It might surprise many of you to know that a lot of thought goes into these ocassional blog entries pertaining to the subject of religion. Though despite knowing that Easter was coming up for a very long time and reflecting upon many different things from many different angles, I confess I haven’t anything particularly fascinating to say.
I would however like to leave you with some words from Canada’s best known religion writer, Tom Harpur. The Spirit Of Things‘ Rachael Kohn asked if those reading the Bible literally were ‘getting the message wrong.’
I think yes, I think they are getting parts of it very wrong. I mean for example, if you’re on a Billy Graham Crusade and you hear him preaching, this whole picture of yourself as a massa damnata or whatever it was St Augustine called it – a mass of sin – and you have be dangled over the flames of hell in order to be sufficiently needy that you reach out for the answer that they ust so conveniently have ready to hand you. I think doing that to people can be very cruel. I know people who went to the Billy Graham Crusade with deep, deep, deep problems and got ‘saved’ and went out later on and took their own life.
This happened with an Oxford student friend of mine, and Billy came to Oxford. You know, I’m not blaming Billy for that. But the last thing this person needed was to be told there was some instant answer to his need, or to be told that he was the terrible sinful person in the eyes of God needing the shed blood of someone long ago. Does that make any sense anyway really? It doesn’t make any sense to me. And I don’t think it makes very much sense to an awful lot of people who stop to really think about it. Does it make sense that one person could take on himself the sins of Buchenwald and Auschwitz and all the camps? I mean just to mention one sick phase in our history. Could all the sin of all the people of all the world be taken away by any amount of blood of any amount of perfect paragons? I don’t think so.
Happy Easter…
