-Sergei Dovlatov
Oh how true. This quote is in the context of a journalist who is constantly forced to compromise his integrity in the former Soviet Union. But think about how this applies philosophically. Isn't that a great way to point out that events are not always what they seem? Doesn't it seem to suggest that we should always tread cautiously when reaching conclusions? Doesn't it make you question the veracity of the facts we've been told?
I know I look at it like that. The other morning, I was on campus, feeling a little down because I'd slept on a couch in the student center...
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that living out of a car is a logistical hassle?
...so I was on campus, taking in the morning light by the Library, and wouldn't you know it? I saw a group of people who looked like they were having a bible reading. I don't know why this is exactly, but just being around religion is a bizarre experience for me, a relatively staunch atheist.
I wandered over to the bronze cat in the hat statue and sat down with them. They were reading a psalm from the old testament, it doesn't really matter which one. Their reader was delivering his interpretation of it, which of course was that we can all put our faith in God to guide us through life because he's so great. So great, in fact, that he died for our sins and offered us salvation...
because we are all so helplessly evil and corrupted
...through Jesus Christ, our lord, savior, messiah, alpha and omega, king of kings, you get the picture-- he's great.
According to the Christian view of god, he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and just all around omni-. I mean, this guy can do anything and everything he (or, perhaps, she?) wants. AND, and this is important here, he is PERFECT. Perfect. Flawless. In every way, including morally. Thus, to them, the overall message of Christianity is an incredibly positive one, full of love, kindness, understanding, faith, hope, courage, mercy, grace, power, and ethics.
They almost seem to be talking about a religion not based on the Bible, which is not really full of any of those things if you step back and take a look at it.
God seems pretty fucking less than perfect if you actually look at the bible. The basic premise of the monotheistic Christian god is that he is the one and only true god and he demands and deserves worship as the creator and giver of life. But isn't that egotistical?
If god were a real father on earth, we'd lock him up and throw away the key pretty quick, maybe even try to execute him. I mean, imagine a family across the street from you where the father demanded that his kids follow his every direction and worship him. This is a father who allows his children-- with his full knowledge of course-- to get into all sorts of terrible situations. Would you let your child play with a socket on the wall? God would. Would you allow your child to continue on a destructive path of behavior without saying a word or explaining why it is wrong, only to severely punish him all of a sudden? God would. Would you tell your son or daughter to do something terrible, that everybody knows is terrible, just because you say so? God would. God's morals are really, really bad in the Bible.
I am more moral than the Christian god because I would never be so capricious, hurtful, misleading, vengeful, or evil as to tell my child to sacrifice his son to me, or condone the wholesale unnecessary slaughter of countless people, especially if I was omnipotent and had the power to remedy any situation in any way I wanted. I haven't killed, condoned rape, established deep social inequalities, tortured, or blackmailed. The Christian god has. I don't care if he created me. He's an asshole who doesn't deserve to be worshiped or emulated.
And that's not just me harping on about the old testament stuff. The new testament is based on the idea that this all powerful being can't simply forgive a transgression against him, as a loving and impervious being might well do, but rather elects to solve this problem (which he created) through an extremely convoluted plan to end/save the world through the world's best known human sacrifice story. And he randomly executes a fig tree along the way for not having fruit out of season.
And to think that the Aztecs were burned at the stake as heretics.
Then there's the problems with the logic, rather than the morals. That original sin thing? The one that's really central to the christian idea of salvation (because every solution needs a problem, otherwise you don't need it)? It's not really in the bible. Seriously. This is where God, really upset that Adam and Eve are no longer naked and frolicking in his personal garden (that's so chaste, by the way), is supposed to hand down this sin that somehow propagates and contaminates the entire human race:
And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring [a] and hers;
he will crush [b] your head,
and you will strike his heel."
16 To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
20 Adam [c] named his wife Eve, [d] because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
There. Clear as day. The serpent and all snakes forever will eat dirt, crawl on their belly, and be in conflict with humans. Sort of the natural order of things anyhow, right? Except that not a single known snake eats dirt. Women will experience pain in childbirth, and put up with those kids and her husband. Man has to work for a living, and everybody has to leave the garden party and give up living forever, even though they're not immortal anyhow. The ground gets really cursed, to produce thorns and bushes and stuff. Wow. Where is the part of this that's so terrible? God here hasn't cursed us so much as pointed out how we inevitably are.
I'd also like to point out that Adam lives until he is 930 years old, according to the book of Genesis, so that thing about surely dying when eating the apple was sort of a lie as well, or that knowledge was one hell of a slow acting poison.
So if there's no original sin in the actual bible, and other equally egregious problems with the internal logic and consistency in the bible, I'm sort of forced to conclude that it's the product of bad writer or redactors, rather than a divine and all powerful being who can't write a story worth a damn. I find myself morally and logically unable to believe in a Christian god. That's me. I'm an atheist because I'm not into mindless sadism.
But that's Christianity. Many Christians might say they believe in a positive truth, based on facts of a positive nature. But those facts are actually of a negative nature if measured against any reasonable societal standard, which would point to a negative truth. The faith just doesn't make sense in the way it's interpreted, much less justify itself.
But then again, that's why they call it faith.
P.S.
ReplyDeletethe genesis passage is from an online New International Version Bible.