More examples of empathy

I turned on the tv this morning and was just about to change the channel to Treehouse TV when my attention was caught by the show that was on. It was "Touched by an Angel", as I figured out a few moments later, and there was a girl singing "Greensleeves" on it. I decided it wouldn't do any harm to watch the rest of the show, and settled down with Elizabeth in the crook of my arm.

Well, there are always parts in that show that make me cry. It's designed to make people cry. So the first time I started to sob, Elizabeth looked up with some concern and said, "It's okay, Mommy."

"I know, hon. It's sad, that's all."

"You wanna kleenex?" Off she ran to get me a kleenex.

She did the same thing the next time I cried, and the time after that, until eventually I had six half-used kleenex lying around me. She even tried to wipe my nose herself and told me when to blow.

Sermon-inspired mini-rant.

The title of the sermon this morning was "The Reason for the Season #1." If I hadn't been half-expecting something similar, I might have choked. I was rather glad kianir wasn't there. :)

Other than ignoring the fact that there have been other reasons for the season in the past, I wasn't upset with most of his points. They were standard semi-thoughtless Christianity at its best, and they were relatively innocuous.

But.

He pointed out that if you took Jesus out of the season, there was no longer a reason to celebrate, Peace on Earth became meaningless, why not just work those days?

Um . . . hold on just a minute here.

I've heard this one before, of course. It's in Elizabeth's "Easter Carol" Veggietales movie, where the hope of Easter is taken away and all of a sudden the orphanage closes and the policeman doesn't bother to stop thieves. It's the standard war cry of countless semi-thoughtless Christians the world over.

The problem is that it doesn't hold water. There are non-religious people who live more giving and caring lives than most of the Christians I know. How would that be possible, if the only reason for the season of hope and peace were to be found in Christ?

Christianity has been the reason both for and against the moral progress that Western society has made in the last three hundred or so years. It was given as a reason to free the slaves and a reason to keep them slaves. Its principles are found in the thoughts and writings of almost all the great statesmen of the last three hundred years, including those who created such documents as the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Charter of Rights (I can't remember the exact title for that one.) It was a reason and impetus for the Civil Rights movement even while Conservative white congregations were quietly supporting the KKK.

Most modern Christians embrace vast tracts of this new morality - a moral code that came about because of the Bible but does not appear anywhere in it. Most will even take at least some credit for it for their faith - and rightly so, because Christian ideals have played a large part in shaping modern morality. (I do not mean to say that they have exclusive right to claim that, of course - only that they contributed, mostly through the Calvinist concept that "God created us all in His image; therefore we all have a basic worth on which to build.") And yet, when the natural results of this morality start to go in ways they don't like (for example, the Gay Rights movement) they decry it and try to say that their morality is based firmly in the Bible.

The thing I find most frustrating about modern Christianity is this ability to pick and choose which laws in the Bible to follow exactly, which examples are good ones to emulate and which can be safely ignored, all while trying to hold the Bible up as the single moral authority for good living. Morals - I don't like to use the word change, because I believe in absolute truth - become better understood over time. I believe that the Bible is a good starting point for these, and that the overall message of salvation is true. However, to say that any one group at any point in time have had a firm grasp of the totality of absolute truth is to deny humanity's imperfections and its need for further change. We have not yet arrived at absolute truth, though we're getting closer to it. There is a reason we were told to examine everything to see if it is good and true. The reason is that the Bible is not an infallible moral source. It has its contradictions, its stories that seem to epitomize immoral behaviour, its moments of condoning things we see as travesties now. It is a starting point, a series of revelations given through the dim brass mirrors that were the brains of many imperfect human beings.

That's my take on the place of absolute truth as it is discussed in the modern Church.

Yay for new neighbours!

'Nuff said - for now. :)