| Sunday, December 29, 2002 |
01:26 - "Paper bag, or triple mylar sleeve?" "No thanks, I'll eat it here."
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Last night, after the movie, we were relaxing in front of the National Geographic channel, when an episode of "Taboo" came on. This is the show where they showcase the Bizarre and Fascinating Practices of Societies Unfamiliar To Us. There's a disclaimer at the beginning that says Every society has its own standards of what is acceptable behavior. Some of these practices may not be suitable for younger viewers. Your discretion is advised. My first reaction was that it had to be the most wussy, PC-ified, every-viewpoint-is-equally-valid disclaimer ever yet seen on this planet; but I'd misinterpreted it as implying that all viewers had equally valid definitions of what was suitable TV to watch, or something. It was actually better than that, but not by a hell of a lot.
Anyway, that's an aside. The show had three segments; the first was on an islander tribe whose males proved their manhood and ensured a good yam harvest by building a big tower and then bungee-jumping off it, except without the "bungee" part. Then there were hot-coal-walkers in Greece. Those were fine. Sure. I can deal with those.
But then there was the third segment, which centered on a guy in the Phillipines who had made a pact with God: in exchange for his wife and daughter living through childbirth, he'd promised God that he would crucify himself once a year, on Good Friday, for like ten years. Thus would he repay God for this deed of divine intervention.
Now, I'm the first to admit that I don't understand much about religion, and that that's probably irredeemably tainting my perspective on this. But one just has to stop and think about this for a second.
The act that this guy is taking upon himself-- flagellating his back with sticks and glass until there's no skin left, then being nailed through the palms onto a cross and left hanging there in front of a cheering crowd for several searingly awful minutes with a circlet of barbed wire on his head-- is predicated on the concept that his suffering is something that he can use to pay for a divine act done on his behalf.
My question is this: What kind of God is it that wants his people to suffer?
If you undergo unimaginable torture in exchange for God's doing you a favor, this assumes that God wants and appreciates and enjoys suffering on the part of his creations. Evidently he gets off on it. Like ants under a magnifying glass. Only these ants hold the magnifying glass for themselves, and fight for the chance to suffer and writhe in agony in order to give God the pain points he apparently craves.
As Lance put it, any God that demands suffering from his people is no god, but a devil.
And maybe I missed something, but wasn't the whole point of the Crucifixion that Jesus chose to suffer so that the rest of humanity wouldn't have to? It's like someone gives you for your birthday a brand-new immaculate paint job on your car; and you say "Thanks!" and proceed to take a circular saw to it. Yeah, way to treat a gift, there, guy.
They talk about how Americans, as a Puritan-derived culture, seem to crave suffering above all else, and work under the assumption that the less you enjoy life, the more worthwhile your life is. Presumably this is what expands to "we like to work hard, harder than our family/social lives can support". But you know-- it seems to me that the urge to torture yourself is more of a general human predilection. Some people do it in different contexts than others, though. Some put themselves through agony in pursuit of the elusive chimaera of personal achievement; others undergo their agony in the hope that God will enjoy watching it so much he'll grant them their wishes.
As I've mentioned once or twice in passing, I'm not religious, but neither am I an atheist; I'm an agnostic, because as one of my classmates once put it, an agnostic is the only thing a scientist, by definition, can be. (We can't know that there isn't a God, any more than we can know that there is a God. We have insufficient evidence one way or the other, and the nature of the question is such that scientific evidence can't be used as proof.) I don't know who or what God is, exactly, to quote Lisa.
But I do think it's not too much to presume that God is not some nasty pimply little boy gleefully roaming the neighborhood with an air rifle and a slingshot. If we have anything like the same morals that God has-- and I think that either has to be true, or all of religion is a sham-- then God can't possibly want to do favors for people in exchange for their voluntary pain and suffering; as though the more they hurt, the more pleasure God feels. No way am I prepared to believe that. I'd have a far easier time believing God exists in the first place than believing that God is that evil.
Okay, okay-- I understand that self-torment and insane personal risk and so forth are a form of "ecstasy", in its etymologically correct meaning-- a way to put yourself "outside" your normal self and existence, a way to feel like you're doing something "special", and therefore achieving some kind of goal or building up some kind of points, redeemable for valuable prizes of the divine-intervention sort.
But I wonder if anybody actually thinks about just what the theological implications would be for this kind of thing to actually work.
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