jesus tie-dyed for your sins

Jesus Tie-Dyed for Your Sins

By in atheism, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion 2 Comments

Adam Gopnik:

To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world—he says categorically that the end is near—and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living.

…One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.

Secularism is all that matters to me regarding religion and society. I got bored by hair-splitting philosophical and theological arguments a long time ago, and unlike many New Atheists, I don’t believe that religion has the power to make otherwise good people do bad things, so I couldn’t care less to harangue people about how logic and decency compel them to abandon their faith. Whatever gets you through the night is all right, as long as you’re not being an asshole about it. On this point, however, I do think it’s worth standing polite-yet-firm. There’s a thin line between metaphorical interpretation and intellectual dishonesty, and people who refuse to acknowledge what Biblical scholarship has revealed about the historical circumstances of Jesus the person are on the latter side, in my opinion.

Eisejesus (Slight Return)

By in jests japes jokes jollies, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion 6 Comments

Andrew Sullivan links to this for our consideration:

In authoring scripture, Origen argues, God has deliberately planted all sorts of interpretive obstacles: problems, difficulties, mistakes, morally objectionable stories, and so forth. These manifold obstacles lead us to press beneath the surface of the text and to search more deeply for its spiritual meaning. Such spiritual exegesis isn’t just a scholarly technique. It requires ascetic purification, the spiritual transformation of the reader. So the problems in scripture…are planted there by God to lead us into the depths of spiritual life, just as a wise teacher might plant mistakes in a class discussion in order to lead the class, gently and unobtrusively, towards the truth.

He doesn’t say whether he cites it approvingly, but knowing him, it’s probably a safe bet. So Origen anticipated the dinosaur-fossils-as-test-of-faith rationale that long ago, huh? That’s impressive. But I mostly enjoyed the use of the term “exegesis” in this context. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I think you mean a different word.

Jesus Lived His Life In a Cheap Hotel On the Edge of Route 66, Yeah

By in jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

Joerg Rieger:

Dangerously, some Christians in the movement were reminded of where and how Jesus had actually lived. Occupiers camping in the streets could relate to Jesus’ deep solidarity, not with the elites of his time, but with the multitude. Jesus had stayed among those who struggled with life: with the sick, the social outcasts, strong women of ‘dubious’ reputation and working people such as fishermen. He himself was a construction worker, and would have been in touch with the many unemployed of his time, who quite regularly experienced layoffs. Perhaps he was even unemployed himself.

Again, I say, going by what sparse evidence there actually is, Jesus would have been disrupting drum circles to preach excitedly about the end of the world on December 21st, and, assuming he didn’t kill himself after the subsequent disillusionment — shall we speculate? why not? — perhaps he would have, at age 33, decided he was still young enough to turn his life around, cut his hair, gone back to school, and become a hedge fund manager.

A Revolution Without Dancing

By in atheism, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

Andrew Brown:

If I’m right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn’t some rational Athens of the mind. It’s Glastonbury.

As someone else recently noted—it slips my mind where, exactly—for people like the Atheism+ crowd, atheism naturally and logically entails progressivism. But most progressives do not see progressivism as naturally and logically entailing atheism, and any attempts to steer progressivism in that direction would likely be disruptive to the goals both groups hold in common. The argument that progressive actions are still dangerously contaminated by even the most benign presence of religious sentiment will seem like dogmatic purism to people who care more about practical results, which is why it has been suggested that you leave it out of your social justice organizing. One national rally and some encouraging poll numbers does not mean you’re ready to remake the world in your image. Many progressives, if not explicitly Christian to begin with, are at least happy to portray Jesus as the original hippie and pay lip service to the importance of emulating him.

I agree that this is tendentious history, to say the least. But I can say that because I’m apolitical and somewhat misanthropic, and I can afford to be a stickler for accuracy over utility. If I were possessed of a burning desire to right some societal wrongs and raise up the downtrodden, I would have to admit that Hippie Jesus might make for a useful figurehead. A thoroughly secularized religion of the COEXIST variety may in fact be the best way of binding a society together in a useful way while leaving enough freedom for purely godless individuals to hold themselves apart philosophically and pride themselves on it.

Lovin’ Mens, Lovin’ Womens, Lovin’ All God’s Creatures

By in jests japes jokes jollies, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion, samesecks No Comments

Paul Oestricher:


Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried. The idea that he had a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene is the stuff of fiction, based on no biblical evidence. The evidence, on the other hand, that he may have been what we today call gay is very strong. But even gay rights campaigners in the church have been reluctant to suggest it. A significant exception was Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham and a convert from a prominent Jewish family. He dared to suggest that possibility and was met with disdain, as though he were simply out to shock.

After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock, I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual. Had he been devoid of sexuality, he would not have been truly human. To believe that would be heretical.

Heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual: Jesus could have been any of these. There can be no certainty which. The homosexual option simply seems the most likely. The intimate relationship with the beloved disciple points in that direction. It would be so interpreted in any person today.

You keep using that word, “evidence”…

The Fool on the Hill

By in extraordinary popular delusions, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

Continuing with a theme, here’s Gary Gutting:

The Sermon on the Mount, however, does not offer a clear view of what makes for a good life.  Many seem to think Jesus is saying little more than be nice to everybody.  Others see a call to a heroic life of total non-resistance or self-sacrifice.  Still others hear him as requiring little more than an enhanced version of the Ten Commandments  (e.g., avoiding not only murder but also anger, not only adultery but also lustful desires).

Almost all Christians ignore many of the things Jesus said on the Mount.  Who literally takes no thought for their lives or for tomorrow?  Who never resists evil?  Who gives to anyone who asks?  Who says “Hit me again” to an unjust attack?  There may be ways of integrating such injunctions into our morality without reducing them to banalities, but the bare text of Jesus’ sermon doesn’t tell us how to do this.

Yeah, it’s true; a literal belief in the imminent end of the world does tend to render the advice you offer people a bit short on nuance and practicality. Seriously, it amazes me how much effort people put into trying to salvage something inspirational from this dreck. Even if you set aside the irrelevance of his preaching once the centrality of the apocalypse is removed, there’s just nothing profound there. As J.L. Mackie said:

Richard Robinson has examined the synoptic gospels as the best evidence for Jesus’s own teaching, and he finds in them five major precepts: “love God, believe in me, love man, be pure in heart, be humble.” The reasons given for these precepts are “a plain matter of promises and threats”: they are “that the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” and that “those who obey these precepts will be rewarded in heaven, while those who disobey will have weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Robinson notes that “Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels.” These include beauty, truth, knowledge and reason:

As Jesus never recommends knowledge, so he never recommends the virtue that seeks and leads to knowledge, namely reason. On the contrary, he regards certain beliefs as in themselves sinful…whereas it is an essential part of the ideal of reason to hold that no belief can be morally wrong if reached in the attempt to believe truly. Jesus again and again demands faith; and by faith he means believing certain very improbable things without considering evidence or estimating probabilities, and that is contrary to reason.

Robinson adds:

Jesus says nothing on any social question except divorce, and all ascriptions of any political doctrine to him are false. He does not pronounce about war, capital punishment, gambling, justice, the administration of law, the distribution of goods, socialism, equality of income, equality of sex, equality of colour, equality of opportunity, tyranny, freedom, slavery, self-determination, or contraception. There is nothing Christian about being for any of these things, nor about being against them, if we mean by “Christian” what Jesus taught according to the synoptic gospels.

Crucifiction

By in augean stables, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, ohferfucksake, religion No Comments

David Sirota:

These findings are important to America for two reasons. First, they tell us that, contrary to evidence in the United States, the intersection of religion and politics doesn’t have to be fraught with hypocrisy. Britain is a Christian-dominated country, and the Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment. It makes perfect sense, then, that the more devoutly loyal to that Bible one is, the more progressive one would be on economics.

…Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing “correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption.”

Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible. In that sense, religion has become more of a superficial brand than a distinct catechism, and brands can be easily manipulated by self-serving partisans and demagogues. To know that is to read the Sermon on the Mount and then marvel at how anyone still justifies right-wing beliefs by invoking Jesus.

Yes, it’s yet another one of those “Jesus would so totally have been a progressive Democrat” hack pieces that Salon specializes in. Put on your hip waders; the bullshit’s flowing thick and fast, and we’re going in.

“The Christian Bible is filled with liberal economic sentiment.” Uh… well, I guess you could say it was somewhat forward-thinking to use two hundred Philistine foreskins as currency for buying a wife, and I guess thirty silver coins was a pretty fair price for a slave, but I suspect Sirota is actually referring to the occasional generic call for people to care for the poor, though why we’re supposed to take those verses seriously while coughing politely and ignoring the far more numerous examples of primitive barbarism permeating the Bible, our theologian-for-hire doesn’t say. Anyway, I realize that economics is not actually a science, but still, I think it’s just a tad unfair to those who attempt to engage in rigorous analysis of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services to equate their discipline with moral commands whose only justification is an appeal to divine authority (which I thought was kinda anathema to classical liberal thought).

Okay, seriously. Let’s be as plainspoken as we can here. If you familiarize yourself even a little bit with biblical scholarship, you will realize that you simply cannot read the Bible as a straightforward, modern narrative, ignorant of the historical context in which it was written. Jesus, as a literary character, is hopelessly incoherent by our standards. Some verses make him seem like a peacenik hippie. Some make him look like a typical authoritarian cult leader. Neither view is wrong, technically. You can selectively read the Gospels and come away with the impression that what matters most is blind faith in authority and enforcing an inflexible moral code among the community. You can also selectively read it and come away with the impression that we’re just supposed to be excellent to each other, peace out. Both views require turning a blind eye to the other.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, Bart Ehrman has been a bestselling author for more than a decade now, and he hammers on this theme repeatedly: after three centuries of scholarship, the historical-critical method of biblical scholarship is in unanimous agreement on the basics and has been for decades. The most fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist and the most liberal Unitarian learn the same things in seminaries and divinity schools: assuming there was a historical figure such as Jesus, he would have been just another apocalyptic Jewish prophet. You simply cannot make sense of his ramblings and seemingly schizophrenic character if you don’t take into account that he seriously expected and desired the violent end of the world. He may have thought that it was a good thing to take all you have and give it to the poor—because he thought the world was about to end and you wouldn’t need it anyway. He may have urged you to consider the lilies of the field in lieu of preoccupying yourself with worldly concerns—which is good advice for someone who doesn’t have much of a future to worry about. He may have offered up a bunch of toothless platitudes about the meek, the peacemakers and the justice seekers—but their reward for believing was going to arrive with the apocalypse, not in some future liberal welfare state. He didn’t want to create a stable, equitable society for future generations—he wanted to destroy the one he lived in.

What I am saying is that inhabiting this mindset radically reorganizes one’s priorities, and that if you don’t believe that the end of the world is something both imminent and desirable, perhaps you should ignore this jabbering lunatic and look for sage advice elsewhere.

Also, as Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks have noted before, I’d like to point out the amusing fact that the death penalty is, ah, kind of an integral part of Christianity; after all, they use an instrument of execution as the very symbol of their faith.

Jefferson’s Razor

By in augean stables, history, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

Let’s return briefly to a different part of that deluded Andrew Sullivan article:

If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was a mere 27 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: “We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.” He removed what he felt were the “misconceptions” of Jesus’ followers, “expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.” And it wasn’t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists’ embellishments as “diamonds” in a “dunghill,” glittering as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.

History is never so precise and tidy, of course, but I’m awestruck by the extraordinary symbolism of Jefferson’s action. And since I’ve been on the topic a couple times recently, I thought I’d elaborate on why that is.

I’ve been reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve this week. With the historical record of the events in question being somewhat sparse, a lot of the book consists of speculation and creative writing, and as such, some of the parts that have struck me the most have been the background details that Greenblatt uses to flesh out the story — brief references to things like the arrest and execution of Giordano Bruno, or passing mentions of ordinary villagers arrested or denounced to the Inquisition for nothing more than a sarcastic joke that could be construed as heretical. The stifling intellectual climate is chilling to contemplate, and yet, it would continue for another few centuries from the point described. We all know the basic facts of the history of religious persecution, but that kind of knowledge can quickly become a superficial recitation of dry facts that cast no shadow across the mind. You really have to immerse yourself in detailed examples every so often to feel the weight of it in your bones.

As I’ve stressed a few times, the intellectual freedom and security that allowed someone like Jefferson to confidently trim the Bible to his liking was not a natural outgrowth of Christianity; it was a product of Enlightenment ideals giving primacy to reason. Whatever the simplification here for the sake of clear narrative, whatever the criticism of rationality that could be offered, the important point is that in the two and a half centuries since, it has become accepted as the most basic common sense that you are free to attempt to persuade others of the truth of your religious views all you want, but it’s unthinkable that you should try to use coercive force in the event that you fail. Christianity had almost 1500 years to establish that state of affairs, should it have been desired, and yet fire and sword were still the main instruments of persuasion. At some point, if you’re honest, you have to acknowledge that this was a feature, not a bug.

The separation of church and state, enshrined in the highest law of the land, was a seismic shift, one of the most important events in Western history, as far as I’m concerned. Religion had been domesticated by the state. Christian might no longer made right. They were forced to swallow any antinomian urges they had and accept the right to existence of heretics and infidels.

Safe to say, it was a wild success and a popular one as well, so much so that tolerance is widely presumed by many progressive, educated people to have been an original component of religious belief per se, all along, and Jesus is presumed to have been the earliest proponent of just such an enlightened, non-sectarian, universal humanism, despite ample evidence to the contrary. You get the impression humankind once lived in harmonious agreement on something like Aldous Huxley’s perennial philosophy, but power-hungry priests and ignorant zealots led people astray into sectarian strife, which was never what any founder of a religion intended.

Now, some have said to me, as long as the end result is a kinder, gentler society where everyone gets along, what’s the harm if they’re fuzzy on the details of how they got there? Why kick up a fuss about it and risk giving offense? I respond: because truth matters for its own sake. Because it’s not innocently mistaken to sweep aside the unseemly parts of Christianity or the significance of the religious/secular divide, it’s flat-out dishonest. Because this isn’t even an irresolvable argument about the finer points of metaphysics; this is a simple case of what did and didn’t happen in history, simple enough to be explained in grade-school textbooks. Because good-natured geniality predicated on mistakes and falsehoods is not as stable or enduring as I would like it to be.

Theologians and garden-variety apologists for religion frequently resort to the cuttlefish defense against the criticisms of atheists; i.e., spilling an tremendous amount of ink in the hope that their attackers will get lost in the impenetrable abstractions and convoluted knots of logic. But unfortunately for them, the basic principles of Christianity have been boiled down to their simplest form for the sake of reaching across language barriers and converting heathens the world over, and it’s pretty clear what it means to be a Christian: All humans carry original sin. God sacrificed his only son to offer you a way to escape this burden. Accept this offering, proclaim Jesus as your savior, and profess your belief in the reality of his death, resurrection and eventual return. If you refuse, there will be the most severe consequences imaginable.

See, there’s no wiggle room there. This is the essence of Christianity, the very thing that gives it an identity, that makes it not-Islam, not-Judaism, not Hinduism, etc. Jesus’s death and resurrection were historical events that only happened once. There is no other path to free yourself from the wages of sin, and only false prophets will tell you otherwise. You cannot change these core elements without doing violence to the story. There is no honest way to square such a provincial, dogmatic worldview with the broad-minded Enlightenment inheritance we’re so fond of.

Thus when I hear professed Christians like Mary Elizabeth Williams talk about respecting the equal validity of other faiths like it’s a self-evident truth, along with touchy-feely postmodern glurge about everyone’s personal truth being different and yet still true, I think, well, you don’t appreciate what a chasm Jefferson opened up in the intellectual landscape. You’re trying to have it both ways without understanding what either of them really mean. You can’t legitimately call yourself a Christian if you don’t accept the very basic rules of membership. If you find them distasteful, if you have to remove or reimagine the core aspects to make them palatable, then have the fucking integrity to admit you’ve outgrown your religion, and put it away along with all other childish things. Quit dressing up the old bones in new clothes and give them a decent burial.

I respect Christianity as a worthy opponent in the Nietzschean sense and so make the effort to take it seriously even if it means the impossibility of reconciliation; it stuns me to see the insouciance with which its supposed adherents treat it.

Just Water Under the Milvian Bridge

By in extraordinary popular delusions, history, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion No Comments

Andrew Sullivan:

What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus’ doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.

Let’s set aside the numerous examples of violence both threatened and implied for those who refused to pay heed to this prophet, as well as the curious idea that one can truly accept and love all other human beings while raging and recoiling in disgust at practically everything that makes one actually human. Because unlike so many proponents of this Jesus-as-ur-hippie rhetoric, Sullivan is at least cognizant of the impractical zealotry from whence it came:

Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.

Sullivan laments the politics and power that stepped in and corrupted what had been such a pure, simple message of world-renunciation and resentful apocalyptic desire, childlike in its innocence. Of course, that worldly political structure is the only reason we’re even still talking about what should have been just another forgotten group of mystery cultists in the first place. The Church’s consolidation of power, rather than being some regrettable aberration that interfered with “true” Christianity’s natural progression toward universal acceptance, was the answer to the question of how to live in the world once it had become readily apparent that the Parousia, the entire raison d’être of Christianity, the only thing that gave it meaning and coherence, was not going to happen. Why, “misinterpreting” the message is a venerable tradition, going all the way back to, well, Constantine himself! Maybe some people are just too close to it to appreciate the wonderful irony of that.

Eisejesus

By in atheism, augean stables, history, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Mary Liz:

After services, I chatted with the youth minister about Christianity’s current image problem. “Oh, you mean the whole ‘If you don’t agree with everything I say, you’re going to hell’ thing?” she asked. “Yeah, that gets old.” And my mother-in-law, a retired minister, agreed. “Certainly traditional Christianity talks about judgment,” she said. “But I think the stronger emphasis in the Bible is love and grace. Some of the last words Jesus spoke were of forgiveness. That’s my faith.” And she added that it’s a faith that we as Americans are supposed to enjoy without ramming down anybody else’s throats. “Roger Williams left Plymouth because he didn’t want to adhere to all the dictates imposed on people by the Puritan group,” she said. “When the state and the religion became the same, he fled. He established the basic principals (sic) on which our country was founded — the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.”

…I’m not out to convert anybody. And though I’m raising my children with our prayers and religious traditions, I’m also constantly challenging them to ask questions, express their doubts and figure things out for themselves. I’m trying to bring them up — in the truest sense of that phrase – in a community where we’re all free to look at the universe differently, as Christians and Jews and Muslims and atheists, without derision.

At a reading earlier this week, the author Stephen Elliott said something to the assembly that resonated deeply for me. He said, “Your truth is different from my truth. And we’re both right.” In a culture of arrogance and self-righteousness on either end of the dial, it’s a tough concept to embrace. But coexistence is only possible when we’re not screaming at each other, smugly pronouncing the other guy either sinful or stupid. All that many of us, as non extreme Christians, want is to simply be treated with the same respect and tolerance that our faith teaches us to give to others. Because whatever else we all believe, how can we ever go on as a diverse, thriving culture if we don’t believe first in each other?

As it happens, I had ample opportunity to think about this last weekend while on a trip up north with my dad and girlfriend to the ancestral homeland. My paternal side of the family was Amish until only about three generations ago, and my great-grandfather was the first president of a Bible college. We had book business at said college as well as a church, and while refamiliarizing ourselves with old haunts and landmarks, we made time to visit the Ephrata Cloister (I would have gone to Roadside America myself, but I got outvoted).

Even if I think asceticism is, for all practical intents and purposes, a form of insanity, I can somewhat respect the devotion and seriousness involved in traveling thousands of miles to carve out such an existence. Ducking under doorframes that were purposely cut low to force entrants to bow their heads in humility, seeing the fifteen-inch-wide wooden boards and small blocks that served for beds and pillows, hearing about the demanding routine of work and prayer on one meal a day; it was all a clear example of what it means to take your religion seriously enough to arrange your life around it, to sacrifice contentedness and genial relationships if need be, for what you perceive as truth. Inarguable, undeniable truth.

Afterward, my dad asked about an offhand comment our tour guide had made, suggesting that William Penn was responsible for establishing freedom of worship in the colonies. Rifling through memories of having done a dress-up presentation/book report on the man in seventh grade, I couldn’t remember enough about him to say for sure how much credit, if any, he deserves for his contributions to modern religious tolerance. Penn founded the colony as a “holy experiment”, and many pacifist, quietist sects settled there. All well and good. But I suspect that the sort of “freedom of religion” that the pre-Revolution colonists were interested in was a more libertarian-ish version, a “Leave me alone to do what I want” type. The majority of colonial Christians were Calvinists to one degree or another, after all. And as long as you were willing to brave the frontier, you could go as far as you needed to find a place to worship whichever derivative of Protestantism you wanted without having to fear being made into kindling.

Which kind of gets back to the earlier point. These people were still arguing over truth, which was, of course, presumed to be a Christian truth. There was no general concept of everybody’s path being just as valid as anyone else’s. Dissenters left their communities because they were sure that the establishment had lost its way in worldliness and falsehood (and sometimes because their fanatical self-righteousness made them insufferable to be around). For a universal ideal of tolerance open to anyone simply on the basis of their shared humanity and enshrined in the rule of law, you need Enlightenment idealism. If you want to give credit to someone for instituting the sort of tolerance that we moderns take to be common sense, look to Jefferson and Madison. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was the product of Enlightenment values, not biblical study:

When Jefferson’s bill came up again in 1786, it passed by a vote of 60 to 27. In an attempt to give some kind of official recognition to Christianity, some assemblymen tried to insert an acknowledgment of “Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” Jefferson took pleasure in the fact that “the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel of every denomination.”

People like Johann Beissel came here to get away from the endless religious wars in Europe, like the Thirty Years War which had left around 40% of the German population dead a century earlier. In the decades just prior to the French Revolution, right around the time that Jefferson and Madison were developing their ideas, people like Jean Calas and Jean-François de la Barre were still suffering the sort of torture and execution we associate with the Dark Ages centuries earlier. Almost 1500 years of Christianity being synonymous with the state, and that sort of thing was still happening. I stress this point because it’s become a core part of the spiritual-not-religious mythology to claim that Jefferson’s legacy, our current understanding of religious tolerance, the one that allows “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel” to live and let live without fear of violent coercion, has been the guiding ideal of religion all along. This would be laughable if it weren’t so intellectually dishonest.

I mean, even Hinduism and Buddhism haven’t been completely immune to sectarian strife and violence; it takes immense stores of chutzpah and ignorance to claim that monotheism’s record of the same is all an aberration from the “real” message, which, as always, corresponds exactly with the speaker’s opinion. And with monotheism, the exclusivity is the entire point. The joys of the afterlife are only available to those who believe. We have the truth. You can either accept it or we can kill you. There will be no peaceful coexistence with heresy and willful perversity. Sin is not just another lifestyle choice.

Among many similar passages, Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life, and that no one came to the Father but by him. If you’re not with him, you’re against him, and if you don’t gather with him, you scatter. I have yet to hear of any alternate gospels where he added, “But, y’know, really, as long as you try your best and don’t act like too much of a dick, it’s all good. I don’t really care. Peace out.” If you don’t believe in sin and its consequences, there’s nothing to be saved from, the entire narrative makes no sense, and Jesus is just one more apocalyptic Jewish prophet eagerly anticipating the end of the world. You want everyone to just get along? Great. You don’t agree with the Manichean overtones in the Bible and Quran? Wonderful. You want to just refer to them occasionally as culturally shared sources of non-denominational, inspirational aperçus? Well, I might have to say that you have terrible, unimaginative taste in literature, but sure, okay, fine. All I ask is that you own up to the responsibility of taking such a rebellious step.

I can respect people who put themselves through immense hardships for what they feel to be the truth. I can respect biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman who have a passion for truth and knowledge instilled in them by their faith, but when their pursuit of truth leads them to the crossroads where it parts ways with faith, they have the integrity to keep going even as they wistfully look back in sorrow. But I can’t respect people who only hear what they want to hear; people who ramble on and on about higher truths greater than themselves while simultaneously stretching the word “truth” until the elastic in it snaps; people who use texts not as portals to an unknown way of experiencing the world, but as mirrors to reflect their own face back at them.

1 2 3