Penni, sorry, but I don't really remember all the paeans of praise to paganism I have written. I think this gets very complicated very quickly, because there are two widely divergent views of paganism. One is the view that Jane and her friends take, where paganism is essentially satanism, and is truly evil. The other is what I guess I would call innocuous paganism, which is simply a reverence for the earth, all life, and environmentalism and feminine energy, without an overlay of Christianity. Certainly, I find no harm in this, but I am not really much of a pagan, and don't write worshipfully about it on a regular basis.
Doesn't every reasonably good parent teach their children basically the same fundamentals of right and wrong? Off the top of my head, I would say that these are the moral and ethical rules contained in the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. Christians would add the ones that are specifically religious, about honoring God, and non-Christians would leave those out. I am under the assumption that the same basic rules of good, decent behavior are consistent in all the major religions, and all agnostic and atheistic teachings of basic civility. I think they are ancient, really, and have very little to do with what religious belief system a person has. I was under the impression that there is general agreement in this area. Am I wrong here?
I am not sure I agree that the wicked things that have been done in the name of Christianity are really the result of human wickedness using Christianity as an excuse for its own perversions, however. I have clearly said over and over again that most Christians are good and decent people. But if you study the history of the Christians, as Jesus and his followers gradually separated from the Jewish sect they belonged to there is an increased polarization and negativity against the Jews written into the Bible. Anyone reading it, particularly taking it literally, would tend to think Jews are evil, when in fact Jesus' followers simply wrote it that way as they were breaking away, out of anger. Certainly, the Holocaust could not have happened without widespread complicity by European Christians, and their leaders, who had become prejudiced by all of this. Is this basic human wickedness, or is it belief systems spinning out of control, not honoring the original beliefs and sayings of Jesus, who himself was a Jew?
In somewhat the same way, people who take the Bible literally believe that homosexuality in a sin, and use this belief system to hurt, hate and discriminate against homosexuals. I have read enough about this now to understand that this concept of homosexuality as sin is based a little bit on fear, and a lot on mis-translations and misunderstandings of The Bible. Jesus does not mention homosexuality, and the Sodom and Gomorrah sins were really prostitution, idolatry, and some others. It seems to me that misunderstandings of early Christian beliefs, and a very narrow interpretation of the Bible that does not take into consideration any of the modern archaeological findings, lead to myopia in several major ideological areas. I don't believe it is human wickedness that causes that, but ignorance of the original historical documents, and some unwillingness to grow and learn which I cannot quite understand, which holds that the Bible is the final authority, although chapters were removed in the early Christian times, and new gospels and other underpinnings have been discovered quite recently and really change some of the religious implications.
I posted this excerpt from the PBS series on Jesus over at Ask God, and it got very little response. It is about how Jesus was really a feminist, and was surrounded by strong women, but that later, his followers became very male-dominant, and actually changed the Bible to support their misogynist views. Mary Magdelene was changed from a powerful, independent woman into a prostitute, for example. What do we do with facts like these? Is is rude and polarizing even to talk about them? Would all of those women been burned during the Inquisition in Europe if Jesus' beliefs about women, and his respect of them, been honored? I think not. It is certainly not my intent to be rude.
pbs.org
Religion is very complex. Christians have not been involved in all the religious wars; it would seem that organized religion in itself causes violent rivalries, however. But certainly I think that if parents are going to indoctrinate their children in a religious sense, they should in some way be responsible for understanding the roots of their religion, and the commonality of all religious value systems, in order to decide what to teach. Unless at some point we have that, everyone just passes down the same prejudices they learned, and civilization does not seem to advance very much. |
