Zen Christianity?

When I began blogging, away back in 2006, I made my theme why the left has failed and how it could stop failing, gain office and change laws to make life better and to preserve it for us and for posterity.   I knew I'd be stepping on lots of toes because the first five or six years of my being online had already shown me a lot of the problems and that people who believed themselves to constitute the left seemed most intent on reinforcing their mutual belief in ideas that had failed, utterly in the previous decades.

Many of those ideas, when they were looked at critically, never should have been on the agenda of the left because they weren't liberal ideas, they were either libertarian ideas that, if followed, would result in more inequality, more injustice and the enhanced enjoyment of the affluent, contented and self satisfied at the cost of the poor, the environment, and the others who the real left exists to help.  What was promoted on the allegedly left blogs wasn't purposeful enough to constitute an agenda, which implies someone's actually going to do the hard work and making real personal sacrifice to make change, it constituted a cultural checklist, the purpose of which seemed to be to decide who was in with the in-crowd, who would get to go where the in-crowd goes.  The world for them was divided into who knows what the in-crowd knows and the vast majority of the world who were all declared cooties ridden stupid-heads.

Sorry, a stupid song that was going through my head this morning.

I never expected to be writing on the massively controversial topic of religion when I began blogging, though I could see that was one of the big problems for the real left.   The right had successfully tarred the left with the anti-Christian bigotry of the in-crowd who grabbed the mic in the mid-60.  That was largely an opportunity stupidly provided to them by said "left" many of whom were based in universities and among the old and new elites who, increasingly, had turned against blue collar people and weren't about to really do anything about poverty. They had read Bertrand Russell, some even Ayer, and the others who had made careers in anti-Christian invective, in the case of Russell, after his careers in mathematics and philosophy hadn't worked out quite how he had hoped for.  That is a career path that one after another of the professional and quasi-professional atheists seem to have taken.  Since so many of them seem to do little but repeat the old bromides, maxims and aphorisms of previous atheists, to someone who is familiar with those it looks like the intellectual equivalent of setting themselves up in a nice little antiques shop.   There isn't much that is strenuous about it.  When one of them, such as Larry Krauss is unwise enough to go up against an opponent like William Lane Craig who, whatever his faults, has certainly mastered both his arguments AND THEIRS, the atheist savant turns into a sputtering, incoherent message machine.

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I got into an argument with an atheist last night in which he brought out one of the recent examples of what goes as a clever erudite argument, the one about how I'm an atheist when it comes to Zeus and Odin but that he only goes me one better by not believing in the Jewish God.   Well, he said he thought the "Christian God" was as imaginary as "pink unicorns" (they all use the same cliches), it being unfashionable to express antisemitism unless you are Jewish.  Well, I said, this might come as a shock to you, but I don't believe in the God I believe in either.  Of course, though I doubt he would even recognize the name, he went all Ayer on me, saying that what I said was meaningless, blah, blah, blah....

But it is true.  If there is anything I believe about God it is that everything about God surpasses my ability to comprehend it.  Love, knowing, goodness, wisdom, subtlety, purpose, and aspects of God which I am sure there is no human word for, not to mention the ability of us to even imagine,  all of those escape my conception of God, both in extent and in actual nature.  The God I can talk about is only the God I can comprehend and I can't comprehend God,  I don't think anyone with a human mind, caught up in the vicissitudes of human experience and human articulation, conditioned as those inevitably are on our shared experience of the physical world and human perception and culture. All of those impose limits on what a person stuck in temporal experience can know and say about God.  God is more than I can ever imagine, more than I can ever think of.  The God I can imagine is not The GOD who really is.    And, as I could answer when he began snarking in the ususal pop-log-pos way, the universe that science can address is also unknowable for similar reasons, there are aspects of the universe that even the most denying atheist who worships at the alter of scientism can't even imagine so the universe they believe in is not the actual universe.

That is not something the in-crowd wants to think about.  It is what, I believe, set Bertrand Russell off so angrily about religion and why it seems to be the road that so many once promising scientists who realize they are not going to be another Newton turn to in lieu of something productive in their own field.  It, I believe, is why so much of science, especially the softer sciences, are so focused on attacking religion.  They are in denial about the limits of science as much as any scripture based fundamentalist is in denial about the limits of their idols, too.  If they bothered to read them, they would see that the prophets all seem to testify to the limits of human abilities and understanding as compared to God.

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This week I also got into it with another atheist who was going on and on about the long history of purportedly religious warfare among the Christians.    The dope made the stupidest statement about "monotheism" being inherently violent as opposed to polytheism.   I was able to ask him why he'd never heard of such gods as Tyr, Mars, Ares, Anhur and gods who were quite enthusiastic about war, such as Athena and Odin.   But, oddly enough, there was no Christian god of war.  Also that one of the things that got Christians in trouble with the Pagan Roman authorities was their pacifism in the early centuries.   Of course the kid cut things off at that point.

It signifies, to me at least, that I happened to discover that the next day's readings for the Catholic Mass contained First Samuel chapter 4:1-11** in which the Israelites tried to use God as a war God and were disastrously routed, losing many men and the Arc of the Covenant to the Philistines.  Obviously, as First Samuel rather decisively shows, they relied on their very human, very limited conception of God, the God who had made a covenant with them and charged them to be a light to humanity.  That, if you will forgive me saying, is a profound thing for a religious scripture to say, I'm unaware of anything like it in any other tradition which I'm at all familiar with, I'd like to see other religious scriptures that made similar points. It leads me to think that more is happening than just fables being told that were the Hebrew people patting themselves on the back for being in the know and in with the ultimate in-crowd.  It is profoundly self-critical and self-questioning, searching for understanding in a way I have never seen among atheists.   Liberals who sit at their keyboards whining about why we never win could learn something from reading and thinking about First Samuel.

* I've since found out that most atheist's idea of a reference work on the same level of reliability as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Wikipedia, has quite a long list of pagan deities of war.

** The Philistines gathered for an attack on Israel.
Israel went out to engage them in battle and camped at Ebenezer,
while the Philistines camped at Aphek.
The Philistines then drew up in battle formation against Israel.
After a fierce struggle Israel was defeated by the Philistines,
who slew about four thousand men on the battlefield.
When the troops retired to the camp, the elders of Israel said,
“Why has the LORD permitted us to be defeated today
by the Philistines?
Let us fetch the ark of the LORD from Shiloh
that it may go into battle among us
and save us from the grasp of our enemies.”

So the people sent to Shiloh and brought from there
the ark of the LORD of hosts, who is enthroned upon the cherubim.
The two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were with the ark of God.
When the ark of the LORD arrived in the camp,
all Israel shouted so loudly that the earth resounded.
The Philistines, hearing the noise of shouting, asked,
“What can this loud shouting in the camp of the Hebrews mean?”
On learning that the ark of the LORD had come into the camp,
the Philistines were frightened.
They said, “Gods have come to their camp.”
They said also, “Woe to us! This has never happened before. Woe to us!
Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods?
These are the gods that struck the Egyptians
with various plagues and with pestilence.
Take courage and be manly, Philistines;
otherwise you will become slaves to the Hebrews,
as they were your slaves.
So fight manfully!”
The Philistines fought and Israel was defeated;
every man fled to his own tent.
It was a disastrous defeat,
in which Israel lost thirty thousand foot soldiers.
The ark of God was captured,
and Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were among the dead.