Gospel & Universe ⏯ Systems
Abraham's Vice
The New Chosen People - Singular Peoples
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The New Chosen People
Jewish antagonism to the gods of the Middle East was part of their historical and political identity, part of their unique status vis à vis Yaweh, their monotheistic God. Because Jesus was Jewish and because Christianity was based on Judaism, it isn't surprising that Christians reacted negatively to the polytheism of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Canaanites and Phoenicians (the last two names often referring to the same peoples). It's also not surprising that Christians ended up believing that they're the only ones who have a true understanding of God. In this sense, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
The main problem I see with the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) is that they’re Abrahamic and monotheistic at the same time. To be polytheistic and Abrahamic would create less conflict, for you could claim a god for your own people and still leave room for other people to claim their own gods. To be monotheistic and not Abrahamic would also create less conflict, for you could open up your ideas about a universal God to anyone. Christianity and Islam have done this to some degree, having created global religions that are open to all races, nations, and ethnicities. Yet most practicing Christians and Muslims are still Abrahamic in the sense that they believe that the One True God revealed Himself historically only to Noah and Abraham and their descendants — certainly not to Utnapishtim or Ramakrishna. They believe that only Abraham, Moses, David, etc. got the real goods from the real God, Yaweh or Allah. They resist, for instance, any consideration of whether or not Ahura Mazda, the supreme God of Zoroastrians, and a major figure in the Classical Middle East, might be the same universal God as Yahweh or Allah.
Christians claim that the Hebrews got it right up to a point. Christians call them the Chosen People because they were chosen first by Yahweh and because historically they set up the correct monotheistic system. From Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham to Jesus, the Hebrew people had a direct line to God and His Heaven. Yet Christians also believe that the Hebrews lost their ability to choose correctly, while Christians perfected this ability. The Jews were chosen to see the Truth of the One True God, yet they weren’t chosen to see the Truth of His Only Son, who, according to Christians (but not Jews or Muslims) is the crowning theological reality. In a way, this makes Christians another Chosen People, or perhaps even the Chosen People.
The higher Christian Truth of Jesus then gets squeezed, in what I call Abraham’s vice, between the ancient claims of the Jews and the more recent claims of the Muslims. The latter, starting in the early 7th century AD, see Christ as a prophet but not as the Son of God who alone can give salvation. The three Abrahamic religions share a general belief in One God, yet they deny each other’s specific truths. They do this because built into their (Abrahamic) tradition is the notion that a certain privileged group of believers can possess a Truth that’s at once historically-based (from Adam to Abraham, Moses, etc.) and all-encompassing (monotheistic). These three groups splinter into yet more groups (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Sunni, Shia, etc.), each one believing that they are the true guardians of the Truth.
Voltaire wrote, si vous avez deux religions chez vous, elles se couperont la gorge; si vous en avez trente, elles vivront en paix; “if you have two religions, they’ll cut each other’s throats; if you have thirty, they’ll live in peace.” Alas, this type of tolerance seems to work better among polytheists. When monotheists split into groups, they tend to retain their sense that they’re not only right, but more particularly right. A Vaishnavite will generally not have a problem with a tolerant Shaivite or a tolerant Christian or Muslim. Hindus generally assume the others have their own gods/Gods and that all gods/Gods are part of a greater Power or Unity, sometimes seen as the all-encompassing infinity of Brahman. However, practicing Christians will generally think that tolerant Muslims and Hindus have it all basically wrong. Practicing Muslims will generally think that tolerant Christians and Hindus have it all basically wrong. Even when the groups split even further, the sense of being right doesn’t seem to entirely dissipate: the vicious wars between Catholics and Protestants, Sunni and Shia, would make Vaishnavites and Krishnavites scratch their heads.
(This isn’t to say that Hindus are models of tolerance. While they display the Ancient and Classical Age acceptance of different gods and other religious systems, among themselves they retain one of the world’s most undemocratic and elitist systems: caste. As we see intimately in Premchand’s short story “Deliverance” (1931) and in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935), the caste system can be brutally intolerant. Even today, while conservative brahmins don’t generally consider other religions all wrong, most will consider other castes inferior, and some may even recoil from the touch of a low-caste shudra or dalit.)
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Singular Peoples
Every group of people (religious, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc.) has the right to feel proud and special, for the group gives a singular yet common meaning to the individual’s brief moment in space and time, in geography and history. But these singular meanings are subject to spatial and temporal verification; to context, history, and science.
The Jews are of singular historic, cultural, artistic, and intellectual achievement. Their religious contribution is nothing short of revolutionary, having overwhelmed the entire polytheistic world west of India for the better part of the last two thousand years. Yet to acknowledge the power of Jewish thought and culture is not the same as to agree with the logic of Abrahamic validation. Many Reformed or Modern Jews retain their cultural background without retaining the religious exclusivism it once entailed, and which it still entails in the minds of fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Reformed Jews may rightly think they’re special without retaining the notion that God thinks they're the chosen people.
Much of the problem lies of course in the article the. If we started talking of a chosen people, and then another chosen people, this whole problem might start to dissolve.
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