Theology: intellectual spackle?
April 14, 2006
Fairly recently—just a few years ago—I let go of Christianity and became what most people describe as “pagan” (for lack of a better term). There were many reasons for this, but the biggest reason, I guess, was the realization that Christianity as I had known it was a political construct more than it was a spiritual one. And as I read and learn more about neopaganism, the more I discover I’m not alone in this interpretation.
Chas at Hardscrabble Creek touches on this issue.
Unlike Paganism, Christianity cannot being avoid the yakety-yak. In the words of Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist of religion, it is doctrinal rather than imagistic. [ Why Men Really Hate Going to Church ]
Jordan Paper says something similar in the preface to The Deities are Many when he makes the point that polytheism is something that seems to connect very closely with how humans understand the world, whereas the monotheistic Religions of the Book (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) require tomes and tomes of theology in order to make it start to “make sense.” Christianity seems no more natural to me than the cathedrals built to serve its rituals, and much of the religion’s purpose is to justify religious political authority over a large group.
This latter point, incidentally, is probably why so many extremist Christian sects focus on the Old Testament rather than the new; it is the Old Testament that has all the rules and commandments—or, at least, the non-communist ones. It’s why the Judge Roy Moore is focused on the Ten Commandments, Ron Luce draws his battle cry from Judges rather than Matthew, and the movement in general pays more attention to Leviticus than they do the Sermon on the Mount. If you’re trying to claim political authority over your fellow citizens, Jesus isn’t going to help you much.
The root problem, I think, is monotheism imagines a god in charge: one God, one Voice, He Who Tells You What To Do. When you have one God telling you what to do, it can’t help but become political: God told me to tell you to stop using birth control, and you better do what God says because God told me to hit you with a really big stick.
The only reasonable response to this is “what?” Which is why we have so much theology; it’s there to hide the fact that Monotheism is just a sneaky way of saying “do what I tell you.”
Photo by Red Betty Black
Posted in Religion
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April 14th, 2006 at 7:59 am
– Christianity as I had known it was a political construct more than it was a spiritual one. –
Then you have not known Christianity.
Christianity is the teachings of Christ, plus a few things directly deducible from them. Organizations that promote anything other than those teachings and their immediate implications are doing Christianity a disservice, no matter what they call themselves.
If you’re going to reject Christianity, do it for a good reason: read the Gospels and decide that you disagree with Christ’s teachings. However, I must warn you: not too many have done that. More than coincidence?
April 14th, 2006 at 8:22 am
Fair enough, Francis, although I should point this out: Christ’s teachings — which I have read and studied — are primarily _ethical_, not spiritual. They may be phrased with spiritual language, and derived from a spiritual understanding, but there are precious few of Christ’s teachings that actually rely on a Christian cosmology, contrary to the assertations of many in the Christian Pharisee movement. Much of what is vital and important about Christ’s teachings have to do with how we treat one another (with compassion and forgiveness), which is to my mind at least primarily political as well.
November 3rd, 2007 at 5:54 am
[...] to monotheistic faith that make the concept of a god logically incoherent and necessitate a whole mess of explainin’. So while this makes gods easier to conceptualize in one sense, it makes them much more difficult [...]