By Morris Dean
Stephen Fry may be familiar to you as Bertie Wooster's butler Jeeves, from the BBC dramatizations of some stories by P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and Wooster, in which Bertie was played by none other than Hugh Laurie, perhaps most famous in the United States as Dr. Gregory House.
Before that, Fry was, along with Laurie, half of the comic double act A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989-1995), which they co-wrote and co-starred in.
Back to Stephen Fry in a minute, but first a few words about today's question. The phrase the god of Abraham refers to a character depicted in the Judaic scriptures, where he is also referred to as Yahweh, or Jehovah, written YHWH (Hebrew: יְהֹוָה). (I do not speak Hebrew, let alone read it, so I'm depending on scholars for the naming information.)
For the most part, the Hebrew scriptures comprise the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, so the god of Abraham is also the god of Christians, except that God in the New Testament is portrayed as more a loving god than a wrathful god, the way Yahweh/Jehovah was portrayed in the Hebrew scriptures, which are variously some hundreds of years older. I'm assured by some Christian believers that it's still the same god. The older Hebrews had just thought of him differently, I guess; I don't know whether contemporary Hebrews still think of him that way, but I suppose they do, since they don't consider Jesus to be divine.
Most of you who might be reading this (or not reading it) may not know that the god of Abraham is also the god of Islam, although Muslims use the name Allah. (Note: I removed the quotation marks I had been using around the various names for the god of Abraham, so that, for consistency, I would not have to run the risk of putting them around Allah, for when I did "quote" it initially, I had a case of the willies, sure that some Muslims would think I was disrespecting their deity – even committing blasphemy.)
The god of each of these Abrahamic religions is supposedly the same god (and consistently masculine), but at least some Christians dispute they're the same (to judge by recent letters to the editor of my local newspaper). They even go so far as to affirm that the god of the New Testament is the only one of the three that actually exists, even though, to Hebrews, Yahweh/Jehovah is the one true god, and, to Muslims (who don't consider Jesus divine either), Allah is the one true god. Sticky situation. But it does offer some solace for atheists, who can take umbrage in the fact that they are only denying the existence of one more god than Hebrews, Christians, and Muslims.
The thing about Stephen Fry is, he has a pertinent answer to today's question: If the god of Abraham was a human invention, then what is blasphemy?
As you may have guessed, Stephen Fry "identifies himself as an atheist and humanist."
| Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean |
Very interesting the way you compared religions---and funny. I think when Paul was asked what will happen to those who do not believe as we do. It has been awhile so the words may not be right but in a nut shell he said, They shell be judged by their beliefs. Even among the Christian religions they think the other is going to hell because they don't belong to their church. If there is a judgement day in our future I fear there are going to be some real shocked people.
ReplyDeleteRight, if there is. I've been saving a picture of Jesus ministering unto a child to which a telling speech bubble has been assigned to Jesus, which I hope to be able to publish on my birthday – I mean, if something even better doesn't come along.
DeleteHmm, having mentioned it, I feel somewhat obliged to at least share what Jesus is saying to the child: "I love you so much that if you don't believe I am the son of god, you are going to hell."
As a devout (what we would call) Orthodox Jew, Jesus would have had to buy the whole Old Testament, literally. Yahweh/Jehovah was regarded by the Gnostics as only one demigod among many. He was placed in charge of this world which he governed with jealousy and rage. The Gnostics called him the "Fool god," because, unlike other deities, He suffered from the delusion that he was the supreme deity. Later descendants of the Gnostics, the Cathars held a similar opinion of the Triune god of the Catholics. They regarded Pope Innocent III as the Vicar of Satan on earth. Of course this pissed off the Pope no end. That and the Cathar's insistence on universal literacy, equality between the sexes, and other horrific blasphemies. Of course, then as now, the theocratic answer to an honest difference of opinion lay not in dialogue but in death for the unbeliever.
ReplyDelete"After several decades of harassment and re-proselytising, and perhaps even more importantly, the systematic destruction of their religious texts, the sect was exhausted and could find no more adepts. The leader of a Cathar revival in the Pyrenean foothills, Peire Autier was captured and executed in April 1310 in Toulouse.After 1330, the records of the Inquisition contain very few proceedings against Cathars. The last known Cathar perfectus in the Languedoc, Guillaume Bélibaste, was executed in the autumn of 1321."
Wikipedia
Thanks for the sad story of the heretical Gnostics. As Bart Ehrman explains in his most recently published book, How Jesus Became God, and as I'm sure that both you and Ed already understand as well as anyone, "orthodox" really means the view of the side that won out and could do away with the losers, and "heterodox" the side that struggled but lost (and was pretty much done away with).
DeleteEhrman also makes the point you start with, about Jesus's being quite steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, which of course hadn't become The Old Testament yet.
I believe King James took the same approach. If you did not believe the King James Bible was the true word of God, you were killed. A sure way to turn non-believers into believers.
ReplyDeleteI think it was more a matter of turning believers of stripe A (the stripe that was outed by the establishment) into believers of stripe B, where B was Protestant and A was Catholic.
DeleteHmm, I just stumbled onto an interesting bit about King James VI/I's interest in witchcraft (in Wikipedia): "Witch hunts: James's visit to Denmark, a country familiar with witch-hunts, may have encouraged an interest in the study of witchcraft, which he considered a branch of theology. After his return to Scotland, he attended the North Berwick witch trials, the first major persecution of witches in Scotland under the Witchcraft Act 1563. Several people, most notably Agnes Sampson, were convicted of using witchcraft to send storms against James's ship. James became obsessed with the threat posed by witches and, inspired by his personal involvement, in 1597 wrote the Daemonologie, a tract which opposed the practice of witchcraft and which provided background material for Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth. James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches. After 1599, his views became more sceptical. In a later letter written in England to his son Prince Henry, James congratulates the Prince on "the discovery of yon little counterfeit wench. I pray God ye may be my heir in such discoveries ... most miracles now-a-days prove but illusions, and ye may see by this how wary judges should be in trusting accusations."
You can't even escape theocracy by dying! That's just not fair.
ReplyDeleteUnless there really is no Theos....
Delete"Those who have not embraced the Holy Mother Church are in a deficient state of Grace"
ReplyDelete-- Pope John Paul, said during his world-wide ecumenical campaign.
"All Catholics are going to hell"
- The head of the Southern Baptist Convention, said publicly at about the same time.
Very to the point. Thank you, Chuck!
Delete