In the 1960s BBC Radio regularly broadcast a panel game called “My Word”. Each week the final round had two of the panellists, comedy scriptwriters Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, delivering humorous monologues.
A conceit regularly employed by Norden was a pseudo-psychological condition he termed Literalism. The supposed sufferer took everything literally, with no sense of the idiomatic: “Man eating fish” would be a sea-borne terror rather than some chap enjoying his battered cod.
Literalism describes the consideration of religious texts as being infallible revelations of God’s truth. The gospel truth claims to be the narrative and teachings of Jesus, events initially orally transmitted.
In what was for most people a pre-literate time, the verbal passing on of a message does not indicate inaccuracy. It does, though, leave scope for elaboration. As the tale is being told from the lectern of a modern evangelical church the story has been born again many, many times.
Whatever Jesus said he said it in Aramaic, subsequently was filtered through Greek, Latin, the King James Bible and a succession of updates and revisions. The effect can be illustrated simply: when referring to God Jesus used the term “Abba” rendered in English bibles as the patriarchal “Father”.
A more accurate transliteration of “Abba”, though, is the more familiar“Daddy”. So, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” is not quite so formal as, “Our Daddy,…”
The sense of a phrase is contingent on idiomatic understanding. So, Jesus walking on the water sounds miraculous. However, no one considers supernatural agency for Newcastle upon Tyne or Stoke on Trent as neither of them is actually afloat on its river.
The point here is not to explain, or explain away, but demonstrate that reading the bible requires a deep appreciation of the linguistic processes the text has been through. The claim it is the word of God begs the question, in which language and at what time?
Authors of the four gospels were neither historians nor biographers in the modern sense, but purveyors of religious ideas.
Miraculous birth attended by celestial beings, precocious wisdom at an early age, the feeding of many from very little, curing the sick and raising the dead, death, resurrection and assumption by heaven are all memes common to many religions, not just the Abrahamic.
The apparent dichotomy between religion and science is misleading: religion has more in common with the Arts and there are few who would claim scientific advance has proved music to be false. A great work of fiction contains truths and ideas that enhance the reader’s comprehension of the world, of creation. It is not a book of falsehoods.
There has recently been the discovery of a planet a quarter of the galaxy away basking in the radiance of four suns. This has startled astronomers contradicting previous thinking about destructive gravitational effects of such an arrangement. Yet science fiction writers have often envisaged worlds with a multiplicity of suns.
Just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t make it a lie. One factor common to all religions is the reality of the divine; even Buddhists who formally reject God or Gods come as close as makes no difference to deifying the Buddha.
In Socratic Athens there was debate as to whether there were actual gods on Olympus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic Meditations raised the question as to the actual existence of gods. His conclusion was it didn’t matter; an individual’s responsibility was to live the good life anyway. Also he often opted for the less well-defined and definable Providence to indicate the divine principle.
Even the most ardent sceptical Darwinist’ insistence on natural selection alone poses a conundrum. Why does natural selection favour the favourable? Why isn’t the cosmos just a seething mass of contending forces incapable of creating anything?
The universe is intelligent and self aware because humans are an intelligence within the universe, aware not only of themselves but increasingly of the wider cosmos. How has humanity advanced? By naturally selecting in a conscious way what has favoured progress. It is hardly a leap to consider intelligence on a grander scale, beyond human limitations or comprehension.
Even if absolutely proven Jesus never existed, the gospels would still have a spiritual value. They would become parables, addressing the ineffable and a pervading sense of purpose within humanity.
A distressing and disastrous form of religious literalism concerns faith healing. On biblical pretexts parents deny children medical procedures in the belief that faith will be rewarded through divine intervention. Children suffer and die.
Humanity is blessed with God given reason, granting the miracle of medical science. Faith in reason enables the sick to seek and accept treatment with confidence. But healing is not just about surgery and medicine, love and attention aids and speeds recovery and in those tragic circumstances where there is no cure, then how much stronger love and attention need to be.
Born in the Enlightenment from which science emerged, Deism offers a religious perspective that does not contradict human progress and understanding. Religious cultures and traditions trying to remain fundamental bastions of revealed truth fall foul of unnecessary literalism.
Evolution is not just about the development of species; it also applies to ideas that, like everything else in the universe, are in constant flux. Christianity has patently changed through the two millennia of its existence and comes in a wide variety of forms.
How many Christians still subscribe unquestioningly to the fundamental literal “truth” of the Pauline version? A Deistic sensibility would mean the drama of its narrative and rituals could be preserved and dedicated to celebrating the universe, its nature and the God of reason whose conception it is.
Becoming a Christian Deist opens Christianity to new exploration and interpretation, just as it emerged from within Judaism. Man eating fish on the beach could be Jesus, preparing a fresh meal to share with the world.
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