
I don't relish robbing people of bliss. I wouldn't try to do it if I didn't think there were enormous compensating benefits to be had. And I believe that enhanced clearness of mind is a wonderful thing. Potentially of tremendous practical use in very many ways..
And we can still keep every bit of those thousands of years' worth of beautiful Christians art and music and literature. I love all of that stuff even more than most Christians do, I daresay, having studied it intently for a long time.
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