Letters to the Editor
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Neil & questioner
"A highly intelligent doctoral student friend of mine asked me just last fall how I imagined what would happen to people who lost limbs in their lives during the resurrection?
WELL???? What was your answer?"
ummm....I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you please clarify this?
Neil, I think someone asked you this question, but I wrote this. Easy to understand since my last name is similar to your name.
To answer the questioner:
I told her I stopped believing in bodily resurrection about the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus (preschool). But this led to an analogy I think she found useful (though of course I did not convert her, nor was I trying to do so):
People frequently believe in the physical or attach importance to the physical before they realize the important thing is the concept behind it. So people believe in Santa Claus, or give sacred status to a flag and refuse to burn it. But then they realize that the important thing is the spirit of giving Santa represents, or the freedom and rights the flag represents. So you find people (non-Christians and Christian alike) in this country who collect Santa Clauses, and people who value the flag enough to allow it to be burned. For me, the entire universe and all of experience is a physical metaphor for something deeper.
Resurrection is a metaphor for the ability of a person to become better than they are. For a person to be able to leave behind the dross and come out tempered and better. It allows people to accept grace.
I told her about Augustine's line, that people who turned to God because they sought to avoid hell feared not God, but burning.
I told her about the evolution of the Judeo-Christian message over time. From the Egyptian book of the dead, with the confession required after death of "I have not murdered/committed adultery," etc., to the adaptation from Moses of "You shall not..." (even if you did in the past), to "Love God...and love your neighbor as yourself—oh, and by the way, your sins are forgiven, here's a clean slate to start over," from Jesus.
I told her a lot more, but I don't want to bore you. But these were the basics. Resurrection is a metaphor. "Born again" is likewise a metaphor. But the event these people were trying to describe was so different from anything previously understood that this kind of metaphor was the only way to describe it.
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Good Interview
Thought provoking. This will get a ton of posts, but there's not much to say really. I think Elaine Pagels has it right on.
What does this show? That we're evolving. That's really all there is to say.
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Faith is called faith because it cannot be proven
And I would argue that atheism is just as much a faith a Christianity, with one exception. The atheist understands that He is personally reponsible for everything he does, even though he may not necessarily take the responsiblilty seriously. Christianity is too easy, and in my view, more harmful than good.
But neither the atheist or Christian beliefs really matter, because neither is more likely to be more moral than the other. Just like the ego, morality, is an inherent part of life itself, and it is up to each individual life to determine how moral it lives. Lives that live morally tend to be happier than those that don't. This may be hard to believe day to day when we encounter injustice, (and that is a much bigger topic) but in the end, that is why faith is necessary.
BUT religion is not responsible for any of this. There are Religious people who are moral, and religious people are are selfish criminals. The same is true with atheists. You can't say "well those people aren't really Christians" either, because those people believe just as strongly that they ARE Christians, and it is really YOU who are not. There is no end to it.
Morality within the human being is the reason why the human being makes religion. Religion is not the cause, it's the effect. Some religions are better, some worse, but they ALL come from US, not somewhere out there.
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Why God?
I don't understand theism. Why do people want to worship something?
Surely most rational theists would admit that, no, you can't prove (or disprove) the existence of God, or point to something and say with assurance, 'that is the work of God', so it seems to me that they believe in God because they WANT to.
Nothing wrong with that per se - you can believe anything you want without needing any concrete evidence to support it - but why do it? What is it that compels people to have these beliefs? Is it just to try and make some sort of sense of the world we live in, or what?
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Thanks E....
I have tried to make this same point many times. There is no connection between religious belief and morality. Moral sensibility is a product of the human social structure, that is we are social animals. It is a product of evolution (as is the religious impulse).
What iritates me most about intellectuals like Elaine Pagels, whose historical work I admire, is that her work basically says that everything we think Christianity is, is a historical/literary construct....yet, she still personally adheres to some notion of fundamental and concrete truth within that fable. There is a god. There is a very off putting stubbornness in people like her, it is a refusal to extend their intellectual powers and rationality fully. In the end they always pull up short. I mean really how is a more sophisticated view of god less superstitious or more truthful than a belief in a white-bearded, vengeful man sitting in the clouds? The all-encompassing spirit is the same as a leprechaun when you pick it apart. This false sense of sophistication is just a way of fooling yourself so you don't have to challenge that sequestered set of beliefs that serve to bring you comfort but are ultimately intellectually limiting.
To those small brains that insist that there is an atheism that is the same as a faith, I would say there is no such thing as an atheist really, there are only believers and the rest of us.