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January 14, 2011

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kathy a.

from what i've read, rep. giffords is jewish. so was jesus.

i grew up in a mainstream denomination, and i believe in that "love one another" part of the message. i still believe in that, although now i'm an atheist. it does not matter to me what anyone else believes, so long as it is not harmful to others, and their specific beliefs are not imposed on others, and so long as they are actively caring to and thoughtful about fellow humans.

as a consequence, i have a lot of believing friends who care about how we treat one another on earth, and about zero who think they own the scorecard for access to heaven. i think the time that counts is what i've got on earth, which isn't gonna last forever. and i think we're flawed, but we're all we've got.

go forth and do good, fellow humans.

Toast

I do not love Erick Erickson. But I'm an atheist, so that's cool.

Kelly M.

Emporia is my hometown, so I've seen this sign dozens, if not hundreds, of times. I'm always bothered by the smug quality you describe, but also by the sloppy writing. If you read it absolutely literally, it could be interpreted to mean: "Accept Jesus Christ and *either* you shall be saved, *or* you'll regret it forever." Of course, most people understand perfectly well that what the sign intends to say is: "Accept Jesus Christ, because if you don't, you'll regret it forever."

I wonder if the people who put up the sign actually thought this through. Do they really, truly believe that motorists on the highway will be struck with this brilliant insight, and will dedicate their lives to Christ then and there? Or do they just want to trumpet their own virtues so they can feel good about themselves? I'm not sure which option is worse.

There is, or was, a sign on the other side of that same stretch of highway that reads: "Righteousness makes a nation great, but sin is a cancer to all people." That one's even more puzzling.

Anyway, I enjoy the blog, and your posts especially - keep up the good work.

Prup (aka Jim Benton)

I think both of you (I'm writing after seeing kathy's comment) underestimate the inherent evil in Erickson's form of Protestantism. It seems to combine all three of the basic mistakes:
[I'm preaching here, so put this on behind my comments.]

1) By accepting 'salvation through faith alone' and its corrolary that 'good works do nothing to increase your chances of heaven' it makes the idea of actig to help others less attractive and makes the focus more on one's personal salvation than on one's duty to his neighbor.

2) By seeing the 'location of evil' in the nexus between God and human, rather than in the intersection between human and human, it results in the evil of "if you've done whatever to your neighbor, all that counts is 'getting right with God' and getting forgiveness from him, and not requiring you to get forgiveness from your neighbor.

3)It sees Jesus as simply a 'gate to salvation' and totally ignores his role of 'mesenger' and anything he actually said.

Whatever you think about Catholicism, it never made these three errors, which is why I emphasize 'Protestant' so frequently.

low-tech cyclist

Amen to all that, Stephen. My only quibble would be that it's hard to overshadow a 'Christian' message of 'get right with the guy who's got all the power before he throws you in the eternal furnace.' Next to that, the smugness of the 'saved' is small potatoes.

Your mention of the Left Behind series reminds me of a thought I've had for a number of years now: if everybody who believed in the Rapture got Raptured one fine day, this country, at least, would be much better off with them gone.

kathy a.

ltc, that second point's not very jesus-like! i don't read jesus as much of an "eternal furnace" guy. dude hung out with a prostitute and lots of poor people; he only really got angry with the entrepreneurs in the temple, fleecing people, so far as i recall. someone with more knowledge will surely correct me.

prup, those are some points about the illogic of evangelical/end-times protestants. but there are lots of flavors of protestantism, and only a few swing that way -- again, my own knowlege is a bit limited, but that's my impression.

low-tech cyclist

kathy, I'm not wishing them ill; they hope to be Raptured, and I wish them every success!

Jesus said love your enemies, and I don't even think of them as my enemies, but just a bunch of ignorant yutzes who are getting in the way of the rest of us being able to change this country for the better.

Not a very charitable view of them, I suppose, but considering their attitude towards us is that they look forward to the swift arrival of the day when we get what's coming to us, I think I'm doing pretty good.

It seems to combine all three of the basic mistakes:

Hey wait, Prup! I don't see any mention of land wars in Asia, drawing to an inside straight, or going up against a Sicilian with death on the line.

Hey, it's Friday afternoon, and I'm getting punchy. Enjoy your weekend, all!

minstrel hussain boy

whenever i am presented with threats of hell, i give them my best country boy look, sometimes spit for emphasis and say:

dude, ya'll don't hafta threaten me with hell. i was a junkie in vietnam. i been. hell's do-able. parts of it are even kinda fun. like the hookers in bangkok, ya know? fun.

that usually shuts 'em right up.

MR Bill

"Heaven for the climate, hell for the company.."

kathy a.

MHB and MRB, have i mentioned that i love you? xoxo

i suppose hell [assuming it exists] could potentially be worse than hot flashes and the other stuff, but if i'm headed there, i expect time served.

Prup (aka Jim Benton)

[Warning, Pruppish pedantry ahead, but if you like this sort of stuff, it might be fun. If not -- Page Down button]

Actually, kathy, the religious point I made was the basis of the Protestant-Catholic theological divide, not, originally an 'extremist' position. And while many denominations have downplayed it recently -- and fortunately -- it is still buried in their moral/ethical teachings, a rotting abscess that sometimes flares up.

Actually the argument behind it is fascinating if you like such stuff. Both Luther and Calvin had problem dealing with the following problem.

a) God is infinite in mercy, goodness, justice and love

b) sinning against such a creature is infinitely wrong, however minor the sin. (Dangerous corrolary: all sins are equal, making murder and masturbation equivalent)

c) such a sin brings infinite guilt

d) a person's 'good works' are necessarily finite, so no amount of them can 'offset' the guilt of even one sin

e) but all of us are sinners

f) therefore, no one can be saved by good works and all of us deserve hell

g) but Scripture shows that some people are saved.

Now Catholics deal with this by denying that all sins are equivalent, and inventing the concept of a Purgatory where punishments (limited in time) are doled out for lesser sins. You can get time served there, kathy, but not in Hell which is infinite. And Catholics use the concept of mens rea to distinguish. In strict Catholic theology -- not 5th Grade Religion classes -- there must be a conscious intention not just to perform the forbidden act but to sin by doing it. There must be a variation of saying "Fuck You" to God in the performing of the act. That makes it a truly mortal sin.

But abandoning this, and other Catholic concepts because of that initial premise left the Protestants with two explanations. Either

a: Salvation comes not from good works but strictly from faith in Jesus as the Saviour (with the problems detailed in my earlier post) or

b: Salvation is a 'free gift of God' given for unimaginable reasons and determined at/before birth (or conception). (Which leads into the tangles of the logic of predestination -- I'd sooner try and paint one side of a moving moebius strip. You'd think it would lead to monasticism or moral laissez faire but instead it always tends towards a conformitarian tyranny.)

At the very least such a view as the Protestant ones leads to the disconnect between the words of the preachers and the words of Christ. At best, because of the solipsistic concern for salvation, other people are still objects helping you to your goal, even if you treat them with ultimate charity. And also because when your sole concern is with "Christ as Saviour" his message, his actual words, become much less important.

oddjob

There is, or was, a sign on the other side of that same stretch of highway that reads: "Righteousness makes a nation great, but sin is a cancer to all people." That one's even more puzzling.

That's a quote from the Book of Proverbs (in what Christians name the "Old Testament"). Proverbs is full of short verse ethical teachings much like that one in style. That particular verse is "Proverbs 14:34". In the New American Standard translation of the Bible it reads this way:

Righteousness exalts a nation,
But sin is a disgrace to any people.

The first part states what happens when you live rightly, while the second more or less does the opposite. Proverbs is replete with quotes of that sort.

If you think of "righteousness" as "right standing before God", "nation" as "nation state/ethnicity", and people also as "ethnicity" I think it becomes easier to understand what the statement's getting at. (As Americans it's easy for us to forget that in most of the rest of the world "nation" necessarily usually also means "ethnicity". Thus, "people" in the context of this verse necessarily is a collective reference, and it probably wouldn't be wildly off the mark to substitute the word "race" there for "people", depending very much of course upon how one defined "race".)

(I looked at five or six different translations of that verse to see if any of them used "cancer" instead of "disgrace", "reproach", "shame", etc., but none did. I conclude therefore that the poster was a misstatement of the verse.)


Here are more, so you can see for yourself and get a feel for the sentence pattern:


The proverbs of Solomon

A wise son makes a father glad,
But a foolish son is a grief to his mother.

Ill-gotten gains do not profit,
But righteousness delivers from death.

The LORD will not allow the righteous to hunger,
But He will reject the craving of the wicked.

Poor is he who works with a negligent hand,
But the hand of the diligent makes rich.

He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely,
But he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

Blessings are on the head of the righteous,
But the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.

- Proverbs 10:1-6 (New American Standard)


Proverbs very much teaches patriarchy, but frankly I think a lot of it is good ethical teaching (provided you're willing to accept its extremely theist point of view, and its blatantly, fiercely patriarchal perspective).

(It also says tons about "wisdom", to the point that, while it's perhaps a stretch, it's not really an enormous stretch to conclude this teaching also reflects a point of view honoring a goddess named "Wisdom". This has long reminded me that the very first word in the Bible for "God" ("Elohim") is also a word that hints at a goddess, even though in the Bible "God" is always referred to as "He".)

If you take the ethical teaching out of Proverbs, the teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, and meditate upon it as it applies to your own life I think you'll find it's actually frightening in the intensity of its demands on your lifestyle. Even as a fundy I was acutely aware of that.

If only more American fundies were!

oddjob

(Dangerous corrolary: all sins are equal, making murder and masturbation equivalent)

That's only dangerous from a societal point of view. If what you're worried about is your salvation, and you believe this, it's all the same.

oddjob

But abandoning this, and other Catholic concepts because of that initial premise left the Protestants with two explanations. Either
a: Salvation comes not from good works but strictly from faith in Jesus as the Saviour (with the problems detailed in my earlier post) or
b: Salvation is a 'free gift of God' given for unimaginable reasons and determined at/before birth (or conception). (Which leads into the tangles of the logic of predestination -- I'd sooner try and paint one side of a moving moebius strip. You'd think it would lead to monasticism or moral laissez faire but instead it always tends towards a conformitarian tyranny.)


And a high school classmate of mine who was a pretty serious Lutheran (insofar as it's possible to be "serious" about being Lutheran when you live in the Philadelphia suburbs, aren't a fundy, and aren't a member of the Missouri Synod) mentioned to me once that Martin Luther never could quite find a way to reconcile his understanding of salvation with the Epistle of James, and that Luther had said something about wanting to throw "James" in the lake.

(The letter/"epistle" of James, one of the "New Testament" books, takes all the arguments about your being brought to salvation solely through your faith in the resurrection of Jesus, and turns them on their collective head. It instead argues that if you don't ever exhibit compassion towards others (it doesn't actually put it that way in actual words, but nonetheless), your "faith" is bullshit (well, it actually says your faith is "dead"):

What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him?

If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food,

and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled," and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?

Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.

But someone may well say, "You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works."

You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.

But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?

Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar?

You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected;

and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "AND ABRAHAM BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS RECKONED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS," and he was called the friend of God.

You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

In the same way, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?

For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.

- James 2:14-26 (New American Standard translation))

Prup (aka Jim Benton)

One reason why James is more highly thought of in Catholic than in Lutheran circles. In fact, while Luther couldn't quite bring himself to kick James out of the Bible, he put it, Revelations, and two other books in a separate section at the back, and older German Bibles -- and perhaps some today, used that unique ordering with the four books (can't remember the other two and am too busy/lazy to check, but one might have been Jude) at the end. Calvin agreed to some extent, I believe. James is a problem indeed.

low-tech cyclist

Where the Roman Catholics, the early Protestants, and contemporary fundies all screw up, IMHO, is in having come up with a theology that quite naturally places the fate of your eternal soul miles above anything else in importance.

Excluding genuine Calvinists here (and I've never grokked why the response to a belief in predestination isn't to live your life as you damned well please), Christianity of practically all stripes adopts the belief that this life is finite, the next is infinite and eternal, but we can do things in this life that may affect the salvation or damnation of others in the next.

Once you fall into that trap, what's the point in doing good for your neighbor, unless there's a chance that it might help lead to his/her eternal salvation? All the good you might do someone in this life alone, with no chance of eternal benefit, is worth less than increasing the likelihood of one person's salvation by an .000000000000000000001 chance.

And it makes things like the Spanish Inquisition make logical sense: better to inflict horrible but finite tortures on someone in this life if it increases the chance, by any minute quantity, that they will get on the right side of God, and avoid suffering even worse tortures eternally.

This logic totally overrides the teachings of Jesus, which is why any Christian theologian worth his or her salt should know it's unacceptable from a Christian perspective.

The logic is airtight; the problem is clearly with the assumption that what we do in this life has the potential to affect the eternal salvation or damnation of others. Predestination avoids this problem, but in a way that's completely ridiculous.

Christianity doesn't morally work, IMHO, without a set of undergirding assumptions that allow for (a) salvation that's widely shared (a God who creates a world where most people are damned is a pretty crappy God, IMHO), (b) salvation/damnation meted out in a way that is as far from arbitrary and capricious as you'd expect a loving God to be able to manage (an omniscient God who can look into our heart of hearts can't be tossing people into hell on anything remotely like a technicality), and (c) whatever the interplay between this life and the next, this life has to matter in and of itself, and not be logically overshadowed by the importance of affecting eternal outcomes. Because if this last isn't true, Jesus' teachings make no sense at all.

It really isn't hard to come up with such a set of assumptions, but I hear the little rascal stirring, so I'll have to save that for later.

low-tech cyclist

The solution is a simple one: an eternity where, salvifically speaking, it's not over 'til it's over - where if, after we die and see God face to face, we're ready to leave our anger and hatred and jealousy and hardness of heart behind, and fall into God's arms, so much the better, but if not, then the matter's still open until we are ready to do so.

In such a moral universe, God would keep on reminding us of his love for us, and we'd eternally have the freedom to refuse that love, and live in our own little hell as long as we chose, or finally accept his love and join the eternal party.

This is hardly an original idea; I've heard it from many sources, including C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce.

I personally buy into Madeleine L'Engle's argument that universal salvation would be the ultimate outcome of an eternity so constructed: that God's love and patience and understanding and insight into each of our souls is, by definition, more infinite and far-reaching than the ability of any mortal to continue to refuse his love.

But that's not necessary. Even without that part, salvation is open to anyone who wants it, and is only denied to those who would deny it to themselves over and over again for eternity, which is about as widely-shared and nonarbitrary a salvation as one can imagine. And we're relieved of any major responsibility for affecting how other people spend their eternity, so that whole business doesn't have to bend this life out of shape, and Jesus' teachings can be back in the center of things where they belong.

Prup (aka Jim Benton)

I started the morning with 2 hours working on a piece, then scrapped it, but maybe can pull some useful scraps out of the rubble.

l-tc: your last paragraph at 9:27 is a good description of the Catholic position, but not the Protestant ones, or the Jewish one. (C.S. Lewis was a Catholic, after all.) Again, it is a basic divide between the religions, strictly speaking -- though American syncretism tends to mix ideas together into a homogenous mass that isn't quite Protestantism or Catholicism, or Judaism, or Islam. (My last mention of Islam for this comment. Like Mormonism, Eastern Orthodoxy and the NAR, the ideas of Islam dissolve into sludge if looked at too closely. There has never been the attempt at bringing rigor to them that Christianity attempted over 2000 years and Judaism attempts anew with every Torah class.)

You, like Catholicism, picture 'heaven' as the 'default position. We have to 'work hard' to get ourselves into hell. (The 'old priest's line' is theologically dubious but makes the point: "Me son, Hell exists, we know that and believe it because the Church tells us to, but sure there's no one tellin' us God's ever actually sent someone there.") And because of that, and because there is a gradation of sins and Purgatory as well as Hell, our works matter, our helping others for their own sake also helps us stay in Heaven.

(And, because of this, when we do injure someone, gaining forgiveness is not merely asking God to forgive us, or 'going to confession.' The forgiveness is dependent on acknowledging what we did is wrong, our sincerely deciding to try never to do that again, but also on our making amends to the extent possible for the injury caused.)

And Purgatory also makes Catholicism more communal. Hell is permanent, eternal, and unchageable -- sorry Madeline L'E. -- but purgatory is not. You can 'pay off your debts' -- which remain even after the sin is forgiven -- but you can also pay off someone else's debts. If you work at a soup kitchen, you can say "Hey God, my account with you is pretty okay, credit this one to Uncle Sean so he can get out of Purgatory sooner." You can even pay off debts by simply accepting hardship, pain, and suffering. "Offer it up" is a particularly Catholic concept, and while Protestants may occasionally say 'pray for me' it is much more a Catholic phrase and is meant in a different way.

But for Protestants, it is hell that is the 'default position.' Do nothing and you are damned. You have to work hard for your salvation -- or if you accept predestination, apparently that isn't fully fixed, and you have to keep reminding God you deserve his 'unmerited favor.'

And even if you have 'accepted Christ as your Saviour' and thus earned salvation -- leaving predestination aside for the moment -- you can lose it at any minute. (Fortunately we've abandoned the early Christian belief in some branches that 'all sins that were committed before you found Christ are forgiveable, but once you were saved, you have the knowledge of the good and therefore any slipping damns you without hope of forgiveness.')

This leads to the idea that other people don't really matter except as objects that you use to show God you deserve salvation. (Wives are just 'baby-makers' because of misogyny, yes -- the books of most testaments are written for men, and only secondarily for women -- but it also comes because it isn't just women, but all other people who are 'objectified.')

And even classic protestants who have outgrown the 'pleasure is a distraction from salvation' idea -- alien to a Catholicism which accepts self-denial as a blessing but not a command and totally condemned by Judaism -- still tend to objectify sexual partners because of the lingering effects of the last statement in the last paragraph.

Protestant "Puritanism" doesn't come from a desire to keep others out of hell. (That's a nice goal, a praisable from a human standpoint, but it does nothing to help with your own salvation.) It is, when theologically justified, a way of protecting oneself from temptation that we know we are always liable to slip into. (In fact, there's usually a substantial 'human factor' of "If I can't do it, I don't want anyone else getting away with it" that would be the equivalent of Jews forcing local butcher stops to refuse to sell shrimp or pork to anyone, or Catholics forcing local restaurants not to sell meat to anyone on Friday. The absurdity of the comparisons makes the point.)

In passing, remember that many Protestants, once they got the right to read the Bible that Catholics of the time were forbidden to do, tended to become too literal. When Jesus talked about a 'dozen dozen thousands' (144,000) people being saved, I'd assume he was using it as we use 'gazillion' to mean a 'large number.' (And remember, for him, the world was basically the Holy Land, and there's little liklihood of him understanding how small a part of even the 'Western World' that was.)

[I hope this came out as a little clearer than my first try, but it's still a mess of ideas. Hope somebody gets some use out of it. If not, here's a 'pop spiritual' to 'pay you for your time' by the sadly forgotten Roy Hamilton, one of the great voices of the 50s and 60s -- who sang everything from this to stabdards to jazz to rock'n'roll, even a great version of "And I Love Her." If you can imagine a cross between Roy Orbison, Nat King Cole and Jackie Wilson (who, like Elvis, admittedly stole his stylings from Hamilton), well, look around on YouTube.]

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