Tag Archives: love

Christianity’s Greatest Failures: 2. Morality

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And straight in at number 2, it’s Christianity’s Failed Morality!

  • Premier Christian News presents what Christianity is all about! Super-hero Jesus! He’s part of the X-Men (you know, the cross and all that)! Maybe The Tragic Trinity. Perhaps just a cheap Superman knockoff.

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What has this to do with Christian morality? Well, nothing, which is the point.

We need, so the Right tells us, to return to Christian morality in the West. It seems to me they know as little about Christian morality as Christian News does. All they seem to have in mind is something to do with family, being nice and kind and going to church.

I’ve really no objection to any of these ideals. If people want to waste their time going to church, that’s their right. But what is the ‘Christian morality’ they want us to ‘return to’? The Christian morality espoused by Jesus?

Not really.

Jesus is often credited, by those who’ve never actually read the gospels, with being an advocate of some sort of Universal Love. He wasn’t, of course; his cultish creators portray him as frequently abrasive, dismissive and exclusionary. His, or rather their, morality is far more radical, far more impractical and, let’s face it, far more antithetical to the family, marriage and society in general. He’s not all that enthusiastic about being nice and kind either.

  • He places adulation of himself above – stratospherically above – ordinary family allegiances. He sees commitment to the cult as far more important than any family ties (Luke 14:26).
  • He regards marriage as a distraction from working towards the Kingdom (Matthew 19:12).
  • He tells his disciples to shake the dust from their feet when people are not receptive to the cult’s message (Matthew 10:14). He seems to think this would show the world what undesirables they were.
  • He would really like to kill his ‘enemies’ (Luke 19:27).

In his latest book, Loving Thy Stranger, which I’ve just started reading, Bart D. Ehrman makes the case that what is startling and novel about Jesus’ morality is its expansion beyond family and community. He is the first, according to Ehrman, to promote a morality that encompasses the stranger and the alien. While of course Ehrman is attempting to show how right on and relevant he is in addressing a hot contemporary issue – immigration – he credits Jesus with too much.

The ancient world prior to the advent of Christianity had rules about the generous treatment of strangers, even if it didn’t always apply them.

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself (Leviticus 19:34).

There are numerous other verses just like this in the Old Testament, while the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is about the maltreatment of strangers and the divine wrath that followed. There are also many verses about taking care of the poor. The theme is not unique to Jesus, nor indeed the scriptures. What is, is the extremes to which Jesus took the morality of the Jewish scriptures.

  • So it’s not enough just to help the poor: you must sell all you have and give the proceeds to them (Matthew 19:21). Jesus would sneer, I’m sure, at soup kitchens and charity drives.
  • It’s not enough, then, to give to charity or volunteer: you should regularly visit the sick and the imprisoned, clothe those without clothes (how you’ll manage this when you’ve sold everything is not explained), and welcome every stranger and outcast into your home. Not the state, not the church but you: you must do this to ensure your eternal life (Matthew 34-40).
  • It’s not enough to be kind; you must give to anyone who begs and lend to everyone who wants to borrow from you (Matthew 5:42).
  • It’s not enough to give to all who ask of you: you must go well beyond what they demand, to the point of giving them the shirt off your back (Matthew 5:40).
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you should put others before yourself and become a slave to all (Mark 9.35).
  • It’s not enough to tolerate being put upon: you should ask for more of the same abuse (Matthew 5: 38-42).
  • It’s not enough to welcome more maltreatment: you must love those dishing it out. Not just forgive them, not just pray for them (though that too) but love them (Matthew 5: 43-45).
  • It’s not enough to honour your parents and take care of your children: your allegiances is not to them but rather to unrelated people who happen to believe the same as you (Matthew 12: 46-50).
  • It’s not enough to be sexually responsible: if you can’t stop having lustful thoughts or playing with yourself you must gouge out your eye and cut off your right hand. Hyperbole perhaps (or perhaps not), but nonetheless Jesus demands you take drastic measures (Matthew 5: 27-30).
  • It’s not enough to marry, stay faithful and only have sex in the missionary position: Jesus prefers you don’t marry at all (Matthew 19: 10-12). Nobody’s going to want you anyway when you’ve poked out your eye and amputated your own hand.
  • It’s not enough to live by this morality: you must show the world that you do (Matthew 5: 14-16). Producing silly memes and making a nuisance of yourself on street corners (and calling that love) doesn’t cut it.
  • It’s not enough to be nice: you must be as perfect as God himself (Matthew 5: 48)

There’s more, of course, of this same extreme, unreasonable morality espoused by Jesus. He and his creators had what they felt were good reasons for promoting it, as we’ll see next time. My point here is that it’s so radical, so extreme as to be impractical and unworkable, which is why no-one has ever managed to live by it. Not even those people Don will tell us about, yet again, who build hospitals in Africa. Jesus’ moral demands go far, far beyond this, which is why Christians are compelled to explain them away, along with their own failure to comply with them. (Cue: ‘they’re hyperbole and/or metaphor’ and ‘we Christians are a work in progress.’)

But it’s not so much that believers fail; it’s that the morality they’re supposed to live by is impossible. It is that which fails, and always has.

A special rendering of ‘One’ Corinthians 13. You’re welcome.

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Blog410a

If I obsess about religious liberty but do not have love, I am no more than a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I judge and denigrate others and do my utmost to suppress them then I have not love.

If I claim I am persecuted while persecuting others, if I try to supplant their morality with my own and have not love, then I am nothing.

If I condemn others to hell because they do not subscribe to my beliefs, but have not love, then likewise I am nothing.

If I give nothing at all to the poor and say it is their own fault anyway, then I am without love.

If I say it is not up to me to fight for social justice and make defending Christian dogma my priority above everything else but do not have love, I am nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

If what I have, what I espouse, what I use to beat you with is none of these things then it is not love and I am a hypocrite unworthy of your attention.

 

The current line-up of The Clanging Cymbals is Scott Lively on Resounding Gong, Tony Perkins on Empty Vessel, Franklin Graham on Smug Tone, Pat Robertson on the Befuddlement, Robert Jeffress blowing his own trumpet and Steven Anderson contributing Heavy Flatulence.

Other members of the band are available for Self promotion, Church socials and Bar Mitzvahs. Pride events are excluded.

 

Love and Kindness

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Blog349

I’m sometimes I asked what, given I don’t believe in Jesus, I do believe in. I always find this an odd question, presuming as it does that Christianity is really the only thing worth believing in. Implicit in it too is an acknowledgement that faith in the supernatural is irrational, and that sceptics are just as prone to irrationality as believers themselves: ‘you too have faith in any number of unprovable propositions, just like us misguided Christians!’ The question is often an attempt to show that sceptics are just as gullible as Christians.

Recently, Jimoeba said on his blog, The Common Atheist, ‘I believe passionately in nothing,’ meaning, I think, he doesn’t believe in any sort of supernatural nonsense. It set me thinking about what, in fact, I believe in. Do I still have some irrational, unfounded beliefs? Certainly I don’t believe – can’t believe – in Jesus and his support cast of mythical entities, who live in Heaven or just out of sight or wherever they’re meant to be. The same applies to their counterparts in other religions. It’s not that I hold this as a matter of faith; there simply isn’t the evidence to support the existence of gods, angels, demons, eternal beings, heaven and hell (as I discuss here and here.)

In any case, I prefer to know things rather than believe in them. Where there is evidence, there is no need for ‘belief’ or ‘faith’. Yet I still have a suspicion I believe in some things; things that seem intuitively right (never a good measure, I know, of what actually is true) but for which the evidence isn’t as substantial as I’d like. Things like love and kindness. I do believe in these, however cliched it may be to say, ‘I believe in love’. I do. I feel and, I hope, demonstrate love for my family, specially my children and grandchildren. Also to my friends and partners. It seems to me love matters a great deal. There are no doubt good evolutionary reason why we feel particularly strong affection for our offspring; taking care of them increases their – and the genes we share – chances of survival. But subjectively it is more than that. I believe it’s more than that anyway.

I find , try as I might, however, that I can’t extend that love to people I don’t know. Jesus’ command (not that I’m under any obligation to follow it) to love one’s neighbours and enemies is an impossibility, another example of his not knowing what he was talking about. It’s possible to feel compassion for those who suffer, or pity or sympathy, but these, while they’re perhaps components of love, are not completely love in any of its forms. So that’s why I believe in kindness too. ‘Be kind to your neighbour, to strangers and to those you encounter in daily life’ would have been, and is, a far more realistic expectation.

There are other things I believe in too – trying to steer people away from irrational belief in deities, saviours and magic books, obviously – and I’m not always consistent in my application of love and kindness. But I do try to be. I know they’re not absolutes, nor even universal values; they’re not delivered from on high because no values are, being entirely humanly derived, and they’re not practised by everyone either, not even aspired to by some. There’s no need to go around preaching about love and kindness, nor do they need a mythology created around them. Nevertheless, they’re what matter – to me, anyway.

I believe in them.

To clanging cymbals everywhere

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Massacre

If you’ve ever engaged one of God’s gentle people™ in discussion about one of their pet topics – the infallibility of scripture, evidence for the resurrection, the ‘abomination’ that is homosexuality or some other damn thing – you’ll know that, sooner or later, they turn nasty. They resort to name-calling and personal attacks; they tell you the reason you’re arguing against them is because you just want to wallow in your own sin – and, boy, are you going to suffer when it comes to judgement day.

Fellow-blogger, Bruce Gerencser has recently experienced this kind of thing from some twerp self-appointed ‘preacher of God’s word’ called T.C. Howitt, over on the Reasonable Doubt blog. I’ve been subjected to it innumerable times too. Eventually, you retreat; not because you’ve lost the argument or don’t have anything reasonable left to say but because there is only so much battering you can take. Then, as Bruce says, the bible thumper declares victory; the foe is vanquished – God’s word prevails! Even supposing this to be true, it is a Pyrrhic victory; the defence of doctrine is at the expense of others’ well-being and is achieved only by hurting them, usually intentionally so.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this of course; it has been the church’s way since the very beginning, from Paul’s tantrum about other evangelists he wished would accidentally castrate themselves (Galatians 5.12) to the massacre of native Americans by those passing on Jesus’ good news in the 16th century, right through to present day ‘hate’ preachers like Steven Anderson and Franklin Graham. Christianity is, and always has been, a nasty, bullying religion that cares only about its own preservation, never other people.

Those who proselytise on its behalf might care to read one of Paul’s better bits of self-promotion (1 Corinthians 13.1-2) which, if it is part of God’s infallible Word™, applies to those Christians today who have nothing better to do than hang around social media:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

We might add that if the only way you can win your argument is by demolishing your opponent psychologically, you demonstrate that you are without love, making you in the eyes of ‘men’ and your own God, worth precisely nothing.

Imagine… no religion

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Jimenez2People say, like, you know, “Aren’t you sad that 50 superstitious nut-jobs died?” Here’s the problem with that. It’s like the equivalent of asking me, you know, what if you asked me, “Hey, are you sad that 50 Christians were killed today?” Um, no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society! You know, I think the world is a little safer tonight!…

The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die… because these people are predators! They are abusers! They take advantage of people! And look, as Rationalists, we need to take the stand that it is not our job to sit there and say, “Oh, this is a tragedy” or “Oh, this is something we mourn.” Look, everything tells us these are deluded, wicked people. These are evil people.

… People sometimes will say, “You guys are advocating violence!” We’re not advocating violence! We’re not saying we should go do this! But we’re just saying this: If we lived in a rational nation with a rational government, then the government should be taking them… I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out. If we lived under a truly secular government that loved rationality and loved children, and wanted to protect them, that’s what we’d do.

Hate speech? Certainly. But not mine. The original, which you can find here, is about the Orlando shootings a few weeks ago, and is directed at gay people. I’ve simply replaced gentle ‘Pastor’ Jimenez’s use of ‘sodomite’ and ‘paedophile’, which he disingenuously uses interchangeably, with ‘Christians’ and ‘religious nut-jobs’, and his use of ‘God’ and ‘righteous’ with ‘superstition’ and ‘rational’. Jimenez, emissary of a religion of love (Matthew 5.44 etc), would like to see his government exterminate LGBT people.

But, you know, maybe there’s also a case to be made for eliminating the superstitious and irrational from among us. Those of us who have adopted a rational basis for our lives would be happy to see the end of religion and superstition, the removal from the Earth of the religious and the superstitious (I use the terms interchangeably). After all, what do believers in mumbo-jumbo add to the world that is any way positive? What can those who are unable to engage with reality without the crutch of make-believe possibly have to give? On top of their general uselessness, they’re also dangerous and predatory.

Maybe there is a case to be made. But I’m not making it. Any philosophy, ideology or religion that preaches the extermination of other people is wrong, debased, corrupt (you’d think, wouldn’t you, that we’d have learnt that by now.) If you subscribe to such a view – be it from a Christian, Islamic or Jewish perspective – you are wrong. No-one, whatever magic books may say about them, merits death simply because those magic books say so (ratified, of course, by the dim-witted prejudices of those who subscribe to them). Rationality and a secular perspective, on the other hand, eschew hatred and are philosophically opposed to harming those who might not agree with them. Yes, even the religious.

In this way it is vastly superior to religion – your religion, whatever that happens to be.

It’s time you all believed in my religion!

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Reblog

Picture reblogged from GodlessEngineer via Friendly Atheist.

My God doesn’t like people who don’t worship Him in the right sort of way (the way I do).

My God thinks people – except people like me – don’t behave properly.

My God has sent a special book to me and my mates his chosen people. It’s a bit muddled but non-believers ignore it at their peril.

My God says followers of all other religions have got it wrong.

My God says Christians need to be cured of their unhealthy behaviour.

My God says Christians shouldn’t be allowed to ‘marry’ because they don’t do sex right (the way I do).

My God says it’s not hateful to say these things. The fact I’m telling you shows how loving I am, pointing out how everyone else has got the wrong beliefs, the wrong morals and doesn’t do sex right. If you’ve any sense, you’ll start to believe in my God and then you’ll be saved like me.

And when you do that, my God will like you too.