A received a loan of three books from a friend yesterday.  The books were from her library, offered because she wished me to look them over.  I am a book lover.  One important axis of my life are books which I choose to read, usually purchased from Amazon.  I read to live and live to read.

The three books, all involved with weighty, intricate Christian theology, the work of three authors to “explain” Christianity in a fashion compelling to someone such as myself, a secular person who respects the life of the mind.  Years ago I read many such books avidly with curiosity.  Such a found a place on the shelves of my library.  I remember passing them on to a friend who moved to Atlanta, after a job offer to work for Fed Ex.  I knew that he would put them to better use than I.

What of Christianity?  Two points seem salient to me.  Christianity at it’s inception was a compliation of elements from mystery religions of late antiquity.  The Cult of Mithras in particular (1st to 4th century BCE), a religion popular among the Roman imperial army, involving sacrifice of a bull and purification by a baptism in blood from the dying bull.  Communal meals were also a feature.  There’s more, a large dose of Platonic idealism was added by the Apostle Paul.  Paul of Tarsus was the well known indefatigable Ad man, who foresaw the potential in the budding new religion featuring the sacrifice of the one god’s son on a cross, a resurrection, the promise of a better after-life, and equality of status between the slave and well-born aristocrat.  Also, I must mention that females were elevated to equal status among the early followers of Christ.  That alone was radical.   (And still is.)

That was the beginning as I understand it.  Certainly a lot of water has flowed over the dam since the late Roman Empire in the Mediterranean basin.  Christianity today is fragmented into too many variations to catalog, sub-cults which are hardly recognizable as descending from the stories in the Gospels.  What I mean is the story of the carpenter turned provocateur, promoting a way of life that featured self respect rather than self hatred, and a critical angle of view of conventional religion.  Did Jesus believe himself to be a demigod, a divinely inspired intimate with the ground of Being?  I do not know and neither do the scholars earning their status and their income by publishing books to argue in the affirmative.  If he did, then no more so than you and I, and that was and is precisely what Jesus offered, — a way of life, a practice described in his teaching.  The Sermon on the Mount (Gospel of Matthew chapt. 5-7) is a good summation of his POV.

So, what is to be made of Christianity today?  Make up your own mind.  I cannot say what you should think.  If you resonate, if you have a felt need for aspects which are offered by existing communities, those who hold a subscription to the tradition, — by all means explore the benefit to your sense of self and well being.

I just do not think that the concept of sacrifice for the purification of an existential deficit (original sin) is either understood or is helpful in general to us today.   All of us live in a globalized world, on the brink of climate catastrophe, and time is running out for the earth, and humanity with it.  What ought we as a species to do?  Yes, “salvation” will require sacrifice, the abrupt killing of a way-of-life, of which we in the West are so fond.  Salvation if it is to be realized, will be a human matter, and not divine.

Finally, what makes the story of Christ appealing in my estimation is the in-your-face irrationality of the whole matter.  I am not impressed by efforts to make the story reasonable, reduced to a rational common denominator…

The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.

– Tertullian