This is the first week of Advent. This is about religion. Those who find this embarrassing, look elsewhere. Sorry.
I was brought up a Christian. Some of my teachers plainly believed; others did not. It was a bit like teaching geography of physics, but less interesting, for them, I imagine.
In my teenage years I rejected it all. Richard Dawkins hadn’t been invented yet, but you get the picture. That is what teenagers do. “What are you rebelling against?” “What have you got?”
About twenty years ago I began to think again. Most of what we read in the New Testament is the result of political squabbles in the first centuries of the Christian era. Look up Nestorianisn, or Arianism. The last makes much sense. (Er, nothing to do with the Nazis. Different spelling. The Goths were Arians. A bit complicated, but no connection.) Arianism believes that Jesus was not the Son of God, or holy, but sent among us to spread the word of a better way of living.
The early Church fathers did not like this one a bit. You can see why.
That message was grafted onto the morals and manners of a Bronze Age tribe of nomadic pastoralists. The Ten Commandments are very big on not coveting thy neighbour’s ass. In a society where all your assets, no pun intended, travel around with you, the concept of property is fluid, and disputes over ownership can fester into blood feuds over the generations. “It’s my sheep!” “No. It’s mine. I’d know here anywhere.” Those assets, incidentally, include your wife. Sorry about that, but it’s in the Scriptures.
It became obvious to me that Jesus was what we would now call a millennial fundamentalist. He believed that the Kingdom of Heaven would occur in his lifetime. This explains two things. One. “Render unto Caesar…” If the world is about to end, there is no point railing about temporal authority. This was not what various Hebrew fanatics, wanting to throw off Roman rule, wanted to hear. It did not play well with the early fathers of the church. in the political struggles of the post-Constantine era, either.
The second, the seven last words from the Cross. “Oh Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus knew he was about to die, and the world was not about to end. Again, the early fathers of the Church had a problem with this.
I have no idea what will happen when I die. Most religions require the concept of a Prime Mover, a being beyond the temporal world that sparks the initial process that brings the Universe into being. I have no problem with that. There are far weirder things in quantum mechanics, or the multiverse theory. Don’t know.
Several decades ago, though, there was a theologian called Don Cupitt, now largely forgotten. His theory was, in essence, that whatever Jesus was or meant, his essential message was the right one. Yes, the Golden Rule, I know, all this existed before as a moral message. I believe, and this will probably come up again here, that the Judeo-Christian belief system, as expressed in the New Testament, is one of the reasons why the world is a better place these days. We don’t tend to nail people to trees as much as we did, for a start.
In this season of Advent, perhaps we should read the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Christmas message.
Here endeth the Thought for Today.
Tom Paines Bones 