Wednesday, September 28, 2016
TWO OPPOSITE WAYS THAT COME TO THE SAME THING
Orthodox
religious people (sometimes known as fundamentalists or conservatives) and
atheists deserve each other. They are cut from the same cloth. Both have an
inhuman approach to religious texts. Atheism is just another form of
conservative religion. It is the mirror image of fundamentalism. Left is right
and right is left. Atheists believe and do everything the fundamentalist
believes and does, but twisted around. I will explain.
Since
I am making a comparison to conservative religion, I should say that I have in
mind a hard-line atheism. But just as there is a more liberal religious
mentality, so too there is a more flexible kind of atheism. Most of what
follows applies only to the more dogmatic type.
Conservative
religious people proclaim that the Bible is the pure word of God. Of course,
God himself did not put pen to parchment. Some human beings had to do it. So
the orthodox religious person presents these ancient authors as pure vehicles
for the word of God. When they wrote the Bible, they weren’t really human at
all, but perfect instruments of God. It is a highly inhuman approach to history
and the Bible. No human being ever stops being human. Even if you believe these
authors were inspired by God, they could not have been perfect. Some errors
would have to appear. The fundamentalist approach means that these human errors
will be worshipped as divine. It is a kind of blasphemy and many religious
people eagerly embrace it.
One
of the most extreme versions of this kind of thinking occurred in the 19th
century. Over the more than two hundred years that the King James Bible had
been reprinted and reprinted, the occasional typo would occur. Some liberals
wanted to correct all the typos that had crept into the text and publish the King
James as first produced. But conservatives were incensed by this and put a stop
to it. In their perverted view, it was a sin to admit that there were any
errors in the Bible that was used in their churches. Eventually, many decades
later, they lost, but they were temporary winners in their day.
The
atheist just flips this and achieves a very similar, inhuman conception of the
original authors of the Bible. He has this demonic idea that the ancient
biblical authors were not only imperfect, but perfectly imperfect. He makes them
out to be perfect liars, pure fantasists living in a totally mythical world.
But no human being is that perfect a fantasizer. It is an inhuman version of
humanity. Atheists have a lot of trouble seeing biblical authors as human
beings who tried telling the truth, perhaps even getting much of it right. The
greatest fiction of all is the atheist idea that the biblical authors
fabricated everything at will.
Both
atheists and religious people refuse to read religious texts carefully to see
what they actually say. All the orthodox of each group want to do is impose
their own theology or ideology on the text. There is in a sense no such thing
as a religious fundamentalist. They are certainly not fundamentalist about what
is in the text. They don’t read the Bible literally. They actually avoid that
with all their might. What they are fundamentalist about is their theology.
They won’t allow anything or anyone to interfere with their theological
beliefs. Even the Bible cannot be allowed to interfere. Exactly the same is
true for the atheist who is in this to uphold his ideology, come hell or high
water. Just like the fundamentalist religious person, the atheist will not
allow any reading of the evidence in the Bible to get in the way of his
ideological beliefs.
The
atheist completely accepts the way conservatives read the Bible, only adding
“but it’s all fiction,” as if that changes anything. They never challenge what
conservatives see in the text. They affirm every bit of it. Conservative
theology is fine with atheists. They want to engage in battle with it and
propose their anti-theology. Abandoning theology altogether is as unthinkable
to the atheist as to the fundamentalist. The atheist will never accuse anyone
of using theology to misread the contents of the Bible. Atheists think the
charge of fiction undermines the fundamentalist reading, but it doesn’t; it
only reinforces conservative dogma. Conservatives are happy with the atheist
claim of fiction because they know (and they are very right about this) that it
can never be proven and this leaves everyone free to believe whatever they want
to believe.
If
I did not know any better, I would swear that atheists and religious people had
joined forces to make sure the traditional, theological reading of the Bible
never changes. The myths we have, for example, of Jewish leaders persecuting
Jesus and Judas betraying him continue not because of the Gospels, but because
neither atheists nor religious people will allow anyone to upset things with a
fresh reading of the evidence. The human approach is still considered out of
bounds.
©
2016 Leon Zitzer
