The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

CHRISTIANITY AS SYMBOLIC CANNIBALISM?

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© December 7, 2016

REFERENCE:

I had written  this to a deeply religious author’s short published essay on “Hypocrisy”:

We only know each other through this medium of words. I discern from this and your previous missive (on "Love") that you are in a special place in your life looking at yourself honestly with no other thought in mind. This is what philosophers and poets do, and I applaud you for it. They don't find the audience the audience finds them.

My wonder is if a less denominational approach might affect a wider audience given the fact that hypocrisy is a common concern to us all. That said if a denominational audience is your target then I stand corrected.

Emerson said that the route to self-knowing is through experience, a journey we take alone. If we capture a sense of that essence in self-reflection, it follows we tap into a common humanity as we are all one.

Words can be a bridge or barrier as not everyone is a Christian, much less a believer, yet believers and non-believers have common experiences that resonate with each other.

Bridge or barrier, that appears to be the key.

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

I find this fascinating because it all boils down to a belief in something or an entity that has characteristics which if ascribed to a human being would be thought to be negative: the need to be worshiped and bowed down to like royalty, the condemnation of all nonbelievers to eternal punishment, along with a belief in human scarifies and total arrogance. So for me the ultimate hypocrisy is to believe in such an entity and called that entity a god of love.

The other aspect to this religious cult called “Christianity” is that its members believe in symbolic cannibalism to which no one seems to object.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Klaus,

I've never thought of it in those terms, but it is true. Holy Communion is symbolic cannibalism as the priest places the sacred host on your tongue in Holy Communion and says, "Body of Christ." That said the history of Christianity is simply incredible.

Jesus was not an atypical apocalyptic teacher and miracle man of his time. He like others of his ilk were preaching the "the last days," of the known world. Scholars claim there is little evidence he could read or write and spoke only Aramaic and not the Jewish language of Hebrew of the educated.

Moreover, his mission was that of a Jewish sect of a religion that he thought needed reforming. He died in 33 of the Common Era (CE), or there about, and the Jewish sect continued under his brother, James the Just, who remained scrupulously loyal to the tenets of Judaism as it was then known.

James the Just did not believe in a proselytizing faith as did Paul. He and his small group had bitter conflicts with Paul (formerly Saul) who proselytized the faith throughout the known Mediterranean world among gentiles abandoning the diet restrictions of Judaism and promulgating Jesus as the Messiah according to the Old Testament of the Bible.

James the Just was martyred in the 60s of the Common Era (some scholars say 62, others 69 C.E.), which essentially ended the messianic sect of Judaism that Jesus had created only to die on the Cross as a common criminal in 33 C.E. With the death of James, his followers scattered to avoid the Roman army with the Jesus movement (if you want to call it that) essentially ending.

Also, in the 60s, the Jewish Masada launched a revolt against the occupying Romans. This was put down by Emperor Titus in 70 C.E., totally destroying Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple; thus not only ending the reformation movement of Jesus, but Judaism as it was then known. Out of the ashes, a new Jewish faith emerged, and Christianity under the inventive style and bold diligence of Paul (much more than Peter), Christianity emerged.

The Four Gospels (or the "good news") of Christianity are something akin to "fake news" today on the Internet, as they were all written late in the 1st century or early in the 2nd century of the Common Era with none of the authors having known Jesus in his lifetime, which was also true of Paul.

[It has always amazed me that St. Peter's Basilica is in the center of Rome and the site of Roman Catholicism, while St. Paul's Cathedral is outside the wall of the seven hills, as if an embarrassment. I have visited both several times, both beautiful, while remaining an enigma in my mind.]

Most of Christianity (which includes Roman Catholicism) was invented by Paul, and after him by the Fathers of the Church including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Jesus, for example, never mention the "seven deadly sins," the Nicene Creed, or other beliefs that were subsequently treated as if originating from him.

Still, more remarkable after being persecuted up to early in the 4th century, Christianity leads to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, and later in that same century to become the state religion of the entire Roman Empire.

Now, in the 21st century, after suffering many scandals and wars and bad to horrible popes, Roman Catholicism has more than one billion members throughout the world, and Protestantism, which broke from Catholicism early in the 16th century, continues to thrive.

Why is that? I have spent a good part of my life studying the works of scholars on Christianity, but the reason it survives much less exists still escapes me. I know there are other Roman Catholics, like myself, who were once devout members of the church, and have fallen away.

In my case, I claim to have gained a great deal from the structure, discipline, tenets of the faith, as well as the ritual and ceremony of the church. With due modesty, I consider myself a Roman Catholic author and philosopher because I have been greatly influenced by the 18th century Enlightenment Period and the 19th Counter-Enlightenment Period, which both fed off of the controversy of Christianity. It is why my writing may appear at times circumspect to ambivalent and even ambiguous when it comes to the matter of faith.

While being somewhat of a product of Descartes and Newton, et. al., and the Scientific Revolution, I often find merit, and even significance in the irrational and intuitive aspects of the mind compared to the present prominence of the cognitive. Were it not for my right brain thinking, I doubt seriously if I would have had the career and life that I have enjoyed.

Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism fulfilled a need during my impressionistic years, and for that I am eternally grateful. As a consequence, I still believe in God, and still see the importance of religion in fulfilling a basic need of man beyond the known and the knowable. I have watched science in my long life duplicate many of the sins of Roman Catholicism in order to promote and protect its image of infallible and dogmatic authority. Science and mathematics are inventions of man and therefore have limits. They can learn from Nature, but they cannot change or improve Nature. Nature simply "is," or reality.

I think Einstein most cleverly hedged his bet on immortality when he said:

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

Jim

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