thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-10, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Vincent: And yet it's precisely the impossible elements of the story that you're asking me to accept.
Pretty much, yeah. Did you ever read Douglas Adam's Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul, when the hero (Dirk Gently), a supernatural investigator, says that Sherlock Holmes had it exactly backwards, and the real rule should be that whenever you rule out everything implausible, what remains must be the answer, even if you thought it was impossible? Either the vast majority of human beings throughout history were completely deluded about something that mattered immensely to them and on which they spent a tremendous amount of energy—which, y'know, is entirely possible—or our idea that God/gods/whatever are "impossible" needs rethinking.
Meg: it has always seemed to me that, in order for much of Christianity to be appealing, you have to fear death. And I don't mean just regular, ordinary I-don't-want-to-die-yet, basic survival thing, I mean you have to be afraid of dying because of what comes next.
Really? Because that's not been my experience or that of the Christians I know (and, of course, that's a small self-selecting group, but it at least proves another way is possible). I'm honestly not that afraid of dying: I saw my grandfather and my grandfather's sister and my grandmother's brother-in-law and my father suffer horribly in their last years, and I longed for them to die, and when death came I was grateful—I once wrote a vaguely John Donne-ish poem whose first line was, "Come, friendly death..."
I am afraid of every good thing I ever cared about coming to nothing, but I don't think that's what you meant. And I certainly did not stop being agnostic because I was terrified of Hell! In fact, belief in damnation is something I've come round to slowly over the years, after careful thought, and rather in defiance of modern liberal-Christian thought, which thinks Hell either doesn't exists or exists but is empty because God is too loving to let anyone stay there.
So fear of death, no. Fear of oneself, yes, and that's a place where we might differ.
Meg: I flat out do not buy the concept "all the evil in myself". Sure, I occasionally feel rage and envy and lust and jealousy and apathy same as the next person, but I don't see myself as evil
Vincent: Turns out that I have that strength without Christ.
You two may well be better people than I am. "Blessed are the poor in spirit," e.g. me, because our problems are so obvious we know we have to run for help. It's only after consciously accepting Christ as my savior in 1991 that I was able to stop seeing myself as evil and consider the possibility that I could be loved and forgiven—which is something I'm still struggling with, honestly. It's a battle in which my mostly secular upbringing is my worst enemy and my beloved wife is my best ally.
Ian, I really don't have the energy to get into "the corruption of the sword" at this point—or, conversely, into "the corruption of pacifism," the idea that maintaining one's own moral purity is more important than stopping the barbarians or the child-beaters or the warlords or the ethnic militias from dragging people into the streets and butchering them. Someday we can ask Vincent to start a thread on that; for now I'm honestly exhausted.
Oh, and finally, "show me the money":
Vincent, if you go to an Episcopal church, at a certain point during the service (after the readings, before the Mass), they will pass around some kind of plate, and pretty much everyone will put some money into it. Most people at my church drop in a dollar. If you don't put anything in, people usually assume that you don't have any cash that day, that is if they actually notice at all. Sometimes the person/people passing the plate gets confused and they miss a few rows, anyway.
If you keep going to an Episcopal church, someone should approach you, welcome you, and try to get your name and contact information. At this point you'll start getting mailed invitations to special events, parish concerts, etc., and of course solicitations to donate money, which will reach a fever pitch around November in most places. If you don't give any money, a few people might be annoyed at you, but as a rule the staff and volunteers doing the fundraising are pretty scrupulous about not letting slip who gave what. I've done it for my church in past years, and there is at least one significant and relatively prominent member of my parish who says, basically, "look at all the volunteer stuff we're doing, I'm not giving you any of what little cash I have too." And that was okay.
