Friday, June 22, 2012

Preaching with a secular flag

As glad as I am that most Christians are not fundamentalists that want to kill me, I often wonder how they justify their more moderate opinions without forcing themselves to appeal to secular values, the very same values that stand against the dogma of their book.

Human rights are not very well represented in the bible itself, so it seems odd that someone could read it as the unalterable word of god and see human rights within the pages. More often than not, we learn our values from the society we live in, and impose those values onto whatever we'd like to believe. Jesus is the perfect character to exonerate in this case because Jesus' reputation is really quite good, even among people who don't generally care about him. From the grim crucifix all the way to the "Buddy Christ" and "Passion of the Christ 2: Crucify This" he's quite popular, and is generally held up as the ultimate good guy who not only was supernaturally awesome, but also a regular dude just like you me.

Too bad it misses the big picture. In the context of the bible, Jesus is god reincarnate, which means that he is a representation of god (an eternal god who can punish and reward you in the afterlife). If Jesus is god, then he can't die. This means he didn't make any sacrifices for anyone's sins, did he? He lived on and continued to judge others based on whether or not people followed his example. Seriously, this is not much different that the bullying god of the Old Testament.

How can anyone read human rights into this story? Regardless of some of the wonderful nuggets of wisdom that Jesus' character can sometimes offer (though they aren't very original, even for the time), he's still the same sort of prick that can't stand to see anyone doing good and disobeying authority. To read this story and interpret it as a universal morality is to miss the point of the story and not see the forest for the trees. The big picture of the story is quite clear, and quite unpleasant.

But perhaps I'm reading the bible wrong, right? Well, who's reading it right then? How would we decide which bits of wisdom in the bible are correct and which were not? How would we decide with which scope we should view these stories? Is there some way we can test these bits of wisdom to decide which parts are good and which are bad? YES! It's called science, but if you're going to do science, why bother using the bible as a source material for your hypotheses? It doesn't make sense, because most of the phenomena in the bible are not observable in the real world.

My overall point is that moderate Christianity (and other forms of moderate theism, though I'm not as familiar with many of those viewpoints) is great because it's closer to secularism than fundamentalism, but it misses the main reason why secular values are important: evidence and reason! If you're going to support secular and humanist values, you ought to be able to back up those values with good reasons. Using your own moral values that you've learned in modern society to modify the message of your bible is not good enough. At some point, we have to admit that our society has evolved beyond the morals of the society the bible was written, and come up with new moral values based on what's happening to real people today.

There's no harm in learning from our historical mistakes, so the bible has value in that sense, but here's the big problem: if people everywhere are still to believe that the bible is the word of god, and its interpretation causes this many schisms, the bible is fucked up! If you're a Christian, here's my advice: Pray to god for a new book. One that's clear, makes logical sense, and appeals to modern human values. A supreme being ought to be able to do that, shouldn't he? If not, then it's better to abandon it as moral philosophy. If you're not comfortable with throwing it out, you can at least acknowledge its genuine problems, and stand in the moral high ground waving the flag of the enemy.

No comments:

Post a Comment