re: #141 retired cynic

Thing is, religion exists in the interstice between the worshippers and the preserved traditions.

There really is no “no, you can’t read it that way” even if it’s utterly outlandish and bonkers. The minute you have text, you have the possibility of interpretation and the divining of “gnostic” meaning. The more commentary you have, the longer the textual tradition stretches, the greater the chance of attenuation of meaning. You can skip about and pick—OT versus NT, gospel versus gospel, Paul versus everything else—until you can justify what you want.

Atop that, there’s charismatic and “spontaneous” traditions that further distort meaning, even though they’re not part of the direct textual tradition. When “validity” of theology becomes attached to personalities that inform their followers what it all means, the text ceases to be a document, but becomes just as significant as a fetish.

The GOP’s current state of truthlessness—an-epistemology, if you will—in many ways comes from how a century of charismatic religion has altered the way the Bible functions for some US Christians. It’s not a coherent text but a body of passages that can be cut-up and re-arranged to “prove” any point; the “hidden” and “prophetic” meanings supposedly present—visible only to key divines, who promote and sell their secret knowledge to their followers—matter more than the very bald statements made; the esoteric notion of dispensations means that the most naked commandments simply do not apply; context—especially Jewish contextualization of the Old Testament, and argument about its “laws” and analysis of its “history”—doesn’t matter…the Bible is “literal” even when so much of it is clearly allegorical.

They’ve rebuilt Christianity to service their needs, but it’s still Christianity—barring a Supreme being dropping down and correcting everyone.

…and it’s not exclusively a crisis in Christianity. The “invention” of State Shinto pretty much fucked up Showa Japan. Right now, Hindutva and the BJP are trying to trim the plurality of Hinduism to create a tidier, conservative religion that services their needs (and deliberately, one that ignores the historic likelihood that Hinduism is a religion that entered the subcontinent via Indoeuropean migration). Islam was built with a number of stringent rules that were an attempt to shut down pluralization of meaning….and they failed almost immediately and sects developed. And the Islamists trying to pack everyone back into “original” Islam are even more creative with their re-readings of law: wherever they’re in doubt, they assume that the issue at hand must be a matter of firm law, requiring harsh action, not something about which there can be disagreement or flexion because it’s not important.

Yep, it sucks.