A Facebook post points me to something I’ve alluded to often over the years, but never discussed in much detail: Why do people humiliate themselves in order to sustain obvious, blinking-neon religious nonsense?
The first and most obvious example arises in connection with publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, which within a decade persuaded virtually every working biologist on the planet that, No, species did not appear on earth spontaneously and whole, but evolved from pre-existing species over vast reaches of time.
Adam and Eve were not our common ancestors, no first couple POOFed into existence — and a tricky serpent didn’t beguile them into eating a bad piece of fruit, thereby Original Sinning, and Falling, and horribly fouling their descendants’ souls for eternity and imperiling them with Hell. Didn’t happen. The Genesis creation tale is make-believe. That is a settled fact; it’s over and the case is closed, no matter what Ken Ham wants to say about it.
And that, you may be thinking, should have been the end of Christianity. Right?
Right. It should have been the end of Christianity — but it wasn’t. What actually happened is that the devout simply went looking for some other reason to believe they’re no damn good and need to be ‘saved.’
So, my question is this: Why would somebody cling to the degradation of Christian teaching and uphold Original Sin when the evidence in plain sight is that it is untrue?
Which brings me to that Facebook link, here, written by a guy trying to convince himself that there are no contradictions in the Bible. After all sorts of complicated gyrations and curlicues he writes this:
I don’t know how else to respect the Bible and what I read there but by arriving at a conclusion like this.
And:
If we believe by faith that God inspired the Bible, we need also to believe that God is OK with how the Bible actually works and therefore, by faith, so should we.
This is, self-evidently, putting the cart before the horse, in effect conceding that there sure is a lot of stuff in the Bible that looks like contradictions and then denying that they are contradictions … because. Just … because.
Again: Why humiliate oneself that way? Why not face the facts square in the face, be a man about it, and grant that there is a whole lot of bullshit in that old book — and be done with it? Holding to inerrancy, denying plain contradictions, can’t possibly satisfy any intellectual need, is poisonous to character, and entails self-degradation. Why on earth do people do it?
The only explanation that I’ve ever come up with, and it’s not entirely satisfying, is that it is easier for some people to chicken-out on reality than face it, that ultimately it is an evasion of adulthood. To that, I urge as Bertrand Russell did almost a century ago:
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Amen.
