{"id":2382,"date":"2021-07-17T09:55:31","date_gmt":"2021-07-17T09:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2382"},"modified":"2024-02-08T08:21:00","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T08:21:00","slug":"thinking-aloud-christianity-faith-of-our-fathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2382","title":{"rendered":"MiSC: Thinking Aloud – Christianity, Faith of Our Fathers?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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NB – This is not an academic treatise, by the way, but a ruminatory opinion piece. I\u2019m just chewing over some thoughts!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u2018desert religion\u2019 turned equal parts fluffy and apocalyptic; a Jewish heresy adopted by a Serbian, who just happened to become Roman Emperor; how and why did a palimpsest of Chinese-whispers become the religion of \u2018The West\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, first off, all religions or creeds are ultimately palimpsests of Chinese whispers. They evolve over time with their users. Christianity is neither unique nor exceptional in this respect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next thought is, \u2018Why, Constantine?\u2019 I\u2019ve read a bit about this, and to be honest it appears that historians feel his adoption of Christianity was about equal measures personal faith\/conviction, and an awareness of the faith\u2019s potential for socio-political utility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But going back a bit, the Christian God actually evolves in plain sight. In the Old Testicle any reader with insight will quickly become aware that the many and various peoples all have their different gods. And even the God of the Israelites is, as Alexander Waugh explores in his book God<\/em>, a slippery polynomial entity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The later Roman adoption of Christianity was a \u2018saltation\u2019 event, of sorts; prior to this the world was peopled with many spirits and gods. Roman Christianity distilled this down to one god. Monotheism as opposed to polytheism was to be very useful for the \u2018divinely sanctioned\u2019 authority of a singular emperor\/ruler. And lest we get too parochial, this was a trend worldwide; as humanity and societies evolved, so too did our myths of the divine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But returning to the older modes of what we might call a more pagan plurality; even the tribal\/racial name Israel is actually itself etymological evidence of this cultural and \u2018spiritual\u2019 evolution: containing within itself, as it does, the names of three older deities, Ish (poss\u2019 a form of Isis?), Ra(h?), and El. And thus the tribe of three Gods evolved into a tribe of just one, albeit one with a dizzying array of names and natures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember being either first made aware of, or reminded of this, on a BBC TV programme called The Bible\u2019s Buried Secrets<\/em>, or something like that. The lady presenting that show was, I think, Greek. (And rather buxom, if mammary serves?) And I have vague mamm\u2026 er\u2026 memories of her noting that some of the deities in this muddled gene pool were female.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interestingly Robert Crumb picks up on this gender related theme in his notes on his illustrated Book of Genesis<\/em>. I mention this because it\u2019s illustrative of how, rather than religion being some conduit to fixed divine truths, it in fact reveals and reflects the people who create and \u2018curate\u2019 it, and their shifting needs and values. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was prompted to write this post when thinking about mutton-headed racists in places like the UK and the US, who so proudly and belligerently claim this confused, arcane, dusty eastern Mediterranean set of fables as their own. Hence the use of a George Cross flag as a crucifix, at the head of this post. I <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It just makes no sense. I mean, it can<\/em> be understood, quite easily, as a very primitive form of conservatism: fidelity with the religion one is brought up in. But there\u2019s an enormous irony in the blind loyalty to this \u2018alien\u2019 creed in contrast with the tendency amongst this same very angry demographic to regard all government as a kind of oppressive crypto-conspiracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suppose that once again, the simplest most obvious explanation – Occam\u2019s razor! – fits the best: the lower orders, the dispossessed, rightly aware that government isn\u2019t always working in their best interest, seek solace in a creed that promises redress hereafter. But the submission to an arbitrary and unmerited authority, in either case (and indeed if it really is arbitrary and unmerited), smacks of a profound and unexamined cognitive dissonance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The horrible ironies pile up so deep and so rapidly: the church itself is a government and oppressor. And even when church is not itself government, in many instances appeals to religion \u2018validate\u2019 authority. And then there\u2019s also the fact that actually sometimes our governments are<\/em> acting in our better interests (even if at times for questionable or complex and convoluted reasons). But for the small-minded small-c conservatives at the bottom of the pile, there seems to be a tendency to always go for the worst \u2018reading\u2019, achieving the worst of all poss\u2019 worlds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If one takes this path, one surrenders critical thinking to an alien creed, and then violently attacks other very similar alien creeds, such as Islam, for example. Totally unable to see the irony or hypocrisy of such a position. And yet one retains the mistrust of authority. So, having deferred to the imaginary and unreal heirarchies of religion – and often swiftly thereafter monarchy, as an earthly equivalent – one then refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the far more real governance of fellow human beings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here we come to the very atavistic lizard-brain level of religion as a tribal identifier. What\u2019s so bizarre is that a collection of arcane gobbledygook, open – like horoscopes – to an infinitely variable range of interpretations, can come to be seen as the immutable and incontestable \u2019truth\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also very clear that parts of the Old Testicle are a repository for a lot of very specific tribal memory and myth. How bizarre that such a specific set of stories, so deliberately and singularly attached to one small ethnic group, can eventually become so transferable. This leads to such bizarre moments as when a European theologian calculated the age of the world using a combo\u2019 of the Bible\u2019s creation myths and lineages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And how sad, pathetic, in fact, that two bastard heresies sprung from the same parents – Christianity and Islam, begat by Judaism – should become the heraldic emblems of warring factions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having used their religious traditions to survive as a more or less itinerant minority, how bizarre is it when the \u2018unnaturally selected\u2019 or bizarrely bred mutant offspring of the old Jewish faith get attached to other ethnic groups, and weaponised in a tribal war of cultures?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NB – This is not an academic treatise, by the way, but a ruminatory opinion piece. I\u2019m just chewing over some thoughts! A \u2018desert religion\u2019 turned equal parts fluffy and apocalyptic; a Jewish heresy adopted by a Serbian, who just happened to become Roman Emperor; how and why did a palimpsest of Chinese-whispers become the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “MiSC: Thinking Aloud – Christianity, Faith of Our Fathers?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-Cq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2382"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11349,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2382\/revisions\/11349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}