© 2006, UrbisMedia
[Continued from 36. 6]
I had noticed the first day that almost everyone in the group had a bible. Donald’s was one of those with a leather cover, a mid-sized bible with those crinkly parchment-like pages that looked as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls. My bible, the one I had gotten way back in high school, and still have, has the same sort of pages. When you turn a page it has the sound of the ages; you just know that God wrote all of those thees and thous.
Donald apologized because some of the pages were loose in his bible—translation: “I just read this thing endlessly”—as he looked for a passage. He said he should get another but there were so many marginalia he had made he couldn’t part with this one. The others had various-sized bibles; little travel-sized bibles (also with crinkly pages) with print for myopes. Donald also had one that looked like a big novel, with a dust-jacket, which he said was the “Jewish bible,” but it didn’t look old and crinkly.
These people seemed to know their way around the Bible pretty well, nodding when passages, like John 44.13, etc, were mentioned and flipping right to them. They read from them comfortably, as if the stilted 17 th century English were something they spoke every day, and also as if the prophets and Christ sole the very same English. The Bibles and the language united them; they were the “people of the book.”
So I took to bringing in my copy of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. I had packed it well before I ever knew I would join this bible study class, and was nearly finished reading it. I didn’t quote from it, flaunt it, or open it; it just resided on thigh, or beside my chair. Still, several people noticed it, with its large, searing title, and would raise an eyebrow, or ask if it was interesting. But no one asked to look at it, or borrow it. The title appeared to be burned into the cover—maybe with the claws fingers of Satan. They had their Book and, although they might read widely in a variety of subjects, I suspected that books like Harris’s, of which there a not many, are quickly categorized as “heresy” and are not to be read.
That’s the basis of my quibble with the “believers.” I have a “problem” with the arrogance of people who insist that they have found the truth , who believe that history—existence itself—turns on the purpose and design they see in that “truth.” It’s a cheap, one-book, Wal Mart, lazy-minded “truth,” buttressed by a faux intellectualism that mucks around in a stew of scriptural references and pretentious thees and thous. They lack the most essential characteristic of intellectual curiosity and discourse—a critical faculty. Indeed, such a faculty appears to be for them perilously close to heresy. [1] If there is one thing that cannot be tolerated among the fundamentalists, it is heresy. The very utterance of a critical hypothesis—maybe that Jesus was just a rabbi, a prophet, but not divine—can mean instant separation. They can turn not so much on you as from you, the way a herd of wildebeest leaves a cripple to the hyenas, the believer who turns heretic is beyond salvation “left behind” to the clutches of Satan. Being “bait” to be saved would require some careful navigation.
The most fundamental tensions between the believer and the agnostic are epistemic, and so my first foray into the discourse nearly killed it for good. “Fear, not faith,” I offered, “it seems, to be the basis for belief—fear of the unknown.” I elaborated that the central “unknowns,” about death and beyond, cannot be known—at least by the living—and since no one has ever came back with a report, we all, those with and without faith, simply do not know anything , not me, not the guy sitting next to me, not the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, some mullah, not anybody.
“Wrong,” Dick says. He knows. He knows Christ is the Son of God and following him he is going to heaven. He says he knows that “the Holy Spirit exists.”
And I say, “No, you don’t know you believe , It (does the Holy Spirit have gender?) exists.”
“No, he counters,” a bit angrily, “I know !” Ron is a short, bald fellow with a face that reminds me of that character actor in so many Frank Capra films, Jimmy Gleason. But Ron’s default facial expression is anger. He clearly doesn’t want anyone questioning his faith. Ron evidently has never taken a course in epistemology. He doesn’t just conflate knowledge with belief, there is not linguistic distinction for him. But deep down inside, I know, there has to be that part of the brain where evolution has, over the eons, worked to create a faculty of reason, of needing evidence, some proof, to really know something, a faculty Ron’s brain needs to constantly repress. In contemporary parlance, Ron just does not want to “go there.”
If Ron admits one doubt, entertains one vexing question (Hey Dick, what does the Holy Spirit look like? Does God have genitals?), one fissure in the shaky edifice of his fundamentalist Christian belief that he has been erected for him over the centuries, then he is in big trouble. He might start thinking . Thinking leads to doubts, doubts lead to blasphemy, blasphemy leads to Hell. That’s right where I wanted to go, not Hell, but to the question of what they thought would put an agnostic there.
My question to the group was simple enough. I wanted to know if they thought that someone like me, a lapsed Roman Catholic, and apostate who doubted the divinity of Jesus Christ could possibly end up in heaven, in other words, attain salvation. It was a question right at the center of their faith, of the notion of being “saved.” I remember that it had been an issue with the Jesuits many years ago when a renegade jebbie by the name of Fr. Feeney was promulgating that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church! Eventually he was ex-communicated.
The response was interesting. One woman, Joan, said that the best she could do was pray for my soul, but it was up to God; another said that even if I did not come to a decision about Jesus, but I tried to find answers, God would probably be nice to me for the earnest effort. Another woman, from England, read me something from scripture about Jesus saying the he was “the way, the truth, and the life.” The answer was right there, unambiguously as far as she was concerned. Deal with it. Then Ed, an Aussie, told me that I wasn’t going to make it, that heaven wasn’t for guys like me who had been offered the chance to accept Christ but declined. There was another Aussie guy who said no one could tell, and anyway, just because people say they are “born again” or “saved” doesn’t mean they won’t sin and offend God. Then the mic was back in Donald’s’s hand. He cleared his throat and proceeded to temporize and muddle through some convoluted bits of scripture that I didn’t understand (and I don’t think he understood either). He was trying to sound pastoral and came off just sententious.
I appreciated the candor of those who spoke up. I was pleasantly surprised by the overall opinion. However, several people had not offered an opinion and I thought that I might provoke them when I turned to Ed and said, “But Ed, I find your view very intolerant and rigid and, if heaven is to be occupied by people like you, I would prefer an alternate eschatological location.”
Donald said that the Line Dancing class was waiting for the dance floor and we should move our chairs to the perimeter.
[To Be Continiued]
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.21.2006)
[1] This applies especially so to Muslims, who are quick to issue a fatwa, an edict that can me the assassination of the heretic, for quite minor offenses against the Prophet or the Koran.