The Sermon on the Mount, however, does not offer a clear view of what makes for a good life. Many seem to think Jesus is saying little more than be nice to everybody. Others see a call to a heroic life of total non-resistance or self-sacrifice. Still others hear him as requiring little more than an enhanced version of the Ten Commandments (e.g., avoiding not only murder but also anger, not only adultery but also lustful desires).
Almost all Christians ignore many of the things Jesus said on the Mount. Who literally takes no thought for their lives or for tomorrow? Who never resists evil? Who gives to anyone who asks? Who says “Hit me again” to an unjust attack? There may be ways of integrating such injunctions into our morality without reducing them to banalities, but the bare text of Jesus’ sermon doesn’t tell us how to do this.
Yeah, it's true; a literal belief in the imminent end of the world does tend to render the advice you offer people a bit short on nuance and practicality. Seriously, it amazes me how much effort people put into trying to salvage something inspirational from this dreck. Even if you set aside the irrelevance of his preaching once the centrality of the apocalypse is removed, there's just nothing profound there. As J.L. Mackie said:
Richard Robinson has examined the synoptic gospels as the best evidence for Jesus's own teaching, and he finds in them five major precepts: "love God, believe in me, love man, be pure in heart, be humble." The reasons given for these precepts are "a plain matter of promises and threats": they are "that the kingdom of heaven is at hand," and that "those who obey these precepts will be rewarded in heaven, while those who disobey will have weeping and gnashing of teeth." Robinson notes that "Certain ideals that are prominent elsewhere are rather conspicuously absent from the synoptic gospels." These include beauty, truth, knowledge and reason:
As Jesus never recommends knowledge, so he never recommends the virtue that seeks and leads to knowledge, namely reason. On the contrary, he regards certain beliefs as in themselves sinful...whereas it is an essential part of the ideal of reason to hold that no belief can be morally wrong if reached in the attempt to believe truly. Jesus again and again demands faith; and by faith he means believing certain very improbable things without considering evidence or estimating probabilities, and that is contrary to reason.
Robinson adds:
Jesus says nothing on any social question except divorce, and all ascriptions of any political doctrine to him are false. He does not pronounce about war, capital punishment, gambling, justice, the administration of law, the distribution of goods, socialism, equality of income, equality of sex, equality of colour, equality of opportunity, tyranny, freedom, slavery, self-determination, or contraception. There is nothing Christian about being for any of these things, nor about being against them, if we mean by "Christian" what Jesus taught according to the synoptic gospels.
9 comments:
Forgive them, Blogger; they know not what they do. The incoherent combination of self-sacrifice, self-aggrandizement, reward in heaven, and the stated goal of true selflessness is an attractive brew. I still think he was on the right track. It's just that he was no Buddha.
Can't even grant "him" that, noel. There's a lot of toxicity in the Jesus Stew...at least as much as the good stuff. Even his actions, as described in the heavily edited Good Book, are not particularly attractive, overall.
Well I didn't capitalize the pronoun! I think you misunderstood me: I'm interested in describing his attraction to billions of followers. I don't think it's just a "right place;right time" thing. Few people have said, "Love your enemy." That's actually an astonishing thing to say.
Yeah, but what does that mean in practice? It either obliterates the meaning of "love" by making it simultaneously mean everything and nothing, or - along with the other extreme renunciatory injunctions, like "resist not evil, turn the other cheek, take no thought of the morrow" - it's an endorsement of "might makes right"... which, again, makes perfect sense if you honestly believe that this world is presently doomed and doesn't matter at all.
Beg pardon, but the phrases mean the opposite of might makes right. They mean you win even if you lose, because you are doing the will of God. God loves everyone, so you should too. You don't seem to have it in you to understand Christians, guys, which is almost a compliment.
I'm not talking about how the phrases have been creatively reinterpreted after millennia of waiting in vain for the second coming; I'm talking about the context in which they were spoken.
I'm saying the phrases endorse a might makes right world -- a world that is fallen and soon to end anyway. They aren't offered as a blueprint for how to slowly change society for the better through the power of love, they're telling people to drop out and wait for it all to come crashing down. What you suffer in the course of living this way isn't important, because you'll be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven.
I'd have to go back and reread some of the literature to be sure, but I don't even think there was originally any conception of each person having a soul that would go to an individual judgment immediately after death; judgment was going to be a mass event, and it was going to happen very soon, at which point the dead would be bodily resurrected. So again, this extreme renunciation is only a temporary existence, not a set of ideals for people to attempt to embody over the course of a long, natural lifespan in order to be rewarded after death.
And I agree with the many people who have suggested that there is an awful lot of hatred, resentment and barely-contained lust for vengeance in the psychology of such a worldview. Early Christians like Augustine and Tertullian were helpfully explicit in telling us that one of the pleasures of heaven was getting to look over the ramparts and watch the torments of the damned below. "Loving" your enemy in this context is a way of asserting superiority, like how modern passive-aggressive Christians say "Bless his/her heart" about someone they hate.
I guess you're right, but you see, I believe all ideas are mostly wrong, so I look for the bits and pieces that might be right in some sense, even just well-intended, like a swerve in the right direction when the trend is toward a ditch or cliff. I see no reason to think Jesus meant "love" to mean anything other than love, so it's confusion with vengence and hate, though it occurs, is incoherent.
But that's what I meant by saying that, taken literally, the command obliterates everything we mean by "love". Love is an emotional (and biological) response to certain characteristics and values; if they're absent, what does it even mean to use the same descriptor? Other than a generic recognition of our shared humanity, what could I possibly feel in common with my significant other and my mortal enemy?
As for Jesus, going apeshit on the moneylenders, talking about bringing "not peace but a sword", or stalking out of town in a snit and telling his followers to "let the dead bury their dead", seem to suggest a conventional personality, quick to take offense and hold a grudge, to say the least.
I think Jesus is saying "recognition of our shared humanity" is more important than people think; "God loves everyone; be like Him.", which I think is the right way to go (without the God part). I agree the other stuff is confounding, but it could be taken differently: I read, "I bring...the sword.", as saying that following him will lead to punishment here on earth, even though it's the right thing to do.
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