baggage
The other day I turned on the TV to find an afternoon cartoon for my son. The TV was tuned to some random channel, and a woman was on telling the story of Samuel from the Hebrew Bible to a group of children. "And Samuel said, 'Here I am, Lord'."
I immediately tensed up. I bristled at the thought of my son hearing that story about god talking to a boy. It could have been any Bible, story, though, and I still would have gone on the defensive. I turned the channel as quickly as possible. To me, that TV show represented the literalist religious tradition I have rejected, as well as the figurative or mythological tradition I have rejected as the standard and origin for morals. To me, the Bible is baggage.
I realized a second later that had it been a religious story from anything outside of Judeo-Christian tradition, I wouldn't have cared. Because to him, the Bible could just be another old book, a collection of stories and sayings about a people and how they see themselves relating to god. I shouldn't keep him from it any more than I should keep him from Hindu scripture or the Koran or Greek stories or Confucian writings. It could have been any Bible story, Celtic myth, fairy tale, Rwandan origin myth, etc. To him, it's all the same. Stories about gods, origins, history, and pre-scientific ways, and oftentimes just fun ways, of explaining the world and human interactions. None more correct or privileged than the next.
What freedom.
6 comments:
It's interesting to think that in different points of history different religions or philosophies have evolved from one set of beliefs and stories to another, making the old antiquated and, essentially, a mythology. There will have been people along the way who were caught up in a disjunction between old and new, and subject to feelings of both angst and liberation.
Like people who lived during the "end" of Mormon polygamy. One day the church is teaching it's absolutely essential for salvation, and the next, they're saying Stop it. Major cog dis, there.
Absolutely. I can't wait for the next 'revelation' the mormons receive - it ought to be interesting to see what they pull from their hats.
'We mourn the old gods passing on and fear the gods to come...'
I don't know where that's from, but it seems relevent.
And I've wondered, what happened to the extra Mormon wives when they stopped polygamy?
Interesting post, exactly spot on too. Freedom is the ability to look at all religions with casual curiosity and not feel so threatened by any of them, as they all serve basically the same function for those humans who seem to need them.
mai- Good question. Some were just abandoned, suddenly single mothers (which they basically were whenever their husbands were in residence anyway). Some men continued to visit and help the women anyway, just secretly. Or they moved to remote parts of Utah and continued polygamy. Some of their descendants continue to live in hiding, in remote parts of the west. Some moved to Canada and Mexico. My husband's grandma comes from one of those Mexican settlements.
Of course, I didn't learn that in Sunday school.
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