Hating for (insert supreme being here)
10/09/06 07:11
In
this
post a few days
ago, I was discussing Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s
book
Is Religion Killing Us? I want to
briefly touch on it again. Nelson-Pallmeyer, who
professes to be a Christian, sees the problems with
religion stemming from the violence contained in
religious texts which are considered holy. As he puts
it:
Designating the Bible and Quran as “sacred” gives legitimacy and uncritical acceptance to the violent traditions.
And of course once you’ve started down the path of violence in the name of your particular invisible cloud daddy, you can justify any sort of atrocity. The only thing unacceptable at that point is failure. Nelson-Pallmeyer:
Terrorist actions were for them a faithful response to historical grievances based on a faithful reading of their sacred text.
The highly esteemed American Lutheran religious scholar Martin Marty puts it this way:
Believe in one all-powerful God. Believe that this God has enemies. Believe that a unique and absolute holy book gives you directions, impulses and motivations for prosecuting war. You have then the formula for crusades, holy wars, jihads and terrorism.
Amen! You tell it, brother! Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s solution to the problems of religiously justified violence is to try to educate people about how these “sacred” texts actually came into being over a long period of time. It sounds like a good idea to me:
As I described in Jesus Against Christianity, Yahweh absorbed powers associated previously with other gods:
It took many centuries for Judaism’s one God to emerge as a powerful, composite deity with many characteristics of neighboring gods and religions.
So basically the ancient writers consolidated this one all-powerful god into existence from a bunch of smaller gods with less mojo. I would really like to ask Mr. Nelson-Pallmeyer if that doesn’t indicate that the Bible as we know it is bullshit from the very first sentence. You know the one: In the beginning there was Gawd. If so, that doesn’t bode too well for the later myth of the pregnant virgin, does it?
Now I’m not so naive as to believe that a world without religion would be a world without hate, but I do believe that if we could somehow take away the supernatural justifications for that hate and expose it for what it is, we would have taken a huge leap forward as a civilization.
Designating the Bible and Quran as “sacred” gives legitimacy and uncritical acceptance to the violent traditions.
And of course once you’ve started down the path of violence in the name of your particular invisible cloud daddy, you can justify any sort of atrocity. The only thing unacceptable at that point is failure. Nelson-Pallmeyer:
Terrorist actions were for them a faithful response to historical grievances based on a faithful reading of their sacred text.
The highly esteemed American Lutheran religious scholar Martin Marty puts it this way:
Believe in one all-powerful God. Believe that this God has enemies. Believe that a unique and absolute holy book gives you directions, impulses and motivations for prosecuting war. You have then the formula for crusades, holy wars, jihads and terrorism.
Amen! You tell it, brother! Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s solution to the problems of religiously justified violence is to try to educate people about how these “sacred” texts actually came into being over a long period of time. It sounds like a good idea to me:
As I described in Jesus Against Christianity, Yahweh absorbed powers associated previously with other gods:
It took many centuries for Judaism’s one God to emerge as a powerful, composite deity with many characteristics of neighboring gods and religions.
So basically the ancient writers consolidated this one all-powerful god into existence from a bunch of smaller gods with less mojo. I would really like to ask Mr. Nelson-Pallmeyer if that doesn’t indicate that the Bible as we know it is bullshit from the very first sentence. You know the one: In the beginning there was Gawd. If so, that doesn’t bode too well for the later myth of the pregnant virgin, does it?
Now I’m not so naive as to believe that a world without religion would be a world without hate, but I do believe that if we could somehow take away the supernatural justifications for that hate and expose it for what it is, we would have taken a huge leap forward as a civilization.
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