Since my monkey brain works all the time, willy nilly, sometimes two longstanding thoughts previously unacquainted with each other will meet. Or collide. And I respond with an Ah-ha, or a Hmmm or a Yikes!
I saw a BBC video title on YouTube, The Most Dangerous Man In Tudor England. I was interested, until the prologue revealed that it was the first translator of the English Bible, William Tyndale. It was apparent from the first portentious and breathless moments --almost all BBC presenters adopt this tone-- that he would be the martyr for The Right Of Everyone To Read The Whole Bible And Decide For Themselves What It Meant.
Only an idiot could think that this would turn out well.* But in the Post-Enlightenment narrative which drives our Post-Protestant culture, this is A Great Thing. Liberation from the tyranny of The Church. (And in the English case, the eventual enslavement of The Church to the tyranny of the Crown and Parliament.)
That's Thought One.
The other thought, Number Two, that collided with that one is this one: for the self-proclaimed heirs of the above liberating and democratizing Enlightenment, what current group do they hold in deepest contempt --Nazis always excepted-- and hatred?
The very same demos that reads the Bible and decides for itself what it means: the fundamentalist Christians, direct heirs of Tyndale, whom the elite literati now call Bible-thumpers, bound in intellectual servitude to Bronze Age superstitions. Oh, and H8ers and bigots, etc. etc.
Funny how, these two thoughts now colliding, the heroics of an earlier part of your narrative become the demonics of the later. Once noble martyrs, now craven tyrants.
Not unlike the tellers of this narrative themselves, who once were passionate advocates of free speech --Free Lenny Bruce!-- but are now the dour censors behind the hate speech codes and PC lies that muzzle us all.
Enantiodromia strikes again.
*Our American/Protestant culture has ceded the right of interpretation of a 4-page document written in our own language, within a mere few centuries of ourselves, to a small group of highly trained sacred interpreters, a magisterium, if you will, (the Supreme Court and the US Constitution) while maintaining that any Tom Dick and Harry can rightfully and easily interpret a thick library of ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Hebraic texts written in dead languages in cultures some two to three thousand years distant from us.
5 comments:
I recall being shown a drama that painted Tyndale in a sympathetic light in middle school- a Catholic middle school, that is. The typical Protestant talking points were hit- the clergy are corrupt, "ecclesia" really means "congregation," etc. When I pointed out the obvious heresies to my (female) teacher after one period of viewing, and asked why something that contradicted the Catholic Church was being shown in a Catholic school, the movie mysteriously vanished. I guess I was something of an inquisitor in my youth. :)
I think your comparison between the SCOTUS and the Magesterium is a little charitable. The Magesterium is larger and has a much longer (and more consistent) record. I still think the about-faces on slavery (okay in some circumstances to a grave evil) and self-governance (violation of Divine Right to how God intended our governments to work) hurt their credibility a little, though.
Bible-thumpers earn my particular ire. I once tried to explain the concept of "divinely inspired metaphors and reductions" in Genesis to a fundamentalist. His brain almost shut down, I think. Trying to explain that Genesis was like one big parable was a little much for him. I got a terrified look and "THAT'S what Catholics believe?" like I had just denounced the divinity of Christ or denied the existence of an afterlife. More trouble than it was worth.
-Sean
@Sean I remember reading somewhere an an atheist website a personal narrative from a man who started out as a fundamentalist/literalist. He was describing how once he had thought that it wasn't even possible for any one to be a Christian without taking all of the Bible literally, but began changing his thinking when he thought about how Jesus himself was prone to speaking in parables, and didn't introduce them with "Okay, I'm going to speak metaphorically now" -- he trusts his followers to be sensible enough to figure out for themselves what is and isn't such. So it couldn't logically be un-Christian if someone happened to decide that Genesis was a parable, whether true or no.
--Nathan
@ Ex: Probably a sacred text should be constructed so that only about 2.5% of the population has enough wit to have any hope of reading it. It should be written in Gregg shorthand adapted to Proto-Indo-European, say.
--Nathan
Nathan, the fundamentalist agreed that Jesus was speaking in metaphors in the New Testament, but then when I said that the Old Testament was the same way, he furrowed his brow and said, "but there are precise measurements!" Then when I pointed out that there are precise measurements in myths, he said in an exasperated tone, "But those are just stories!" I think you see my dilemma. Fundies irk me because they provide a very nice strawman of Christianity for secularists and atheists. But then, I believe that wine and wafers of bread turn into the blood and flesh of God but keep all the physical characteristics of wine and bread, so...
Catholics never believed that the world was made in 7 consecutive 24-hour periods. Even St. Augustine said that Genesis was more important for its moral teachings than its historical and scientific accuracy, and should not be interpreted literally. The round Earth theory didn't cause too many problems. Heliocentrism was a bit of a goof-up, but both Mendel (genetics) and Georges Lemaitre (Big Bang) were Catholics, and clergymen to boot. It has always puzzled me when people have accused Catholics of being anti-science. Rather, I would say Catholics are cautious of the things science has brought us- everything that the Church warned would happen if the Pill was made available has come to pass.
-Sean
One thing I have noticed about sacred texts, across religions, is how un-obvious they are. Seems that in order to achieve the necessary level of sacrality, a text needs to be fairly inaccessible.
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