Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Christianity

The Lessons Of Jesus (Or “Why Conservatives Hate Francis”)

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On March 28, 2024

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As Easter approaches, let us consider Pope Francis.

https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1771152349698142589

The difference between Francis and his critics isn’t as wide as some people make out, and he’s far less unorthodox than his enemies claim, but this is the difference: Francis wants to welcome people, and believes in a God whose primary trait is love, while Church conservatives want to exclude people.

The greatest controversy of Francis’s pontificate has been his allowing blessings for same sex couples. He doesn’t allow marriage, and no priest has to bless a homoxexual couple, but they are now allowed to. In Africa, most of which is virulently and culturally anti-gray, this has gone down badly even with those on the left of the Church, but outside African, it’s been a theological issue. The Church teaches homosexuality is a sin and no grace can be given to homosexual couples.

Anyone who knows the church finds this ironic and funny, given that the priesthood and the bureaucracy couldn’t run without closeted gays.

The larger issue, though, is that just as Jesus spent time with tax collectors, prostitutes and other low-lifes, and believed it was almost impossible for the rich to enter heaven, Francis believes the Church should reach out to sinners, treat them kindly and even love them, as Jesus loved humanity, despite our sins.

The example of Jesus, as displayed in the Gospels, is that of love for the unworthy. His contempt is for the empty ritualists, the Pharisees, and the greedy, but even they are invited to join Jesus on the path to God. But, of all the sins he took time to condemn, Jesus himself never spoke of homosexuality.

I’m not, overall, a fan of Christianity. I’m with Gore Vidal, who said that monotheism was the worst thing to befall the West. Christianity and Islam’s records are of vast violence and coercion and horrific crimes.

But there is a good side to Christianity, a tendency to love and acceptance and care for the poor and the weak which comes directly from the Gospels, and that care tends to be show much more in the better offshoots of Catholicism than in most Protestant denominations, tainted as they are by ideas of predestination and/or salvation by faith alone. When Henry the Eighth forcibly shut the monasteries one claim was that they didn’t help the poor enough, but the new Anglican church did even less.

Francis is the only Pope of my life who I regard as Christian: as following the the example of Jesus, even if very imperfectly. The others were orthodox inquisitors, feeling that rules were more important than love and charity.

I rather doubt that either Benedict or John Paul II will like their reception, should Jesus and Heaven exist:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

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Standing With the Good Samaritan Against So Many “Christians”

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On April 18, 2022

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I was brought up Christian—baptized Anglican and enrolled in Roman Catholic Sunday School. That was my mother’s bargain: dad could chose the baptism, but mum got to choose the Sunday school. Smart woman.

I can’t say I’m Christian anymore, though I still have a ton of respect for Jesus from those early days. Like most schools for beginners, my Roman Catholic Sunday School concentrated on the basics. The basics I received were:

  • God is Love
  • Jesus wants you to take care of those less fortunate than you
  • Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself.
  • Do Unto Others As You Would Others Do Unto You
  • Better to be a Good Samaritan than a Pharisee (i.e., better to not believe and do good deeds, than to believe and not do good deeds)

Now, I’m no theologian, and unlike with some other disciplines I know I haven’t read enough to have a really informed position. But I do know a few things, a few simple things. I know that when Jesus talked about judgment, he said this:

35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,

36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37″Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?

38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?

39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40″The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Whenever I read these words I think that Jesus is a man I could love and respect. And whenever I read these words I am saddened by how few of his followers today are worthy of the word “Christian.”

Marx once said “I am not a Marxist”. I wonder if today, Jesus would say “I am not Christian”.

Oh, certainly there are many good Christians, like the priest who taught me so many years ago, or the priest who regularly visited me when I was in hospital even though I wasn’t one of his flock. Many, many Christians feed the hungry and visit the prisoners and the sick.

But so many seem to suffer from the sickness descended from Calvin, this diseased thinking that to be Christian all you have to do is believe in Christ, that belief and not works matter more. Once “saved”, once “reborn”, well, after that you can do whatever you want: be a Pharisee and still call yourself a Christian.

I stand with the Good Samaritan. I’ll take my chance with God, and Jesus, for that matter, with all my doubts, but at least understanding that it’s my deeds in life that mattered and that what I did to help the least of Jesus’s brothers is what I’ll be judged on, not whether or not I “believed” the correct piece of doctrine about who Jesus was, or what the after life is like, or whether being gay is bad.

Because I’m not a Christian. But I hope I’m a good Samaritan.

And if Jesus is God’s son, I hope he’ll recognize me as such when that time comes when I have to account for the life I lived.

Originally published in 2008, at FDL.

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The Most Radical Statement I’ve Ever Read

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On May 4, 2021

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From Dr. Robert Tabash, in Bethlehem:

The poorest deserve the best.

I stared, stunned at this for a while, because it’s absolutely 180 degrees from how we do things. To do this would be a complete repudiation of our entire society, and every society of which I am aware.

I stumbled across it in the replies to this tweet, on the same general theme.

It’s hard to say much about this, because it’s almost impossible to imagine a world in which we do this.

Of course, this comes from Christians, and it’s why I have contempt for most modern Christians, especially evangelicals.

Christ was a radical. Unbelievably radical. “As you have done to these, the least of mine…” and telling the rich to sell all their possessions and give them to the poor. Real Christianity, the path of Jesus, not all the crap accreted about Christianity, is perhaps the most radical, and hardest, in the world.

This is why most “Christians” don’t follow Jesus’s clear instructions: Doing so is hard. That’s fine, I don’t either. But I also don’t call myself a Christian.

But put the Christianity aside, if you can, and marvel just in the idea of a world completely topsy turvy to the one in which we live, where those who are poorest; those who are weakest, get the best, because they are the ones who need it most, and we care for each other.

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Christianity as a Religious Ideology

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On December 27, 2019

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Religions are ideologies. They are little different from something like capitalism, or Marxism, or the divine right of kings, or humanism.

That is to say ideologies are sets of statements about how the world and people are, and how they should be.

Christianity takes humans as fallen. We are innately bad, and we must be reformed by good education, including punishment. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” This is different from classic Confucianism, which assumed that humans were essentially neutral slates, or the Confucianism of Mencius, which believed that humans were innately good, similar to Rousseau. The Chinese Legalists, on the other hand, assumed humans were bad, and the Imperial justice system tended to run on their ideas, not those of Mencius.

If you believe humans are bad, you must change them; fix them. Such ideologies tend to be punitive. If you think humans are good, on the other hand, you have to mostly avoid screwing them up, and such ideologies try to avoid punishment and negative reinforcement.

Christianity’s caused a lot of suffering down through the ages, a statement I hope isn’t controversial. A lot of that comes down to Christianity’s metaphysical beliefs for most of that time.

  1. The only way to go to Heaven is through acceptance of Christ;
  2. If you don’t go to Heaven, you will wind up in Hell. Hell is eternal torment.

The combination of these two beliefs means that, logically, anything is acceptable if it leads to someone becoming a Christian. Charlemagne once force-converted ten thousand pagans, then executed them. They died as Christians, with no chance to sin, doubtless they went to heaven. Spanish conquistadors would burn heretics, because they believed that would send them to heaven. Conquering a country to convert its people was not only moral, it was the only moral thing to do. To do otherwise would be to condemn everyone born there to hell, which is to say to torture which never ends.

Christianity is a form of hegemonic ideology. “Everyone should follow this ideology.” Democracy is another hegemonic ideology, “Everyone should be able to vote for their leaders.” Oh, there are exceptions, but they are minor. A country that is not a democracy, to a believer in democracy, isn’t ruled legitimately. Plenty of wars have been justified by hegemonic democratic principles, and plenty of non-democratic governments have been overthrown when democratic powers defeated them (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, for example.)

But remember that, after the Napoleonic wars, aristocracy was re-instituted in France. The hegemonic philosophy of the day can differ.

Islam is also a hegemonic religious ideology: everyone is supposed to eventually become a Muslim. That’s the goal, although it’s sort of okay for the other monotheists to stick around.

Hegemonic philosophies which get traction change the world. They evangelize. They conquer. When they go bad, they go really bad.

Religious hegemonic ideologies have the extra oomph of “God said.” If “God said,” well then, you can’t override that, because obviously “God is right.” The best you can do is to say “Well, perhaps we misunderstood part of this.”

Non-hegemonic ideologies find hegemonic ideologies horrifying. Hegemonic ideologies breed fanatics, people who aren’t willing to say “it’s okay for other people to live differently.”

Don’t think this is always a bad thing: Our ideology may radically oppose slavery, for example, or starvation, or torture or rape, and say “No one should every do these things!”

Is that bad?

Well, is it worth fighting wars over? That’s really the question. Is it worse using violence to stop this? How much violence? At what point are the evils of the violence you’re using worse than whatever it is you oppose, or whatever good you intend to impose?

Christianity’s monster state ruled by crusades and inquisitions and insisting that women bear the children of their rapists–that sort of thing. This isn’t in question, because we have a lot of Christian history.

This doesn’t make Christianity uniquely monstrous, or more evil than many other ideologies, but it is baked into the set of beliefs required to be Christian (forced conversion, death to pagans and heathens) or is easy to pervert a hegemonic ideology towards (abortion is murder, murder is always bad, unless you’re murder a non-Christian to force conversion of their society).

Other ideologies have other monster modes. We’re beginning to see Hinduism’s right now. We’ve been seeing how Islam goes wrong for many decades now. Communism regularly gets vilified for its crimes and I trust people know the crimes of capitalism, though they tend to be understated–because it is our ruling ideology.

But religious ideologies are always particularly dangerous, for the simple reason that one cannot admit God was wrong, because God can’t be wrong. (The Hindu Gods, oddly, can be wrong. Pagans are usually pretty clear that gods aren’t always right.)

Beware the consequences of monotheism with infallible Gods, and beware the consequences of hegemonic ideologies.

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