Wrestling with Religion

Before the Christian invention of celestial paradise, the underworld in most cultures was either undesirable or divided into good and bad sections. Celestial salvation appears early on as a perk for the Pharaohs and later Roman Emperors, who were supposed to ride the boat of the sun or become stars, but the destination of the of the ordinary dead was underground: the Hebrew Sheol, the Greek Hades, the Mayan Xibalba, the Egyptian Duat, the Mesopotamian Kur, and the Old Norse Hel.  In the oldest Mediterranean systems, including those of Homer and the ancient Hebrews, any afterlife was so joyless that it could scarcely be called life. Unless their families provided for them, the Sumerian dead had only dust to eat and drink. After Odysseus lured shades of the underworld to drink at a pit of sheep's blood, he suggested that the spirit of Achilles should have no regrets, having died well, but Achilles replied that he'd rather be the slave of a peasant than king among the dead (Home...

  The Bible makes a few nods toward androgyny. Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female , for you are all one in Christ Jesus," but this is the only mention of gender among passages where Paul dismisses the Jew-Gentile distinction. Christian scripture is firmly male-supremacist. God is a masculine creator with no female counterpart. The brief appearance in Proverbs 8:22-31 of a feminine-gendered Wisdom ( Chokmah in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek) who creates the world is overshadowed by the testosterone-soaked Yahweh of Moses, a jealous, law-giving tribal war god. Jesus' Father, more vague and loving, is still unambiguously male. Androgyny appears more often in non-canonical Christian scriptures, so much so that it must have been systematically suppressed after the church acquired police powers. The orthodox attitude toward heresies is that they deviate from the true faith of the apostles, but man...

  Plato's Theory of Ideas looms like a cliff face on the frontier of philosophy: his belief that every meaningful word is the shadow of a pre-existing, perfect, and unchanging entity in a World of Forms. Everything we know, whether abstract or concrete, is a debased copy of a perfect model accessible to contemplation but obscured by material existence. All learning is remembering because all truths pre-exist.            When I was a nineteen-year-old philosophy student, Plato's dialogues read as nonsense because they assumed this. Socrates would ask an interlocutor to define an abstract word--the kind of word that, even at nineteen, I knew meant different things in different contexts--and then he would change the context as if that invalidated the definition. Plato assumed that a word like justice, goodness, or tree has a single fixed, universal meaning. Aristotle disagreed. He saw justice, goodness, and tree-ness as mental constructs abstracted fr...

The 451 Council of Chalcedon defined orthodox Christianity by denying a series of heresies. Non-Chalcedon Christianity persisted, but Chalcedon is enshrined in creeds recited by Greek, Roman, and Protestant congregations today. These creeds hedged against a variety of interpretations of Christ and the Trinity in the early church. Beginning with vague first-century catechisms, the creeds evolved into long, explicit definitions in terms of Greek philosophy. These terms and the doctrinal disputes they address are so obscure that worshippers may innocently hold heretical views while reciting the words. The earliest surviving guide to Christian converts is the Didache , written about the same time as the later gospels. Like them, it doesn't fuss over theology. The emphasis isn't on belief, but on morality, which is detailed in the first six sections with references to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, but no explicit mention of Jesus. In the seventh section, the Father, Son, and...

  This song lyric channels my place of first memories that I left at age three but often visited before the Rural Electrification Administration strung power lines. It's my Eden, my Rosebud, my tie to the 19th-century--a log house (since moved to a house museum) on a hill surrounded by National Forest. Water came from a well, oil lamps projected circles on board ceilings, and we huddled before a stone fireplace on winter nights. Galaxies of lightning bugs swarmed, and owls and bobwhites spoke from the windy silence of the woods. That world is already gone. Today, coyotes would make short work of the chickens I once shelled corn to, and giant lumber-company machines have cleared the old forest and planted loblolly pine. That 1940s world, already gone, seemed a fit place to imagine everything ending.                HE WILL BE THERE When the last dog chews the last bone On the front porch, he'll be there. Yes, his eyes are on the sparrow. ...