God save me from smug, ill informed, modernists who spend their time deconstructing faith thinking that they know what is true. The latest, and conceivably the worst, contribution to this genre being Divinity of Doubt by Vincent Bugliosi.
It makes me angry because, while they legitimately dismiss the mythic constructs of faith formed in pre-modern times, they fail, utterly and completely fail, to recognize the validity of the experience those ancient constructs sought to illumine. They described those experiences, and reflected on their meaning for the life we live, using the language and worldview available at the time. Has our worldview evolved? Certainly. Do we know more than they about the working of the physical world? Of course humanity has made great strides along that line of development. But has either the modernist or post-modernist worldview provided a context for meaning that can sustain and guide human society in the face of the cataclysmic change which even now bears down upon us? Most assuredly not, for that line of development has atrophied.
As a matter of faith, and further as a matter of experience, I believe those mythic-literal forms of religion were pointing towards something real. We ignore them at our peril. Place yourselves in the arrogant hands of Mr. Bugliosi and that is precisely what you will do.
The jacket cover suggests that Bugliosi is “joining the 2000 year old conversation which no one has contributed anything significant to for years,” (Oh please), and that he “shakes the very foundations of Christianity by establishing that Jesus was not born of a virgin, and hence was not the son of God.”
He succeeds only in setting up a straw man – an idea about God that is constructed as near as I can tell, from a literal reading of the Bible, and poll data about what Americans believe – (not my first source for theological reflection thank you very much). Then he neatly and smugly tears it apart. Well congratulations Vince, you have discovered that the ancients were operating from within a less evolved world view than ours. This is your contribution? There haven’t been thousands of others before you?
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