While her articles are always informative and fascinating, and one appreciates her attempts to show a divine benevolence underlying all religions, the sceptical disdain showed towards Christianity, that is never directed towards other religions, is somewhat grating. Bart Ehrman’s views that Jesus was a self-deluded Palestinian killed by the colonial authorities keeping order, yet somehow the originator of some good moral maxims, is not that different from many theologians and scholars serving the elites in the West. That Ehrman is a born-again evangelical fundamentalist who became an atheist podcaster and YouTuber is par for the course.
The imputation is that ordinary Christians are simply stupid, think hallucinations of departed relatives mean they are resurrected and alive and well, hold views akin to the Hebrew three-decker universe (nice illustration by the way), is crass and also misses a crucial point. All the great religions, from the heights of the Old Testament, Plato, Plotinus, the great Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist philosophers all concur that the divine is not contained within our four dimensional experience of length, breadth, height and time. Yet, unfortunately, whether we like it or not, our brains are incapable of visualising God, or anything else for that matter, except within that four-dimensional frame.
That is not a flat-earth theology fallacy. John Robinson (a brilliant Biblical scholar) made a heroic attempt in Honest to God to provide a new way of visualising God but he simply ended up with a mental picture of us floating in a syrup of divine benevolence. Jesus of Nazareth still asks across the centuries, “Who do you say that I am?” The answers to that are more likely to come from the martyrs being slaughtered by a new Zionist colonial regime than from the Ehrmans of the north. I am with the deluded Palestinians, Muslim and Christian, who truly honour Jesus.
Read Full Article on The Witness
