Pride & Prejudice & Pragmatism
It occurred to me a few weeks ago that in my attempt to be the most open-minded person I can be, there remains one thing that I have adamantly resisted, vehemently prevented from gaining any ground in the world of my mind. That one thing was, and is, institutionalized religion, particularly Christianity. I said to someone even yesterday that Christianity is on the top ten list of things I hate most in the world. That’s a pretty powerful statement, and yet I’ve had trouble articulating why exactly I feel such an enthusiastic distaste for the religion, and why I will not even consider it as having any legitimacy.
Just so it’s clear, the source of my contention is not any fear of Christianity’s validity, but rather a fear that this rigidity may leak out and infect other areas of my life. If I can remain so stalwart in my resistance to religion, then the troublesome routines I find myself falling into may be a result of that same refusal to budge or to change my worldview. To explore this possibility I started trying to read C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”. That quickly became a chore because of how often my mind conjured up a counterpoint to everything he wrote, and the unshakable feeling that had Lewis been exposed to certain contemporary philosophies, he would’ve been hard pressed to sustain his point of view. At that point I started skimming through, looking for his more crucial arguments. I found a part which spoke of “Pride”, which Lewis defined not merely as being proud, but more like hierarchial behavior, that inclination in human beings to claim some form of superiority or at least uniqueness.
I found that I couldn’t really disagree with the points he made. He suggested that all the other so -called “sins”, like greed, all stem from pride. He says that extremely wealthy people do not seek more money because they need it, or even can really use it, but because they want to be richer than some other wealthy people. Their pride insists that they prove themselves in some way better than others. So, applying this argument to myself, my passionate “hatred” for Christianity may very well be derived in part from a certain luxury it grants me. It enables me to look down upon adherents of the religion, dismiss them as “wrong” or “stupid”, and thus exalt my own philosophy or worldview as superior.
I will concede that I do just that on a regular basis. I do tend to think of Christians as stupid, or at least misguided people. Of course this view is not simply because they do not adhere to my “superior” philosophy. I have quite a few reasons, but most of which are an argument against biblical literalism and fundamentalist points of view, which do not represent the gestalt of the Christian ideology. Plain and simple, I think that anyone who takes the Bible literally, i.e. considers it some kind of historical account, is an idiot. All it takes is the bare minimum of knowledge about the underlying structure of the religion, and its origins, to realize the folly in taking the Bible at face value.
Two examples: the suppression of the Goddess religion by the Indo-Europeans, and the subsequent demonization of the feminine and her serpent symbolism, from which stemmed the Adam and Eve myth; the co-opting of the story of the Great Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which became the story of Noah’s Ark. This story came out of Mesopotamia, a region trapped between two rivers and prone to flooding. For people of that time, for whom the “world” was quite small, such a flood could be devastating enough to be chronicled as an exaggerated myth. And speaking of Noah, who wasn’t an exceptional man, how could he possibly have known enough to collect two of every animal on the planet? How could he, having no zoological expertise, have identified the different sexes of each one? Can you even imagine the amount of TIME this endeavor would’ve taken? Ah, but then again, according to the Bible, people back then lived for several hundred years. Maybe also he was guided by the voice of God? Yeah, sure.
The idiocy of biblical literalism alone is not enough to spark my hatred, though. It usually comes as a parallel to the kinds of human behavior and world views that stem from it. When I hear a woman say that a man is the rightful head of the household, and Eve condemned herself and all of her kind (women) to live beneath the heel of men because she ate the forbidden fruit, I feel a burning anger swell up in my chest. While I’m talking about that asinine story, I also have an extreme dislike for the mere idea that God forbade Adam and Eve from acquiring knowledge.
Should I mention the Crusades? That the Christian institution hated alternative worldviews enough to justify long bloody wars to suppress them goes hand in hand with that idea of forbidding knowledge. Just as religion was for the conquering Indo-Europeans, Christianity was as much or more of a political weapon as it was a medium for spirituality. There is all kind of speculation out there as to the motives of the Jews in victimizing Christ which revolve around politics, and the alleged fact that he was descended from King David. I really don’t want to spend too much time talking about my specific points of contention, because I’ll never get to my real point. Returning to fundamentalism, the same kinds of problems are being bred from ignorance today – such as wars with an underlying religious motive fought under false pretenses; they suggest a return to a Crusader’s mindset.
As our civilization advances, so do humans’ proficiency and innovation in developing methods to destroy each other, particularly on the grounds of differing ideologies. Now politics and socioeconomic manipulation serve as some of the most powerful weapons. Racism, classism, misogyny – all of these things are propagated through the fundamentalist worldview. It is these things that make me hate Christianity, but also Islam and Judaism, and every other rigid, archaic, ritualistic institution.
Now, I couldn’t call myself open-minded if I believed that the fundamentalists of any religion represent the ideologies of all adherents. I acknowledge that some people merely use religion as a moral guide, or as a loose set of principles by which to live their lives. They “interpret” the Bible in such a way that enables them to reconfigure archaic ideas and apply them to present day situations. Some of these people may say that Jesus as the son of God was merely symbolic, and that all people are ideological “children” of God. Whatever. Here comes my main point. If in order to take anything meaningful or useful or practical from the Bible one has to analyze and reinterpret it – and probably in a way that its authors could never have anticipated, what value does the original text really have? The moral ideals in the Bible are nothing new. Be it human nature or a matter of balancing the conceivable benefits vs. the risk of harm within the context of self-preservation, we know on some innate level that murdering other people is wrong. There is probably no culture in the world that doesn’t condemn stealing, simply because no one wants to be a victim of theft themselves. These ideas existed long before the Bible, and continue to exist well outside the realm of religious ideology.
Whether it be moral guidelines or some sort of transcendent spirituality, what is it that’s specific to Christianity or any other religion that makes people choose to believe them? It seems to me that the answer is NOTHING. If a religion has to be removed from its original historical context, transformed, interpreted, and adapted to fit modern times, does it even keep enough of its original form to be viable? I could choose to worship Shakespeare and adapt The Individualy interpretations of his works to create some kind of framework for living. Does that make Shakespeare holy? So why Christianity? Why Islam? why Judaism? Is it cultural self-identification? Is it to achieve a sense of belonging? It seems to me that there is nothing that institutionalized religion offers that cannot be found by way of other philosophical ventures. Worse, it creates an opening – through literalist interpretation – for the propagation of archaic, counter-progressive, and ultimately destructive ideologies. That, for me, establishes institutionalized religion as unfit for survival in a contemporary world, and provides the grounds for its complete abolition.