When you can read the source and the revision side by side, you can watch early Christians decide which parts of their own founder were too embarrassing to keep.
My father used to beat me with the belt and cause welts. It was abuse. It created trauma. It created permanent damage to me and in our relationship. And he must've been feeling uncomfortable about it, because he preached sermons from the actual pulpit on "Spare the rod, spoil the child."
It may be true that the "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, an American Unitarian minister and abolitionist.) And although my father could be arrested today for his abuse of me, that fact is a measure of change, more than a condemnation of his entire generation. But no matter what that fact suggests, it remains the case that I'm traumatized by events that occurred 70 years ago and that in spite of my father's efforts, he could never fully overcome the violence that he perpetrated during his life.
And Christianity? What an abusive religion it is been! What a hugely important and violent institution of the systematic torture of children, women, slaves, indigenous people, LGBTQA+ people, the environment, the poor, the un-housed, and in every possible way, the other! Human beings cannot be trusted with truth or wisdom. Any more than they can be trusted with science.
If only we weren't stuck with them! Unfortunately, we've got no alternatives to humans.
Thank you for trusting this space with something this heavy. Seventy years on and the welts still ache in memory, which tells you everything about what "discipline" actually was. The detail about the sermons is the part that stays with me.
Physical punishment of children is one of the things that frustrates me the most. There are countries that have minimized or completely got rid of the distinction between assaulting a child and an adult, making beating children a criminal offence at that level. It's time for more countries to move that way.
I agree. The instinct that became Christianity is far older than Christianity, older than writing, probably older than agriculture. The archaeology gives us hints rather than answers, which is part of what makes it so compelling.
My father used to beat me with the belt and cause welts. It was abuse. It created trauma. It created permanent damage to me and in our relationship. And he must've been feeling uncomfortable about it, because he preached sermons from the actual pulpit on "Spare the rod, spoil the child."
It may be true that the "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, an American Unitarian minister and abolitionist.) And although my father could be arrested today for his abuse of me, that fact is a measure of change, more than a condemnation of his entire generation. But no matter what that fact suggests, it remains the case that I'm traumatized by events that occurred 70 years ago and that in spite of my father's efforts, he could never fully overcome the violence that he perpetrated during his life.
And Christianity? What an abusive religion it is been! What a hugely important and violent institution of the systematic torture of children, women, slaves, indigenous people, LGBTQA+ people, the environment, the poor, the un-housed, and in every possible way, the other! Human beings cannot be trusted with truth or wisdom. Any more than they can be trusted with science.
If only we weren't stuck with them! Unfortunately, we've got no alternatives to humans.
Thank you for trusting this space with something this heavy. Seventy years on and the welts still ache in memory, which tells you everything about what "discipline" actually was. The detail about the sermons is the part that stays with me.
Physical punishment of children is one of the things that frustrates me the most. There are countries that have minimized or completely got rid of the distinction between assaulting a child and an adult, making beating children a criminal offence at that level. It's time for more countries to move that way.
I agree. The instinct that became Christianity is far older than Christianity, older than writing, probably older than agriculture. The archaeology gives us hints rather than answers, which is part of what makes it so compelling.