I haven't had a rant about organised religion for ages. So, as it's Easter, what better way to get through the day without gorging on chocolate bunnies and eggs, fillet beef and Margaux and the latest episode of Thirteen than to examine, as I sometimes do, why people have such curious beliefs.
I will, however, be serving with the net up and returning likewise and I would expect you to have the courtesy to do the same. I will not seek to dissuade you from your faith since faith is an illogical response to what is, in essence, not amenable to rational discourse. Nor will I seek to persuade you that one particular God is preferable to others, although there are a plethora to choose from. Nor will I make an attempt to convince you that such an infinite God, an omniscent, omnipresent, all loving and omnicompentant being, makes no more sense than the fairies that may exist at the bottom of my garden. To be as infinite a God as most religions profess, full of omni-this and omni-that, he or she, would have to embody all those properties, which define their opposite; a stupid, all-hating, vengeful God, who was neither here nor there and was supremely incompetant. A bit like the Old Testament God, now I come to think of it, who screwed up so often that he was forever 'starting over'.
No. As it is Easter, we shall look at the Passion and the Resurrection.
I will start by saying that I hope you will agree that the early Church Fathers had vested interests; if you do not agree with that statement then I am playing with a busted flush and I might as well go back to An American in Paris and the beautiful Leslie Caron and leave it at that. I already have a short piece about Snorri Sturlasson prepared, which I can use as a substitute.
In playing the vested interest card, I am saying that the early Church Fathers, who had faith, had an interest in getting their brand of religion accepted by the Eastern Roman Empire, and by extension the Western one also; at the very least not the subject of persecution. They also had to make it acceptable to the Jews; after all, as far I can tell, Jesus was a practising Jew and merely sought to amend it in places. Those early Fathers had also to contend with the fact that organised religion costs; big time. So, the more converts, the more money would flow into their coffers.
By 325CE, at the Council Of Nicaea, they had started to get their act together and effectively proclaimed the New Testament, as they saw it, as not only largely synoptic but based on eye-witness, or second-hand eye-witness, account and largely convergent with Old Testament prophesies about the Messiah; the Council of Ephesus merely confirmed that Jesus, by Mary, was God made flesh. For added good measure, they included redemption by repentence. I do not know if the historical Jesus, if such a person actually existed, actually preached that but it would certainly prove to be a game-changer. To a largely ignorant or uneducated population of peasant farmers, small-time merchants and an effete aristocracy, that must have been really attractive. The Jewish God, the Teutonic, Roman and Greek Gods were such a let down; all they promised was sin and misery.
So, the Christians had a winner on their hands; a supremely benevolent God, so long as you believed that Jesus was the Son of God and truly repented before you died; it's surely no surprise that it swept the Western World. The glory of everlasting light in the hands of some priest or other, and which it was easier to grant then not; the priests became not averse to welcoming a donation to the church in return for such absolution. (For goodness sake, get a handle on history! The issue of indulgences was a major concern of Martin Luther.)
But.
These early Church Fathers were intelligent; they had education. No-one (I hope) would consider Cicero or Horace or Virgil stupid, even though Pliny the Elder could spout arrant nonsense at times, and those early Church Fathers knew exactly what it was that they were doing; propoganda has always been the tool of those who would aspire to religious or political dominance. Should we treat the Gospels as gospel just because the early Church Fathers thought that we ought to?
How much can we trust them?
Why so many miracles? All performed in Galilee where no could witness them. Wouldn't one have been enough to show the divine power? After the feeding of the 5,000 on the mount, anything else is just overkill! Why was poor Judas Iscariot hauled in as a scapegoat, if not to lessen the guilt of the Romans for executing the Jews' Messiah. The kiss, when Jesus must have been recognisable to the Sanhedrin or the Consulate, given his perfomance in the Temple? And if it was to be in secret, why the howling mob with clubs and torches? Surely, half a dozen legionaries would have been enough against an unarmed man, who had admittedly shown a propensity to violent outrage.
Why was Jesus sent from pillar to post in his vain bid for justice; the Jews, after all, had a punishment for blasphemy; death by stoning. The Sanhedrin did not need the Romans to execute him. And he denies, in front of Pilate (obviously a fiction) that he's not the Son of God - 'your words, not mine'. So much does not make any sense.
I will pass over the Resurrection. It has, as far as I can determine, not happened before or since and re-animation may be possible for a God but is impossible for a man. Therefore, you either have faith or you do not; I cannot bring myself to make that saute metaphysique. It goes against everything that I know or have learned about the world. Maybe I am mistaken and will find myself in fiery torment for eternity but that has lost favour over the centuries and, if I believed, the worst that I could conceive would be to be consigned to perpetual darkness; deprived of the light of the Almighty.
One question remains. If Judas Iscariot did perform the ultimate sin for the betrayal of the Son of Man, will he find Glory if he truly repents? Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a short story about a heretical, Swedish priest. He maintained that the greatest sacrifice a man (or God) could make would be to consign himself to Hell for all eternity; does not that describe Judas?
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