Commentaries and Opinions

Well, it's been a year since I posted. I've decided to spend a bit more time on this particular blog. Originally, I wasn't planning on posting links because so many other sites contain atheism links. I realized though that perhaps my opinions about these sites and news stories might be worthwhile to write about. I'm so self-important.

I plan to start following more focused websites. I recently joined GodTube. Cureently, I've been pointed to religious and atheist stories by FARK, like this story, and from Reddit. The story that I found most striking in my recent readings was this one:

Vicar takes down crucifixion sculpture 'because it's a scary depiction of suffering'

I wondered if this reaction was unique to protestants, maybe to Britain or Europe perhaps extending over the pond to Canada. Americans of all stripes flocked to Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ. Granted, Gibson is a Catholic, a franchise that purposefully displays the an extremely violent view of the torture of Jesus.

Maybe our reaction was due to the rise of Fundamentalist Christians and the recent administration's 'born again' fervor. Has this overwhelmed the sensibilities of our nation? Has the extremist conservative Christians desensitized the general public to the implacable nature of their views? Is this akin to the studied desensitization of our society to violence due to television and video games? While decrying violence in our society, we revel in a moment of tribal religious blood letting. The moderate majority then return to the prevalent, sterile warm and fuzzy view of Jesus who sports locks rivaling Fabio and cuddles the lambs and small children.

Regardless of our peculiar and contradictory American sensibilities, I understood the main theme of Christianity to be that Jesus brought a revision of the Old Testament laws and served as a sacrificial lamb to seal the deal. (Talk about great material for future massive emotional blackmail.) So, if Jesus' death wasn't terrible, wouldn't the sacrifice have lost its potency? If Jesus had died in his sleep, had a heart attack, developed a fatal illness or some other natural and unremarkable death, wouldn't his teachings have lost a certain amount of punch? If he hadn't had a violent death at the hands of others, would he have actually been a sacrifice? Would it have been more horribly obvious that God had essentially orchestrated a suicide mission for his only son? Couldn't he have just delivered another set of tablets?

Don't Christians need to acknowledge the terribleness of Jesus' fate and the obligation it puts upon those who have received the benefits of God's new found mercy and forgiveness? Isn't this the foundation of their religion? Isn't this the celebration, that by living with humans and willingly dying at their hands demonstrate in stark and clear terms the total love of God for his creation, despite their cruelness? Isn't it a heresy to avoid the harsh bloody details to focus on gentle love personified (or animal-ified) by an egg delivering rabbit?

Of course, I'm an atheist. I personally think it's a primitive and horrible thing that a god would ask for sacrifices of animals or more terribly, children (Abraham offering Isaac, Jephthah killing his daughter as an offering to God, and then most horribly God of his own son). In Luke, Jesus talks of hatred and abandonment of family, of being a bringer of war, and his wish that those who doubt him should be killed. It's all appalling and immoral in my point of view, but then again, it's not my religion.

Why do Christians profess to believe in Jesus as the "Prince of Peace" prophesied and then ignore the contradiction -- Jesus lacks of the quality of peace of the promised Messiah. Is the Bible's message too frightening and uncomfortable in our state of enlightenment?

I really can't resolve these conflicts in my mind. I don't know how Christians do it. It doesn't make any sense to me -- unless these religious people craft their god into the shape of the tool they need to get by in life. He would be a personal god then, a god created by the believer. This god is made using a framework of the Bible, of pagan traditions (bunnies and decorated trees), other faiths' wisdom and of our society's own awareness and sensibilities of right and wrong. This personal god has the same name as everyone else's and subsets of the greater pool of knowledge. As a society, we can then politely ignore the fact that this is not one god. This is a pantheon of at least as many gods as there are people on the earth.