Today a friend linked on Facebook to this tweet by the Canadian blogger Ian Welsh. It's part of a longish thread, really a sermon, on religion, a subject on which Welsh has shown himself to be careless in the past. That makes this remark ironic at least:
As I'll try to show, Welsh hasn't done the necessary work either. On just a factual level, he wrote in an accompanying blog post containing some of the same materials:
Jesus, poor bastard, had his teachings bastardized more than almost any great prophet I can think of: a Christianity which includes the book of Revelations has lost the plot, and I suspect the Old Testament should be ditched as well, because the God of the Old Testament acts in ways opposite to what Jesus teaches.
Either Welsh hasn't read the New Testament or he's imposed his own preconceptions on what he did read. First he takes a popular position, that Jesus had a pure (i.e., not "bastardized") set of teachings that his followers twisted. That wouldn't be surprising, but how does Welsh know what Jesus' original teachings were? He left no writings; we know him only through the New Testament, which is not a reliable source (or rather, collection of sources), but there's no way to get behind it to Jesus himself. Scholars have been trying to recover the "historical Jesus" for over two centuries, and they're no closer to solving the problem now than they were when they began.
As for the Revelation of John, which is a bugbear to many, it certainly poses many difficulties, but Welsh doesn't indicate why he objects to it. It appears he doesn't know that its themes of violent judgment and punishment run throughout the New Testament, including Jesus' own teaching as the gospels report it. You could ignore or remove the Revelation altogether, and you'd still have to deal with an end-of-the-world cult. As the great historian Morton Smith declared in a 1955 review of a scholar who tried to get rid of the end-times material in Mark, "to accept the great majority of the sayings in [Mark] as substantially accurate reports of Jesus' ipsissima verba [i.e., his own words] ... is implausible. But to do this and also get rid of the apocalyptic sayings, is impossible." Welsh is ready to criticize his "great prophets" for teachings he disapproves, so this shouldn't be a problem, yet he prefers to blame all of the bad parts of Christianity on everybody except Jesus.
As for ditching the Old Testament, once again Welsh expresses a view that is shared by many who haven't done the work necessary to have an opinion worth respecting. Jesus situated himself in "Old Testament" religion: he quoted the Hebrew Bible frequently, and claimed to be its fulfillment. When he rejected parts of the Bible, he usually did so to make them harsher: it is not enough to refrain from killing, you must not even get angry; not just to refrain from adultery, you may not even feel erotic desire, so it's better to make yourself a eunuch if you can. The Hebrew Bible demands the death penalty for some offenses, but Jesus threatened endless punishment after death, to be visited on the overwhelming majority of humanity. Jesus' more attractive teachings, such as "Love your neighbor as yourself," are often direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible -- Leviticus 19:18, in that case. Teaching care for the poor is a major theme in Hebrew religion, as in most religions, even if it's honored more in the breach than in the observance, but it's not the core of Jesus' teaching any more than it is of Hebrew religion or any other.
Welsh refers to Jesus as a prophet, along with Confucius, Mohammed, and the Buddha. But of those four, only Mohammed actually was one. A prophet is a person through whom a god speaks. Jesus never said "Thus says Yahweh," as the classical Hebrew prophets did; when he set aside parts of Torah, he did so on his own authority: "But I say to you..." His disciples reported that some thought Jesus was a prophet, but that's treated as a misconception: he wasn't a prophet but the Messiah, the Son of God. Perhaps Welsh would dismiss this as another bastardization of Jesus' pure teaching, but if he wants to be taken seriously he would have to give good reasons for dismissing it. As it is, he doesn't seem to know what a prophet is; he seems to use the word to mean "a really cool guy."
In another tweet in that thread, Welsh declared that "Nobody is God's only or final prophet. Anyone who says or believes otherwise is spreading evil." This is strangely religious language, but except perhaps for Mohammed, no one seems to have claimed to be only or final prophets. If Welsh had actually read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, he'd know that ancient Israel was crawling with prophets; much of the Hebrew Bible is the work of some of them; for some reason Welsh never mentions Moses, the prophet par excellence of Israelite religion. Also, "prophet" was an office in the early Christian churches, as worshipers were possessed by the spirit of Jesus and spoke on his behalf. And of course, there were prophets and oracles in ancient Greece, from the Delphic Oracle to Socrates and beyond, none of whom was "only or final." Welsh doesn't seem to know much about the history of religion. "I have a lot of respect for Confucius, Jesus and Buddha," he writes, but respect born of ignorance is an odd kind of respect.
"The person of reason," Welsh declares,
the moral person, takes these beliefs as arbitrary and inquires as to what parts are good and bad, rather than bowing down before tradition and authority.
This is the path of respect for the great prophets, each of whom came into an imperfect world, was unwilling to accept it, and tried to make it better. Buddha saw suffering and sought a way to end it. Confucius saw rulers savagely mistreating their subjects and sought to bring better rule. Jesus saw people following “the law” and missing the spirit of love and care for fellow humans that was the essence of the love of God. Muhammad’s first followers were mostly women and slaves (as was true of early Christianity) because he offered them a better life than the one they had.
This is a tendentious misrepresentation of all these men. Welsh's take on Jesus, for example, is a variant of Christian anti-Semitism; Jesus' criticism of those "following 'the law'" was standard "Old Testament" prophetic teaching. The core of Jesus' teaching was the imminence of the final judgment and the importance of escaping hellfire. The Buddha was concerned first about his own suffering, the suffering of others was a mirror in which he saw himself, and social justice was not his priority. About Confucius and Muhammad I know less, but I see no reason to suppose he's any more accurate about them. I wonder where Welsh got this stuff; it sounds as if he had read a couple of popular books about religion, and never bothered to go any deeper. He claims he spent "a good 15 years meditating," and denies that he's an atheist, but his take is basically that of the kind of people I call Village Atheists, who picked up their information from crank literature and spun it into conspiracy theories, and who pay lip service to the great teachers they evidently identify with but know nothing about.
I agree with most of Welsh's expressed values, such as his opposition to caste (though he has nothing to say here about Hinduism) and the oppression of women (though he has nothing to say about the deeply entrenched sexism of Western secular science). But you don't need prophets to take those positions. Moral positions don't come from gods, and someone who says you shouldn't oppress women because a god says so is part of the problem.
In another tweet Welsh declares "All most religious followers are is indoctrinated slaves; born into a religion they did not choose. It's just another form of identity politics, usually combined with authoritarianism." Of course, because a prophet is by definition an authoritarian figure: "Thus says Yahweh!" But does Welsh seriously believe that you can eliminate indoctrination and authoritarianism by getting rid of "religion"? The real and probably intractable problem lies in the fact that human beings are born helpless and must spend years being brought up in families. Children don't choose their parents, the language they speak, the culture in which they grow up -- all of which they learn to accept as "nature," the way things are. "Religion" is just a part of the matrix of indoctrination that goes with being human. I hope Welsh knows better than to believe that you can raise children without indoctrinating them; that's a fantasy, one that could fairly be called religious. It's certainly not based in science or reason.
Welsh also either ignores or is ignorant of all the scholarly work that shows how unsatisfactory, misleading, and impossible to define the word "religion" is. But ignorance never keeps people from pontificating, does it? Given the ex cathedra quality of his remarks, I wonder if he sees himself as a prophet.
