The Worst passage in the Bible. Another expanded sermon helper.
I link to an article titled “The Worst passage in the Bible” this week. It’s the Corinthians passage, actually scheduled for Tuesday. It’s not one of those articles that goes on about evil Christians who want to see people burning in hell. It’s not that kind of bad. It’s bad because it is not seen as bad by perfectly kind and loving people. What’s bad about it is that it sets up a wall between Christianity and anything good that doesn’t validate or might even contradict it. It renders useless any discussion about where we come from or something like morality comes from. As it states a few times, such talk is “foolish”.
There are other difficulties in leaving or challenging religion, like in-group loyalty, or in more insular environments there are people who will come after you if you try. If this bit of bad logic only existed in Christianity then I think we would have overcome it a few hundred years ago, if not sooner. But like many things in religions, it was not invented by just one of them, it’s something more ingrained in human nature.
That makes the way out of this bad reasoning a lot harder than people think. Those who are not involved in organized religion think they have the right reasoning, but often they are doing the same thing from the point of view of whatever worldview they have chosen. The problem is explained in the link within the Lectionary helper but I’ll skip to the positive answer first, rather than focusing on that negative.
Religion can and does contain helpful practices and teachings. It is becoming more popular for mainstream churches to say they “don’t own the franchise” on faith. They are willing to partner with other faiths and with secular organizations to accomplish the goals they believe are in line with their faith. They will also use logic like this passage to explain why they still think it’s important to pick one set of beliefs, one denomination, and stick to it. And this logic prevents any curiosity about where else their ethical teachings might come from or why it is that there is so much cross-over with those other faiths.
The answer to that, I believe, is natural facts. That is, when choosing to put someone’s eye out, turn the other cheek, have an abortion, or enter war with another nation, everyone always relies on facts that can be derived from observing nature. Some experimentation may be needed, and in all cases, certainty is impossible, but deriving our views from our environment is part of being a conscious social creature. We figured out how to get along over millions of years of evolution and what we learned was passed on, with many errors along the way.
We have some sense of being good. I’m going to have to wave a hand here and acknowledge there are bad people, but it is rare to find someone who can articulate that they know they are bad and that they don’t care. I’m not talking about having too many sweets or not flossing kind of bad, that’s covered in the “many errors” part of how we have passed along these ideas of right and wrong.
I also acknowledge that we can see bad behavior rewarded. Nature itself does not enforce morality. We can’t claim that killing is moral because predator animals do it. We can observe that and see that those creatures are still leading brutal lives, lives that don’t lead to cures for diseases or vacations by the sea.
That good person that we think we are, is constantly challenged. Our choice of grocery store includes how our food sources and packaging affect people around the world. It can’t be avoided. Even doing nothing, when there is so much need in the world, is a moral choice. We can’t save the world, and sometimes that is a source of stress. Prayer does not always make that go away.
Even if you believe in God and love your church, you bring some reasoning to it. When challenged to question your beliefs you will start with facts. You might say something about the value of human life. At some point, you will run out of reasons why, and you will rely on some cosmic origin for those values. These are patches for those errors in our understanding of the world. A less charitable anti-theist might call them “crutches”. In any case, they are a way to bridge what we are able to discern with our rational minds with the place we’d like to be, our aspirations for what we envision.
I see the same phenomenon in Wiccans, or pagans, of some off-the-grid self-made philosophers. Even an average person on the street of an industrialized nation will admit there is work to do. You may have heard the words that capitalism or democracy are “the worst systems, except for all the others”. We are beings that look to the future, reflecting on the past, with barely a plan.
It’s interesting that this passage comes on Easter Sunday, a day that attempts to reconcile the world to the Old Testament, and to deal with the death of Jesus on Good Friday. After a few hundred years of Jews trying to understand these letters and gospels, the dominant theology said that death had been conquered. I think that was an interpretation of people who had lost their own history. I think Easter is about accepting death and moving forward, not about finding a way around it or conquering it.
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