Jesus/violence etc.
I’ve just spent the weekend in Florence.
When I wasn’t eating ice cream I was looking at the inside of churches. One such place of worship (Santa Maria Novella), unsurprisingly, has lots of pictures of Jesus on the walls. It was as I was staring at the nails in the feet and hands in one of these (The Holy Trinity by Masaccio) that it really hit home how violent this whole Jesus thing really is.
Imagine if someone appeared today who peacefully went up against the ruling power, gradually turning millions of people to believe in love and tolerance for thousands of years. But then millions of other people took those teachings on and used them to justify killing millions of other people. How did that happen? How did loads of people turn a (supposed) root belief in being nice to one another into the exact opposite?
This would be down to the Bible and its openness to various interpretations. Christian fundamentalism is the practise of defending the ‘fundamentals’ of a literal reading of the Bible, sometimes with violence. Does that conflict with what Jesus supposedly taught? Looks like it, but then there’s so much in the Bible that sends people off in another direction. How do you deal with heretics and those who would threaten Christianity when the Sermon on the Mount preaches loving your enemies?
So here we are with lots of nice Christians and lots of violent ones, all coming from the same teachings. So either they don’t believe the teachings or they think, somewhat ironically, that it’s justifiable to ignore them for the greater good of defending them:
If (and I’ll say for the record that I’m an atheist, so I find this quite a sizeable ‘if’) there was some big plan of a creator to make us all nicer people by sending his son down here to tell us how to behave, then he really ballsed it right up. I guess people who defend God would say that it’s our free will that made it all go wrong, but then the creator supposedly created us, too, including this ‘free will’ that seems to mess up his plans so many times. Then he gets annoyed at how naughty we are. Well, he (very supposedly) created us. If he didn’t want all this bad behaviour then he should have made us less prone to faults, or at least accept his part in those mistakes and started again, or given us a little running adjustment, like an OS update. Surely that would be a piece of piss for someone who is omnipotent.
So a guy whose life ended with nails in his feet and hands inspired millions of people to kill millions of other people, despite his express intention to do the exact opposite.
How strange…
Greedy people will always appropriate popular concepts to get their own way. Today it’s using ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ as a pretext for a war in oil-rich countries. Does that make democracy, or the Enlightenment, responsible for the deaths?
It’s all pretty tragic.
Who knows what goes on in the heads of fundamentalists? I can only imagine it is because they follow their preachers and not their texts. I doubt many of them are all that literate, so it makes sense. Their preachers are, it seems, appropriators of the concepts and have their own material agendas – based on prejudice, avarice or patriotism.
It seems it was ever thus. Constantine was sagacious enough to see that the survival of the Roman Empire depended upon appropriating the popular ideas of the time. And the trend continued by powerful men (and women, Elizabeth, Mary etc) throughout the ages.
I’m not sure it was the words of Jesus that has led to so many deaths. More the power that greedy men could gain from the ownership of those words.
The other stuff, the free will stuff. Hinduism makes so much more sense of it – the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Puranas. Christianity doesn’t really do the concept any justice at all. The original idea of avatars and incarnation and all that is far more sophisticated than the West understands. Outside of the words attributed to Christ in the New Testament, I don’t know how anyone can take Christianity seriously. It’s a shame, as the ideas, the more ancient ideas it is itself appropriating are actually stunning.
It’s all a bit like using Russell Grant as an authority on astronomy.
But it’s a subject that seems to make everyone hot under the collar. Unsurprisingly.
Thanks. Comments like that are why I write this blog.
Tell me about it. I’m really fucking cross.
IMO, religion is largely a veneer that is much thinner than anyone would like to admit. Ireland is a great example. In my lifetime it’s gone from a Frano-esque state dominated by the Catholic church to an increasingly atheistic couldn’t-be-arsed place, much like the UK has been for decades.
Why do I think less of intelligent people who say they’re Christians (never mind Catholics)? And the Sacred Heart stuff is downright horrible. (I expect the Spanish Inquisition round any time now.)
I think there’s maybe at least something to the theory that religion is a tool of evolution. Necessary until we could come to terms with the fact that we’re all in this alone. Now it’s possibly outliving its usefulness.