Jed Rothwell wrote:
revtec wrote:
We are all buried under a mountain of bad things we have commited,
and each
day, inspite of our best efforts, we continue to add to it. Do we
want to
justify this pile of crap in front of God at the Judgement or should
we put
it under the blood of Jesus and have it lifted from us?
Many aspects of religion strike me as creepy, but none more than this
attitude. This debasement and belittling of the human species is sick,
sick, sick.
Well put. My wife, who, in reaction to that attitude, has recently
dragged the family out of the traditional church of which we were
members and over to the UU church down the road, could not have said it
more clearly or succinctly.
Jesus as the "lamb of God", the "blood of the Lamb" ... anybody here
ever attended an actual animal sacrifice? That's what the "Lamb of God"
business is all about, you know; that's a _sacrificial_ "lamb of God".
Furthermore, the "Lamb Upon the Throne" is supposed to be a _human_
sacrifice, to appease a God who was ticked off at everybody at the
time. One could say that Jesus was actually redeeming the animals, not
the humans, since it's the animals who got their throats cut in the name
of God in the old temple Judaism; by his sacrifice of himself he saved
the sheep and doves from that same fate. (In reality, of course, it was
the Romans who saved the sheep and doves, by razing the temple -- but it
was only a temporary fix, they're rebuilding it again.)
First century Christians understood all this perfectly well, since
animal sacrifice was still current, and human sacrifice was something
that had happened in relatively recent history. Nowadays we need to do
a double-take to realize what the words and symbols actually mean.
Going slightly farther off-topic, for a good time, read how cows are
slaughtered in a kosher slaughterhouse. They have to follow roughly the
same rules as those which governed animal sacrifice, including the
no-broken-bones rule, which means the normal methods of killing the
cattle can't be used.
We are, as Hamlet put it, noble in reason, infinite in faculties, the
paragon of animals. We have done nothing wrong and we have nothing to
be ashamed of.
Here one must ask, does this grand and supremely innocent "We..."
include the young George Bush feeding firecrackers to frogs to watch
them blow up?
One might, with some effort, come up with a few other things for which
the human species has been responsible which some might view as worthy
of some small amount of shame, I think... but I'm not sure any of them
are proscribed by the Bible, come to think of it.
To quote Bertrand Russell:
"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the
world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its
ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the
world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the
terror that comes from it. The whole conception of a God is a
conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a
conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church
debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and
all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of
self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world
frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world,
and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better
than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world
needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful
hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by
the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless
outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not
looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust
will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."
- Jed
