Right. Pardon me folks, this got a little bit long.
John Galt said:
Moving on, my primary beef with religion is it's horrible rationalization and justification techniques. In the Bible, they repeatedly praise genocide and rape and state that the perpetrators are virtuous. Should you replace Ancient Israelites and Canaanites with Nazis and Poles, then the situation changes and the devout call them monsters. It's like saying: "Killing is bad, unless God says so, then it's a virtue."
It's an unfortunate pattern that humans seem to tend towards that whenever they get hold of a set of ideas that a lot of people are keen on it only seems to be a matter of time before a few particularly mental individuals reckon it's logical to start killing people who disagree with them. When that idea is "Celtic Football Club is better than Rangers Football Club" or vice versa the resultant murders take on a rather pathetic air, but when the idea is "lets all live in peace and not do nasty things to each other" using that as justification for murder takes a very special yet sadly far from unique strain of madness to carry off.
The Old Testament, as you say, is littered with such madness, and that's why we have the New Testament which lays out the ground rules again and makes it quite clear that murdering folk you don't like and stealing their stuff is not what God wants. Eight hundred years later, European monarchs decide they quite fancied some new holiday homes out east and thus the crusades kicked off. The problem there was not a flaw in Christian doctrine but rather that the footsoldiers didn't know the doctrine themselves and the people in charge of them didn't care so long as they kept bringing back lots of pillaged gold and art and so on. This is why, despite being a Catholic I think the Reformation was one of the pivotal periods in the history of Christianity and without it we'd all be a hell of a lot worse off, because if ordinary people can't understand the source of their own belief system they can't hold the men who uphold it to account when they start declaring that Jesus wants them to charge a set rate for the sacraments and suchlike.
John Galt said:
Then you've got the arbitrary rules of morality and what is good and evil. When a religion begins to spout things like "Gays are bad" and "Don't eat pork on Friday" what you have is a collection of arbitrary rules set forth by a select (often self appointed) group of individuals enforcing their own prejudices on you. This leaves no room for challenge because if you don't prepare your food a certain way, you've sinned and are going to hell. When you use Hell to threaten people into submission, and then tell them that only your ways are acceptable to the divine, you've taken an initially benign thing like religion, and turned it into a tyrannical organization.
This takes me back to my point about the Reformation and how important it is for people to know their own beliefs. The Church's attitude to homosexuality is one I've always found particularly aggravating because they really don't have a leg to stand on. The only passages I'm aware of that even mention it are a couple of lines in Leviticus that Biblical historians reckon isn't about homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, but rather the common tradition of single combat among men with disputes where the winner would rape the loser to enforce his superiority over him. Thus the message is not 'gayz R bad' but rather the more reasonable 'thou shalt not enforce prison rules upon thy neighbour's ass'.
There's also a brief mention in St Paul's letter to the Romans where he was reeling off a load of iffy sexual practices such as sex in temples, in public places, with horses etc. It's worth remembering that St Paul, before he (literally) saw the light, was a professional executioner who travelled from town to town rounding up heretics and arranging for them to be stoned to death. This is not a role in life that attracts people open to alternative lifestyles. The letters as a whole are basically Gospel editorials and taking each word of them as gospel (so to speak) is probably ill-advised.
John Galt said:
Now for Free Will. If how can God be an omnipotent creator, and still make sinful people? If I sin, isn't it God's fault for making me able to commit a sin? If he's omnipotent, why not carry out his will on Earth directly instead of going through the cloudy medium of prophets?
If God controlled all our actions directly and sent us weekly newsletters written in the skies telling us how to live, life itself would have no meaning. Bear with me.
When trying to explain how people could recognise objects with common functions despite visual differences (what makes a chair a chair, etc) Plato came up with the idea that there were two universes- an 'imperfect' universe of the body with various types of chair and jam and cloud formation, and a 'perfect' universe of the mind with ubiquitous examples- concepts, essentially- of 'chair', 'jam', 'cloud' etc. Nowadays we understand that organic brains can make experience-based decisions using incomplete sets of data and can define a chair as loosely as 'something with a flattish platform about bum-height'. Anyway, the idea of the corporeal universe as being fundamentally imperfect proved popular with philosophers and theologians and has been chucked around ever since.
Unusually for a concept rooted in theology, this one is backed up by hard science. In the 1800s Ludwig Boltzmann hit upon the concept of entropy, the idea that there is no such thing as a perfect mechanical system and even came up with equations for quantifying the amount of energy lost in any given case. He presented his findings to the Royal Society of Physics, and like any large group with an idea they really liked (designing the perfect steam engine, at the time) they attacked the man with different opinions, barring him from publishing his work anywhere, ridiculing him in the press and eventually driving him to suicide. He was right, of course, and the universe we inhabit is fundamentally incapable of supporting perfection.
So what does this have to do with sin? Well, I believe it was Homer Simpson who said "if everyone in the world was like Ned, we wouldn't need to go to Heaven, because we'd already be there." Now, the idea of a judgmental, mildly-sectarian loony like Flanders being the perfect man probably fills you with as much terror as it fills me. However, it raises an important idea- if an entire society followed its own set of just laws exactly and without exception, there would be no suffering, war or poverty. Also, nothing interesting would ever happen. Without adversity (and most of our adversity is man-made, at least for the last couple of centuries or so) man has nothing to triumph over, and so the greatest acts of human endeavour and greatest periods of development never take place. Take the tank out of the scene and that lone student in Tienanmen Square just becomes a bloke standing in the road. Without the fight for equality, Martin Luther King would just have been an everyday preacher with a local reputation for stirring sermons and shagging anything that moved.
In South Park: The Movie the Devil sang "without evil there would be no good so it must be good to be evil sometiiimes". This sounds counter-intuitive, but without the existence of evil and the capacity for people to commit it there would be no requirement for others to do 'good' and since without evil and the free will to choose it over good everyone would be good all the time the acts themselves would have no merit and corporeal existence becomes an exercise in killing time. I reckon. Kryten's scene in the Red Dwarf episode "The Inquisitor" is worth watching for a good example of this.
John Galt said:
Finally, we have the concept of Hell. When a religion preaches love and kindness, no problem. When it preaches love and kindness, and then goes on to say that unbelievers are sub human and damned to the worst torment for eternity, then you have a glaring hypocracy. Many Christians will assert that Jesus is the only way to God. This means, the kindly Buddhist/Hindu/Muslim/etc. who devoted their life to helping the poor and sick, will play poker with Hitler in a pit of fire for all eternity.
Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? It's a disappointingly popular viewpoint among thumpers of holy text and is, I'm relieved to say, complete bollocks. Jesus said, according to the gospels, that "I am the way the truth and the life. No-one can come to the Father except through me." Can't remember chapter and verse off the top of my head, but it's in there. Anyway, some people view this as a sort of threat- 'be baptised or be buggered' essentially. However, aside from condemning Abraham, Moses, Elijah and all the other OT heavy hitters to hell along with everyone else who died before baptism was invented, this viewpoint is completely at odds with Jesus' other teachings- a handy example being the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritans were heretics, seen as the lowest of the low by mainstream Jewish society, and the parable explains that these fellas are capable of carrying out God's work more effectively than the pork-avoiding, scripture-thumping Pharisees if they simply care more for their fellow man.
Add this to all the tales of forgiveness and rebirth and really the only way to avoid Heaven in the long run is to be offered a place and to decline. The "I am the way etc" speech is shown not to be a threat at all, but simply a statement of fact. Christian tradition and Jewish tradition before that states that the messiah is humanity's strongest link to God and that his death will open the gates of Heaven to humanity. It would be unforgivably anthro-centric to suggest that this applies to the entire universe so I reckon all the other races out there will have their own saviours which would cause all sorts of theological consternation and the confused adding of points to the Holy Trinity, but we'll condemn that bridge as a heretic and burn it down when we come to it.
-Nick
