26 April 2009
Reviewing Reviewers--Jesus Interrupted
)Published on April 26th, 2009 @ 04:09:19 pm, using 1349 words, 62 views
If the current efforts to reestablish the same financial institutions and their officials who put us in this god-awful mess weren’t enough to establish how delusional our current period in history is, or the horror of debating whether waterboarding someone at all, much less dozens of times (all to stop that atom bomb that’s about to go off . . . when exactly??), or the prospect of watching polar caps disappear while we debate in the mode of professional wrestling, then I guess there’s no way to convince you that, far from the rational beings we claim to be, we are pretty much psychotic and thousands of people are in institutions for far less craziness than we’re exhibiting.
It’s understandable how we are this way. Our minds are built from birth around finding regularities and patterns on which we can base action and inaction. Sometimes the regularities and patterns are simple enough, allowing more or less successful action and response, belief and truth. Mostly, however, the world is varyingly complex, too hard for us to sense, much less understand. So we build incomplete pattern structures in our heads, the easiest and most accessible form of which are (no, not scientific formulas and theories, although they are the same basic thing) stories, fantasies, myths. As long as they don’t get us killed or harmed (most times), we can survive day to day, year to year, entire lives functioning on partly or even completely wrong stories. Until reality steps in (like it did to the Indian tribe that believed their sacred dance made them invisible to enemies, or to the Soviet Union, for example, or that time you just knew you had found the love of your life). We’ve gone on and on here (although not lately since it’s so self-evident now) about the fantasies and stories of the Chicago Vatican, I mean, school of econ that took a few real-life items and spun them into the elaborate myths that led us to the debacle that we now face and which guide our President and his econ priests even yet. It’s so very hard to give up your stories, even when reality insists, especially the ones that comfort us most, that give us our worth, that include us in groups. That’s why the very best cultural stories last so long. Like “free market” stories, and “democracy” stories, and sectarian hatred stories.
Which leads us to the best stories of all, our religion stories, the ones that tells us why we’re here, what our purpose is, why we’re special enough to be chosen above all other creation. Every time they’ve been put to do-able tests of reality, they fail, but, because most of the time we can survive those failures, or investment in them convinces us to give our own lives up, we hang on and on to them. Giving up those stories would be like addicts coming off the drugs or dependents becoming responsible for their own lives. Too hard for most. Better not to even discuss, much less confront, the problems the stories have meeting reality. Just hope for the best. Call it “faith” while you’re at it. That feeds your story about yourself very well.
Finding the people who have started with the stories but let reality guide them to, well, reality is a rare and, to some of us anyway, treasured event. That’s why I’ve been reading Bart Ehrmann’s works lately, describing the truly tortured road he has travelled to let reality win out over the much more comfortable and comforting delusions that made up his and others’ religious beliefs over their lives. Ehrmann, a religion professor, has produced yet another work, Jesus Interrupted, which, as he admits, simply goes through what is taught and known in seminaries across the world, all the ways the Bible, especially the New Testament, the Gospels, contradict themselves because they are stories with the purposes of stories, not reality. As such, he has challenged much of the comfortable and drawn the predictable response, as this review indicates:
One of Ehrman’s chief critics is the theologian and author James White, a leading practitioner of apologetics, the branch of theology devoted to defending and proving the orthodox faith. White denounces Ehrman as an apostate guided by deepanti-Christian bias. He charges in one Internet post that Ehrman has “moved far beyond the realm of his narrow expertise in his last three most popular books, all of which are designed to do one thing: destroy Christian faith.”
If criticisms of Ehrman veer toward the personal it’s because his evidence — the Bible’s own text — is what it is. And there is no denying the inconsistencies he surfaces between the various Gospels and letters that form the New Testament.
Not exactly reality-based. But as the reviewer notes:
Ehrman’s book has met with a fierce reaction from some quarters, which is understandable. Who among us isn’t inclined to fight back when our deepest, most cherished beliefs are challenged? But there is no need to demonize him as a “wolf” on the prowl against the church, as one critic has. His ideas, like so many other new thoughts and new insights that keep coming around with the surety of the seasons, need not be regarded as insults against God or bids to prove the Bible false.
Rather, an eye to church history and the big picture leads to an appreciation of the inevitability — even desirability — of varying perspectives and changing interpretations around the complex and challenging meaning of the figure, Jesus, around whom the New Testament revolves. Ehrman’s evidence and argument leave one with the distinct impression that belief diversity receives an endorsement from the people you might least expect: the compilers of the Bible itself.
That’s the thing about the Bible. Locking into your story, the one that makes you saved, a hero, special, better than others, all those very human and very delusional things that have made religion one of the greatest sources of evil and hatred in human history, overlooks what’s actually there in its history and pages. A life framed around the story of human hubris and its consequences and the better course of accepting one’s delusional humanity is what the Bible is about and would be a life best led. As Jesus said, there are two and only two basic rules for life–never think you’re God and always think about the impact of your actions on others and don’t do anything you wouldn’t want done to you. That’s it. As he and Hillel, the other great Rabbi of the period, said, the rest is commentary. In other words, don’t live an exaggerated, self-exulting, self-exalting life and don’t think your stories are truth. People who get to there are the closest to the message of all the Bible, the thread that unites all its pages. Those who buy off on the stories we’ve woven from the bits and pieces of our choosing over the millenia, the stories that make us believe in magic and spirits and other beliefs that get the less fortunate institutionalized, can often avoid the reality, as Ehrman says his friends (and in another book, his wife) do, and never face the consequences. But as various parts of the world show every day, the stories are not benign, and propagating them has not done the world any favors. In fact, if delusions and wish-fulfillment underlie the grandest of the stories we tell, no wonder we are so hesitant to rely on actual evidence of reality to face the climate, economy, or our torture-approving selves that derive logically from that psychosis.
Ehrman is a brave man. Reality is hard and unforgiving. Easier, like his “smart” friends, to embrace fiction and myth, especially when it keeps you popular. He’s clearly still wrestling with the loss. But he’s also aware that a life lived in delusion can’t limit those delusions just to grand magicians in the sky. As we face the reality of a planet that will very likely not support our way of life much longer, perhaps his path was the one we all should have taken.
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