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Recently, a friend forwarded
an email endorsing a bumper-sticker mentality that, apart from very suspect
statistical sampling, seems to be blissfully ignorant of historical theological
and philosophic thought. I apologize for the bulleted list, but I hope that
these somewhat disjointed ideas will cooperate with each other to form a
web of meaning that shows that the simple-minded reaction noted above is
dangerous and un-American in the best sense of the term.
- The "Christian" church
included early Jewish followers of Christ who had marketed their church
in Europe as a less ethically demanding faith that allowed previously
"heathen" populations to join.
- The New Testament was written
over a couple of centuries by followers of Christ who each presented
their impression of the tenants of their leader. Their recorded views
were often not necessarily consistent and remain the subject of controversy
among those who generally accept them and those who don't.
- The early Christian church was
the Catholic church. Church leaders were at least sensitive to political
issues in the countries where the church resided, and at worst were
intimately involved with political leadership or were political
leadership. This became arguably the most pronounced during the rise
of the Medici family which ruled Italy and the Catholic church and which
was responsible for the election and occasionally murder of Popes.
- Prior to Gutenberg's invention
of movable type and its dramatic effect on book production, all books
were produced by individual scholar/scribes. New books were either translated
from Hebrew or Aramaic to a current, local language or they were copies
of those translations. As translators are wont to do, these scholars
attempted to bring some consistency to their translations and since
they were translating the writings of authors over many centuries who
had many different points-of-view, the translations were individual
and sometimes conflicting. As new copies were made, simple copying errors
were introduced and perpetuated. This makes the authenticity of modern
religious documents suspect. Some modern religious leaders, like the
Morman Joseph Smith, seem to have done an end-run around this problem;
Smith claims that an angel of God appeared to him sometime in the middle
of the 19th century with golden tablets containing the word of God for
which there was a limited borrowing period.
- In the Renaissance, those who
challenge the religious dogma of the Catholic church--like Copernicus
and Galilio who suggested that the Earth was not the center of the universe--were
summoned before the Inquisition and on pain of death were required to
recant their published beliefs.
- Prior to the reign of Henry VIII,
England was Catholic. In search of an heir, Henry went on a shopping
spree for a wife/mistress who could provide a male heir. When the archbishop
of Canterbury--the head of the English Catholic church--could not negotiate
a divorce for Henry, English religious separatists suggested that Henry
could create his own English church where he would be both head of government
and head of the church. Voila!.
- When the first settlers came
to this country, many were trying to escape religious persecution in
Europe. They believed that both Catholicism and Anglicanism were corrupt
and that church leaders were not morally qualified to interpret divine
standards. For practical and faith reasons, community and religious
leadership in the early New England colony were strict. By the end of
the 17th cy, some New England residents found that they had jumped from
the frying pan into the fire--literally.
- Over time, many human cultures
have developed religious beliefs. Greek and Roman cultures had hierarchical,
multi-deistic systems. Early Hebrew beliefs were founded around a single
god. Christianity and Moslem monotheistic faiths grew out of Judaism.
There has been a consistent pattern of each new -ism discounting the
validity of the -ism that it replaced.
- Religions have been founded on
a recognition by individuals and groups of individuals that something
larger than humans or other species must have been responsible for the
creation of the physical and biological worlds. Often these individuals
and groups have believed that such a creative entity must have established
standards that should govern at least human behavior.
- Coincident with the foundation
of religious beliefs, humanity has realized that it is a social species.
Ancient and modern science has shown that humanity is not alone in this
category--bees, ants, chimpanzees, lions--also have social groups and
hierarchies. In most cases, social roles seem to be more hardwired than
they are in humans; however, in each case social order and a recognition
of roles seems to be essential.
- Humanity can reason, often endlessly.
Such reasoning activity, in and of itself, has been called philosophy.
Early philosophy was often the equivalent of theology, though the difference,
to the extent there was a difference, was often contentious.
In "modern thought," there were those who made a point of
this difference. Sometimes, this departure included the idea of a god--for
example, Pantheism, where the idea of a god includes and is equivalent
to all of existence. In some cases, the idea of a god was explicitly
excluded--athiesm--or put on hold--agnosticism. Often, philosophic schools
developed elaborate standards of social behavior that were indistinguishable
in their prescripts from those of "established religion,"
except for the establishing authority.
- Both religious dogma and non-religious
philosophy have contended with human self-interest. The tendency of
humanity to cast itself in a favorable role in relation to the rest
of existence has been the monkey-on-the-back of theological and philosophical
thought. At its extremes, this tends to frame itself as beliefs that
are independent of human or individual welfare vs. beliefs that tend
to favor and support human welfare.
- The image of a god often tends
to reflect this conflict. At the one extreme is the idea of a force
that created all of existence, which we now may believe is vast and
incomprehensible to human thought. Such a force, we might believe, has
established a universal order, but one in which human existence is such
an insignificant part that it doesn't warrant much attention in the
scope of universal order. "In God we trust," seems irrelevant;
we don't have a choice. At the other extreme may be a concept of a god
that created humanity in "his" image and has an egoistic interest
in how well this creation prospers. Such a god might have published
a divine rule book by which success of this favored species could be
judged. Arguably, such ideas of a more personal god may lead imperceptibly
to ideas that this kind of god favors certain species, nationalities,
modes of thought, races, genders, casts, military services and viewing
preferences.
- A recurring element of theological
and philosophic thought has been the idea of individual and/or group
ethical responsibility. Milton's 17th century view that humanity was
created "sufficient to have stood but free to fall," poetically
paraphrases other more verbose expressions by Hume, Kant and other voices
of the Enlightenment. The governmental structure of nearly all societies
imposes a collective oversight of individual actions. Many religions
impose a moderated oversight, for example, the Pope and delegated priests
who are intermediaries and help interpret or enforce interpretation
of divine standards.
- Individuals and groups that are
subsidiary components of larger groups stubbornly resist oversight,
however. Protestant thought resisted the intermediary of the Papist
hierarchy in the affairs of individual conscience and rejected the idea
that early sins could be assuaged by later good deeds that met the standards
of human dispensation. Protestants wanted to eliminate middlemen and
held that individual conscience was bound only by direct appeal to God.
States' rights challenge federalism. National sovereignty challenges
international law.
- Ethics and theology are frequently
caught on the horns of the dilemma of absolute rules vs rules interpreted
in some context. Absolute rules sometimes seem ridiculous at best and
non-Darwinian at least when judged in a real-world context. Relative
interpretation always runs the considerable risk of self-interest.
- Some wise and often very contentious
people wrote the documents that established the model of American government,
which though not perfect, seems to have been constructed to withstand
many of the failures I've noted above. This model recognizes that professions
of religious belief should be held separate from government. While we
may more or less agree about the limits we place on human behavior,
the way we arrive at the basis for those agreements may vary considerably.
We may agree that such discussions generate more heat than light. We
ought to agree that the bases for those individual beliefs deserve respect
and that rather than telling each other to shut up, we should be encouraging
each other to describe the basis for individual belief on the chance
that we might learn something.
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