Pope Francis, kissing the
feet of Islamic boys and girls
Catholic
Lectionary Reading
Sunday,
June 30, 2013
Excerpt:
Luke
9: 51-62. "When the days drew near for Jesus to be received up,
he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him, who
went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him; but the
people would not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. And
when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, "Lord, do you want us
to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?" But he turned and
rebuked them. And they went on to another village."
***
"Lord, do you want us
to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them?"
The "capital crime" that inspires James and John's
murderous intent is that a village of Samaritans refused to welcome
Yeshua.
Imagine The Nativity Narrative if Joseph,
repeatedly told "there's no room in the inn," were to utter,
"Lord, do you want me to bid fire come down from heaven and consume the
burghers of Bethlehem?"
It is, of course, unthinkable that "the baby Jesus"
would be born in a world where Dad beseeches God to torch his hometown.
But... When "the baby" becomes "a man,"
it is high-time to "get down to business."
And "business as usual" obliges contemplation of "righteous slaughter." Surely it is our divinely-ordained "responsibility" to kill "infidels" and "ingrates."
And "business as usual" obliges contemplation of "righteous slaughter." Surely it is our divinely-ordained "responsibility" to kill "infidels" and "ingrates."
It is a hard truth that those who consider themselves
"closest to The Light" take advantage of that presumed
closeness to justify their own murderous rage.
By identifying their personal ill will with "The Will of
God," "The Righteous" presume themselves agents of Divinity who
participate, fist in glove, with God's "smiting hand."
From the beginning of scriptural time, "The Righteous"
have harbored the twin beliefs that Justice requires punishment, and that the
worst crimes can only be righted by capital punishment.
The Law of the Talion -- grounded in
vengeance, vindication and (eponymous) retalitation -- compels people,
particularly those who see themselves as "righteous," to champion God
as the ultimate dealer in hellish torture and slaughter. http://paxonbothhouses.
"The punitively righteous" are not humble enough to
say "the devil made me do it" but instead proclaim "God made me
do it and I am but His humble servant." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Fundamentalists across the Abrahamic spectrum - Jihadists,
Zionists, Armageddon Cheerleaders - drape themselves in the
mantle of Deity, and thus "invested" with inerrancy, transform God
into a hateful errand boy - a personal "gofer."
Jesuit Tom Weston observed: “You can safely assume
that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the
same people you do.”
With good reason, Pascal noted that “Men
never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction.”
Although Pascal is typically represented as a mathematician, physicist and philosopher, he was, at bottom, a passionate Christian, filled with unusual ardor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Aflame with that ardor, Blaise was well-situated to see religious passion burning out of control.
Although Pascal is typically represented as a mathematician, physicist and philosopher, he was, at bottom, a passionate Christian, filled with unusual ardor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Aflame with that ardor, Blaise was well-situated to see religious passion burning out of control.
This process of unconscious "self-divinization"
(whereby "Christians" -- presumably "one" with Deity --
demand retaliation and vengeance) is the same projected ego-centrism that
characterizes fundamentalism in every religious climate.
Despite professions of patriotic orthodoxy, American
conservatives - be they sacred or secular - are more accurately characterized
as American Taliban. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
***
Gear shift...
In "Mere Christianity," C.S. Lewis makes a mistake
common among old-school scholars who - despite the intellectual rigor they
brought to secular study -- were unable to believe that The Bible, particularly
The New Testament, could be anything but the inerrant Word of God.
Said Lewis: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the
really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to
accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be
God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man
and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He
would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached
egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either
this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You
can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you
can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any
patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left
that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Despite Lewis' illustrious professorship at Cambridge, he
labored under the burden of 2000 years' mandatory acceptance of Scripture as
the infallible Word of God.
Throughout most of those millennia, the "reverent study of
scripture" was the incandescent, all-consuming focus of scholarly pursuit.
(Harvard, like other Ivy League colleges, was founded as a Christian seminary.)
During the first 1500 years of the Christian era, it was
essentially impossible to question "the chain of apostolic
authority." (Ironically, that "chain" itself is in serious
doubt. http://www.princeton.
If one did question apostolic authority, s/he would be tortured
- and not infrequently, immolated. (In Spain, The
Inquisition operated until 1834. http://en.wikipedia.org/
To pose any question "outside the box" was as
preposterous as doubting Aristotle's supposedly "complete" treatment
of Natural History, a presumption so deeply ingrained in the
Western psyche that the thought of rational, scientific investiga
Although my favorite book is Chesterton's "Orthodoxy"
- http://www.ccel.org/ccel/
The details of this sordid affair will stop committed apologists
"dead in their tracks." http://en.wikipedia.
Not only is this history appalling, it reveals the
inevitable shortcoming of orthodox absolutism.
Even so, and despite the delay of centuries, all things change, including The Vatican. http://www.time.com/
Even so, and despite the delay of centuries, all things change, including The Vatican. http://www.time.com/
Speaking of centuries...
Only in the 1800s did scholars turn a disinterested eye to
Scripture, and it was not until the middle of the 20th century that secular
scholars took up the task.
I understand that "faith has eyes of its own" and that
it is appropriate for The Religious Imagination to embroider
the meaning of Scripture. (Einstein is rightly famous for saying
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." But he did not say --
as many self-professed "Christians" do -- that "knowledge is
unimportant.")
Just as the earth moves 'round the sun -- Eppur si muove! -- the
religious imagination must range over the full spectrum of Scripture - not only
its text, but its context and exegetical expansion.
Any text without a context is a pretext and
far too many "Christians" are eager to use scripture as means of
incarceration rather than liberation.
Blessedly, the great Maimonides -- 12th century rabbi, physician
and scholar -- reminds us to "accept the truth from whatever source
it comes."
Moshe ben Maimon went on to say: "There is one [disease]
which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in
degree in different men ... I refer to this: that every person thinks his
mind ... more clever and more learned than it is ... I have found that
this disease has attacked many an intelligent person ... They ... express themselves
[not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other
sciences about which they know nothing ... If met with applause ... so
does the disease itself become aggravated." http://en.
We now know that the words Jesus actually spoke are most
faithfully rendered in the parables and that "moral laundry lists"
and other matter-of-fact gospel verses are unusually prone to scribal
distillation, adjustment and interpolation.
Notably, the unifying message of most parables is that human
standards of justice are not God's standards.
Indeed, relative to the gushing beneficence of God, most
Christians -- among them "the most righteous" -- are stingy about
giving-and-forgiving and therefore deeply disturbed that God constantly rewards
"the prodigal." http://www.biblegateway.com/
***
If readers are ready to risk an end to their belief in
"inerrant scripture," UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Bart Ehrman (a former
Evangelical seminarian) dissects the multifaceted development of Christian
scripture, and in the process sets forth good reasons for no longer pretending
"infallibility." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
In essence, Ehrman liberates the religious imagination to
explore-and-value meaning more than choke-chain punctiliousness.
Galileo and the Aristotelian Cardinals:A Study of Suppression
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www.newyorker.com/.../brain-experiments-why-we-dont-believe-science.ht...Jun 7, 2012 - A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, ... Our findings suggest that naïve theories are suppressed by scientifictheories but ... refutation of Aristotle, who claimed that heavier objects fell faster.
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