It isn’t an uncommon reaction, on exposure to the wonders and beauty
of
the world and universe, to wish to ascribe a higher purpose to the
whole thing. While it is quite possible that this is an illusion,
caused by the high degree towards which human perception and cognition
is adapted towards pattern recognition, with resultant tendencies to
see patterns even when they aren’t there, such an explanation is
spiritually unsatisfying.
However, it is a large jump from a sense of the divine to
anthropomorphise it into an old guy with a beard who used to spend a
lot of time following around one particular obscure tribe in the Middle
East … or for that matter to some specific chick in a skirt, or some
shaggy guy with horns. A spiritual ‘Occam’s Razor’ would appear to
apply – why ascribe a more complex spiritual explanation when a simpler
one fits the feeling of wonder?
This in turn leads to the question of whether the specific spiritual
characteristics ascribed to the divine are in fact inherent to it, or
are merely an artifact of the observer – an attempt to reduce the
unfathomable down to something we can deal with? Do we each create god
in our own image, according to our idiosyncratic needs and prejudices?
It’s odd. In spite of the many problems I have with Christianity,
the
figure I have least problem with is Christ himself. Unfortunately to
accept the Christian conception of the divine you have to accept a lot
of spiritual baggage in addition …
It starts off with a fairly stereotypic tribal god – lots of smiting
thy enemy, long lists of taboos and some quite petty tricks to test
their loyalty. The sort of thing that makes sense for the spiritual
needs of a tribe attempting to maintain survival, morale and cohesion
in an area packed with other tribes.
It then turns into a guy telling you to be nice to everybody, and
consequentially not be too greedy or judgmental. Not a bad message
really.
This however gets heavily expanded on after his departure, by a number
of people, not all of whom knew the original guy personally, to include
quite a bit of stuff beyond simple clarification of the original guy’s
teaching, some of it quite judgmental, and finishing with a prophecy
that some really not-nice stuff will happen to a lot of people near the
end of things.
The whole thing hangs together about as well as Odin putting on a
scanty dress and calling himself Aphrodite and then getting a haircut,
putting on army boots and calling himself Mithras.
This can lead to three views of Christianity:
That it’s all true, with the result that Christianity is meant to be
seriously schizophrenic. The consequences of attempting to apply such a
view of Christianity would be seriously scary, were it not for the high
probability that the practitioner would quickly get locked up.
A la carte Christianity – whereby Christians individually choose, often
at a fairly unconscious level, which themes of Christianity, and
specific biblical passages, to emphasise and de-emphasise. This is, I
suspect the way that most Christians operate – even “literal word of
God” fundamentalists (who happily cite biblical justification for
smiting gays, while conveniently ignoring the majority of the Levitican
taboos). This creates two problems. Firstly it turns an apparently
singular religion into a myriad of, often very different and heavily
contradictory, splinters. Secondly it allows people to not only “create
god in their own image” to confirm their own prejudices, it further
allows them to cite biblical authority for this prejudiced view (for an
extreme example, do an internet search on ‘Addicted to Hate’, the title
of an unpublished book freely available online about one of the more
bigoted Christian churches & its founder).
A more explicit and systematic culling of Christian thought, including
the bible, to attempt to provide a more consistent and stable spiritual
basis. This however has two problems – firstly it would be heavily
schismatic from normal Christianity, secondly it would take
considerable research on what to throw out (assuming you didn’t do a
gross-level cull of simply dumping the Old Testament and/or the
post-Christ sections of the New Testament).
Even postulating a creator, is one sufficiently small-minded as to demand with menaces the worship of his creations worthy of that worship?
Is an umpire sufficiently careless that it allows hundreds of
contradictory rulebooks to circulate (thus guaranteeing a high
probability that they will serve to mislead rather than illuminate
players), one that you would wish to judge a game whose outcome is the
fate of your immortal soul? Surely it would follow that if a perfect
creator wished to establish a belief system for its creation, its
belief system would be sufficiently superior to any belief systems that
might accidentally come into existence that it would entirely displace
them? Does it not follow therefore that, lacking a belief system that
is obviously dominant to all others (both in following and in
perfection), that either there is not a creator, or that it does not
choose to establish a belief system?
Is a deity sufficiently ineffable and cryptic in its intentions that
whole libraries of arguments have been written reconciling its reputed
omnibenevolence with the existence of evil within its creation (and
with biblical references to a supernatural evil, apparently also of its
own creation), one with whom we can have the “personal relationship”
that so many Christians promote?
'Free will' is often used to excuse the existence of evil and
suffering, while still claiming an omnibenevolent creator. This line of
argument has numerous flaws however...