136. caparison

Dunno about anyone else, but I’m always relieved whenever a religious holiday finally passes. Christmas and Easter are probably the toughest to get through, mainly because they’re the two holidays that have entered our national consciousness. Even non-Christians observe them, though for them it’s more about the family gatherings, the food and the gift giving at Christmastime than it is about the birth and death of Jesus Christ, who doubles as a swear word for those of us who don’t accept his deityhood.

I’m often asked, “If it isn’t true, if we’re just deluding ourselves why does it bother you so much?” And it’s a fair question. We don’t begrudge the people who think that they’re Napoleon, or that nefarious government agencies are secretly plotting against them. To be safe, of course, we give them a wide berth, but thankfully we’re past the days when we persecuted people for their delusions. Today we acknowledge that these are symptoms of a malfunctioning mind, and hope for recovery and that the affected individual will someday be a fully-functioning and productive member of society again.

That’s mental illness. In most cases it’s a matter of genetics that comes down to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or even some kind of damage to the brain itself (in the case of something like post-traumatic stress disorder), and people can’t be faulted for that. You’re not going to blame someone for hearing voices or experiencing severe depression. There are drugs and treatment programs to help.

In the case of religion, though, we accept behavior that would normally get a person locked up. We think it’s acceptable to mutilate the genitalia of male infants because a 2,000-year-old book commands it. We tolerate street preachers standing on sidewalks and telling people that they’re wicked and awful and going to hell unless they say a magic prayer to an imaginary god and stop drinking, swearing, and having sex. We allow children to be taught that the earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, and that some deity in the sky is watching their every move and can read their thoughts (especially when they reach adolescence). We permit parents to deny their children medical attention because of the belief that to intervene is to interfere in the will of their god, dooming the child to a life of otherwise preventable but excruciating suffering and even death.

Of course, not everyone holds such extreme beliefs. Not every religious person goes around openly judging everyone who doesn’t believe what they do. Not every religious person rejects scientific evidence or proof. Not every religious parent circumcises their male children because of their beliefs (and if they do, it’s often in the interest of hygiene). Nor does every religious parent believe that god would send them and their children to hell for going to the doctor. It’s wrong to generalize, no matter how tempting it is to do so.

My problem with Easter is that it stands for two appalling lies. The first is that Easter itself is really a pagan fertility festival. The name can be traced to several ancient gods and goddesses, including Ēostre, the Saxon-Germanic goddess of the dawn, whose festival fell around the end of March and early April, and her observances involved both hares and eggs. Other possible candidates include the Greek goddess Demeter and the Assyrian fertility goddess Ishtar.

The second lie is that Christ’s death was a noble sacrifice. Noble sacrifice? As if having yourself butchered up for an imaginary sin that you invented in the first place is noble! It’s a bit like creating an imaginary virus, telling everybody that they were in terrible danger and then waving your hands over them in order to cure them of said virus. But this is something that people truly, sincerely, deeply believe! They think that, as John 3:16 states, “god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (I can still quote it in the King James Version.)

What I object to is the fundamental belief that many Christians have of the certainty of the existence of god. Sure, some atheists may be certain that there is no god—but how can you be sure of something for which there is no evidence? Atheists can’t disprove god any more than theists can prove it, so what does it really matter?

I don’t have much of a problem with religious people who shrug and admit that they don’t know, that they want to believe, and refuse to force that belief on others. That I can at least respect. Sometimes you can’t help who you love, as I should well know, and that probably extends to belief as well.

What I object to the kind of mindless bible thumping that’s been going on lately in conservative circles, especially where women’s and gay rights are concerned. I object to the kind of magical thinking that allows religious people to retreat into their places of worship and leave the fate of the world and their fellow human beings to their imaginary god. I object to the kind of extremist, political, dominionist ideology that leads them to think that this world is theirs to take back; that we all ought to strap ourselves into their subjective straight jackets; and that, by virtue of their birth, all children ought to be likewise fettered as well before they have a chance to learn to think for themselves. I object to the kind of theist who looks at evidence and rejects it based on the fact that it contradicts something in their holy book written thousands of years ago by pre-scientific people.

I object to living an unexamined life, to never questioning what you’re taught or what you believe, and to not being true to the essence of who you are as a person. At best, we live a hundred years, and a life is a terrible thing to waste.

68. blinding

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow
– Arcade Fire, “My body is a cage” (from Neon Bible)

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Yesterday afternoon I came across an article on the Huffington Post by David Lose entitled “Adam, Eve & the Bible.” He starts out by comparing the Biblical story to the legend of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Paul Revere warning the colonists (or the British, depending on whose history you listen to), then launching into discussion on Scriptural authority, problems with the Bible read as a historical or scientific text, and fundamentalist insecurity about the veracity of the Bible and of truth in religious belief.

NPR even aired a story on August 9th about evangelicals questioning the existence of the Biblical famous first couple (leave it to NPR to find evangelicals willing to admit to that on record). According to Scripture, all of humanity descended from one literal man and one literal woman in the Garden of Eden. However, as Dennis Venema, a professor at Trinity University, is quoted in the article, “that would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years.” There is too much genetic variation in the human genome today for that to be true. It’s even more ludicrous if you ascribe, as evangelicals do, to a “young earth” theory (i.e., that the earth is 6 to 10,000 thousand years old).

I was taught Young Earth Creationism growing up and believed it for a long time—until I heard and was convinced by Richard Dawkins. Evolution was touted as thought rebellion against God, a rejection of Biblical teaching on the origins of the universe, the earth and man. In 5th grade, my Sunday school teacher at the time was a colleague of Australian creationist Ken Ham (whose famous one-liner response to evolution is “How do you know? Were you there? Do you know someone who was?”) and had arranged for him to come to my church to do a seminar on Creationism. I had flashbacks recently after seeing a video of school children at his Creation Museum, who were about my age when I saw Ken Ham. When asked how they knew Creationism was true, most of the kids stumbled back with canned-like responses such as, “Because it’s in the Bible” or “My parents told me,” reflecting a lack of intellectual and critical foundation in Christian fundamentalist thought.

One curious aspect of the article was when Venema was later quoted as saying, “There is nothing to be alarmed about. It’s actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world — and from a Christian perspective, that’s an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence.”

This seems like an odd thing to say, partly because of the weight Evangelicals place on the reliability of the Bible, but also since the Genesis story was a point of departure for me from Christianity. For me, the similarities between the Biblical creation story and early Mesopotamian accounts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were too close for comfort, so it’s likely that in forming his creation story, the author of Genesis drew from that or even earlier legends to write his own, with Yahweh at its center.

The Bible hangs upon the premise that humanity fell from grace as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, leading to Christ being enfleshed in order to take our place to suffer God’s wrath. The theology of the Apostle Paul, which forms the bedrock of theology in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant faiths, is built on this premise. (That alone could take up a whole post, but I’m trying to keep this as close to 1,000 words as possible.)

I can see how there might not be much to worry about if the first few chapters of Genesis are a metaphor for the creation of the world—or, as David Lose put it, “The story of Eden is the history of humanity writ small.” The Bible was written by a Bronze-age people that didn’t have or expect solid scientific evidence. Lose writes that the Bible “is a collection of testimony, confessions of faith made by persons so gripped by their experiences of God they had to share them using whatever literary and cultural devices were at hand.” Why should we saddle an ancient text with modern expectations?

It would be one thing if this were just personal belief. However, from this story of Adam and Eve sprang an institution that is responsible for the torture, oppression, abuse and slaughter of millions based on an imperialist theology and eschatology (the same could be said too for Islam, or any other belief system). It had better be more than a story since billions of people have based and are basing their lives on it, and millions have led lives of misery for the sake of “Christ and his kingdom.” And, as my last article discusses, a radical, conservative interpretation of God and the Bible is currently being used to shape political policy, with tangible effects. So if it’s just myth, somebody has a lot of explaining to do.

At this point I’m asking myself, “Self, why are you making a big deal of this? So what if it’s true or not? Even if it’s not true in the literal sense, it’s still true psychologically, in the way that other stories are ‘true’.” After all, what’s wrong with a God creating the universe (or setting evolution in motion and letting it play out), or even Jesus dying for our sins?

Because as nice as those stories are, inherent to belief in religion is a certain amount of willful blindfolding that must be done in order to maintain that belief. You must be willing to accept certain precepts on faith alone, such as the claim that Jesus was the Son of God—or that God even exists—in the face of a lack of evidence or even to the contrary. It’s likely that there was a man in Judea in the 1st century C.E. named Yeshua; that he taught some really radical things; and that the Jewish religious leaders had him executed, but no genuine proof he truly performed miracles or physically rose from the dead. His followers certainly believed he was who he claimed to be—though as Robert Parsig writes (as quoted by Dawkins), “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

I consider myself a naturalist and a secular humanist. While I acknowledge the possibility and likelihood of a “god,” that which is “true” must be quantifiable by what we see and observe in the known world and universe. Science tells us that humanity could not have sprung from two original humans on the basis of the genome, so if the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, the rest of the Bible probably is too. What science is showing us through its evidential work is that humanity probably evolved over millions of years, gradually developing the tools and skills for survival, including language and consciousness.

So I would put it to you, dear reader: Where do we draw the line between artifice and delusion? Is a belief in a transcendent reality (and a transcendent deity) incompatible with the pursuit of reason and rationality? And if not, does it matter which system of belief you follow so long as it brings you closer to that “inner spark of divine light”?

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References

Arcade Fire (2007). My body is a cage. On Neon Bible [CD] Durham: Merge.
Hagerty, B. (9 August 2011) Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.
Lose, D. (17 August 2011) Adam, Eve & the Bible.