Saturday 10 May 2008

He who sits in the Heavens will laugh them to scorn

The God Delusion. written by Richard Dawkins (an Oxford academic) is an outspoken attack on religious faith in general and Christianity in particular. It is brilliantly written, although the actual content is sloppy and naive. One among many examples of this naivety is his handling of the story of Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac, which Dawkins roundly condemns, in effect accusing Yahweh (the name often used for God in the Old Testament) of child abuse.

I have met many Western Christians who are also uneasy about this story. I think both are mistaken. They are attempting to interpret the text through their own cultural filters and failing to see it through the eyes of those about whom and to whom it was written.

We know that human sacrifice was widespread in the centuries before and soon after the Old Testament period.

  • In the ancient Near East the God Molech is described by many authors as consuming living babies.
  • Chemosh in Moab required the occasional human sacrifice.
  • The tomb of Queen Pur-Abi in Ur (the city from which Abraham had come) contained the remains of 5 soldiers and 23 ladies in waiting.
  • It is believed by some that Phoenicians and Carthaginians sacrificed children.
  • In the Americas, the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca almost certainly practiced human sacrifice.
  • There is evidence for it amongst the Celts and the Vikings,
  • and in India and China.

Now imagine the story of Abraham, not being read by an academic living at a time when human sacrifice has been outlawed for millenia, but being heard around the campfire by people to whom human sacrifice was the norm. To them, the really shocking thing about the story would not have been that Yahweh said "do it" (that is what gods did in those days) but that Yahweh subsequently said "stop".

And people, particularly people who do not have access to books, learn through stories. To a peasant who has grown up with human sacrifice, this is a story with an unforgettable punch line: a story worth a thousand finger-wagging admonishments. Here is a God on the point of getting the ultimate sacrifice from one of his followers saying "stop - I don't want it"

It is arguable that this story of Abraham and Isaac has actually been redundant for the last thousand years, having done the job God intended for it. The three Abrahamic religions have wiped human sacrifice, once so common, from the face of the earth. It is banned in every country on the planet and has almost completely disappeared from every culture. We cannot wind back and re-run history without Abraham, but it is a fair guess that this story which Dawkins so derides has played a part in that triumph.

2 comments:

Andy Latham said...

Hi John,

Just playing 'Devil's advocate' for the purposes of an intellectual debate.. On your comment:

"The three Abrahamic religions have wiped human sacrifice, once so common, from the face of the earth"

My view is that the top three "Judaism", "Islam" and "Christianity" have been the source of most of the human sacrifice seen in the world over the last 2000 years. I appreciate the subtle distinction of sacrifice in the context a ritual ceremony from religious war and bloodshed but surely the latter is the former under the banner of religious politics? I have no problem with religion per-se as in the worship of a deity and the social and moral structure to be a good person but the Abrahamic religions are so tied to political agendas that they have become the root cause of sacrifice and human suffering. To give some, from countless examples:

- The Inquisition
- Stoning and maiming women in Islamic countries for being adulterous (this still goes on)
- The 2000 year persecution of Jews for being “Christ Killers”
- Zionism in Palestine and the Jewish claim for ‘their’ holy-land
- The Crusades
- Islamic terrorism

The list could go on and on…

I appreciate that Dawkins bashes Christianity in his book, I can only imagine his target audience were westerners and therefore more familiar with Christianity. I was raised Catholic and therefore this is from where my experience is derived:

I am of the opinion of late that the Catholic Church is the Roman Empire in different clothing. From around the 1st century AD the Roman Empire was not at the height that it once was, splinter cells from various religious groups were challenging the authority of the pagan leaders and emperors. One of these were the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ teachings were not only wonderful and inspiring but were completely new to many people. We’re looking at a time when few people believed in a kingdom of heaven on earth, a dream that pagan religion didn’t offer the common people. A time before churches, before priests, before guilt and confession and inquisitions and holy wars. Strip away all that and you go back to the essence of what Jesus of Nazareth had to say; what drew so many people to him.

This was a powerful movement and spread from the Jewish communities across all of Rome to the point where the empire had to embrace it, or collapse. Emperors converted to Christianity but to regain their power structure took the words of the MAN, Jesus of Nazareth and moulded them for their own political needs in order to retain political control. It as it this point that the gospels were decided upon (written years after Jesus had died on the cross) and from what I can gather, that Jesus’ divinity was invented in a council to promote a stronger message. Soon after, the Roman Empire as was known, became the Catholic Church, which is still one of the most powerful, global political structures in existence today, controlling millions of people under the banner of religion.

This of course is my own personal interpretation of the history books. I have nothing against the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth the man, and do follow them; and from this perspective I am a Christian. What I don’t follow is the political doctrine of The Church because I feel it has twisted the original messages of Jesus. You only have to question why gospels, such as the Gospel of St. Thomas which are written in Coptic, the language of Jesus at the time he lived and therefore will be closer to his original teachings, more than Mark, for example, have been dismissed as heretical by The Church. One has to assume it is because they threaten the authority of the power structure. If The Church was built on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, then you would have thought that they would embrace his original message and not reject it? Then of course they started adding their by-laws:

My mother, as a five year old child, would have to walk in the snow every first Tuesday of the month at 6 o’ clock in the morning to Mass to receive Benediction. Each Benediction she went to would reduce her time in purgatory by one week. This is one example of Catholic control, there are so many. This ‘by-law’ could be taken apart bit by bit but the essence of what I’m getting to fundamentally is that I don’t remember reading this in the bible? Assuming the bible is of course the direct teaching of Jesus. Some Priest has decided this, maybe dictated from the higher echelons of the hierarchy and forced a child through terror and trepidation to be working on reducing her sentence in purgatory. They make it up as they go along methinks. And ‘followers’ through fear from the wrath of God do as they are told. If this is not a dictatorship then I don’t know what is. Either way, it’s a sad sad way to ‘run’ a religion.

The point I’m getting to is that I think all religions promote peace and goodwill to all women and men and that can only be a good thing. However command and control and autocratic power-hungry dictators manipulate religious teachings for political advantage and we as the sheep following the shepherd get caught up in this. This ultimately leads to suffering and religions wars and the reason I feel that the three Abrahamic religions have not wiped sacrifice from the face of the earth; quite the opposite.

Like I said at the begging John, this is nothing personal, just for intellectual debate… Looking forward to hearing your thoughts…

All the best,

-Andy

John Hardy said...

Very interesting Andy.

I certainly agree with

"...However command and control and autocratic power-hungry dictators manipulate religious teachings for political advantage..."

Wars and other killing happen, and will continue to happen with or without religion (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot on the one hand, the LRA and the Taliban on the other). You can if you wish characterise this as "human sacrifice"; but that is to distort what I was attempting to argue.

Credit where credit is due. Whatever influence the Abrahamic religions may or may not have not have had on wars, the ritual killing of an innocent (often a child), specifically in order to appease a deity, is a horror that they have virtually destroyed