I have major doubts, but I feel like I’m moving into an area where I want to start seriously considering religion, and specifically Christianity. I talked about it at length in my last post, so go back and read it if you haven’t already.
Anyway, I’m possibly prepared to accept Christianity in a sort of provisional sense, as the most meaningful mechanism by which I can access the Divine Mystery of Unknowable Universal Truth and Miscellaneous Etcetera.
I even feel like I can turn to the Bible as something spiritually meaningful and religiously relevant. I would do so with the caveat that the Bible is the record of one nation’s interactions with the Divine, but that it is heavily filtered through their cultural lens and their milieu. Moreso than many other scriptures, the Bible is open in my opinion to this kind of interpretation. People wrote the Bible, after all, and they were people who lived in a certain time and place, with certain limitations. It aims toward ultimate truth even if it is not itself The ultimate truth.
As far as Jesus and his life, mission, and divinity go, I’m prepared to accept it conceptually without worrying whether it is literal fact or not. I can accept Christianity as a spiritual scaffold without needing to muck around with apologetics and debate.
However, the biggest problem for me, the stumbling block, is Judaism.
Unlike the rest of the Bible, the Law of Moses is supposed to have been directly dictated by God and written down the way He said it. Even the words of Jesus by comparison are removed enough from their original source to be a little bit shrouded in the mists of time, history, and myth. But the Law is a full document straight from God’s mouth to the stone tablets, and I think the Law sucks.
Not in the Paul “the law killeth” sense. I mean that the Law is simply not the kind of thing that could be given by any kind of God I could imagine, and unlike the rest of the stories in the Old Testament which may or may not be just stories, it’s kind of hard to say that the law is just a mythic interpretation of something.
It advocates death by stoning for all kinds of petty stuff. It condones slavery. It’s crap. And the way I see it, it’s not the kind of thing that is Mythic at all. Either God dictated it to Moses or Moses made it all up. It doesn;t come down to us shrouded by oral tradition. And the entire Old Testament from then on is fairly rooted in it. So what’s the deal? It’s kind of hard to separate Christianity from the Law.
I’m not talking about the no-brainers like “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery.” I’m talking about stuff like where if a man rapes a girl he just has to pay some money and get married. I’m talking about where it says to kill your family if they believe differently than you. I’m talking about the divine mandate to commit genocide. Or how you’re supposed ot kill your children if they don’t obey you.
You want to see me deny the existence of God? Convince me that the only possible God is the one that made those rules. I just don’t buy it. And that’s a problem, because it means there’s a whole section of the Bible that I can’t simply deal with in my wishy-washy liberal way, and that means I don’t know what to do other than junk the whole thing, other than as a piece of literature.
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Sailing to Byzantium 