Wishful thinking
Joe Hockey has been reading Karen Armstrong, it appears.
Those who seek to proclaim the prescriptions of the Bible selectively or literally provide an armoury of ammunition to those like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Laymen like myself struggle with the logic of such an approach. While debate rages about such matters, the true message of the scriptures – of compassion, justice, equality, dignity, forgiveness, charity and respect for other people – inevitably takes a back seat.
That’s the true message of ‘the scriptures’ is it – in spite of all the content of the scriptures that says no such thing but rather the very opposite? In spite of all the abundant material in the scriptures that urges cruelty, brutality, inequality, humiliation, revenge, anger and hatred for other people? Somehow in spite of all that ‘the true message’ is…….what people want it to be.
I don’t accept that any of the great religions envisage a God or a divine force that sanctions the worst failings of humanity. Religion asks of us to become better people – to choose a life of giving and compassion. This “Golden Rule” is a thread that runs from Confucius to Christianity, from Buddhism to Islam. For me this is the essential message of all faiths – that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves…The God of my faith is not full of revenge, as the Old Testament would suggest with a literal interpretation…It is not a loving God who wilfully inflicts pain and suffering. No God of any mainstream religion would do that if God’s love is real….My God does not discriminate against women, or favour first born children over others…All of these things have been claimed as acts of God at various times in our history. They provide easy targets for those who argue that religion causes harm rather than good. However, they are not propositions that I believe have any foundation in the mainstream religions.
He can ‘believe’ that only if he has sedulously avoided finding out what is actually in the ‘scriptures’ of the big monotheisms and if he has avoided learning anything about what religion was understood to mandate over the past three thousand years. Maybe his God doesn’t discriminate against women, but everyone else’s God certainly did for century after century after century…and the God of most people hasn’t stopped yet. Joe H should check out the Vatican’s view on all this, and that of your average online imam. He should have done that before he wrote this piece.
OB: Isn’t that last paragraph yours? So shouldn’t it be not indented?
I have good news and bad news for you, Joe Hockey. The good news is that there is neither a shred of evidence nor any other kind of reason whatsoever to believe in the existence of the misogynistic, homophobic, murderous, totalitarian God believed in by those foolish literalists you chide. The bad news is that there is not one jot or tittle more evidence or reasoning which supports the existence of the kinder, gentler, loving God whose presence and character you in your superior wisdom can somehow discern to be the “central message” of exactly the same texts and traditions wherein that other, decidedly nastier God is described.
While some might be tempted to conclude that your “superior wisdom” is really nothing more than transparent, self-serving rationalization whereby you cherry-pick of the bits and pieces you want to believe from various holy books while being able to give no independent reason to believe any particular bit over any other bit – and indeed, no reason to believe that any of the bits are even remotely true – I’m sure that, on the strength of your prior performance, you can wisely discern that such an insulting interpretation of your perspective is not the true message of my comment, and that it would be shamelessly literal-minded for anyone to think so.
“While debate rages about such matters, the true message of the scriptures – of compassion, justice, equality, dignity, forgiveness, charity and respect for other people – inevitably takes a back seat.”
So… how does, say, opposition to gay marriage fit into that message?
The notion that it’s all about love and compassion is the take-home message, not the real message.
I may deserve some kind of prize for mentioning AH and Nazism so early in a thread(!) but I was struck some years ago by reading about how those who attended AH’s rallies – he was an excellent orator – often went home with the recollection that he had only spoken about peace and love.
Joe Hockey is the Shadow Treasurer in the Australian Federal Parliament, so he should know what he is talking about. (Snigger.)
I got the impression from a quick reading of this piece from Hockey that his God is a sort of Barbie doll (or should that be Ken?) that can be dressed this way or that to suit the individual customer’s preferences. You don’t like his cruelty and lust for vengeance? Sure, no problem. Just leave those bits out. Don’t read them at all.
It’s a bit like ordering a pizza: Leave out the pepperoni please, and a bit more anchovies and capers. To suit.
You’ve got to hand it to Joe. A real theological breakthrough.
Well, the strange thing is that they really don’t see it; they don’t see that the God of their scriptures (for any scriptures, practically, you care to mention) is very much as Dawkins describes him (almost always him, of course), the most unlikeable character in all fiction. But, as I say, they don’t see it. Even when the evidence is placed before them, they still won’t see it. I’ve tried and tried with people I know, ever since I “jumped ship”, as it were, and Jesus is still the epitome of peace and love, though I have convinced a few that the atonement story is vicious and sanctifies suffering. Never mind that it will be worse for Chorazin and Bethsaida than for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgement, because their inhabitants had not recognised the deeds of power that were done in them, and Capernaum will be brought down to Hades for its perfidy (in rejecting – who else?) God’s son and messiah.
And anyone who can read the Qu’ran and find it a document of love and compassion must have been sleep reading. There is something perverse about supporters of religion suddenly coming out with the old lie that religion is really about love and compassion, despite the plain meaning of its sacred texts, and the undoubted history of murderous cruelty that has been the basso continuo of almost all religious believing since religion began its disastrous trek through history.
That Joe Hockey wants it to be all about peace and love is commendable; what is not commendable is his blindness to aspects of religion which are about something else entirely. He should give a little thought for Ehsan Fattahian and the role that Islam played in his death, and stop talking about his father who, after all, sought a secular society where he would be free to practice whatever religious idiocy he favoured without penalty. It wouldn’t take all that much, given the temper of the day, to turn Australia and other tolerant nations into hotbeds of intemperate and definitely intolerant religious zeal.
As I was writing this an email from Amazon.com arrived touting a new book: Intelligent Faith: A Celebration of Darwinian Evolution with a blurb from Martin Rees of all people, and a forward by the Archbishop of Canterbury, a collection of essays with titles like: “Lives of Meaning: Organismal Intelligence and the Origin of Design in Nature,” which sounds a bit ominous, and the next, “Intelligent Design and the Origin of Life,” and then, “Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation.” Gosh! Down what garden path are we being led? I wonder.
I look on the bright side here: this guy isn’t primarily attacking the meanie New Atheists, he’s attacking religious literalists who do cruel things in the name of their god.
If religious folks like Joe Hockey predominate, and they go on acting like their religion tells them to be compassionate, then I don’t really care (except in an intellectual/academic manner) that it doesn’t. I wish all the religious people in the world ran around acting like powerful sky-fairies are telling them to be nice.
Or maybe I’m just making up the bright side to console myself after attempting to read Armstrong’s twaddle about the “Axial Age.” I don’t know.
I would agree with you Jenavir, except … Except that their sacred books say otherwise, and they maintain that their sacred books are sacred, and as long as they do that, there will be enough people around who will read them literally – they are sacred after all! – to do harm. Until religions are prepared to accept that their books are human, all too human, they will constitute a danger to others. It’s as simple as that, however moderates choose to use those books. Moderates don’t do harm by what they choose to believe. They do harm by empowering those who choose to believe otherwise on the basis of texts that both moderates and literalists acknowledge as holy.
Eric, I don’t know that it’s true that there will always be enough people around who read the sacred books literally. Maybe it is. Right now there certainly are. But I could also easily envision a trend where it becomes immensely popular to say that no holy book should ever be read literally, and nobody but a handful of nuts ever does.
I have no prediction either way, I just don’t think literalism is inevitable.
Hmm.
Literalism probably isn’t inevitable, but on the other hand, there are good reasons to think that it is highly likely – reasons to do with the combination of ‘faith’ and the presence of commands within the ‘sacred’ texts themselves to read them as just that, and to obey every jot and tittle. It seems to me very over-optimistic to think it’s 50-50 whether or not all believers will some day get past all that.
I wonder what Joe Hockey thinks of the American Catholics that are threatening to pull funding from social programs if they’re not legally allowed to discriminate against gay people.
Whatever one might choose as ‘the true message of the scriptures’, the fact is that those writings were produced in the course of a truly Darwinian human struggle for survival in the Ancient World. The Jewish ‘captive’ tribes in Egypt and Babylonia were almost certainly a despised national minority subject to repressive treatment by the majority, as is the case say for the Tamils in contemporary Sri Lanka. The Old Testament is the survival manual produced by one minority that managed to emerge from such a struggle more or less intact. The “compassion, justice, equality, dignity, forgiveness, charity and respect for other people” Hockey likes were an aspect that found inclusion, and without them the Bible would have been a mere rant like ‘Mein Kampf’, and giving rise to just as short-lived a religion as was Nazism.
The New Testament I see as a minority handbook for survival in an empire, when fighting your way out is not a realistic option. That is the message of the Gospel writers’ Christ, though the historical Christ was probably different.
Modern Saudi Arabia is vastly different from the Arabia of Mohammed. Probably the region of the world approximating closest to it is Afghanistan, where Islam plays something of its earlier role overcoming the tendency to a routine of war of all tribes against all tribes. Islam does this by identifying a common enemy for them to unite against, and in this it is partly successful.
It would appear that for an increasing number of people, spirits, angels, gods etc are no longer necessary. I agree with Eric when he says that “…Joe Hockey wants it to be all about peace and love is commendable; what is not commendable is his blindness to aspects of religion which are about something else entirely.” For the hockeys of the world, religion is a work in progress, like a house undergoing a perpetual makeover; close this room off here, add another two rooms there.
Whatever new religions are taking shape before our eyes and with whatever gods, they will identify some to be included in the ranks of the holy, enlightened, saved and rightly privileged, and others in the numbers of the unholy, reserved for eternal damnation. That is the name of the religion game.
The danger I see is that religion may lull a critical number of people into a sense of false security. On this lonely planet in the vastness of empty space, there is no god to protect us. There’s just us.
THe first comment there, by “Craig”, kind of makes the point. This idiot, Craig, wants Hockey to stop being so liberal-minded and to do what he can to ban abortion.
And the problem with Hockey and his line (and Armstrong’s, and Eagleton’s, and so on) is that the Craigs are very far from being an insignificant powerless force. Hockey’s wishful fluff just abandons masses of people to the tender mercies of the Craigs.
So have you seen Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion, then?
I’ve seen Armstrong talking about her charter, in many places; I think I’ve looked up the charter itself, but I’m not sure. Why?
‘This “Golden Rule” is a thread that runs from Confucius to Christianity, from Buddhism to Islam.’
Interesting he mentions Conficius. My knowledge is slim, but I thought this is a reasonable summary:
“Confucianism can claim to be a philosophy not a religion because it makes reference to no higher power or revealed teachings. According to Confucius society is capable of harmonious existence without any help from the supernatural, all it needs is for everyone to be properly educated and to know their own place in society. Confucius was once asked about the afterlife by a student, and responded by asking how a man could possibly contemplate things like God and Heaven when he did not yet fully understand the mortal world.”
source
So he’s actually acknowledged that ‘The Golden Rule’ is not a matter of faith, but of a philosophy of life. You can do away entirely with the vengeful gods who then have a change of heart.
I’ve had (inconclusive) arguments with theists who insist that Confucianism is a religion. I suspect that they don’t want to admit that a country as populous as China could have been mostly non-religious for all that time, so Confucianism has to be a religion too, because everybody needs religion.