Below is a message I received from a good friend of mine. He gave me permission to post his message on this blog. The next couple of posts will continue the correspondence. I think he is asking a lot of very good and important questions.
You know, I have been thinking a lot lately about faith. I used to have tons of it in the tradtional, doctrinaire, religious sense. I believed in God, Jesus, the devil, heaven, hell, the saints, pretty much I was a rank-and-file Catholic and accepted it.
Every ounce of that is gone now. I'm not even convinced Jesus, as we commonly understand him, was even a real person. I still feel nervous typing phrases like that, because the dangers of blasphemy were drilled into my head so completely that there's an irrational part of me that still fears being smoted.
But I think it's all junk. I think it's stories and metaphor and myth, told to ignorant people in part to control them, in part to soothe the horrors of their own nasty, brutish, and short lives, and part to soothe the anxious human brain that really can't comprehend infinity. I have a hard time understanding people who believe the Bible literally (i'm not suggesting that you do). It is so full of contradictions that it cannot be taken as one literal whole.
I find myself agreeing with pop-athiests like Hitchens and Dawson. That God is not great. That we use "Him" to justify our worst impulses (The Crusades, The Inquisition, any number of Intafada, polygymy, most everything conceived by the Puritans, female circumcision, ethnic cleansing, jihad, etc.) I believe that there's something wrong with giving deference and power to people and institutions who will willingly profess that they take things "on faith," that is, without proof and against all available evidence. That we consider our moral leaders to be, literally, those who talk to and interpret the wills of invisible beings who perform magic. It no longer makes any sense to me.
The Catholic sex abuse scandal might be considered the inciting event for my lack of faith. Gail Collins, in a recent NY Times column headlined "Saints Preserve Us!" makes a good point. Pope Benedict, when he was a cardinal, sent a note to the clergy that threatened excommunication to anyone who divulged information about internal abuse investigations to the police. Note, Collins points out, he was not threatening excommunication for pedophiles, but to those who called the police. This, Collins, says, from a pope who has long warned us on the dangers of moral relativism.
If someone asks me why I left the church, I find the answer "institutionalized child rape" is one I'm pretty comfortable with. Actually, it makes me want to say, "and why haven't you left?"
So this is but one example of why the Catholic Church has zero moral authority .
And while, someone may argue, that's a different issue than the theology, I don't see it. I trusted the church because I believed its hierarchy was directly descended from Jesus ("Upon this rock..." and all that). Even if you can draw a straight line from Benedict back to Saint Peter, it no longer means to me what I thought that meant. I know there have been some popes -- especially through the Middle Ages, that made Benedict look like an actual saint. But since the days of Innocent IV were a long time ago, I guess I overlooked it.
So I'm going long here, I'm going to cut it short. Once I realized that the Catholic Church had zero credibility, I wondered, "who has any?" Everyone is telling the same story. Every church has an enemies list. Every church creates God in their own image and says that every other faith is the faith of infidels. Every church is full of hateful, ignorant, people and when I meet them I think, "If there is a Heaven, and I get to go there, do I have sit next to YOU?"
And at the root of all this is the Bible. Which, in my non-expert understanding of it, is a document written over the course of centuries by hundreds (scores?) of authors with their own agendas and historical contexts. And then there's the old arguments: what about all the contradictions, the violence, rape, and slavery, the stunningly different accounts of the Passion in the Gospels? Jesus seemed to indicate in several quotes that he thought the End Times would be within his own generation, and yet they were not. Does that make Jesus fallible? Or if not, a liar? There are pretty heavy implications either way.
And now, Jonathan, after all the above, which is rougher than a rough draft of an essay, just some thoughts that have been boiling in my head recently, is the point of my note to you:
You are a smart guy. You're an intellectual in the very best sense of the word. I respect your thoughtfulness and seriousness on these matters. I'm not asking you to convice me, I'm asking you for your perspective. You know all this, and still you are comfortable enough with it to preach it. Why?
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