ON CHRISTIANITY SHOOTING ITSELF IN THE FOOT
May 15th 2004
The rationale behind this web site is that while religious thought can be anything from the brilliant to the banal so also can the same be said for secular thought. Hence it is an absurdity that broadcast and printed Thoughts fo the Day/Week should have almost always been an established religious monopoly
I am happy to report that a local newspaper has accepted and published my secular 'Thought for the Week' from time to time and looks like continuing to do so. The following paragraphs in this AT are taken from my next piece of 'The Plain View' that I contribute to the quarterly Humanism Scotland
I have been a church watcher for seventy years or more. Christians vary from the magnificent to the mediocre, from the murderous to the merely mad, but one common trait is for Christians to shoot themselves in the foot. Here is a list of examples within my personal experience.
About 1932 or so, a very strict but kind primary teacher told us that Jesus had two fathers - Joseph his earthly father and God his heavenly father. OK, that seemed to make Jesus special and I could grasp that. Very soon after, this good lady told us that we were all God's Children - thus obliterating her perceived distinction between Jesus and the rest of us. I did not, of course, use adult language at the age of eight but I seem to have had a nose for incoherence.
Then my Mother - as good and kind a person as one could wish for - told me that if I doubted the existence of the Just and Merciful God then I would likely be struck dead. My nose for incoherence was honed still further by this inconsistent nonsense from an otherwise deeply sane and caring parent.
Then in 1940/41 I was a prefect at grammar school and one of my official duties - it applied to all of us prefects - was to read a passage from the Bible at daily morning assembly. We prefects were not fools. We carved up the job so that each one of had a particular piece. Mine was always the first few verses of St John’s Gospel verse 14 - "Let not your heart be troubled .... ". In verse, number 6 the KJ Bible says that "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life : no man cometh to the Father, but by me.
This is a wonderful piece of English prose, and should be celebrated as such, but it is the very foundation of Christianity's claim to exclusiveness ; it relegates all other views of life as being, at best, second class segments of the ideological world. It takes little intelligence to see that it is a seed of interfaith strife and, by obvious extension (absolute statements, by their very nature, are wide open to extension) it comes down to suggesting that the believer's own version of Christianity is the only genuine version. So the verse is not only a seed of interfaith strife but of sectarian strife as well.
This is not all in the rather distant personal past of that Old Ruin or Ancient Monument, Eric Stockton.
In a recent issue of the Kirk's magazine, Life and Work, there is an article by a leading Christian thinker extolling this very verse in John 14 and more or less explicitly claiming for it, in his own words and drawing his own conclusions of course, the seminal significance that I attribute to it.
Click here for this article from a recent issue of Life and Work
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/stockton/lw1.jpg
An old friend (sadly now dead - the loss of valued contemporaries is a sad feature of old age) was a Lay Reader in the Church of Scotland. A favourite saying of his was "A text without a context is a pretex". The editor of the Kirk's magazine, 'Life and Work' has kindly agreed to my scanning and using the entire article in question. So this is no mere text; it is the whole context:
Read this article carefully; I claim that it makes precisely the point that I make of it - but from a different standpoint. It rallies the faithful but, because of its exclusiveness, it does so at the expence of discouraging others to join them. It is an absolute position that generates dissent and so tends to undermine its credibility.
The Christian foot is ever the target for Christians to shoot at ........ and the retreating remnants agonise over the decline, decade by decade, of Kirk membership.
The main thing we learn from history is the reluctance with which we try to learn from it.
All the main monotheistic religions are alike in their several claims to exclusiveness ....... "We are God's Chosen People and this is Our Promised Land" ..... There is no God but Allah and the Prophet is His Final and Sufficient Messenger. Assertions of exclusive access to Great Truths lead inevitably to tensions, divisions and - ultimately - to mass murder. Mass murder is mass murder especially when it is fuelled by perceptions of Absolute Certainty on matters of importance that are genuinely controversial.
E.S..
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