thread: 2006-09-08 : Picky-choosy religion, 3 views
On 2006-09-12, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Lots of good, honest, thoughtful, passionate posts here. (I now find myself strangely happy that I have to type "human" every time I enter a post; it seems profoundly fitting). No one should worry about offending me, either, especially given what I've managed to say about paganism, neo-paganism, Mormonism, and more. I'm particularly glad to see someone try to explain things from a Judaic perspective, since it's clear I don't know the knowledge to speak for that tradition: I'm not a Jew, I don't bargain with God, and I often feel we Christians are like the little brother at the dinner table, watching in awe and no small terror as our big brother argues with Dad.
Conversely, though, lots of people keep on characterizing Christian theology based on a fundamental misconception—admittedly, a distortion of which a lot of Christian preachers and writers have been guilty—and I will keep shooting this horse dead until it stays down:
Joshua: The concentration that Christianity has on belief is ... psychologically dangerous, theologically flawed, and politically pragmatic; it requires you to state openly that something is true despite the evidence; why state it if it's obvious?
Clinton: Basically, Christian theology boils down to "If you believe that God exists and that he sent his son to get nailed on a cross so that you won't eternally suffer, and you ask for forgiveness for the things you've done that God doesn't approve of, you will get to live in eternal bliss." I've tried to phrase that very neutrally, so that I won't sound biased towards either side here. If you don't buy that that's Christian theology in a nutshell, let me know, because that invalidates the rest of this.
Clinton, no, I don't buy it; Joshua, no, that's not what we mean by belief. (Well, it's not what most of us mean; there are plenty of fundamentalists who'd disagree with me virulently, but I honestly think that most Christians, in most places, in most of history, didn't think in those terms—heck, in the Dark Ages, bishops were often happy if they could find priests literate enough to walk people through the rituals, let alone make the entire population understand the theology).
To quote what I said already in the companion thread(specifically at http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=247#8024):
Remember that "believe in" or "have faith in" is not about checking off the right ideological boxes (though, sadly, plenty of Christians throughout history have missed that point). When I say to my wife, "I believe in you," I don't mean that I'm intellectually persuaded that she exists: I mean that I think she is worthy of my trust and faith, and I believe what she says. When I say, "I believe in God," I use the phrase the exact same way.
And I also said (at http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=247#8083):
I get the impression that a lot of people think that "being a better person" and "being a saint" and "being saved" all have to do with holding specific, slightly weird intellectual positions and performing certain ritualized actions, and have nothing to do with trying to be happy and make the people around you happy. BULLSHIT. Sainthood starts with trying to be decent to the people you see every day.
Please do not think of God poring over some kind of ideological checklist. Please do not think of the things God wants you to do—the things that make you good/virtuous/saintly/whatever—as a list of arbitrary genuflections that have little to do with day to day life. Please do not think of Heaven as a reward, or Hell as a punishment, for things you think or things you do. What you think and what you do changes who you are until you are ready for Heaven or too warped for anything but Hell.
It's perfectly possible to know the theology inside-out, read the Bible and attend services every day, believe fervently that Jesus Christ is your personal savior, and still be an asshole—in which case, guess, what, you're going to Hell. And I'm not talking about inquisitors or witch-burners here, I'm talking about ordinary self-satisfied, self-proclaimed Christians (and their equivalents in other religions) who are so pleased with themselves, and so uninterested in other human beings, that they are rude or spiteful or dismissive of others around them.
Read C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce: One of the characters he condemns to Hell is a Christian theologian, and another is a little old lady who whines constantly about her bunions and her digestion and her ungrateful children. "How can someone go to Hell for grumbling?" asks the protagonist (I'm paraphrasing here; my copy's in a box at home). And his saintly guide replies, basically, "Because she devoted more and more of her time and energy to grumbling, until there was nothing left of her to love the people around her, or take joy in them, or give them joy: She became nothing more than a grumble."
Hell is not a place we get sent because we do things that "God doesn't approve of." Hell is a prison we build around ourselves every day, brick by brick, until the light of God cannot let through and we are left in a darkness of our own making. We build its walls every time we are too lazy or too angry or too self-loving or too self-hating to reach out to someone else and treat them like a human being. We build its walls every time we treat another person as merely a means to our own ends—pleasure, revenge, being right, being the center of attention, even our own need to "do good" for others because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We build it every time we deny our own potential and stop trying to grow because we are too afraid of the risk, or too cautious to spend the energy, or too satisfied with who we already are.
Heaven is not a place where we get sent because we convince ourselves of certain propositions regardless of the facts. It is possible to be a militant atheist or a Satanist, to trample crufixes, burn Bibles, and mock God, and yet to make the effort to understand our fellow human beings (yes, even those self-righteous, closed-minded, witch-burning Christians), to reason with them, to respect them, to treat them with kindness, to be happy for their happiness, and to try to help them when they are in pain or in distress. Guess what: You're going to Heaven.
I think it's a lot easier to be a better person if you stop spitting against the wind that is the Holy Spirit and start using it to fly. I think it's a lot less lonely if you stop railing against the heavens and start to look up to a loving Father. I think it helps to believe Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior because it's true. But those ideas and attitudes are aids to salvation, not salvation itself.
We build our stairway to Heaven, step by step, every time we see someone shaking with fear or grief and take them in our arms, every time we share our food with someone who is hungry, every time we share our words with someone who is lonely. We build a step every time we rejoice in someone else's joy, every time we teach someone to do something they couldn't do before, every time we learn to do something we couldn't do before, every time we share pleasure with another person, every time we deny ourselves pleasure because it would cause another person pain. We build it every time we pick ourselves up and try again, every time we smile at our loved ones, every time we smile at someone we don't know. We build it every time we stare fear in the face—fear of death, fear of pain, fear of being laughed at—and say, "No: I'm trying anyway."
Every hour of every day, we have an opportunity to do a little good or a little evil, to strengthen the best part of ourselves or to let it die by inches, to open our hearts wider to the goodness and God-full-ness of the people around us or to close ourselves into ourselves a little more. Every hour of every day, even if we've wasted every hour that came before, we have another chance at Heaven. Every hour of every day, we can choose to be a channel through which the love of God can flow.
"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'
"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'"
(Matthew 25:34-40)
