Cosmic Concrete

Today I was once again confronted with the reasoning behind my defection, as it were, from Christianity. Indeed, I was so confronted on two occasions. The first occurred while I was talking with a young lady during lunch at work about the novella that appears in Don Quixote. I told her about the impertinent curiosity and of Lothario's claim that a newly-wed man's friend ought to work to keep his wife in line. I added that this was after all Christian Europe and so that kind of conduct was necessary under the laws of that culture. I was ashamed to be a man, much less one of European Christian descent.

Perhaps I generalized a tad too much about Europe. When I later talked with my more conservative friend (to whom I shall, for the sake of creative license refer as Lothario) on the way home the topic of discussion wandered to women. He reminded me that the Bible contains many warnings about women. For various reasons I have felt it prudent to keep from him my true atheistic sentiments for fear that my revelation of them would provoke a flurry of proselytism.

Lothario has afforded me no shortage of reminders concerning the true nature of Christianity. He is in my eyes the best example of a Christian I have yet encountered. A devotion to Christian scholarship along with a life lived entirely in the faith has made him a perfect specimen. When I was a Christian I looked to Lothario as a shining example of the way I ought to conduct myself.

Alas, however, it was Lothario also who taught me why I needed to leave. His offhand comments about women and about homosexuals and about first nations peoples were enough to convince me of the folly of my decision to become a Christian in the first place. Indeed, I had, over the course of my time as a Christian, opportunity to meet many others who taught me similar lessons. One agreed with the actions depicted in Robertson Davies' "Fifth Business," in which a woman's husband ties her up in their home as a punishment for an act of infidelity, while another thought that an attack on a homosexual man's laboratory 'helped the cause' of stopping the gay agenda. I even recall listening to a supposedly progressive evangelical scholar lamenting the fact that an epidemic of racism had broken out among evangelicals in some parts of the United States.

Now some of my readers might be thinking that perhaps these examples were simply people who were too conservative. A casual stroll through the various denominations of Christianity is enough to reveal that the Christian is someone who subscribes to a faith which has no root in the real world. The fact that there is so little agreement amongst Christians concerning such things as infant baptism, women in ministry, military service, and even the trinitarian nature of God -- much less whether or not he has a nature(Alvin Plantinga once gave a lecture entitled "Does God Have a Nature?") is enough to convince one that the fundamental core of Christianity is not a person or a god but rather a text and its interpretation. Dogmatic adherence can and does arise in every Christian denomination. After all, why not? What is to prevent adherents of one interpretation of the Bible from being less correct than adherents of another, God?

Suppose that you had many friends and that you offered them some advice. How plausible is it that these friends should then fight amongst themselves about what that advice meant without ever approaching you for clarification. Our hypothetical scenario can be made even more comical. How plausible is it that not only do your friends fight amongst themselves but also bow their heads and allow their gut feelings and emotional responses to constitute an expression of your volition concerning their conduct?

Christians are akin to Star Trek aficionados in that both debate endlessly the merits and drawbacks of this or that school of thought on this or that issue as it is found in a static artifact. Fortunately for the Trekkie, however, one rarely finds genocidal zealots populating Star Trek conventions. My point is to highlight what happens when you take a child and bring him up in a particular school of interpretation of a particular text and instruct him to believe that the text in question not only has a basis in reality but also underpins it. The god and the tradition are one and the same. I should add that this is generally the case of any Christian. The Bible is a translated volume of texts compiled over several centuries and then interpreted as a coherent narrative documenting the salvation of mankind (oh wait, I am falling back anachronistically into my Dutch Reformed theological training). Without something concrete to back him up, God ceases to exist. In the case of Christianity, the concrete is the Bible and its perspective applied to all things natural and man-made. Without presupposing the veracity of the Bible Christianity falls apart.