Unsettling Cognizance:
Considering the endpoint (no one gets out of the world alive) maybe our meager success to learn much of anything about life (by the time you do you are old enough to die) is puerile uselessness at best. At some point it really doesn't matter anymore. The few times I have wandered through a cemetery I am always fixated by the thought that for most everyone, after one or two generations, the grave stones mean nothing to anyone. When is the last time you gave thought to your great grandaddy? How could you? I suppose, if you have a family tree you might be aware he was carpenter in such and such a town in such and such a state. When all you know about a person is what they did for a living and where they lived you really know nothing of any matter about them. Thus, to those offspring who follow, these deceased really don't matter anymore.
I suspect any child raised in a Christian home in our era who went to Sunday School or attended a religious grade school learned to accept Biblical text as the "word of God". The 'stranger' passages were never read aloud in church services or in Sunday School lessons. If you read these passages on your own you saw strange sentences but as an act of faith you simply refused to pay any attention to them. For all practical purposes they simply weren't there. It is not like you rushed to Sunday School and asked why the Bible says if a child does this or that they are to be stoned, etc. I don't recall anyone asking why God had a chosen people, and if he did, why were they always getting banged around? These kind of disturbing questions could have been asked right and left. Let's face it, much of what is in the Bible is dated and barbaric measured against more modern civilized standards. Of course, buried amongst all of that are some really uplifting, enlightening, universally ethical guidelines. These are guidelines found in all major religious texts. When all is said and done, right and wrong, in most instances, is never beyond human understanding. When right is not done it is almost exclusively for self-serving reasons, often involving some sort of 'tribal' patriotism---using the word tribal in the broadest context.
Clearly, if the Bible is the 'Word of God' then everything in it would have to be true. Even the most rigid fundamentalist doesn't accept that premise, and they too ignore what they choose to ignore. Like most raised to believe in the Bible I just let the unsettling passages slide. After all, there are plenty of good passages on which to concentrate. But then again, how weird would it be for God to have the Bible written as the 'Word of God' and then leave people to pick and choose which words to believe or follow. Like most others, it was just too unsettling for me to face the possibility that the Bible or any other religious tractate is simply not the 'Word of God'. For one thing, if the Bible is not the "Word of God" then where does that leave us? And just exactly how should one view the Bible?
Hardly anyone thinks God does not exist. After that, it is kind of a religious free-for-all. The number of differing sects of differing religions must be in the thousands. By any rational definition that is quite a circus. But unlike the Barnum and Bailey variety of circus, this religious circus is not fun filled or entertaining. In this circus there has always been a whole lot of dead serious killing going on, and depending on the time and place in history a lot of persecutory hatred. When people have that hunted look they oft are members of the wrong religious sect.
I recently read a book titled: The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of Newark. A lot of what I now believe ethically and what follows is really a combination of Lincoln, Spong, the Bible, and Peter Singer. I now look on the Bible as epic history, not the 'Word of God'. None of the New Testament books, for example, were even written until some 40-70 years after the death of Christ. Of course Christ existed, of course Buddha existed, etc. We also know Christ impressed his peers as a man of God, much like all of us would so like to be known metaphorically as a man of God. And of course those who years later wrote books about Christ probably embellished the basic facts and events, much like many have done with Lincoln. How far one can embellish depends on the historical culture and sophistication of the times. Back in earlier biblical times people were receptive to a divine figure walking on water and miraculously healing the sick, etc. In later times, for example, no matter how impressed one might have been with Lincoln, there is no way an author could claim Lincoln walked on water or healed the sick, parted the waters of the Potomac, etc. The fact some have chosen to embellish the life of Lincoln is no reason why anyone should toss aside the essence of Lincoln. The fact that the authors of the Bible have chosen to embellish the life of Christ is no reason to toss aside the essence of Christ.
"Ok", one might argue, "how then can one distinguish the essence from the embellishment?". For a start, the essential message of Lincoln is repeated over and over in various ways and from varied sources. If, for example, a singular source claimed Lincoln said "The only good Indian is a dead Indian", there is no good reason to accept this as valid, especially since it goes against the grain of everything else Lincoln said about others and how he treated others. The essence of Christ's teaching are repeated over and over in the various New Testament books. This is the core of Christianity. Using obscure isolated statements in scripture to justify actions or attitudes which are antithetical to the basic and oft repeated tenets of Christ's teachings, is sacra-religious. Therein lies the 'devil' so to speak of scripture. All sorts of unethical and persecutory behavior can be justified by dragging out some isolated lines from scriptural text only if one views scripture as the literal 'Word of God'---every line of it. Once scripture is viewed as epic history the value of scripture as an ethical guide rises immensely.
Religion and science continue to be pictured as some sort of competing or incompatible
venues. When scriptures are viewed as epic history, there is no conflict. Epic history is written with the level of scientific understanding at the time. If the bible doesn't help us with abortion, birth control, how to deal with dying in an age of modern medicine---how could it possibly do so if scripture is epic history? It could only do so if scripture indeed was the word of God. To insist scripture is the Word of God would be to make God a scientific ignoramus. That would really be a kind of silly stretch.
Those who reject evolution in favor of individual species creation are really insisting that science is an illusion. Obviously people can believe anything and often do. A lot of gangsters go to church regularly and obviously believe they are going to Heaven. What an amazing cop out---do whatever you feel like and believe you are going to Heaven. If gangsters can do that imagine the extent to which more 'angelic' characters do it. People believe in any one of the thousands of religious sects in the world and believe that sect is a ticket to Heaven. And even worse, they don't even, in the vast majority of cases, choose a religious sect at all-----they are born into it. Isn't that a bit ludicrous? Doesn't that make Heaven a by-genetic ticket?
I do not, at this point in my life, believe it humanely possible to understand the nature of God or fully understand the nature of the creative process. We can only understand the creative process in so far as science can lead us. When someone says to me that God has enlightened them about the creative process I always want to say, "Really, well explain to me what he has told you about the creative process of which we are a part." Science, after all, is part of our created process. Creationists seem to be on an endless ego trip. God created humans in His own image; God gave man dominion over all other creatures; God controls the life of every individual, at least those born into the right religion; God is some kind of vindictive abusive being whose vengeance will be unmerciful to the sinners, the unsaved---whatever. But of course God loves the 'saved' and everything in a saved's own lifestyle which the 'saved' love about themselves. The 'saved' and their ilk alone are worthy, others are unworthy. Interestingly, the saved rarely are content to let God punish, but as God's faithful soldiers, marching en route to Heaven, they are eager to punish heathens in the name of God. God, of course will be pleased to have his killing load and persecutory load lessened by these blessed disciples. Maybe so, but after listening to the words and viewing the actions of these 'saved' religious 'purists' I find them more and more misguided. I think it must be a combination of their hate filled oratory, the glazed look in their eyes, their waving bibles in the air, their blind patriotic faith, their self serving sense of justice, their aloofness to others outside their own immediate family, and the rigidity of their thinking which offends by better sensibilities.
I don't find the evolutionary process, as best we understand it today, an affront to religious faith at all. This evolutionary process, in operation for millions of years, reflects the complexity, endurance, and general direction of God's creative process. There is nothing static about this process at all---change is the operative word. And over the long haul, the changes are good and thus we have progress. Humans are a part of this amazing created process, a small piece in the chain linking other forms of life. That we are dominant over other forms is, based on the science involved, an absurdity. For us to exist we need the sustenance of other life forms, including plants. Our arrogance towards other forms of life is rapidly leading us towards partial or total extinction. I suppose, in their own dumb way, the dinosaurs thought they were the dominant life form on the planet. They could pretty much stomp on any other species at will. Well, they were dominant for a while. Maybe their religion wasn't straight. Where was Jerry Faulwell when the dinosaurs needed him?
The value of Spong's insights lie in his willingness to directly confront our confusion about the bible in a way few, including myself, have been able to do. Condensing his concerns to a few examples Spong asks if we want to worship a "God who plays favorites, who chooses one people to be God's people to the neglect of all the others?" "Will our modern consciousness allow us to view with favor a God who could manipulate the weather in order to bring the great flood that drowned all human lives save for Noah's family because human life had become so evil God needed to destroy it?" "Can we really worship the God found in the Bible who sent the angel of death across the land of Egypt to murder the firstborn male in every Egyptian household in order to facilitate the release of the chosen people?" Do we really want to worship a God who says in the Bible "if children do not obey their parents, if they overeat or drink too much, they are to be stoned at the gates of the city"?. Spong concludes that "institutional Christianity has become so consumed by its quest for power and authority, most of which is rooted in excessive claims for the Bible, that the authentic voice of God can no longer be heard within it." "My hope is that we.....can return to that vocation which is, I believe, the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. We are to build a world in which every person can live more fully, love more wastefully and be all that God intends for each person to be. In that vocation we will oppose everything that diminishes the life of a single human being, whether it is race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, sexual orientation or religion itself. That is what I see Jesus as having done, and because he did exactly that, people were able to see, to meet and to experience God in him in a radically different way." Part 2 to follow.
