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capri0mniEpisode 2 -- the topic request that came in second:
Snarky Rant on the Dangers of Christian Theology
(I know there are Christians on my f'list, and maybe Christians in the wider Web ocean who are reading this. But I won't put this under a Pagans-only filter. If, based on the above title, it seems likely that you will be offended, please scroll past to the next entry)
Most Neo-Pagans* know the mantra: "Even though we're non-Christian, we're not anti-Christian." The reasons for this are clear enough. The more people fear us, the more they are likely to attack us, and decree by law that Neo-Pagan religions are "fake," and therefore not protected under the First Amendment. So we do everything in our power to project an aura of sweetness and light, and proclaim that all religions are equally valid, and we all, at our core believe the same things, even if we express those beliefs in different ways.
And the liberal, secular, humanist part of myself wants to believe that. I don't want to be prejudiced against someone, based on how they percieve the Ultimate Reality. But, deep down (and, in recent years, rising closer and closer to the surface), I believe an essential, core belief of Christianity is simply Wrong (both intellectually and morally), and potentially Dangerous, and willful liberalism and tolerance is no longer enough to surpress this belief.
And I'm just not talking about the Christianity of wingnuts like Fred Phelps and David Duke, either; this danger is woven deep into the theology of the religion itself, and exists even in the faith of Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Fred Rogers. I'm talking about the Christian concept of Satan.
This concept began with theologizing of Saint Paul (Saul of Tarsis). As Joel Carmichael writes in The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism (Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York: 1992):
Paul's explanation for the hiatus between the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the advent of the Kingdom of God rested on the assumption of a real conflict between Devil forces and God forces: the Angels, who for Paul were maleficent, opposed the Kingdom of God, the God forces promoted it (pg 15).
This concept of Satan, as the leader of an army opposing The Kingdom, is far different from his original place in Judaism; in Judaism, he is a servant of God, who works his trickery to test mankind only by God's permission. In this testing, he is very like the trickster dieties of pagan religions, upsetting God's applecart and causing suffering for humans, but nonetheless furthering the rhythms of life and faith (q.v. Job, who, through Satan's torment, is finally prompted to question God, and thus understand Him). In Paul's theological reasoning, Satan's power is raised to that nearly equal with God's, and he is the enemy -- actively working to thwart God's will.
Over the centuries that the Christian Church developed and codified its theology, Paul's vision of Satan grew and twisted into that of a literal general of a literal army fighting against the Kingdom of God for the destruction of the universe. Not only does Satan command a legion of demons, imps and sprites here on Earth (the angels cast out of Heaven by the Archangel Michael) he also recruits human soldiers to his side: Jews, witches (it's no coincidence that witches' gatherings were called "sabbats" -- they were named after the Jewish "Sabbath"), heretics, homosexuals. It's this concept of Satan which sets Christianity apart from all the religions that came before it, and which makes Christianity so dangerous: As long as you believe there's a personal force of evil out there, actively recruiting your fellow humans to aid in the destruction of the universe, you're going to be duty-bound to find those humans and stop them -- keep them in ghettos, restrict their freedom, jail them, torture them, kill them. After all, this is war.... and, of course, none of "them" would be people like you.
If Satan really did exist, and if he wanted to implant one single idea in human minds in order to do his work on Earth, it would be the idea of Satan.
And it's not like you can just cut the idea of Satan out of Christianity, like you can cut the face of an ex-lover out of a photograph. According to Christian teaching, Jesus died on the Cross to save us from Satan, and spent the three days between his death and Ressurection charging through Hell, freeing the souls of the innocent. Without Satan in the picture, the Crucifixion becomes just another example of man's inhumanity to man.
That said, Satan's place in Christianity is not so fixed that his prominence is unwavering. Many Christians today, if they think of him at all, see him as an abstraction -- an embodiment of a spiritual distance from God. And Christianity did inspire Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Fred Rogers to do their work...The Christian concept of Satan is like a cancer gene in the faith -- it can stay dorment, or nearly so, for generations, and life can go on in its presence. But it is always there, and it is always dangerous, because who can say when it will flair up and be active again?
---
*(American Neo-Pagans, at least, I'm not familiar enough with the status Neo-Paganism world-wide to make this a global generalization)
Next up: Cuddly Animal Toys. Coming soon: Raves and reviews of my favorite wonder tales, Woolen Horse blankets left by ancient astronauts, and Romance (or the lack thereof) in my life.
(I know there are Christians on my f'list, and maybe Christians in the wider Web ocean who are reading this. But I won't put this under a Pagans-only filter. If, based on the above title, it seems likely that you will be offended, please scroll past to the next entry)
Most Neo-Pagans* know the mantra: "Even though we're non-Christian, we're not anti-Christian." The reasons for this are clear enough. The more people fear us, the more they are likely to attack us, and decree by law that Neo-Pagan religions are "fake," and therefore not protected under the First Amendment. So we do everything in our power to project an aura of sweetness and light, and proclaim that all religions are equally valid, and we all, at our core believe the same things, even if we express those beliefs in different ways.
And the liberal, secular, humanist part of myself wants to believe that. I don't want to be prejudiced against someone, based on how they percieve the Ultimate Reality. But, deep down (and, in recent years, rising closer and closer to the surface), I believe an essential, core belief of Christianity is simply Wrong (both intellectually and morally), and potentially Dangerous, and willful liberalism and tolerance is no longer enough to surpress this belief.
And I'm just not talking about the Christianity of wingnuts like Fred Phelps and David Duke, either; this danger is woven deep into the theology of the religion itself, and exists even in the faith of Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Fred Rogers. I'm talking about the Christian concept of Satan.
This concept began with theologizing of Saint Paul (Saul of Tarsis). As Joel Carmichael writes in The Satanizing of the Jews: Origin and Development of Mystical Anti-Semitism (Fromm International Publishing Corporation, New York: 1992):
Paul's explanation for the hiatus between the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the advent of the Kingdom of God rested on the assumption of a real conflict between Devil forces and God forces: the Angels, who for Paul were maleficent, opposed the Kingdom of God, the God forces promoted it (pg 15).
This concept of Satan, as the leader of an army opposing The Kingdom, is far different from his original place in Judaism; in Judaism, he is a servant of God, who works his trickery to test mankind only by God's permission. In this testing, he is very like the trickster dieties of pagan religions, upsetting God's applecart and causing suffering for humans, but nonetheless furthering the rhythms of life and faith (q.v. Job, who, through Satan's torment, is finally prompted to question God, and thus understand Him). In Paul's theological reasoning, Satan's power is raised to that nearly equal with God's, and he is the enemy -- actively working to thwart God's will.
Over the centuries that the Christian Church developed and codified its theology, Paul's vision of Satan grew and twisted into that of a literal general of a literal army fighting against the Kingdom of God for the destruction of the universe. Not only does Satan command a legion of demons, imps and sprites here on Earth (the angels cast out of Heaven by the Archangel Michael) he also recruits human soldiers to his side: Jews, witches (it's no coincidence that witches' gatherings were called "sabbats" -- they were named after the Jewish "Sabbath"), heretics, homosexuals. It's this concept of Satan which sets Christianity apart from all the religions that came before it, and which makes Christianity so dangerous: As long as you believe there's a personal force of evil out there, actively recruiting your fellow humans to aid in the destruction of the universe, you're going to be duty-bound to find those humans and stop them -- keep them in ghettos, restrict their freedom, jail them, torture them, kill them. After all, this is war.... and, of course, none of "them" would be people like you.
If Satan really did exist, and if he wanted to implant one single idea in human minds in order to do his work on Earth, it would be the idea of Satan.
And it's not like you can just cut the idea of Satan out of Christianity, like you can cut the face of an ex-lover out of a photograph. According to Christian teaching, Jesus died on the Cross to save us from Satan, and spent the three days between his death and Ressurection charging through Hell, freeing the souls of the innocent. Without Satan in the picture, the Crucifixion becomes just another example of man's inhumanity to man.
That said, Satan's place in Christianity is not so fixed that his prominence is unwavering. Many Christians today, if they think of him at all, see him as an abstraction -- an embodiment of a spiritual distance from God. And Christianity did inspire Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Fred Rogers to do their work...The Christian concept of Satan is like a cancer gene in the faith -- it can stay dorment, or nearly so, for generations, and life can go on in its presence. But it is always there, and it is always dangerous, because who can say when it will flair up and be active again?
---
*(American Neo-Pagans, at least, I'm not familiar enough with the status Neo-Paganism world-wide to make this a global generalization)
Next up: Cuddly Animal Toys. Coming soon: Raves and reviews of my favorite wonder tales, Woolen Horse blankets left by ancient astronauts, and Romance (or the lack thereof) in my life.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 07:39 am (UTC)And hm, IMHO Satan is just part of the same dualistic/hierarchical world view that has existed in desert religions thousands of years before Christianity.
Mr. Moley waves his paw and says he can't wait for the cuddly toy post:).
Yes, Well....
Date: 2005-02-21 03:18 pm (UTC)To a certain extent, yes. The idea of Satan didn't just pop, fully formed, into Paul's head out of the whole cloth. Jewish views of Satan had already been influenced by the Jews' living among the Babylonians for so long, and in the folk beliefs of Judaism, Satan was seen the source of evil in the world, and the enemy of God.
But Paul's belief that Satan used ordinary, mortal Jews as his instruments was unique, as were the later elaborations of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
I mean, when Tiamat and Ba'al go at it, it's more on the level of Cosmic and Eternal Battle Between Light and Darkness, not the Faustian "Sell me your soul, and I'll give you X" kind of thing.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 03:36 pm (UTC)That's why I'm so worried about my country, now. The latter group of Christians seem to be getting the larger stage for debate.
Thoughts
Date: 2005-02-21 11:55 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2005-02-21 03:30 pm (UTC)Actually, I think it's more simple than that. I think it's more a case of: "My god is stronger than your god," especially during wartime. One of the things that really creeped the pagans out about the Jews, was that the Jews still worshipped their God, and saw themselves as the "Chosen People" even after their Temple had been completely destroyed, instead of taking the hint that maybe their God wasn't all that and a bag of chips, after all.
And there is much less animosity between the gods of different cultures. If I recall correctly (and I may not, so I may be putting my foot in it, big time), The Illiad opens with the Olympian gods returning from a feast/summit meeting with the gods of the East.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2005-02-22 04:34 am (UTC)Christianity has done its share of outright demonisiation, but at least in the early days the faith seems to have spread by somewhat less brutal means. Perhaps because they still had fresh memories of being persecuted themselves, the early Christians did a lot of their proselytizing by adapting local beliefs. Instead of converting people with swords, they did it by throwing a better party. Christmas right after Yule? Way to impress the locals! You folks got a dozen gods to our one? Fine, but we'll throw in specialist saints for your every need!
Now if only they had stuck with those methods...
no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 02:19 pm (UTC)I no longer consider myself Christian (love that Jesus, but can't imagine his being any more divine than the rest of us, hence, not the Christ), but when I did, I grew out of a belief of the devil early enough. People do bad things not because someone told them to but because they've made a poor decision. And I hate it when they blame their actions on some evil entity. There is evil in the world, but that evil is actions, not beings*. (I also don't like it when people say the reason good things happened was because of God's Will. Well, what about the poor schlupp who wasn't spared by the natural disaster? Who came in second in the Olympic event? Did God hate them?)
*So people say "What about Hitler?" I like Eddie Izzard's description of him. He was a "mass murdering f*ckhead."
no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 05:09 pm (UTC)But it's Joel Carmichael's point, in The Satanizing of the Jews, that it wasn't just Hitler; if he were working alone, he wouldn't have been been able to mass-murder over six million people, even if he was high on a cocktail of speed and Jolt soda. Hitler was able to get as far as he did, because the idea that Jews were damned by God and in league with the Devil was an integral part of Christian theology from the very beginning.
It's more comfortable to condemn Hitler as the sole, crazed, monster of the story. But the truth is, all of Christiandom is, in part, responsible. Remember how long it took Pope Pius XII to condemn the murders?
And now, as this (http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006605.html) report points out, prisoners in Abu Ghraib are being tortured with the same techniques used during the European Witch Craze.* So when Bush talks on the domestic side about his "mandate," and how he is president because God wants him to be, and on the foreign policy side about "The Axis of Evil," I get very squirmy.
*I'm no longer one of those Neo-Pagans who try to out-Holocaust the Holocaust with the so-called "Burning Times," but that sad period of our history shows the dangers of allowing Satan's half of the Christian theological puzzle to rise to the surface.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 04:19 am (UTC)I'm no kind of Biblical scholar, but by the time of Jesus it seems that Satan's role may have changed even for (some?) Jews. Jesus was, after all, a good Jewish boy, yet (if we can believe the new testament) after the whole fasting-in-the-desert-and-getting-tempted phase he chases Satan off as though he's the enemy. Not just the enemy of humans but of God too. So I don't think it's entirely Christianity's fault.
Early Christians may have played up the Satan angle a lot in order to make their religion more attractive to people who were used to dealing with demons in their own folk religions. To make it easier to convert them and all. In the same way that they played up the Saints angle when trying to convert people whose folk religions had lots of specialist Gods. Like Satan, that sort of thing probably wouldn't have sold very well in the Middle East, but it seems to have worked very well in Europe.
As to Paul's role in all this, well Paul came from Rome, which was polytheistic. A malevolent Satan probably made more sense to him than a Satan who works as God's bad-cop, and it would probably make sense to those Paul wanted to convert too. Rome's gods were constantly battling each other, so an adversary for God may have seemed natural or even obvious.
After all, this is war.... and, of course, none of "them" would be people like you.
*That* idea is far, far older than Christianity. Jews had their "us" and "them" too, and were, at times, quite happy to oppress or even exterminate "them" for the greater glory of God. Ditto for the Romans. It seems, alas, to be a *human* problem, not just a Christian one, or a Jewish one, or a [insert religion here] one.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-22 07:19 pm (UTC)While the attitude toward the other [insert cultural/religious group here] that: "My god can beat up your god. You talk funny. You stink. Your marriage customs are kinky. And your mother wears combat boots!" is indeed as universal as (earthly) war itself. But the "war" I was referring to was the cosmic and divine war as conceived in Christian theology, especially in the writings of Augustine.
My point is that it's the Christian concept of how that divine war is waged -- with a personal god of evil recruiting ordinary mortals as his foot soldiers that's unique and particularly dangerous in the scope of world religions.
As for the story of Jesus in the desert -- I can't help wondering: if Jesus was alone with Satan as the time, how can anyone be sure what was said to whom? ;-)
Besides, the early Church Fathers didn't develop their theology by reading the gospels, they picked which gospels to canonize based on whether they agreed with their theology or not. Besides, no one's quite sure when the Gospel of Matthew was written, but it was no earlier than 50 AD, and it might have been as late as 80 AD.