Temporarily Assigned to Planet Earth

Here it is, finally, the blog entry written as a collaboration between Mike and Mary (aka Mom). I'll indicate the passages each of us contributed.

Mary says:
This started out as a post-election-bitterness blog entry. I was going to rant about my belief that for many people on the religious right, the decision to believe in the teachings of evangelical Christianity was probably based on a desire to join a powerful and growing movement rather than on a religious epiphany. It feels good to belong, it feels good to believe you are morally righteous, blah blah blah.

I'm somewhat past the post-election-bitterness now, but we'll do the blog entry anyway; it'll just have a milder tone.

It's always an awkward moment when I tell people my son is majoring in religion at UVA. They assume he's studying from within what I call the "bubble of belief". By that I'm referring to, for example, "Bible study" that is done within the context of assuming it's The Word Of God: first, assume it's true. That would be the case if Mike were a student at Bob Jones University, but at UVA the study of religion is done from outside the bubble. The Bible, like the sacred texts of other religions, is treated as a collection of historical texts. Mike says he chose it as his major simply because religion classes are the most interesting...

Mike says:
...because it's one of the few subjects in which you analyze people's true beliefs. Why did people believe the things they believed? More often than not, it is possible to trace a progression of religious thought in terms of culture and society.

Mary says:
It seems, in fact, that one semester of religious studies has ruined Mike for mindless religion. This is about what I would expect; it's amazing the effect a little knowledge of the history of a set of religious beliefs can have. This semester, Mike took three religion classes: Introduction to Hinduism, Jesus as a Historical Figure, and End of World Studies. Taking the last two of these classes concurrently was apparently an eye-opener.

Mike says:
Many of the readings involved in Jesus as an Historical Figure were commentaries by theologians, which supplemented the reading of the 4 canonical gospels and other early Christian literature. In the 1950s, one of the major theological descriptions of Jesus portrayed him as nothing more than a failed eschatological prophet.

Mary says:
As in, he preached that the end of the world was coming, soon, and nothing ever happened.

Mike says:
The fact that this belief was taken by a very famous and popular man, Albert Schweitzer, made the question of who was the Historical Jesus even more difficult. According to the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Jesus tells his disciples that before they die, they will see the persecution that will bring about the end-times. At any rate, this was one of many theories of who/what Jesus was, based on a plethora of non-canonical-gospels (also known as apocrypha, which means "secret"), numbering in the tens, written around the time of his life or shortly thereafter.

The four gospels that made it into the Bible paint very distinct pictures of Jesus. While they all tell virtually the same story, they are very different in exactly how they show Jesus' teachings and actions. John's description of Jesus makes him seem like an altogether different person from the three synoptic gospels. Early Christian theologians tried to explain these differences by arguing that the differences were not as large as they seemed, and that John was always intended to be more of a "spiritual" gospel, than a synoptic one.

Mary says:
Well now, might it just be that the "gospel of John" was written by a woman?

Mike says:
As time passed, revelation stopped being seen as being the ultimate way to prove a point, and reason took over. Nature, in a way, began to prevail over the super-natural.

Mary says:
Combining this class with End of World Studies seems to make the pieces fall together like a jigsaw puzzle. The apostles believed the End of the World was coming, and soon. It made persecution bearable, because suffering brought redemption, which would lead to the Great Reward when the End of the World came. And so the religion evolved, and for two thousand years Christians have believed we've been living in the End Days, and every few years a bunch of them gather on a mountain somewhere and wait for the Second Coming.

Mike says:
These dates are the result of trying to read Revelation and the Book of Daniel as a timeline, and trying to put one's own community into that timeline. When Christian groups were persecuted, one of their reactions was to paint their persecutors as the spirit of the antichrist, and their leader as the son of perdition trying to apostatize the weak of spirit.

Mary says:
When most people talk about "Bible study" they mean going to church on Wednesday night to study the Bible from within a bubble of belief: I know this is true; what does it mean?

Mike says:
How many times have you heard of the two-Gospel theory in Church, or the book of Q? How many times have you heard someone quote the Gospel of Thomas?

Mary says:
It's nothing at all like studying the Bible as a collection of historical texts. Contradictions that are explained away within the bubble of belief become glaringly irreconcilable.

Mike says:
My professor of End of World Studies told me once that at one point, he had a religion professor tell him that all we can know for sure about Jesus was that he was born and died. Now, this point came with a clarification, as the professor just happens to be a Catholic priest. He told me that he believes what a large number, perhaps even a majority, of modern theologians believe now: that Jesus existed, and must have had some impact on Jewish society, because there are simply too many writings from different sources to deny his existence and ties to Holy works. Hardly something you'd hear from a Catholic priest at mass, huh?

Mary says:
My own experience has been that once you have stepped outside of the bubble of belief to study your own religion, you can never insert yourself back into the bubble again...

Mike says:
...but when you look at other religions while having doubts about your own, you inevitably try to put yourself into those religions. For example, Christian dogma states that the soul is created upon birth, and after the death of the body, remains intact and travels to whatever type of secondary plane, or heaven, you want to imagine. But, if one were to say to themselves: "Well, I think our souls last for all time," one might put one's self into Hinduism, whose concept of atman (the soul) is that is lasts until the time of enlightenment, when one receives moksa (liberty) and transcends even heaven. The problem with this for me is that when someone changes a small belief like this, all of a sudden they are taken completely out of the context of their own religion. So, perhaps one has a Hindi belief about the soul, but a Christian belief about the end of the world. What does that make someone?