Letters to the Editor
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"oh my god", no kidding
I'm arguing against an atheist when I don't even believe in God!
so do you know what that makes you????
laf!
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It's holy week - time for something challenging Christian orthodoxy
Just like the sun rises every day of the year, so too do publications like salon.com feel obliged to run some piece challenging orthodox Christian beliefs any time some major Christian holiday (Christmas, Easter, etc.) rolls around.
Fair enough - but will other religions (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) also get this "loving" attention? Critical examination and intellectual challenges are fine in my book - but I do find it odd that this mindset is only applied to the beliefs of one religious community and that the media finds special glee in always publishing such reports in conjunction with major Christian holidays.
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Ben Nathan Israel
They do it because it's the religion that pissed them off and betrayed them. Same reason that most of the atheists treat a belief in God as equivalent belief in fundamentalist Christianity. They hear "God" or "Jesus" and stop thinking clearly.
They don't understand that being invested in arguing against the thing that disillusioned you is still giving it control.
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for sale: clues
Look, I think Salon sucks as much as the next misogynist, but Steve Paulson has been running this series about religions every few weeks for over a year. So all you fucktards who think this article is part of the Illuminati's conspiracy against all of Christendom need to adjust your tin foil hats for better reception.
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Pagels - The subtle dodger
Pagels' approach to religion is, to me a dodge. It aims to take religious claims out of the world and place them in a realm of metaphor and context that safeguards them from being disproven, from being testable. I see this as a reaction to the rise of science as a successful discipline, one that has gone a fair bit in explaining things in the world. To say that the Resurrection can be taken to mean many things, and that it is essentially untestable - well, the former is true, but the latter is confusing. The physical resurrection (the claim that Jesus actually rose from the dead and walked among the living for a while)is untestable for the same reason that historical events are hard to prove: reasons to do with witnesses, the preservation of evidence, the reliability of sources. There are reports of eye witnesses but the question is: are they reliable? In just the same way, claims about the End of Times are not essentially 'religious', that is impossible to test: if there is going to be an End of Times, say, in 2007, well, we will all see it and confirm it at the time. The claim that the world will end on a particular date has the same status as the claim that the Red Sox will win this year: unprovable today, but awaiting for confirmation or refutation. In the same way, there either is another world or there isn't. Maybe there isn't, and maybe people just use talk of afterlife as a metaphor of some sort. But to say that the resurrection is a metaphor and just a metaphor is to say that it didn't happen. It is to say that you are going to discount certain accounts in the historical record, but that you don't have to guts to say so. If you are agnostic on the issue, simply say: well, we don't have enough information on the matter to determine if that's true or not. Don't say, like Pagels says, that it was experienced in many ways. Would anyone accept such a dodge if we were talking about about the Rwandan genocide, or about the takeover of Hawaii?
To sum it up, in a less rambling manner: I think Pagels' thinking is confused in fundamental ways and I think this confusion has as a cause the desire to protect religion from being examined by the standards of science. This strategy saves religion, but at the cost of turning it into some kind of enfeebled collection of inspiring metaphors; a sort of belief cocktail that will give meaning and succor, and which is 'real' because it is experienced as real by people, not because it actually is.
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Manichaeism is not gnosticism
The formulation of the canonic gospels was perhaps the first intellectual property case, "spiritual copyright" if you will, a trade marking of the story of Jesus. It was necessary as gnostic cults were plagiarising Jesus name to sell their vision. The determination of canon was an absolute necessity. People wanted the genuine article.
Gnosticism borrowss bits from babylonian astrology, tacks on hunks from judaism, then throws in the name of Jesus when he becomes popular, but never venturing far from its source code as an idealistic Pantheism, proceeding from the conception of matter as a gradual deterioration of the Godhead; the later appearance of Manichaenism holds a more dualistic course that matter is the depraved antithesis of the spirit.
Manichaeism perhaps carries gnosticism to its logical conclusion, reflected by the Cathars: an apology for the depraved ruling classes and suicide cults, just like our modern day Heavens Gate cult is a gnostic throw back: why bother living this physical lie? Kill yourself, and get to heaven right away. By the middle ages, the church was combating dangerous cults that preached depravity and suicide in a time of mass hysteria, immense poverty and unrelenting hardship.
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How to Cherry-Pick the Bible
Elaine Pagels must teach a course called Bible Cherry-Picking 101.
Actually, I've read two of her books and find her to be a very thoughtful woman. But like most thoughtful people who try to cling desperately to Christian faith, she must read the Bible selectively or it will fall apart altogether. Those passages that don't hold up to modern reasoning and morality must be read as metaphors and, whenever convenient, dropped altogether. The study of non-canonical texts seems to give her a broader range for accepting a religion with dubious historical origins and limited modern relevance. But what spiritual value do any of these texts really have for us in the 21st century? As a historian of early Christianity, Pagels does a great work. Everyone should read the Gospel of Judas and learn about an alternate form of Christianity that was suppressed by the orthodoxy. But as a spiritual philosopher, Elaine Pagels comes up short. I was surprised and disappointed to hear her extol the virtues of faith as a means of understanding things that science "can't explain."
What does she mean that she "can't say it's impossible" that Jesus rose from the dead, and that "from a historical point of view, there's no way you can comment on that"? No one has ever risen from the dead. That's not only a scientific fact, but a historical fact. To inject some metaphorical meaning into these legends is to obscure the fact that millions of people believe quite literally in every word that's written in the Good Book and would like to make it a basis for public policy. While Pagels is not one of these people, I fear that she implicitly enables their belief system.
So let's research Christianity in all its various forms. But let's not be afraid to say that the things written in ancient texts are usually false and impossible. Water, my friends, does not turn into wine.