In recent months, I have developed an personal interest in comparative religion and philosophy. Academically, this subject has mildly interested me since taking on
freethought, but it has not been until the past year or so that I began to get a sense of what religions
mean to people. A growing awareness of my own...prejudices has prompted me to look deeper into religion, beyond tradition and wish fulfillment. The result of this has been a growing sense that behind the established religions and behind spirituality -- folk or otherwise -- is an honest human desire to find happiness on Earth. However compromised the religions have been made by dogma and power, I think humanity is underneath them all -- waiting to be be freed, to breathe.
Despite my waning hostility toward religion (if not my total opposition to dogma and hate), I find myself avoiding the religion of my youth. It was forced on me: it was an imposition. Unlike other "de-converts", I have no memories of reasonable inquiry slowly eroding my ability to believe: for me, discovering freethought was like realizing that the door to my personal hell had sprung open, and I sprinted out of it. I didn't stop running for many months. I had been raised to be a Christian, but Christianity never meant anything to me. I didn't have a relationship with God despite my attempts to reach him. The effect of this was enormous given that I was raised in a particular sect in which "feeling God" is completely ordinary and which even the lowliest of sinners can do. I never felt a thing, despite doing what everyone else was doing and despite attempting to do so sincerely. That's pretty scary. What little meaning I found I found in the Old Testament: there, God was a mean cuss, but he was reliable. He cursed those who disobeyed his laws and blessed those who obeyed them -- save Job, who got to be an object lesson. As a child and teenager, I wanted the protection of an almighty deity. Adding to this was that OT God served as my yearning to see justice done and my awe of the universe.
Jesus, on the other hand, was completely unappealing. His sermon on the mount -- the Beatitudes -- sounded to me like demagoguery. I didn't know that word back then, but when I learned the word I realized it described that sense of discomfort I felt when reading Jesus' words. His miracles did not move me -- what was the point? He preached compassion, but threatened Hellfire. It was Hell I hated most: I hated it because it made me live in fear, and I resented this god-thing preaching love and creating pain in the same breath. I was not moved by his death: people told me it was a sacrifice, but even to my skeptically untrained brain, I saw that he had lost nothing, and that he had accomplished nothing. What was this supposed need for "atonement"? It seemed to me completely arbitrary. If this god-thing was so offended by people, why didn't he just mind his own damn business -- or just forgive them, if he was truly a loving entity? Most damning for me was that in my worldview, all of human suffering seemed to have been consciously brought about for the sole purpose of giving the god-thing sincere worshippers. This was for me an unconscionable horror, and it caused me to denounce religion to myself and to purposely turn my back on it.
After freethought, I began realizing that the New Testament, like the rest of the Bible, was a book written, translated, compiled, and read by people with agendas, and that logically it was quite possible that the depiction in the so-called gospels had not done him justice. In the years since, another Jesus has emerged from my reading of how others perceive him. Their Jesus is a human teacher -- perhaps divine, perhaps human, perhaps only divinely inspired. For their purposes, it doesn't matter. To them, he came teaching the same thing Buddha and various other religious and philosophical teachers taught: love. When he said his way was the only way to Heaven, these people* interpret him as saying love was the only way to be close to God -- not believing in the saviourhood of Jesus. And honestly, I want to believe in this Jesus. His humanity, like Buddha and the Dalai Lama and so many others, appeals to me. I have found the gospel of love -- that you don't have to dislike life or other people, that you can learn to live with them despite their and your perfections, that compassion is the source of soy -- to be utterly...captivating. When I think on love, or practice it, I feel grand. I'd like to think that Jesus is one of many teachers who realized this -- but I cannot embrace this Jesus.
I cannot embrace him because from my perspective, the gospel accounts are not reliable. They were written decades after his death. Even accounts written from firsthand remembered accounts are bound to be compromised: I know full well how tricky memory can be. In telling a story, people embellish the truth: they add to it. There are lots of criticism of the gospels and lots of defenses, but to me it seems impossible to arrive at an objective "This is Jesus" descriptive. People can interpret him freely: they can see in his life many things, and I think they tend to see what they want to see. Realizing this holds me back.
I have come to understand the Jesus people like Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg describe, but I don't understand the other Jesus(es). For instance, I don't understand the Saviour Jesus: I don't get why people find him attractive at all. In the interests of better understanding the people I interact with every day, I want to probe into this and figure out who they're seeing -- to look at various interpretations of this figure. To that end, I will be engaging in a quest of sorts. I will be reading the Gospels, both authorized and not, and reading other people's perceptions of Jesus. I will then reflect on what I'm reading. I don't know how long this will take, or even if I will be able to pursue it persistantly. I may tire of reading about him. In any case, though, I want to begin -- I want to see where this interest takes me. This, therefore, may be the introductory post to a series of "Who is This Jesus?"-related posts. I invite comments as I read.
Labels: musings, Who Is This Jesus