AncienTrails

Total Depravity and Salvation–Updated

Samhain                          Waning Wolf Moon

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

Mencken’s acerbic prose lit up the 20’s and 30’s.  As the WC Fields of intellectual life I’m used to his biting, funny persona, but the one revealed in this quote sent my way by Warren Wolfe is new to me.  There’s more Mencken to read apparently.

This quote hit me dead center because going into the museum today I had a nagging thought on my mind.  Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, leading voices in the so-called New Atheist movement, like to ridicule people of faith as if their scorn will cause a Presbyterian to say, “Gee, I never realized I was so bush league as to believe in God.  I see the error of my ways and am headed out right for an E. O. Wilson text on evolution.”

These guys are mean-spirited and, frankly, give atheism a bad name.  Every time I read an article by them or a book review–I even read Sam Harris’ book–my reaction is, “Who gives a damn what these ornery, self-important bastards feel anyhow?”

That was not the thought that was on my mind though it started there.  Here it is.  The God idea no longer makes sense to me and by implication the varieties of religious embroidery of the idea no longer make sense either.  Yet.  What if we approached the question not from the perspective of delusion and happy ignorant fools, but from the perspective of what theological and dogmatic ideas mean in the context of  human life.

Yes, I know lots of folks in various new agey churches find that “all religions believe in love” or the golden rule or Spirit or light.  Well, all religions don’t share common threads, at least not in the way these folks mean it, but I’m suggesting a similar endeavor, though more nuanced.

The idea mushroomed from a remark in a Spiked article about John Calvin in which the author considered the notion of total depravity.  It is, he said, something even those of us who believe in humans as the product of evolution should consider.  Aren’t we often struck by how far our actions fall away from intentions?  Don’t our limitations, both physical and psychological, make such disjunction inevitable?  There is an existential reason to acknowledge the truth behind Calvin’s terrible dogma.  We are all (totally) liable to error.

That struck me.  Huh.  I went immediately from there to grace.  A gracious God accepts total depravity as a given and loves us anyhow.  That’s liberal protestant dogma, if that’s not an oxymoron.   Why would Christians keep believing that century after century?  If there is no god, and if there is no religious apparatus validated by god, then all those folks, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Tibetan Buddhists, Religious Taoists believed in ideas generated by humans and treated them as if they were divine.  With me so far?

That means that those ideas must have had some powerful real world value.  In a sense I’m turning the Dawkins, Hitchens crowd on its head and saying that religious beliefs have, let’s say, salvific power on their own.  No, I’m not saying that every peculiar tick in the thought world of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks or present day Quakers and Baptists and Shiites has psychological or sociological or anthropological positive affect, but I am saying that many of those ideas must have substantial benefit to the kinds of lives human beings live now and have lived for thousands of years.

Let’s take salvation as an example.  What would it mean to be saved in psychological sense?  It would mean that in spite of the painful childhood, in spite of the alcoholism, in spite of the narcissism there is a place beyond all these things–IN THIS LIFE–that will include them and neutralize their negatives.  Might be analysis or therapy.  Could be.  Might be a marriage.  Might be.  Might be an immersion in a cause larger than the wounded life.  In other words paradise could not be in the sky bye and bye when you die, but here and now.

Do you see where I’m going with this?  Probably somebody else already thought of this, but it hit me as important.