Simple And Easy Are A Curse On Both Their Houses

If you aren’t struggling with the text, you aren’t engaging the text.

Hosea was a hard read then. No reason it shouldn’t be now, too.

RMJ

To which I say , Amen.   And to add that a large part of religion and anti-religion in the English speaking people, the French, almost as much, not as much with the German (I'm totally ignorant of  anti-religion in other languages) is exactly that kind of refusal to struggle with the text, to engage it seriously, dealing with the difficulties, the hard to believe, the impossible to believe, the clearly brilliantly insightful, what in it leads me to believe that large parts of it are, for want of a better concept of them "the Word of God" certainly more impressive and shockingly clear than anything I'd guess people would come up with on their own, unaided.   As I've pointed out any number of times, while science can come up with blindingly clear thinking about its legitimate subject matter, at times, the subject matter of real science is minutely focused and specific and limited, the subject matter of religion, of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition, is far more complex and far from the ability of science to use its method on it.  Complexity is baked into the scope of religion in a way that it is removed from science by design, by common agreement and, if they are exercised with honesty and wisdom, by the methods of science.  

There is no better way of discerning the catestrophic reality of human-caused global warming or the dire necessity of social distancing and masking in the current pandemic (which are still necessary if this thing isn't to kill even more than needs to) than science, there is nothing else that will come up with a prevention or, maybe, someday a cure.   But it can't tell you why it is immoral to not do everything possible to prevent its spread or to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere - one of the idiocies of making science the last authority in the law and politics is that it can't do that, the experts doing that have to rely on morality being commonly held by an effective majority of people.  And people are notoriously bad at discerning that moral truth and notoriously easy to gull into doing the opposite.   

And if you think I'm holding that out as a guarantee if you follow a religious path, well, think again because so many taken as religious figures in the United States, Canada, elsewhere, have been some of the most immoral in that regard, people like the incumbent head of the Archdiocese of New York, like various Orthodox Rabbis, slews of TV preachers prove that is no less a difficult claim to make - and a dishonest one - than claiming that being a professional scientist will guarantee of it. 

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In one of my responses last night, i brought up the condemnation of the neo-integralist vulgarian, director Franco Zeffirelli's slam against Martin Scorsese for his direction of The Last Temptation of Christ "that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world."  No doubt something the idiot who provoked me into mentioning it never heard of as he sentimentally recalled his introduction to Romeo and Juliet watching the 1968 extravaganza that Zeffirelli made of it.  Which especially romanticized the suicides in the typical cinematic manner.

What is especially funny to me about that is that the ultra-conservative Catholic Zeffirelli was in every way an example of de-Christianized Catholicism of a type that Vatican II tried to steer the church away from and, though I have no idea what his profession of religion might be, Scorsese in his hard complexity is, to my thinking, a far better example of Christian thinking than the easy show of easy piety that the other might make.  I also don't know what he does other than his directing and interviews, so I have no idea the extent to which he does it.

The book and film of The Last Temptation shows one thing about the point that RMJ so excellently made, that writing a novel or making a movie of the novel is probably not a very effective way to precisely get across what you are thinking unless your thoughts are slight, superficial and unimportant in a way that religion cannot get away with being without that religion being damaged by it.  To bring up the things that someone like the author and director do in the movies is a way to try to imagine what the Crucifixion of Jesus was like for how they imagine Jesus as being.  Which is, by the way, in none of our thinking of Jesus, guaranteed to be much like the truth of it - something that religious authorities and figures should realize applies to their imagined Jesuses as well.   I do, though, think that when you do think about it within the confines of a novel or a movie you're asking for that kind of trouble and, given the popularity of the movies and, to a far lesser extent novels, the potential for getting a strong reaction to your conception is far greater.    As somewhere in this series, I believe it is, Walter Brueggemann points out the people putting together the canon of the New Testament included four different, hardly uniform views of Jesus in the four Gospels - not to mention the differences in the other books so chosen and the differences in those have led to all kinds of difficulties.   Science has those too as the various schools of legitimate science and illegitimate sciences proves too.

I won't go on piling up examples of complexity and difficulties in various areas of thinking - it would be never ending.   But to reject something because it has those, as it generates heated and, in opposition to the teachings of Jesus, violent conflict, if applied evenly in all of life would lead you to be as insipid and stupid as the choice to be an insouciant. superficial person of fashion will lead you to being. No one's going to stop you from being a superficial fop, you'll no doubt be as happy as you choose to be stupid and to focus on the stupid.   But you should be glad that not everyone chooses that route.   I have not recently noted something that I early on noticed in engaging with other college-credentialed people of the English speaking world when first going online, how they figured that the often heard freshman style whine "But that's haaarrrrrrd!" sufficed as a means of rejecting something.  It should be the slogan of secular, popular culture and easy, facile piety, too.