Is violence the true religion of our time?

Nope. Money is.
Violence is just one of its study buddies.

If violence is religion, then I’m an atheist.

Violence is in our Chimpanzee Nature, cooperation and Eros in our Bonobo heritage. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny in behavior, too.

@Piper_Brianmind Violence for money is our religion. :)

@cyndihugs Exactly.
Sex sells.
Violence sells.

No. Violence isn’t a religion, but it is often a tool of religion.

I believe that every sentient species fights among themselves for control of food and other resources and the ability to reproduce, and has since organisms had more than one cell. How is this merely “our” religion for “our” time? Humans are simply “intelligent” enough to use religion and other justifications as a cover.

None of the answers so far shows any intellectual engagement with the question being asked, which is contained in the explanation below the masthead question above.

Its a shame, since if Wink is correct, this is one of the most important moral questions of our time. If you read the whole question or, better yet, the essay from which I have excerpted, you will find a cogent argument that violence the dominant ethos of our time. It pervades our religions, our collective myths, our politics, our sense of justice, and our sense of history. It seems to hold a favored place in our assumption about a great many things almost as if it were an actual religion, holding sway over people’s values and beliefs.

Saying that money (or materialism) is more important, simply side-steps the question. Why on earth would people find money spiritually fulfilling, much less form the basis of their morality? Materialism is simply the self-distraction of people who are already spiritually dead. Saying violence is somehow endemic to our species isn’t an answer either; its simply an intellectual shrug. But I’m not asking if violence is “really” a religion. Religion is just a metaphor here for a complex of myth, values and beliefs that seem to hold sway over people.

@Zuma, so you’ve answered your own question, eh?

@evelyns_pet_zebra Seems that way.

@evelyns_pet_zebra No, not at all. This question has no “answer”; it is intended to be a spring board for a discussion of the role of violence as an unacknowledged ethos, which so far hasn’t happened.

everybody has it’s own religion.my religion is science but I agree that the majority thinks that power obtain trough violence,politics etc is the most important

From Wink’s essay:

Jesus taught the love of enemies, but Babylonian religions taught their extermination. Violence was, for the religion of ancient Mesopotamia, what love was for Jesus: the central dynamic of existence.

Uh, no. There is no Babylonian religious text that commands genocide. Wink must have confused that with the Bible, which is the only religious text in existence that actually commands followers to commit genocide. See Deuteronomy 20:16, as well as the entire book of Joshua, which details and celebrates the God-commanded extermination of the Canaanites and other tribes by the Hebrews.

Wink goes on to contrast the Babylonian pre-creation battle between Marduk and Tiamat with the asceptic creation story in Genesis. Nevermind the fact that the Psalms and Job describe Yahweh engaging in the exact same types of battles with ocean monsters. Nevermind that Yahweh is a warrior god who constantly orders the Hebrews into battle, often genocidal battle.

And if Wink wants to claim that Jesus somehow negates all of this Old Testament violence, he is ignoring Jesus’ violent parables where Yahweh is characterized as a slavemaster who will kill and dismember the “unsaved.” He is also ignoring the entirety of Revelation, an exceedingly violent text even by the standards of apocalyptic literature, which explicitly describes horrible acts of torture and death inflicted upon the Romans and the unbelievers by a vengeful God.

Violence is central to Wink’s religion. It is codified in Wink’s religion, even more than it is codified in other religions. Wink’s essay is dishonest tripe, and further proof that the field of “theology” is intellectually vacuous.

@Qingu I think you are being unnecessarily harsh and, inexplicably, just a little bit obtuse.

Wink is a professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary and would probably be the first person to agree with you that the Old Testament is saturated with violence. He is part of a group of Christian scholars who are attempting to to reclaim Christianity from the messianic, apocalyptic and other “violence-of-God” traditions that seem to dominate fundamentalist thinking. I’ve just finished a book by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, a close colleague of his in this movement called, Is Religion Killing Us? Violence in the Bible and the Quran which addresses these violence traditions head-on.

Its strong stuff and, frankly, pretty disgusting to a modern sensibility. So I read Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews for a bit broader and, perhaps, a more sympathetic perspective. Cahill goes to some pains to explain the pagan worldview in order to set the stage to show what the Jews introduced that was new. The picture that Cahill paints is of a world where there is no sense of history because everything is part of a repeating cycle; there was no sense of the future being shaped by one’s actions in the present; no sense that one’s character was important shaping one actions; and no sense of moral righteousness to shape one’s character. In the pagan world of Babylon and Sumner there was no sense that violence is an evil; it was simply accepted as a common fact of life.

You are correct that there is no Babylonian text that commands genocide in the same sense as Deuteronomy. But, Wink never said there was. Wink’s argument is that Babylonian society was violence-saturated and that it accepted this violence as a central dynamic of existence. If you read the Enuma Elish the Babylonian text he refers to, violence is not presented as evil or as a problem to be solved, it is simply accepted as a primordial fact.

You are correct, that there is plenty of violence in the Old Testament. That is not being contested; but when the Jews get done with committing their own genocides and get packed off to Babylon, something new creeps into the Jewish sensibility and into Western thought: a concern for the plight of the underdog—the sick, the orphaned, the hungry and the homeless, a reaction to the injustice of having been enslaved in Egypt and Babylon.

What Cahill does is accentuate the positive and downplay the negative, as do most mainstream non-fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims when they gloss over the horrific passages of God-violence (like Abraham and Issac) that abound in “sacred” texts. What Wink and Nelson-Pallmeyer advocate is confronting this violence head on and rejecting it as inconsistent with the compassionate and non-violent themes that are common to the three monotheistic religions. They argue that these violent passages are the work of the fallible and self-interested men who wrote, edited, translated and rewrote monotheism’s various “sacred” texts. We don’t have to accept them uncritically, and they give us good reasons based on textual analysis and other evidence why we shouldn’t.

Wink isn’t ignoring what you call Jesus’ “violent parables.” What he and Nelson-Pallmeyer ask is that you consider who is talking, because is sure isn’t Jesus in these instances. Matthew, for example, just can’t seem to get the idea that people will do things like tend to the sick, and the thirsty, or visit people in prison unless they are threatened with being cast in a fiery pit where there will be much gnashing of teeth (always with the gnashing of teeth). John (and Revelations) don’t even appear until two centuries later and, according to one of Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills, and are obviously the product of a completely different theology written by a different John than John the Apostle.

Somehow I get the sense that you didn’t get past his mention of Babylon, which is actually peripheral to his argument. He goes on to criticize the whole idea of violence as an ethos or religion. I just don’t see the bad faith that you attribute to him.

I’m not accusing him of bad faith, just cherry-picked selectivity and intellectual dishonesty.

I agree with much of the essay’s criticism of violence (actually, I think a better word for it is vigilatism or unilateralism, at least with respect to the “gunfighter”/superhero ethos he brings up) in modern Western culture.

However, he repeatedly invokes the Bible as a foil for what he sees as the roots of this violence—pagan/Babylonian mythology. As I pointed out, this is utter nonsense. You only disagree with me to the extent to which it is nonsense.

To which I respond: I don’t think you, or Wink, actually grasps the extent to which violent, genocidal, and—indeed—unilateral/vigilante violence permeates the Bible. It’s not just in Deuteronomy. It’s in the story of Exodus. As I said, the entirety of the book of Joshua details and celebrates genocide—but so do much of the later Deuteronomistic history books, which collectively make up about a fifth of the entire Bible.

Violence also permeates the most ancient Biblical texts, the psalms and Job, where Yahweh is described explicitly as a Mesopotamian ocean-fighting warrior god. And of course, Revelation (I can think of no better example of a “superhero” story where a savior unilaterally punishes the “bad guys” through extreme vigilante violence), as well as the parables, and much of Paul’s threatening theology. All of this, collectively, presents an “us-vs.-them” mentality where the “them” deserve punishment and torture and death. And as violent as the Babylonians and Romans and Greeks were, their gods never commanded them to commit genocide. In fact, these cultures were far more tolerant towards the gods of other religions than Biblical cultures—they’d take conquered gods back to their own pantheons.

Regarding “concern for the plight of the underdog”—this is also nonsense. Reading the Prophets (the texts that came after Babylonian captivity), the concern is not for the underdog in general, across cultures. It is for the Hebrew underdogs. Certainly the violent fantasies in the prophetic apocalyptic texts—Ezekial and Daniel—don’t exhibit much care for Babylonian poor, hungry orphans. Claiming this is a reaction to being enslaved in Egypt and Babylon is also nonsense—the Old Testament condones (Lev. 25:45) and mandates (Dt. 20:10) slavery. While the Babylonian captivity wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t technically slavery—and the prophets-era Jews weren’t abolitionists. And in any case, many pagan myths urge charity and hospitality and are concerned with correcting injustice.

And you can’t simply disown all of this—which, arguably, makes up the majority of the Bible—by saying you’re “accentuating the positive and downplaying the negative.” You can’t claim, with zero evidence, that Jesus didn’t really say all those violent things (because otherwise that would mean Jesus said violent things, which contradicts your asserted conclusion!) It’s cherry-picking. And if you’re going to invoke the Bible and Biblical religious tradition as this great beacon of nonviolence, it is absolutely absurd and dishonest. If Wink wants to champion nonviolence, he should find a different religion based on a less violent book.

@Qingu ” I don’t think you, or Wink, actually grasps the extent to which violent, genocidal, and—indeed—unilateral/vigilante violence permeates the Bible.”

Did you click on the link marked “saturated with violence” above (scroll down to my lengthy comment)? Did you browse the description of “Is Religion Killing Us”? a book I told you that is related. I have been making a fairly extensive study of the religious underpinnings of our modern sense of retributive justice.

“And as violent as the Babylonians and Romans and Greeks were, their gods never commanded them to commit genocide. In fact, these cultures were far more tolerant towards the gods of other religions than Biblical cultures.”

Pagan gods didn’t command anybody to do anything. There was no faith or belief in pagan religion; there was nothing “spiritual” or “morally uplifting” or anything else we associate with religion in the modern sense. The pagan gods were little more than good luck charms that could be appeased, bribed or bargained with through sacrifice and ritual rigmarole. Indeed, much of the meaning of that rigmarole had been lost for centuries (which was why the pagan world was so ripe for monotheism when it finally came).

Of course polytheistic religions were more tolerant of other gods than monotheistic ones, but it doesn’t follow that pagan people were “tolerant” in a modern civil libertarian sense. Look what happened to Socrates when he openly challenged the living myths of his day. The Romans were a particularly brutal people. They were extremely materialistic, power-oriented, money grubbing, ambitious, self-aggrandizing and brutal. They didn’t need to be commanded to commit genocide; it came naturally to them. They lined the road with crucified people as a practical demonstration of their power. The Sumerians of Gilgamesh fame were no pikers when it came to violence either.

“Regarding “concern for the plight of the underdog”—this is also nonsense. Reading the Prophets (the texts that came after Babylonian captivity), the concern is not for the underdog in general, across cultures. It is for the Hebrew underdogs.”

You are deliberately missing the point. Of course it was limited, at first. But without this innovation there would have been no Jesus movement, no modern abolitionist movement, no feminist movement, no Enlightenment and it’s concern for human rights, or any of the rest of it. Name one Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Egyptian, Sumerian or any other pagan text, sacred or otherwise, where there was even the slightest concern for the plight of any underdog whatsoever.

“And you can’t simply disown all of this… with zero evidence, that Jesus didn’t really say all those violent things… It’s cherry-picking.”

Indeed we can disown all this “god-violence.” And do so with evidence. Who told you that “cherry-picking” is intellectually dishonest? You aren’t obligated to believe everything you read in any other context; so why here? Let me quote from Cahill’s Gifts of the Jews for a while:

“It is no longer possible to believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God. Fundamentalists still do, but they can keep up such self-delusion only by scrupulously avoiding all forms of scientific inquiry. They must also maintain a tight rein on their own senses, for, even without access to modern biblical criticism, any reader might wonder at the patchwork nature of the scriptures, their conflicting norms and judgments, outright contradictions, and bald errors. But even without resorting to modern scientific methodology or noticing what an inconsistent palimpsest the Hebrew Bible can be, we must reject certain parts of the Bible as unworthy of a God we would be willing to believe in. We read, for instance, in the Book of Joshua that God commanded the Israelites to put all Canaanites,even children to the sword; and in the Psalms the poet regularly urges God to effect the brutal destruction of all the poet’s enemies. Though the people who wrote such words may have believed they were inspired by God, we cannot.”

I agree that much of the Bible is saturated in violence, and so is unworthy of belief; but we are not obliged to swallow it whole. It is possible to deconstruct it, to discern from internal evidence the coherent, compassion and non-violence of Jesus’ message, and distinguish it from the violent garbage that has been put into his mouth. Cahill again:

“We can read the Bible (as postmodernists do) as a jumble of unrelated texts, given a false and superficial unity by redactors of the exilic period and later. But this is to ignore not only the powerful emotional and spiritual effect that much of the Bible has on readers, even on readers who would rather not be so moved… Without the Bible we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movement of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement of Poland [etc., etc.].”

“And if you’re going to invoke the Bible and Biblical religious tradition as this great beacon of nonviolence, it is absolutely absurd and dishonest. If Wink wants to champion nonviolence, he should find a different religion based on a less violent book.”

I’m afraid that finding another book isn’t an option. The battle is between a violent fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and a nonviolent post-Enlightenment human rights interpretation. “To find another book,” as you put it, would be to cede Christianity to the fundamentalists, and that would be disasterous. I too would love to throw my hands up in disgust and simply dismiss the whole god-violence thing as unworthy of belief, but Cahill has convinced me (see also, How the Irish Saved Civilization) that whether or not you are a believer, Judiasm and Christianity have been pivotal in shaping the world history and how we think today, and it is only honest to give them their due. If you think this is absurd, I can only refer you to Cahill’s books, for they make a careful and subtle argument much better than I—and to Karen Armstrong, and Nelson-Pallmeyer.

I think greed is the true religion of our time for many.

@Zuma, I had written a longer reply but alas, low battery plus spotty internet connection…

Two major points:

1. I think it’s interesting—and I mean that in an eyebrow-raising way—that an atheist like yourself is purporting to tell Christians how to interpret the Bible, a book you do not believe in. How are you not simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing? You want religious people to interpret the Bible in the same way an atheist would—as a historically important but manmade book of myths, legends, and largely outdated morals from which you can cherry-pick a few decent ones still applicable.

You claim that taking the Bible at its word would be “ceding Christianity to the fundamentalists”—well, people who believe in the Bible would rightly point out that your method would be stripping religion of everything that makes it a religion in the first place. If your rubric for believing stuff in the Bible is “does it match up with post-enlightenment secular philosophy?” then you are not a religious person, you are a secular person using religion as window-dressing. I prefer to be more upfront about my efforts to destroy religion. :)

2. You claimed that, without the Bible, we wouldn’t have an abolition movement, or any concern for the poor, and asked me to provide myths that show the same concern for the underdog that the Hebrew myths do. One that immediately comes to mind is the Greek flood myth, Deucalion, where two poor strangers come to a town and seek shelter. Everyone turns them away except for an old couple who give them food and a place to sleep. It turns out that the strangers are actually Zeus and Hermes and they’re going to flood the town and kill everyone—except for the old couple who helped them. The moral is obviously “show hospitality and kindness to those in need.” Charity and alms are also a major part of Hinduism and Buddhism; Buddha achieved enlightenment, supposedly, when he saw the suffering of the poor and wondered how best to prevent it.

And in any case, I think it’s completely spurious to trace things like the abolition movement to the Bible. Yes, abolitionists used the Bible as “window-dressing” to support their ideology, but their ideology was firmly rooted in post-Enlightenment philosophy. This should be obvious; Christianity never had an abolition movement until the advent of enlightenment philosophy. Even more obvious is the fact that the Southerners held up the Bible just as much as the abolitionists, and when they held it up, they weren’t cherry-picking and dishonestly interpreting it. They rightly pointed out that saying “slavery is a sin” flat-out contradicts numerous parts of the Bible that not only condone it but command it. The abolition movement—much like Galileo’s and Newton’s natural philosophy—didn’t emerge from Christianity so much as it escaped from Christianity. And (again, just like Newton’s philosophy) it demanded an “interpretation” of the Bible that is really more of an “ignoring” of the Bible to make any sense.

@Qingu “You want religious people to interpret the Bible in the same way an atheist would—as a historically important but manmade book of myths, legends, and largely outdated morals from which you can cherry-pick a few decent ones still applicable.”

Actually, my view of the Bible, Jesus, Christianity and morals falls squarely within the bounds of Ecumenical Christianity that has been the consensus of the non-fundamentalist Christendom since Vatican II. Believe it or not, this is what they are teaching in the mainstream liberal denomination seminaries nowadays, and it is part of the reason that fundamentalists regard themselves as the only true Christians and dismiss mainstream liberal denominations and European Christians as “atheists.” You don’t think I came up with this all on my own, did you?

It all boils down to a schism over whether Faith Alone is sufficient for salvation, or whether you believe that there has to be a conversion of the heart that requires you do good works out of your love for humanity. If you want to make a fundamentalist hiss like a vampire splashed with holy water, simply suggest to them that it is sufficient to live with Love in your heart and salvation will take care of itself. Such words are poison to them, but they are central to the Christianity handed down from priest to priest, practiced in monestaries, or by liberation theology missionaries.

Your idea that a “religious person” is one who uncritically accepts the whole of scripture, or is someone whose orientation to religion is primarily through an intellectual commitment to scripture is a uniquely Protestant idea, and a relatively recent one at that. There was no “scripture” in Jesus’ day, so what did Jesus’ followers take away from Jesus? That is what modern Christianity is trying to get back to. If you read Cahill, you see that there is a coherent personality both in Jesus and St. Paul (who is the actual founder of Christianity). There was no “scripture” in the primitive communism of St. Paul’s early Christian church. St. Paul’s epistles, which are so fetishized today as the Old Testament God of Creation speaking through Paul to us today is such a perversion of what the early Christians thought and believed that it boggles the mind.

“people who believe in the Bible would rightly point out that your method would be stripping religion of everything that makes it a religion in the first place”

That would be true if the Bible was what made Christianity a religion. Christianity isn’t about the Bible, its about Christ as his contemporaries saw him, not through the layers of self-serving theology that have worked their way into scripture. It is about living according to the example of Christ (as a man, who gives us the parable of the Good Samaratin, or who rebukes the Pharisees for attempting to rebuke him for helping a man who has fallen into a ditch on the Sabbath). My point is, that you don’t have to “believe in the Bible” or the divinity of Christ to believe in Jesus’ invitation to the human heart.

Its not about ignoring the inconvenient bits; it is about using the techniques of textual criticism to discern the coherent personality behind the Gospels, and then use the techniques of historical reconstruction to figure out what this would have looked like to Jesus and his contempraries. In my view (and I am in good company on this) Bible belivers practice a form of idolatry (biblicism) when they place their legalistic literal reading of scripture ahead of the living traditions of Christianity.

Unfortunately, you have to read someone like Cahill in order to get a sense of the scholarship involved in this, or to get a sense of how the modern Enlightenment is a fullfillment of the Christianity of St. Paul. Fortunately, they are wonderfully competent popular histories and a delight to read. I was surprised to learn, for example, that it was Ireland’s St. Patrick that we have to thank for the modern abolition movement. See How the Irish Saved Civilization available now for only a penny at Amazon.com. For a treatment of Jesus and St. Paul, see The Desire of the Everlasting Hills for another penny.

“I prefer to be more upfront about my efforts to destroy religion.”

I’m not so sure that religion needs destroying, or that it advances the cause of compassion. If you listen to people like Karen Armstrong you will see what I mean.

Every truly Western form of religion has as its basis in violence in the establishment of it’s position in society itself. Yet it has more to do with the heart of man than any one dogma.

The Protestant movements and its later establishment in Great Britain, the Puritan Movement in coming to the New World, their subsequent fending off the British and establishing an oppressive rule over the Native Americans. The Muslim rule of Sharia Law and ideas of holy war are but two other blatant examples. The Roman Catholic brutal and power driven rule for centuries not least of which was the Inquisition.
All of these movements have relied upon the subjugation of millions to acquire mass influence and even greater holdings.

And ironically they would all speak today of a means of peaceful ecumenical coexistence. If peace is the aim (and not shock and awe), why not redistribute the wealth of these massive insulated temples of avarice to the downtrodden?

Why not establish a system which uses compassion to speak to ones heart and truly influences the heart of man rather than one which simply appeases his guilt. I am all for the hypocrisy of religion being eradicated yet would not go so far as to deny persons the right to assemble peaceably. I believe this has to happen in the heart of man first and then society will change. Anything else can too easily be Fascist.

@pdworkin
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny in behavior, too.
What is, wordy statements for 2,000 Alex.

@SeventhSense I direct you to the Karen Armstrong link above.

Yes thank you.

@Zuma, you claim that Christianity is not defined by the Bible (supporting this by pointing out that the Bible as we know it did not exist during Christ’s time).

That’s true. However, Christianity is defined by the mythology of the Bible. Let’s look at your interpretation you put forth in your post. You claim that only love is necessary from salvation. That’s fine. But salvation from what? The concept of “salvation” makes absolutely no sense without the prior context of Yahweh, the Mesopotamian god who gets very angry when you disobey him.

You seem to believe that you can be a Christian simply by being a fan of a cherry-picked selection of Jesus’ moral teachings (you are of course ignoring all the times Jesus advocates blind obedience or threatens violence). You seem to think that someone can define themselves as a “Christian” if they like a few things that Jesus says. By that logic, this person would also be a “Muslim” since Muhammad says many of the same things.

Do you, Zuma, believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead, and that this act was somehow salvific in terms of avoiding punishment by Jesus’ father, Yahweh? I assumed you think that’s all nonsense, and yet if you ask your mainstream liberal Christian friends, I bet many of them will tell you it’s absolutely central to their faith.

If Jesus did not come back from the dead and if his deity-father is imaginary, then Jesus is just another moral philospher. And if you water Christianity down such that being a Christian means agreeing with several points that Jesus makes, you are erasing the distinction between Christianity and other religions. You are, in fact, watering down the religion to the point of its destruction.

You said, Its not about ignoring the inconvenient bits; it is about using the techniques of textual criticism to discern the coherent personality behind the Gospels, and then use the techniques of historical reconstruction to figure out what this would have looked like to Jesus and his contempraries.

I’m all for doing this. I have consistently said the Bible ought to be understood in its cultural context. But that’s not what you’re doing. It’s not what Cahill is doing, from the little bit I’ve read of him. We don’t know that much about the “historical Jesus,” but the scholarly consensus on the historical record is decidedly not that the “real Jesus” was a peace-loving hippie. Many strands of the gospels considered early contain violent parables and threatening imagery. One of the scant few things we are relatively sure Jesus said was that “divorce is wrong.” You are cherry-picking—you are taking only the verses that support your presupposition that the real Jesus preached only about love and tolerance and ignoring the rest—and then you are just labeling this cherry-picking as “scholarship.” (As a religious studies major, I’m not fooled.)

And to say the Enlightenment is a fulfillment of the Christianity of Paul is just absurd. You don’t need historical reconstruction to arrive at the real ideas of Paul, we have his letters. (Well, you do need some scholarship to discern his real letters from the pseudepigrapha, but that’s not particularly difficult.) The mythology of Christ’s death and resurrection is absolutely central to almost all of Paul’s letters. I understand the Enlightenment as widening the circle of empathy and rational inquiry—but Paul isn’t empathetic (check out Galatians, where he jokes that he’d like to see a rival sect of pro-circumcision Christians go all the way with their circumcizing and cut their whole penises off), and he certainly isn’t espousing rational inquiry. His logic is flawed and faith-based, and he constantly rests his arguments upon appeals to his own asserted magical authority. Paul is an opportunistic demagogue; if anything, Stalin’s opportunistic appropriation and deification of Lenin is a modern-day fulfillment of Paul’s appropriation and deification of Jesus and his cult.

I have not read the book about St. Patrick and the abolition movement, but surely you’re not saying that the entirety of the abolition movement is because of St. Patrick? Again, you can have abolitionism without Christianity. It is clearly based on secular Enlightenment moral philosophy. Obviously, Enlightenment philosophy had to be dressed up in the shape of Christianity to some extent for it to take off (the same can be said for natural philosophy for a time). But for 1,800 years, we had had Christianity without Enlightenment philosopher—and no abolition movement. That strikes you as a coincidence?

@Qingu I was going to say, for an atheist, you seem awfully well informed. But, you don’t seem all that out of place as a religious studies major or, even, as a seminary student in one of the more liberal Christian denominations, nowadays. I forget who mentioned this to me, but a great many young theology students take their professors aside and sheepishly ask, “Do you really believe in God?” What they mean, of course, is that nobody in their right mind can really be expected to take all this supernatural physics-defying rigmarole at face value. And, as you are well aware, all these violence-saturated bits, seem positively counter to the whole program.

So, what to do? Chuck 2,000 years of evolving humanist sensibility in a dismissive pique of so-called “intellectual honesty” or attempt a new synthesis for a new historical time? I have written elsewhere (and I actually expect you to click on this and read it) there are at least 8 distinct historical incarnations of Christianity, only one of which places scripture at the center of belief.

The preoccupation with “salvation” in the sense fevered sense we encounter it today among American evangelicals and pentacostals is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning in earnest around 1830 as a reactionary protest against abolition, and the waves of anti-abortion legislation as a reactionary protest against women’s suffrage and modern feminism. As you correctly note (and as you will see again if you read the link) both sides of the civil war felt fully justified by scripture, which is starkly contradictory on the subject of slavery.

Is it intellectually dishonest to “cherry pick” out the anti-slavery parts and defend them against those who have picked out and defend the pro-slavery parts? No, the parts you pick out to defend depend on your reading of Christianity. Do you see it as a project for the liberation and fulfillment of humanity—an as yet unfulfilled promise? Or do you see it as an oppressive dehumanizing ideology that legitimates inequality and the subjugation of reason? In this respect, what Christianity is isn’t an intellectual question; it isn’t about which vision of Christianity is “really” Christianity, it is about which vision of Christianity you wish to foster and support.

Either way you choose, you will find scholarship in support of your choice. I choose to stand with Cahill even though I am not a believer because I find his scholarship, which is based on textual analysis and historical reconstruction, superior to the biblical exegetics and presuppositional apologetics of his Protestant critics. But I would still be with him in any case, because I don’t see the Bible as the ultimate authority on Christianity.

Cahill, in The Desire of the Everlasting Hills takes up the topic of St. Paul’s treatment of slavery, showing how it created severe problems for the egalitarian Christians of his day. He couldn’t come out and simply repudiate slavery because that would have been the kiss of death, because the Roman Empire would have quite rightly regarded such a religion seditious and would have wiped it out. (In fact, it was this very accusation that sparked the Christian persecutions under Nero, probably with some justification.)

What we see instead is that Paul winks at slavery. He urges the Corinthians not to keep slaves for sexual purposes because it sows dissension and enmity in the community; elsewhere he urges masters not to act on their prerogative to put runaway slaves to death; elsewhere he urges that those who join Christian communes as slaves remain nominally slaves, but they are to be treated with full human respect. Shall we look back from the safe vantage point of our 20/20 hindsight, from the comfort of our post-slavery world and snub St. Paul for being “dishonest” in his attempts to finesse this issue? To do so is to engage in historicism, and would be mean-spirited.

But, who is St. Paul anyway? He never met Jesus. What makes his pronouncements the definitive Christian authority on this matter? Only Protestants who believe that the Bible is the supreme authority on Christianity, believe that. And the only reason they believe that is because they have broken with the tradition of apostolic succession of the Catholic Church, which they see as corrupt. In order to see St. Paul as more a more authentic voice of Christianity, they raise St. Paul and make him the mouthpiece for the God of Creation; something is radically different from reading Paul as Paul, or Jesus as Jesus—or rather, as Jesus filtered through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Nowhere does Jesus speak to us directly in the Gospels. And it isn’t until you get to John, around 200 years later, that you get the notion that Jesus is speaking to us as anything but a man. So, there is quite a bit of latitude in reading scripture simply in whether you choose to read it as the voice of the God of Creation speaking to you through a bullhorn, or as a literary work with a human voice, created by fallible and imperfect men.

Of course you are correct, I take the whole resurrection thing with a grain of salt. But, as Cahill points out, the circumstances of the whole affair are open to question. For one thing, all the apostles are hung over after drowning their sorrows. Their eyes are all suspiciously sensitive to light (ergot poisoning?), they aren’t able to get a good look at him and don’t recognize him as Jesus at first, and seem to have to be talked into recognizing the apparition as Jesus. Could Jesus have survived the crucifiction? Who knows. Normally, it takes a day or two for the person succumb as their limbs give out and they die of asphyxiation. Could he have been drugged and survived the lance?

It doesn’t really matter to me because I don’t see Jesus’ death as an act of atonement for “original sin” and I don’t see his death as instrumental in my salvation because I never saw myself as “lost” and needing to be “saved.” Rather, I see Jesus’ sacrifice as an act of human altruism, a moral exemplar to those of us who would speak truth to power no matter what the cost. To me, humanity doesn’t need to be “saved” so much as healed, and that is done by having the courage to put yourself on the line for your fellow man. And by that, I don’t mean leaping in the first bayonet thrust your way; I mean doing the best you can with what you have.

I’m sure you can read St. Paul cynically as an opportunistic demagogue, instead of reading him in a more charitable light as a distant ancestor to the modern Enlightenment. The two readings need not be mutually exclusive. Historical figures and movements turn out to be complex when you examine them closely. As for St. Paul’s one remark about circumcision “proving” he “wasn’t empathetic” is simplistic; rather like saying someone who has once told a lie is a liar for all time.

The book about St. Patrick is not about the abolition movement. It is about how the Irish saved civilization. St. Patrick, who was a young roman nobleman, was sold into slavery in Ireland at the age of 16, where he “went native.” When he persuaded the Irish to convert to Christianity many years later, one of the things he asked them to give up was slavery, which they did. It was the first time in the history of the world where slavery was abolished (around 490 AD), but its not, by any stretch, the main part of the brawling, squalling story of the Irish and their unlikely contribution to civilization.

Please take a look at the Karen Armstrong link above, because it too addresses many of the issues we are talking about.

Religions should not be limited by ancient books. They should be living discourse. To give you an example what this means take a long at the biography of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

@mattbrowne
He was quite a powerful man of conviction.

@SeventhSense – He was indeed!