After the death of Jesus and for centuries to come,
Christianity would be an outlawed religion in the Roman Empire. If you were a caught practitioner death
would often be the punishment.
There were massive propaganda campaigns against Christians and the
spread of Christianity by the Roman Empire and one of the most successful among
these was the charge that Christians were cannibals. You may be thinking, how could they have lodged such a
campaign? It is pure lunacy to
label Christians cannibals. That’s
true, it is a ridiculous argument, but the way that the Roman Empire did this
was by taking a passage from the Bible literally. In Matthew 26:26 it is written:
So often however many people read scripture and find
different meanings or messages, and each one believes they are right no matter
how contradictory other interpretations might be. The Bible is written in about 10 different forms of
literature and is almost impossible to be read “literally.” Many people would shutter at what I am
saying now, but it is true. Belief
and interpretation surrounding all sorts of sacred scriptures have evolved so
much since their writing that it is difficult to discern if there actually is one
particular way of interpreting certain passages. This way of reading scripture and unequivocally believing
your view is the only right view is called fundamentalism. In religious terms it is the
unwillingness to consider alternative views on the meaning of scripture or
religious teaching.
.
26 While they
were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and
gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”
According to the Roman indictment it was clear, Jesus
ordered his followers to eat his body and in a later passage to drink his
blood. This is cannibalism. We, of course, would look at this and
have a more nuanced approach to this and realize that Jesus was speaking in
metaphor. His words were a way of
explaining the sacrifice that Christians believe his death symbolizes, not a
command to eat flesh and drink wine.
He wanted his followers to eat bread and drink wine so that they would
not forget the sacrifice that he was going to make for humanity.
My
point in saying this is that we have to be very careful how we read all sacred
scriptures and how we interpret them. It is all too easy to take the Bible, Koran or Gita
completely out of context and frame people or a religion in a certain way. It has happened all too many times that
Christians are said to believe in 3 gods, or that Jihad is a “holy war” or that
Hindus are polytheistic. All these
“claims” are not true. Christians
use the trinity as a way of understanding their one God with three distinct
roles. Jihad means struggle and is
used in the Koran to represent primarily an individual’s struggle, not a mass
movement or war of any kind. And
no, Hindu’s are not polytheistic; technically it is a monistic religion, this
belief being that all is one.
So often however many people read scripture and find
different meanings or messages, and each one believes they are right no matter
how contradictory other interpretations might be. The Bible is written in about 10 different forms of
literature and is almost impossible to be read “literally.” Many people would shutter at what I am
saying now, but it is true. Belief
and interpretation surrounding all sorts of sacred scriptures have evolved so
much since their writing that it is difficult to discern if there actually is one
particular way of interpreting certain passages. This way of reading scripture and unequivocally believing
your view is the only right view is called fundamentalism. In religious terms it is the
unwillingness to consider alternative views on the meaning of scripture or
religious teaching.
In
our world today you will see fundamentalists in Islam perverting the meaning of
the Koran for their political purposes, all while there has never been much agreement
at all on how to read it or what meaning can be discerned from particular
passages. The same goes for
Christian fundamentalists who believe that the world is 6000 (or something like
that) years old. They have a total
disregard for science and interpret one part of Genesis literally while
“interpreting” and rationalizing other parts such as “do not kill your enemies,
but pray for them.” The three
major monotheistic religions of our times all say that human beings were
created in God’s image, but the problem is that we create God in an image that
suits us through the narrow prism of our political beliefs or interpretation of
ancient sacred texts. What
fundamentalists foolishly are unwilling to do is say, “I don’t know” or even
think about another perspective than their own, proudly thinking that they have
the answers.
Fundamentalism
erodes our scientific accomplishments and simplifies extraordinarily
complicated matters. For
fundamentalism to be dangerous and harmful to our society it doesn’t have to be
violent. Often times in America
today fundamentalism shows its face through arrogance and ignorance of things
we know to be.
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins and for people to
presume to know as much as they claim to about an infinite all knowing God is a
prime example of this deadly sin.
We need to be willing to ask questions and then be even more willing to
accept the answers without them destroying our world and our understanding of
it. Without this our world has no
hope. By no means am I saying that
we ought to throw out our faith and religion and replace them with puritanical
science, but I am saying we need to achieve a balance. We need to be able to keep our religious
beliefs all while realizing that no scripture is an historical or scientific
text. There is supposed to be
meaning to these writings, deep meaning that will explain the unexplainable and
for us to presume that we have it all figured out is pride. When fundamentalism of all kinds rears
its ugly head it turns the world from a place of beauty and intrigue to a place
of death and destruction. We need
to be able to keep an open mind all whilst not losing our soul
.
I appreciate your thoughts, Bryan. I think a big part of it is just that communities have a hard time figuring out how to read texts. Very often, those we characterize as "fundamentalist" do not acknowledge--or are not aware--that they bring a particular set of assumptions to the text. Many Christians still think that they "read the Bible as it is", without being aware that what they think it means is conditioned by their upbringing, their beliefs about the world, about society, etc. which are not shared by the people who produced the text in the first place. This "critical consciousness" takes time to develop, but above all it is a risky process since it challenges much of the "status quo" of our interpretations. Once we acknowledge that there is a gap between "the world of the text" and the one we inhabit, there can be this space where we can think critically about how we read and what we read. Nevertheless, easier said than done.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I'm not sure how to move forward from here--that is, I don't know how to show someone that between the text and the reader there is a synapse of meaning which will always exist--a space where uncertainty and the possibility of misreading dwells. On one level I'm quite sure this is not so much an epistemological problem as it is an ethical one--namely, that it is not so much hard to understand as it is hard to accept. Perhaps experience and reflection are the keys to this realization? I don't know.