Humility: Vice or Virtue?

Ah, the joys of humility, that most cherished of Christian virtues! O ye wondrous affliction, scourge of my heart, desiccator of my soul! How could I envision Original Sin without you, you who from ancient times have trampled all that is good and true and beautiful within me! You who are the very face of Christian orthodoxy! You who demands that I obey my earthly leaders! Fair Humility, you are an idol beyond compare!

Humility, your justness and righteousness have been proved again and again within orthodoxy's precincts. To you we owe a great debt, for you have protected the Church throughout the centuries from the evils of independent thought. Even more important, you have locked the door to Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven to ensure that people of true faith and good heart can't get in. Verily, you are one of the rocks upon which the orthodox Western Church stands.

Hear now a modern summary (written by this humble author) of the famed Rule of St. Benedict, first written in Latin in Italy in the early 6th century. (The reader is referred to the following text: Timothy Fry, ed., The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982)).

Abbey of Monte Cassino, Italy, site of the early 6th century CE monastery founded by St. Benedict of Nursia. Monte Cassino was the first monastery founded by Benedict, author of the highly influential Rule of St. Benedict. The buildings were reconstructed after being largely destroyed in the WWII Battle of Monte Cassino. Photo credit: Monte Cassino – wide view by Pilecka – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

FIVE CORE CHRISTIAN VIRTUES IN THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT
For St. Benedict, author of The Rule, the most important Christian quality is to place the love of Christ before all else, a point he returns to several times in his book of instructions for beginners (for example,Chapter 4:1, 20; Chapter 72:11). Benedict takes a two-pronged approach – faith combined with good works – to this religious vocation (an approach which turns out to be particularly effective, too, if we are to consider the fact that his Rule is still used by many religious orders today). First, he creates guidelines that affect how the monks will think and feel about their relationships with themselves, each other, and God; in other words, he tries to fulfill the needs of faith. These are the instructions that pertain to renouncing the self and to humility, both great virtues in Benedict’s opinion. In order to follow Christ, monks must renounce themselves, taking no notice of anything good in themselves except to give the credit to God, not themselves (4:42). No one is to follow his own heart’s desire (3:8). Neither should monks expect to have free disposal even of their own bodies and wills (33:4; 58:25). Private ownership is a vice (Chapter 33), and, along a similar vein, a monk may not exchange letters, tokens, or gifts with anyone – or be found to be in possession of such items – without the abbot’s consent (Chapter 54). These rules, if followed, draw the monk’s thoughts and feelings away from anything that makes him distinct or different from his peers, and make it easier for him to practise humility. "Humility" is one of the core features of Benedict’s Rule. Chapter 7 outlines the 12 steps of humility, and many other chapters of the book exalt humility as well. A monk who ascends Benedict’s ladder of humility will find at the twelfth and highest stage an awareness that he is always guilty on account of his sins, and through this awareness of his true unworthiness, he will be able to receive cleansing of his vices and sins through the grace of the Holy Spirit (7:62-70). In this way, the monk will finally know the perfect love of God.

Second, Benedict creates a set of strict guidelines that governs what monks do, when they do it, and how they do it. In other words, he tells them exactly how to perform good works – how to act. Monks who agree to these rules, which can be thought of as the day-to-day tools and practical routines necessary to the vocation of loving Christ, will acquire the essential Christian virtues of obedience and self-discipline. Obedience to the abbot and the rule is profoundly important in imitation of obedience to Christ. Indeed, the abbot is believed to hold the place of Christ in the monastery (2:2) Moreover, obedience must not be blighted by the evil of grumbling (5:14; 34:6; 53:18) but must be given always with gentleness (Chapter 68) and purity of heart (20:3). Monks who take their final vows must promise three things: stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience (58:17). From that day forward, they are no longer free to leave the monastery (58:15), although they may be cast out or excommunicated after due process if they are sufficiently disobedient. It is therefore in the monks’ best interests to exercise self-discipline, which could perhaps be defined as being "not slothful, not unobservant, not negligent" (the vices that Benedict lists in his concluding chapter, 73:7). In Benedict’s monastic communities, this self-discipline meant more than just "a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love" (Prologue: 47). It meant remembering all the rules, and practising all the rules, even on rare occasions when monks were travelling or were working far away from the oratory; so, for instance, monks on a journey could not omit the prescribed hours (50:4), nor could monks sent on a day errand presume to eat outside the monastery on pain of excommunication (Chapter 51). Self-discipline may also have been helpful when it was time to get up in the middle of the night to celebrate the Divine Office! [from an unpublished paper by the author; italics added]

The apostle Paul would be proud of you, noble Humility. For you are the theological sleight of hand that keeps good, pious Christians in their place, doomed to feel unworthy, sinful, desperate to be saved, and constantly separated from God.

You are a proud and cruel goddess, Humility.

More on Harpur's "Pagan Christ"

I'm still feeling grumpy about Tom Harpur's suggestions for Christians who want to find "the only way ahead," so I'm going to talk some more about that.

Early on in my writings on this blog, I stated -- in bold letters, no less -- that I am NOT a Gnostic (March 6, 2010: Some Reference Books I Read & Recommend). Even though I'm a practising mystic, and even though I believe in a number of things that can't be seen by the human eye (so sue me -- even radio waves can't be seen by the human eye), this doesn't make me a Gnostic. It's only sloppy thinkers who haven't done their homework on Gnosticisms would insist on calling me a Gnostic. (Note here that I've used the plural form of Gnosticism because careful researchers know there's no such thing as one single historical form of Gnosticism any more than there's one single historical form of Christianity or one single historical form of Judaism.)

According to Gnostics of all traditions, this is what you look like: old, ugly, stained, and walled off eternally from God unless you accept the cult teachings that will grant you "escape." Naturally, for the price of your human obedience, worship, and financial contributions, Gnostics will be happy to sell you the secret knowledge that blasts open the door to ascendance. Photo credit JAT 2021.

In order for a person to be included under the umbrella term of Gnosticism, he or she has to hold certain beliefs about the nature of humanity's relationship with God. Central to all Gnosticisms is the idea that the soul is a tiny piece of God's essence that is trying to find its way back to God. Immortal souls end up in mortal bodies, but this isn't really a good thing, according to Gnostics, because our physical bodies drag the soul down into a "prison" of matter. The spiritual task for Gnostics is to recognize the spark of God/Christ/Divine that exists within, and to set about freeing that spark by raising their consciousness to a higher level. The goal is to seek "wisdom" and hidden knowledge (gnosis in Greek). This knowledge leads to transcendence.

If this sounds a lot like Plato's teachings about the soul's journey, it's because Plato's teachings and later Gnostic teachings have a lot in common. Most orthodox Western Christian scholars don't want to admit it, but these teachings also strongly influenced the apostle Paul. The famous passage about life after death in Chapter 15 of First Corinthians is a fascinating blend of Jewish apocalyptic thought (future resurrection) and Platonic thought (incorruptibility of the divine): "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." (Cue Handel's Messiah.)

Tom Harpur is quite up-front about the fact that he admires Gnostic thinking. On page 175 of The Pagan Christ, he says, "What's really important is that Paul's spiritual view of Christ (his Christology) and Gnostic Christianity held the early Christian movement up to a truly high standard of intellectual and philosophical excellence."

Bear in mind that Harpur himself doesn't believe there ever was an actual man named Jesus Christ who lived in1st century CE Palestine. He believes the gospel stories about Jesus should be read typologically, not literally. He believes the story of Jesus is pure symbol. An important symbol, but a symbol nonetheless. A myth, not a fact.

In fact, Harpur believes that all Scripture should only be read symbolically, not literally or historically. For Harpur, "the enigma of the Bible has been largely solved. Dark passages, cryptic narratives or events -- all have been shot through with a new, though long-lost, light because of this awareness that the key to all Scripture is to be found in the doctrine of Incarnation (page 181)."*

And what is the long-lost light that Harpur sees in this symbolic reading of Scripture? Why, it's the ancient wisdom of the Egyptian mystery cults!

Here's where I have a really big problem with Harpur's thesis. He recommends without reservation that Christianity of the third millennium reclaim "the wisdom expounded by the Egyptians, the Orphics, the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as by St. Paul, the Gnostics, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and a host of others . . . (page 191)." (Can't argue with the historical links that existed among these groups, although I would have added Manicheans and Albigensians.) He thinks the choice to reclaim this long-lost light will arm us "with the moral and intellectual courage to live our lives to the fullest for the advancement of all . . . (page 193)."

Me, I think such a course of action will demolish whatever moral and intellectual courage Christians have.

Why do I think this? I think this because I've lived through the devastating effects of ancient mystery teachings on the human brain, and although I've fully recovered from the effects of my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I'm alarmed when I see reputable scholars using their positions of authority to urge dangerous spiritual practices on vulnerable, less well educated people.

It's irresponsible, and there's no excuse for it.

Harpur is advocating a return to what is indisputably a cult psychology based on status addiction. He's kidding himself if he thinks the leaders of these ancient cults were nice people who truly found divine wisdom and willingly shared it with all people. Pythagoras (of whom Harpur seems fond) founded a sectarian cult with strict rules where only a small group of chosen disciples were initiated into the secret knowledge and rituals. (That's status addiction!) Hellenistic mystery cults such as the Orphic mysteries and the Eleusinian mysteries engaged in bizarre, ritualistic, occult practices that most people would find abhorrent today. Addiction issues and sexual misconduct were rampant in these cults. Later, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, Christian monks, nuns, contemplatives, and mystics separated themselves from regular communities and engaged in self-harming ascetic practices so they could "imitate Christ" and be "closer to God." (Again, status addiction.) Needless to say, addiction issues, sexual misconduct, and other forms of abuse continued to take place in monastic communities and continued to be blamed on evil forces such as demons, incubi, and the devil.

Is this what Harpur wants? Because this is what he's going to get if he naively places these ancient mystery cults on a pedestal. Where he sees a "long-lost light" in these ancient teachings, I see only a "darkness of abuse" we're well rid of.

As for Harpur's claim that he wants to help bring science and religion closer together and "highlight Nature's guiding role" in a renewed Christian faith, I just want to choke. There is no hard science in his book, but there are lots of superficial cliches and lots of references to the spiritual symbols seen in Nature. When Harpur says, "I never see the moon without being reminded of its reflecting the solar glory and its monthly telling of the story of our incarnation and ultimate resurrection (page 188)," I gotta say that don't impress me much. (Cue the Shania Twain song.)

There's tons of light and wonder and goodness and love in the natural world -- the scientific world -- that God the Mother and God the Father have created for us. But we won't find it by looking backwards to the mystery cult teachings of people who believed in a status-ridden journey of spiritual ascent, and we won't find it by pretending that all Scripture is "good" if only we understood how to read it symbolically! Christianity has been there and done that. It doesn't work.

You don't have to choose between mystery and science. Jesus understood this, as did Job before him. The back of the moon wasn't visible until the space program revealed it. But seeing the moon through the eyes of science hasn't lessened the sense of wonder and awe we feel when her silvery beauty gleams. Photo credit JAT 2021.

The only forward for the Church, as I see it, is for us to come at spirituality from a whole new angle. We have to let go of "traditional teachings" and "infallible doctrines" that don't line up with new findings in neuroscience, quantum physics, quantum biology, astronomy, and so on. Other fields of endeavour have had to let go of cherished beliefs that eventually proved false. Why should Christianity be any different?

Does it make sense to you that God would make special rules for the Church that hold us to a LOWER standard of scholarship than the standard observed by secular researchers in fields such as teaching, environmental science, or psychiatry?

Maybe it's our unwarranted sense of entitlement -- not the devil -- that's the source of our ongoing problems in the Church.

I think I'll sign off now and go read Discover magazine's latest special issue on The Brain. Although I don't always agree with the scientific conclusions I find there, there's plenty of good food for thought, and I'm grateful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving!



* In his glossary, Harpur defines "incarnation" as "the God within each of us -- the 'Light which lighteth every person coming into the world.'"

Paul's Idea Of "Grace"

By the time Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans (one of his latest writings) his own personal nastiness had seeped into all aspects of his theology. The book of Romans -- a book that is central to orthodox Western Christian church doctrine -- is not a nice book.  

Paul says horrible, nasty, judgmental things about everybody. In Chapters 9-11 of Romans, he specifically targets Jews. These writings have been used for many centuries by the Church to justify its persecution of Jews. These chapters are simply awful, awful, awful, and no person of faith should pay them any heed.  

But Paul doesn't attack only Jews in his letter to the Romans. He targets everyone who doesn't accept Paul's own teachings. Ironically, in doing so, he targets God the Mother and God the Father (as they actually are), along with the man who lived as Jesus son of Joseph (as he actually was).  

To understand what Paul meant when he used the term "grace" (charis in Koine Greek),* read Chapter 11 of Romans. It's clear that Paul believes some people have been specially chosen by God. This small group is "the remnant, chosen by grace" (Romans 11:5).

Photo credit JAT 2019

Paul didn't invent the idea of "the remnant." The specially chosen remnant had been spoken of centuries before by Jewish prophets (eg. Isaiah 37:31-32; Ezekiel 6:8; Micah 5:7-8). But in Paul's head, the chosen people now include only his own people -- Paul's people. The people who follow Paul's teachings about sin, separation from God, sacraments, and salvation. The people who call themselves Christians. Not the people who follow the teachings of Jesus.

Paul didn't invent the idea of the "remnant," an idea that's very appealing to anyone who's addicted to status. But Paul did invent the idea of "grace" as it's expressed in the Letter to the Romans. It's his biggest contribution to the history of religious doctrine. Paul's doctrine of grace is the bedrock of orthodox Western Christianity. Remove it and there's not much left except sin, damnation, judgment, hell, and a nasty, judgmental God.  

Grace is Paul's way of keeping hope alive. Grace keeps your hope alive, your hope that one day, for no particular reason, God will suddenly decide to single you out for special, preferential treatment not offered to your peers at the present time. Sort of like winning the spiritual lottery. One day you're broke, debt-ridden, and worried sick about all the money you owe. The next day -- presto! A million dollars falls into your lap! Yippee! No more worries! For the price of a single lottery ticket (sorry, I mean for the price of a single baptism) you can always hope you'll score big on the big grace lottery in the sky.  

Of course, this means that God would have to be a fickle, immature parent who favours some children over other children as a way to acquire attention and status from vulnerable human beings, but hey -- why not, right? Plenty of human parents behave this way, so why not God? Why should anyone expect God to be a parent you can actually look up to?  

Paul's God is so unlikeable that I wouldn't want to invite them to dinner, let alone call them "Mother and Father." Paul's God demands fideism (blind faith). Paul's God loves people conditionally, not unconditionally, and not with forgiveness. Paul's God saves only the people who worship at the "moveable Temple" (a.k.a. the body of Christ). Paul's God insists you obey and respect the civil authorities, because they were chosen by God to look after you (Romans 13:1-10). Paul's God wants you to ask no questions, make no waves, respect the status quo, and always be vigilant against the corrupting power of Satan and sin and the law. Paul's God is a status addict who loves to be feared and obeyed. 

I'm thinkin' it was probably Paul who wanted to be feared and obeyed. But that's not surprising. It's all part of the narcissistic mindset. Full-blown narcissists carry around a whole raft of nasty thinking, and they're always looking for ways to raise themselves up at the expense of others. (This often means they try to make other people fear and obey their narcissistic wishes.) Worse, they constantly believe they're "victims," and they blame other people for the mistakes they themselves make.  

They're not very nice people (read what Paul says about himself in Romans Chapter 7). Yet they can't tolerate the idea that some people actually are nice. It sticks in their craw. It makes them sneer. It makes them feel angry and resentful. It makes them feel contemptuous. It makes them want to get revenge.  

The real problem is that God the Mother and God the Father are nice people, and because they're nice people, narcissists (such as Paul) react to them in the same way narcissists react to nice human beings. The niceness sticks in their craw. It makes them feel angry and contemptuous. It makes them want to get revenge against God.  

Think the Bible -- both Old and New Testaments -- isn't overflowing with the cup of human narcissistic anger toward God?

Who needs a traditional Jewish Messiah -- prophet, king, warrior, priest -- if not to serve as a punching bag for narcissistic feelings of revenge? This way people can transfer their hostile feelings onto a Messiah figure, and not have to face the fact that they're constantly angry with God.  

The world doesn't need any Messiahs, and it doesn't need any Divine Saviours. What the world needs is self-honesty, healing, and a giant dose of common sense.  

Plus a whole lot of people who are willing to open their hearts to divine love.  

* The Greek word charis can be translated in a number of different ways, including "benefit; charitable act; an act of favour; free favour; grace; graciously bestowed divine endowment; sense of obligation." These are values commonly associated with PATRONAGE in the first century CE Roman Empire. Paul is presenting God as Patron, Christ as Saviour, and Spirit as in-dwelling Life, thus covering his theological bases in one neat package. Paul is one clever shark.

Further Update on the Vatican's "Sin Within"

Last Friday, on June 11, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed 15,000 priests who were in St. Peter's Square to mark the end of the Vatican's Year of the Priest. In his homily, Benedict asked forgiveness from God and from affected people for the sins of the sexually abusive clerics in the Roman Catholic church. He also promised "to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again" (Nicole Winfield, "Pope Begs Forgiveness, Promises Action on Abuse," The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010).

While I'm quite certain that God the Mother and God the Father do, indeed, forgive Benedict for his own errors, and do, indeed, forgive the priests who've intentionally harmed the faithful in their care, I'm equally certain that hidden abuse will continue in the Roman Catholic church.

Many Christians want to make this a question of theodicy: how do we explain evil in the world while at the same time preserving our image of God as good and loving? If God allows abuse to continue in the church, does it mean that God is powerless and ineffectual? Impotent against the powers of the devil? Or does it mean that God is actually not a very nice person?

Many of the Christians I know would much rather blame the problem of evil on God and/or the devil than put the blame where it belongs: on the values and moral beliefs held by both individuals and by cultural groups.

The Roman Catholic church is a cultural group. It teaches particular cultural beliefs. (These comprise its theological doctrines). It has a consciously promoted schedule of active teaching. Its goal is to teach its people early on in life how they should conduct themselves in relationship to God, church hierarchy, and empire. Traditionally, it has punished members who question its teachings or its authority (the Inquisition). It has conferred upon itself the mantle of infallibility. It claims it is the one true church, the only legitimate path to salvation. 

The Roman Catholic church has long held a vision of how society should be -- how society should look, act, and "feel." Its body of theological doctrines has been carefully cultivated so that only kind of garden can grow in its presence. The church has no one but itself to blame for this.

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011.

 

The conditions in a garden dictate what kinds of plants will thrive there. A garden that has full sun, lots of water, and lots of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc.) will grow very different plants than a garden that has shady conditions or a high pH in the soil or low nitrogen. If you restrict certain nutrients, you restrict which plants will flower abundantly. If you water some plants and not others, you control which plants will flourish, and which plants will live a miserable life of bare subsistence before dying a premature death. 

Throughout its history, the orthodox Western church has been heavily committed to the lessons learned from gardening. Hewing closely to the principle that the person who controls the conditions of a garden will control the ultimate harvest of said garden, the church has intentionally chosen a specific blend of nutrients for its religio-political garden. The nutrients in this case are its doctrines. The doctrines are what "feed" the hearts and minds of the faithful. If you precisely control the "mix" of doctrines available to your people, you precisely control the rate at which people's hearts and minds can grow. If you balance this mix with the precision of a master botanist, you can ensure that the people in your congregations grow just enough to offer you the occasional flower without ever getting big enough to overshadow you.

It's a new idea, this idea that the introduction of particular belief systems can alter the physical structure and biochemical functioning of a person's central nervous system and brain. I suppose I should amend that to say it's a new idea among neuroscientists -- unfortunately, it's not a new idea among history's power mongers.

Long before the advent of brain scanning technologies, would-be tyrants had empirically observed that people's behaviour could be altered through the careful repetition of certain ideas. These tyrants didn't understand the changes at a biochemical or neurophysiological level, and they didn't need to -- all they needed to understand was the result, the harvest of their ideological campaigns. Early orthodox Church Fathers understood this principle well.

Early in the history of the church, orthodox Christian teachers made a conscious decision to take an axe to the teachings of Jesus as represented in the Gospel of Mark, and to overshadow Jesus' sunny, open "vineyard" with the giant magic beanstalk of spiritual ascent (a beanstalk seen later in the children's fairy tale of that name). They've been feeding this beanstalk of "elevation" for the "elect" with their repeated assertions that the devil exists, that Judgment Day is coming (soon, very soon! -- or at least sometime, maybe, we're pretty darned sure, because it says so in the apocalyptic books), that the soul is tainted by original sin, that Jesus is your only hope of salvation, that Holy Mother Church is the only portal through which you can gain access to the gold at the top of the beanstalk.

This set of teachings was well established by the mid-3rd century CE. It's not new (and it certainly didn't originate with Jesus himself!). The problem with the church's teachings is that their doctrines damage your biological brain. When you fully embrace these teachings as "divine truth," your brain stops working the way God intends. Your brain responds exactly like the plant that's been crippled because the gardener has intentionally withheld the water, nutrients, and care you need. Your heart and mind don't really grow. You spend all your life sitting in the shadow of the towering beanstalk and feeling like crap. You feel like crap because all the truth -- all the spiritual nutrients -- about the actual nature of your relationship with God have been artfully concealed from you. You wouldn't recognize the plants that grow in a sunny, lush, well-watered garden if they came chasing after you. 

Such as forgiveness. Would you be able to recognize forgiveness if it entered your life? Probably not. Most Christian's can't. That's because the orthodox Church has never taught people about forgiveness (which is why I'm somewhat sceptical about the Pope's current pleas for forgiveness).

Why hasn't the Church taught people how to forgive when it's obvious from reading the Gospel of Mark that Jesus insisted on the message of forgiveness? The Church doesn't want to teach people how to forgive, because once people catch onto the feeling of forgiveness, they'll be able to figure out for themselves that divine forgiveness is the antithesis of "salvation" and "grace." They'll realize that the church has been lying to them for centuries about their souls. The garden of orthodoxy might start to look like a thorny patch of weeds and thistles instead of the prophesied paradise!

It's no mystery why some church clerics have been sexually abusing vulnerable people in their care. You can't expect a human being's brain to produce a harvest of compassion, integrity, inclusiveness, and enlightenment when all you do every day is try to fill that person's brain with a steady diet of dissociation, lack of forgiveness, hierarchical control, and suppression of learning.

If Pope Benedict really means it when he says he wants to do "everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again," the only truly effective strategy will be for him to call a Council along the lines of Vatican II, and embark on the painful path of rescinding some of the church's most cherished doctrinal beliefs.

Somehow I'm not holding my breath.

"The Sin Within"

Like many people, I've been following media reports about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. 

At the Vatican. Photo credit J MacDonald 2011

 

On May 11, 2010, the Globe & Mail published a Reuter's story entitled "Pope Says 'Sin Within' Is Church's Greatest Threat." There are two parallel threads in this report. The first thread is the Pope's statement that "today we see in a truly terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin with the Church." 

The second thread is encapsulated in this quote from the Pope: "We must admit that the Catholic faith . . . was often too individualistic. It too often left concrete things to the world and thought only of individual salvation and religious affairs without realising that there was a global responsibility (for economic decisions)." 

Ya think? 

Hmmm . . . maybe there's a connection between the second thread and the first one. Maybe -- just to go out on a limb here -- maybe the Vatican's own theological belief structure of sin and salvation is a major contributing factor to the abusive behaviour of some of its senior clergy. 

I really, really hope that when Benedict says "the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies but is born of sin within the Church" that he isn't trying to imply that the true source of this "sin" is Satan, a.k.a. the Devil. It would be typical of orthodox Christian thinkers to try to pass the buck to the Devil. Christians have been pulling this stunt since the apostle Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans. (In Romans, Paul made "sin" a sort of cosmic force, and many other Christian authors followed Paul's lead.) Yet, before Paul, there was apocalyptic literature. Read that stuff (including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and you'll hear all kinds of paranoid speculation about the cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Long before that, Plato was scaring the crap out of people with his Evil World Soul doing battle with the Good World Soul (see Plato's Laws). Yup -- there's a time-honoured tradition amongst philosophers and theologians of blaming bad behaviour on the devil. (I'm old enough to remember comedian Flip Wilson's famous line, "The Devil Made Me Do It.")

Lest you think I'm being unfairly suspicious about the Pope's beliefs, the honest truth is that Original Sin and the Devil are still very much a part of official Roman Catholic doctrine. If influential senior clerics didn't still believe this stuff, they would take it off the books. 

It's too easy to blame bad choices on an imaginary Devil. We have enough difficulty trying to understand our relationship with God without making up stories about big bad scary evil beings. There are plenty of logical scientific explanations for abusive human behaviour -- particularly scientific observations related to brain physiology and mental illness. 

Occam's Razor: go with the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions. The simplest assumption in this instance is that the Roman Catholic church has not properly assessed its clerics for evidence of psychological dysfunction. No imaginary Devil is needed in order to explain the abusive behaviour of these men. It's just plain old fashioned brain chemistry. 

An even simpler assumption is to ask what happens to people's brain chemistry when they're told over and over, year after year, that human beings are a worthless, sin-ridden lot who may, if they're lucky, be blessed with the gift of salvation, but could just as easily end up in the eternal torments of hell. I'm thinkin' these teachings are probably as healthy for the brain as a dose of carbon monoxide. 

The reason carbon monoxide is so deadly is that it bonds like crazy glue to hemoglobin in the bloodstream, and hogs the sites where oxygen molecules are supposed to catch a ride to your body's cells and tissues. You end up asphyxiating invisibly from the inside out because you can't get enough oxygen into your brain, organs, etc. -- even though you may still look normal on the outside. 

If the church fills up people's brains with toxic "carbon monoxide" teachings, there's less and less room available for the life-giving "oxygen" of Jesus' teachings about divine love. 

It's well known that people who've been poisoned by heavy metals can show marked changes in behaviour. (The classic example is the Mad Hatter who, in former days, used mercury salts to craft gentlemen's hats, and gave himself mercury poisoning). 

Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that some Roman Catholic clerics are behaving so badly. Many of them seem to be suffering from a case of self-induced "sin poisoning."

The Question of Suffering

This week I was checking out the remaindered book section at Chapters, and I found a copy of Bart Ehrman's 2008 book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer. As I mentioned in my post of March 6/10, I really like Bart Ehrman's books (though I don't always agree with his conclusions). So I bought God's Problem.

I knew a bit about it before I started to read it this week. That's because last year -- in July 2009, to be exact -- I bought and read Ehrman's 2009 book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them). In Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman talks about his earlier book on suffering. Still, it's always better to read the original book rather than the precis of it, even if the precis is written by the author him/herself. So I was glad to find God's Problem on the sale rack.

In God's Problem, Ehrman explains why he lost his faith and now considers himself an agnostic. It wasn't a sudden decision on his part, nor an easy one. He says, "I came to the point where I could no longer believe. It's a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it." (page 3) 

I think Ehrman clearly expresses a belief shared by a whole lot of people. And who can blame them? There's no disputing that suffering exists, and there's no disputing that centuries-old Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand how to cope with suffering.

Mind you, Christian theology has been pretty useless in helping thoughtful, compassionate people understand a lot of things. Readers who, like me, attend the United Church of Canada (UCC) will understand when I say that the United Church scores a "B" and sometimes an "A" on social justice issues, but earns an "F" on questions about the soul, about death, and about spiritual practices. We don't get to hear sermons that tell us how to relate to a God who allows the suffering in the first place. But we're given lots of opportunities to help fix the suffering by rolling up our sleeves and supporting various social justice causes.

Don't get me wrong -- praxis is very important. Good works are incredibly important, and these days a lot of dedicated individuals who don't even believe in God put the rest of us to shame with their manifold good works. It's pretty obvious that Christians by no means have a monopoly on "Christian charity."

In the past 12 years, I've asked the same questions about suffering that Ehrman asks. I agree with his questions, and I agree with his willingness to point fingers at the parts of the Bible that simply don't help. Yet, for me, the end result has not been a loss of faith. For me, the end result has been a sense of frustration and sadness at the obstinate refusal of most Church leaders to be honest -- honest with themselves and honest with their parishioners about the history of church doctrine, and the extent of the damage that's been caused by this body of doctrines.

Never in any of the UCC or Anglican churches I've attended have I heard a minister say to the congregation, "Today's readings will be taken from Plato's Phaedo. Let us now hear what Plato has to say about the soul." Yet the Church's formal teachings about the soul have far more to do with Plato than with the teachings of Jesus. Most Christians (including many ministers) just don't know this.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the God of orthodox Western Christianity owes far more to Plato's ideas about God than to Jesus' teachings on same. 

Too often, we think of the human journey as a few fleeting moments of beauty and happiness that are quickly stripped away, only to be replaced by the pain of loss and grief. If we’re patient, however, and wait for the fruits of insight, meaning, and transformation to evolve, we see the many ways in which God’s love sustains us even during the harsh hours of winter.

 

I sympathize tremendously with Ehrman's struggle over God, faith, and suffering, and like him I've read books such as Elie Wiesel's Night and Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, but in the end I decided that the problem for people of faith is not the question of suffering.

The problem, as I see it, is that Christianity has not been teaching people anything about God as God actually is. Christianity has instead been teaching its own portrait of God for purposes that have nothing to do with God -- purposes such as authority, political power, empire, cultural hegemony, and wealth.

Christianity in the third millennium must be willing to confront its own historical role as a creator of suffering if we are to heal our relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

If I sound a bit like a Liberation Theologian, I suppose that's because I share some of their reasoning.

Honesty precedes healing. It's time for the Church to be honest about its past motives and actions, especially with regard to its body of doctrines (that is, its formally accepted truths). Only then can we proceed to a state of full healing.

Thanks be to God.