Then we'd have to invent him so we could have something to ignore
If there were no God or Christ we would have to invent him. That's no conceit of mine, it's origin lies with the German philosopher Heidegger, who said of our modern (and now post-modern) epoch that "Only a god can save us now." By which he meant that only something that was at once fundamentally objective and fundamentally just could relieve us of our all-consuming confusion as to what is 'true'. What is frequently not understood is that Heidegger intended his comment ironically. It's a mark of that fundamental confusion that that irony was never clearly comprehended and that his comment was taken in its literal meaning.
People give credence to particular revelations, and accept the teachings that are elaborated from them. Those who do this delimit the experience of the world available to them, and mark off vast swathes of that experience as illegitimate, as flawed, as fundamentally deceptive. Every adherent of a total explanation of the world, and life in the world, does exactly this. In the name of wholeness they make cripples of themselves. I don't condemn them for their wilfull blindness, their arrogance and conceit - because I was a party to the same mindset, the same exclusive beliefs, which they now take to be universal meaning and universal truth.
In just the same way that they do, I denied the validity of every other experience of God and reality. Like them, I had no choice. I was part of a proselytizing, messianic sect that believed that it's revelation was the only revelation that counted. And as a consequence of my escape from that totaltarianism of the spirit and conscience I now believe it to be true that it is beyond the capacity of human nature to conceive of a god that is not merely that nature magnified, stripped of its failures and follies, and made good from all its imperfections. Look in a mirror, and you're looking at your God.
None of which should be understood as a denial of the reality of the Divine. I believe in God in the same way that I draw breath. It's an autonomic response to the state of being alive. I have in the past denied the reality of God. But I never once ceased to believe. But because I know the reality of God doesn't mean I'm competent to understand that reality. If the bible is to be believed, God is more at home with human failure, human weakness, human corruption and wickedness, than It is with righteousness and virtue. It is more at home with those that deny than those that attest.
And with that I am in sympathy because I have always been for the underdog, my heart has always been with those that fight for hopeless causes, those that revel in what it is to be human even as they agonize over their failure to be what is righteous. I'm always going to be on the side of the honest sinner, the one who is what he is without shame. And I see that same partisanship in Jesus - except that he never failed to rebuke the sin even as he made it plain that he accepted the sinner. And not grudgingly, but with love.
I think the question that I want to ask of Christians particularly (though it's pertinent to any Messianic faith that proposes to save the world), towards which I've been struggling as I write, is this. Bear with me while I preface it, it's not easy to formulate clearly. The question I posed was 'if there was no God or Christ'. What if there weren't? What would be missing from human experience if there were no God or Christ? I don't mean what would be missing in terms of Christian theology. There would be no heaven or hell. There would be no judgment and no salvation. And? Personally I'd be happy to live without those things. But since I live in a world that accepts such things, let me put it to you this way. I know I'm going to Hell. And I'm happy about that.
What I'm asking Christians is, irrespective of its theological virtues and moral graces, what has Christianity done for humanity? Be damned to your saviour, your salvation, your heaven and your hell. I didn't ask to be saved, I don't believe in your salvation, I don't want your heaven and I'm not afraid of your hell. So what is there in your faith, Christian, that could convince me of your truth? There's nothing I want from your God, so why should I believe in him?
These are rhetorical questions and I don't expect much by way of response. But that's alright, because I'm using this post as a way to talk to myself. I do that a lot on JU. My mother talks to herself and has done for years. When as children we would ask her why she did that she would reply "I'm talking to the wisest person present." I concur in that judgment. Which is why I'm talking to me while posting an article in a public forum. Yes I want you to read it, or I'd write it in a journal. But it isn't written for you, and your response is not what motivates the writing. The dialog with myself is what motivates me to write.
If I want to make a profit I have every reason to believe in Christianity. Faith is given in order to buy salvation, not because the presence of a god requires it in the form of adoration. Christianity is about barter, profit and loss. And it's also about beggary and slavery. Christians are the slaves of their god. Their obedience is the price of their freedom from punishment, not the sign of their promotion to spiritual adulthood. Christians are perpetual spiritual infants, at once terrified by Daddy's anger and obstinately determined to do everything possible to arouse it.
If there's anything at all in Christianity that might tempt me to accept it, it's the nature of Jesus. There is nothing in the teachings of any of the Christian sects that remotely impresses me as true. But the depiction of the character of Jesus found in the Gospels rings very true to me, and I have always loved the character of the man. He stood in front of a stone throwing mob to protect someone who was friendless, helpless, and undeniably a sinner.
As a child I was once stoned through the streets. The kids throwing the half-bricks didn't think of me as a sinner, they thought of me as a freak. But the impulse to punish was just the same. No one stood up for me. No one defended me. No one helped me. But Jesus stood up for her, and that matters to me a great deal, and impresses me a great deal, and draws me very strongly toward Jesus. But I see none of that character in any of the people who call themselves Christians and in consequence I have no respect for them, no faith in their teachings, and no trust in their church.
Jesus made a difference. But Jesus wasn't a Christian. He was a Jew raised in the teachings of the Torah and the Rabbis. He was a man of the Old Dispensation, not the New Dispensation that was formulated after his death and of which there is not the least trace in his recorded words. Jesus didn't deal in dogma, in interpretation, in teaching. He told stories of everyday life that were meant to illustrate a point. But he never held a class and he never gave a grade.
The language of Jesus is inclusive. It doesn't deal in what seperates you from God but what draws you closer. It calls sin as sin, yes. But to the sinner it calls out as to a friend. But the language of every Christian sect is exclusive. Christians are defined by what they are forbidden to do, not by the freedoms they are said to possess. It is the absence of sin, not the presence of the love of God, that guarantees the Christian his salvation.
Jesus. The perfect commodity. And you can buy him dirt cheap.
'If there were no god or christ' we would have to invent him because without him we have something to sell but nothing to buy, and there is no holier act in American culture than buying and selling. If there were no God or Christ how would those whose moral imaginations are so utterly atrophied that they require leaders to tell them what to believe and how to behave be able to tell right from wrong? If there were no God or Christ how would we know what to condemn, how would we know what was sinful, so that our prurience can be excited, so that we can feel virtuous as we condemn in others what we want to do ourselves?
Christianity has become a religion of what you must not do, and what you must not think, and what you must not feel. Heaven is bought through not being sinful, not granted as a state of grace. Hell is earned through not obeying the commandments, not realised as a state desired and sought after. There are no positives in Christianity, only negatives. Nothing is affirmed and everything is negated. The God of the christians is simply the negation of the ancient pagan gods. It knows no virtue greater than theirs, it shares with them the passions of envy and hate, and it is as capricious as they are. The God of the Christians, despite these similarities, is simply affirmed through dogma and doctrine, to be 'not-pagan'.
If there were no God or Christ the world would certainly be different. The gathering storm of violence inspired by the fratricidal hate between Christians, Muslims and Jews, would not exist. Europe's wars of religion would never have happened, the entire history of monarchical power in Europe would be transformed. Obedience and self-sacrifice would be the dominant moral characteristics, not independent self-realisation and rebellion against authority. The history of the relations between the sexes would be transformed, the nature of sexuality would never have entered into public debate, no discussion would ever have taken place over the nature of conscience and its relation to power.
If there were no God or Christ none of these things would have entered into the realm of public debate.
And? So? All these things have ever done for us is give us more to fear, more to hate, and more to want. And if there were no God or Christ the same could be said of Islam or Judaism. Religion organized on the scale of Christianity, Judaism and Islam is never anything more than a coherent set of justifications for hatred and division and never serves any purpose other than the aggrandizement of its priesthood.
At every turn the practice of the Christian church (in all its sects and denominations) contradicts the character of Jesus, which was always to befriend and help the outsider, the failure, the cripple, and the criminal. It was always sin that was the enemy of Jesus, never the sinner. His faith let the sinner come to God on his own terms. The faith of Christianity dictates that the sinner come to God on terms derived from human thought, human prejudice, and human intransigence. Hence the Council of Nicaea, and the deliberate exclusion of revered texts from the canon of the bible. You can know only what we want you to know. You can understand only in ways that we permit you to understand.
If there were no God or Christ it would be necessary to invent him as a symbol of the struggle of individual conscience, individual faith, against orthodoxy and complacency. Jesus taught that the Temple could be destroyed and resurrected in three days. He taught that the Kingdom of God resided in the spirit of the believer, not in the state of Israel. He taught that mercy, forgiveness and justice were to be preferred over condemnation and punishment. He taught that the poor, and not Kings, were the elect of God and that the widow's mite was worth more than the fortunes offered by the pharisees.
In every way, what Jesus taught was a scandal and an incitement to insurrection, a provocation to authority and the transgression of dogma, doctrine, and the received wisdom of the day The absence of this transgressive, revolutionary Jesus from the teachings of the sects and denominations of Christianity is one reason among many why I'll have nothing to do with anything those teachings attest.
The Jesus they profess to worship is a castrated faggot utterly at odds with the Jesus of the Gospels. The Jesus of the Gospels would, I think, tell the christians of today to depart from him because he knew them not. So great is the gulf between the character of the man they have taken for their God, and what they actually say and actually do.
If there were no God or Christ in the sense of the Christian church's teachings, if the God and Christ of Christianity were nullified and removed, but the knowledge of the character of Jesus remained, then the world would again be a very different place. If men knew of and believed in someone who defended the guilty from those who were just as guilty but more powerful; if they knew of and believed in a man who refused to turn aside from those who are hated and persecuted; if they knew of and believed in a man prepared and willing to honestly sacrifice himself for others without any thought of reward; then it's possible that the teachings to be found in the character of Jesus would be an inspiration to good deeds, to the establishment of justice without prejudice, to the practice of a universal equality that was found in reality and not in the words of demagogues seeking their own advantage.
If there were no God or Christ in the sense of the teachings of the christian church then it's possible that these and many other wonders would come to be. But there is the God of the Christian church. There is the Christ of the Christian Church. And while these two idols dominate the life of Christian thought, belief and practice, the testimony of the character of Jesus will go largely unheeded, its transgressive challenge to the powerful remain no more than a fist thrown in the air and disregarded.