2 posts tagged “judgement”

Off with his head

On Judgement Day our attempts to be religious will testify against us.  They'll seek to gobble us up; so we need to defang them in this lifetime. 

A holy book may tell believers to compel unbelievers to believe, and to kill them if they refuse to believe.  Notwithstanding the the fact that you can't really force someone to believe something, believers may obediently drench whole empires in blood trying to fulfill the command.  And you know what God will say to them on Judgement Day?

He'll say, ‘How hard, exactly, did you work to make people believe before resorting to the sword?  How winsome did you make yourself?  Did you intoxicate the whole world with your kindness and generosity?  How much did you contribute to culture and architecture and science and wisdom and world peace and tolerance and community and laughter before you thought, “Enough of that.  These people won’t listen.  Let’s decapitate them”?  Did you go as far as you could possibly go before you picked up your sword?’

The answer, of course, will have to be no.  You can never go far enough.

God will continue: ‘So you had the effrontery to kill people who I created, who I made myself, because you found it too taxing to win them over with your goodness and reasonableness and creativity?’

The believers will be miffed.  ‘You said we could kill, Lord.’

‘I fixed an impossible precondition to your lust for violence.’

‘How were we to know?’

‘Didn't get the hint when I said that I am love?  When I said I am all-merciful?’

‘You tricked us, Lord.’

‘I tricked the evil in you to come out of hiding and show itself.’

That's the kind of conversation you'll hear on Judgement Day.

Is there a chance that you might be in need of mercy on that day?  If so, in the days leading up to that day, it's best to err on the side of mercy.  That's how you defang your religion.

Evildoers begone

In biblical theology, there are no big or little sins.  ‘Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin,’ Paul tells the Romans.  This attitude towards sin scandalised the Pharisees, and it continues to scandalise many Christians today.

A while back, a new law was proposed according to which hoteliers and owners of guest houses (etc.) could not discriminate against homosexuals by refusing to let them stay in their accommodation.  Some Christians objected to this law, on the grounds that it would require them to violate their religious convictions.  But this is a dangerous place to stand; it has a whiff of brimstone about it.  Singling out one particular kind of person as ‘especially’ sinful is precisely the kind of thing that made Jesus’s blood boil.  (In Jesus’s time it was prostitutes and tax collectors, two kinds of people whose company Jesus much preferred to that of their self-righteous detractors.)  If it is true that ‘everything that does not proceed from faith is sin’, then hoteliers should refuse to let anyone stay in their rooms who does not demonstrate some requisite level of faith, lest these sinners use the room to sinfully watch television, shower, make coffee, and so on – a veritable catalogue of vileness!

Presumably, most if not all of the people who objected to this anti-discrimination law thought they were doing the right thing.  Some may even have spared a thought for how hurtful their opinions must have been to gay people, who are, I imagine, pretty sick of being treated as moral deviants for dispositions and activities that, if consensual, contravene no non-religious, non-tribal ethical standard - and which only contravene biblical standards according to certain interpretations (that's a different topic entirely).  But all such Christians should be aware that singling out certain ‘others’ as exemplars of sin puts them firmly in the same camp as the Pharisee in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican.  In case anyone needs reminding, the Pharisee wasn’t the one who left the temple justified in the eyes of God.