Zoomtard

I have yet to catch up on the whole series but the latest Channel 4 foray into documentaries on Christianity started very badly with an episode on the Jewish roots of the faith fronted by Howard Jacobson. I blog about it here. You can watch it there.

Common loudmouth, Disapproving Ex-Housemate challenged me in his comments to back up my claim that this show was a “classic sidelining of real theology and the real faith of Christians to make way for a stereotype that no one could ever believe”. Here we go.

He links us to this article in Cosmic Variance and I will offer you, the avid reader, an echoing post from Andrew Sullivan on related topics before taking up the challenge to defend my broad generalisation!

I am listening to the Fleet Foxes as I write this and am wearing a witty beautiful t-shirt and eating 70% cocoa chocolate. In other words, lots of sophisticated and smart people give me a hearing on this silly God waffle because I look similar to them and I can reference obscure Swedish movies and make jokes that rely on you having a rough grasp of calculus. But let me be clear. I believe in an interventionist God; a God of wrath and judgment as well as mercy and love. I am not an advocate for the “touchy-feely non-interventionist religion”. In the eyes of the authors of Cosmic Variance, I am definitely with “the overwhelming majority of religious believers”. In fact, I quite consciously critique my ideas against orthodoxy, a conceptual standard that stretches back into the past 2000 years to make sure I don’t go astray.

In other words, I am batshit crazy with an imaginary friend in the sky that I lean on when times get tough. Yadda yadda yadda. Insert all the other threadbare bankrupt arguments of the nu-atheism school.

And my congregation of fellow God-botherers are all equally deluded. My friend Sharnparks who is fighting with a photocopier on the other side of the office is so crazy that she took her tech-job eady degree and volunteered to work with disadvantaged kids in Ringsend for the best years of her 20s. On her days off she comes into my office to make sure, amongst other things, that child protection policy is implemented rigorously in our community. What a crazy mentalist.

But Sharn is an excellent example of why talk of Christianity in terms of it being a belief system of “bodily escapism”, as Channel 4 claim, is complete bollix. She is uncommonly disciplined in her own personal devotions but the major way that she expresses her faith is through bodily service- she sings songs for our church, she makes crafts with the little inner city ragscallions she loves so much and in the summer she flies off to Cambodia to teach kindergarden. At no point does she peddle pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die pleasantries. Instead she sees there is no way to honour the spirit by disregarding the flesh. If the sociologists are on to anything, then the best way to test Sharn’s beliefs is to examine her practice. There is no correspondence between her faith and the one described in the documentary.

In the sphere that Channel 4 strayed into of philosophical dualism, Christianity as a historical phenomenon is notable if anything for its opposition. It is against the Gnostics that Paul fights in Corinth. It is against the Gnostics that John fights in his letters.

Now we can go out and find errant churches, like lost dogs, that peddle a hyper-spiritualised faith. My old minister Trevor Morrow keeps threatening to write a book on Gnostic threads in contemporary western Christianity. But my essential point is that such branches of the church can be uncontroversially shown to be in error, against the standard of orthodoxy.

Back to Cosmic Variance: The case has been compellingly made that for nu-atheism to even meet an appropriate standard of intellectual rigor it must engage with what theists believe. There is no theory of religion. No such theory can exist without being so broad that it includes atheism (or excludes Buddhism)! Dawkins’ book, for example, is truly phenomenal in that it fails utterly to land a punch. Jacobson’s assertion that Christianity is an invention of Paul is equally futile. One can find exceptions to the massive broad mass of believers who share the doctrine of the Creeds in common, but they do not amount to a case against a movement that declares its God was, “conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”

If being able to cite a conversation we once had with a chap in the SU bar counts for the foundation of an argument, then ladies and gentlemen, I can confidently proclaim that men think blow up sheep are as much fun in bed as a woman. Anyone who denies that this is the case will have to do business with my exceptional evidential specimen.

So that is how I defend my claim that the first episode of the series was yet another “classic sidelining of real theology and the real faith of Christians to make way for a stereotype that no one could ever believe”.

Your Correspondent, Off to watch Episode 2

POSTSCRIPT: In the Our Father, a prayer composed by Jesus and not Paul and recited by all Christians as the formative shape of every prayer, we hear the plea that God’s reign of heaven would come to be on Earth. It is the anti-dualistic vision of the Our Father that ought to be the starting point of any informed discussion of Christianity’s continued Jewishness….