Musings: Notes From My Daybook

The AJC carried an opinion piece by Mary Lefkowitz on October 26.  She presented the argument that the trouble in the world is not religion.  Rather, the trouble is rooted in monotheism.  See her article as it appeared in the LA Times.

 Here is my response below:

With Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and other atheist authors gaining a voice in the public square, Mary Lefkowitz’s October 26 opinion piece in the AJC offers an important conviction that bears repeating.  The trouble in the world is not because of religion.  However, her proposal that the polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome presents a stronger framework for religious practice than the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam requires a deeper look.

Indeed, as Lefkowitz notes, the worship of gods and goddesses in the ancient world did create a broad tolerance for people of different backgrounds and cultures.  But for all of that tolerance the gods of the Greco-Roman world had little interest in redemptive work in people’s lives or in nations.  The capricious and self-willed actions of Zeus, Poseidon, or Athena were simply that; gods and goddesses used humans as pawns on the Olympian game board.  Furthermore, human conduct, the practice of virtue, and the development of any ethical dimensions for social relationships found little or no resource in the antics of the gods.

Obviously, in a pluralistic world full of cultures and multiplicity of beliefs, tolerance is an important value.  And I would be the first to acknowledge that monotheistic faiths have plenty to confess when it comes to expressions of intolerance and hate.  But the religious tolerance of the Greco-Roman world only worked because in that ancient environment what and who was worshipped mattered little.  It is easy to ignore or to casually embrace what means little.  A much more constructive approach to the realities of pluralism in contemporary culture would be of honoring the real differences of thought and opinion that exist between Islam and Christianity, between the atheist and the believer.  Respect and healthy dialogue will lead to understanding much quicker than saying it does not matter.

But what about gender?  Though Olympus was crowded with male and female gods, offering an inclusive image of the divine, that hardly offers any constructive model for sexuality today.  Much more profound is a monotheistic faith that presents a single god who transcends maleness and femaleness.  The biblical record presents that the one God created male and femaleness and that it takes the masculine and the feminine together to fully embody the image of deity (Genesis 1). Our conversations about gender would reside in a much healthier place if they were grounded in respect for masculinity and femininity as reflection of the divine and in the humility for the reality that spirituality transcends gender.

In thinking about questions that emerge about religion, one heavy question centers on what to do about evil.  Does polytheism help us understand the problem of evil or create a healthier way of wrestling with the unknown?  Lefkowitz says yes.   But I hardly think that assigning evil to the conflict between the gods or saying that the gods’ disinterest in human affairs gives freedom to humans to develop inquiring minds or engage in philosophy.  A richer resource is the Judeo-Christian tradition.

For example, rather than assign evil to divine conflict, biblical texts suggest that evil is the result of human action.  Rather than pooh-pooh a god that “permits” such evil, these texts present God as actually suffering with and on behalf of humankind.  Though the complaint is often lodged that the God of the Bible is hard-nosed and vengeful, one would find it hard to make such claims if reads the prayer book of ancient Israel—what we know today as the Psalms.

Furthermore, it has come to be quite popular to think that to be a person of faith is to park your brains and blindly follow whatever the faith tradition says.  However, it was people of faith who ushered in the Enlightenment and brought to light the scientific method.  Whether one considers the discovery and use of ancient Greek philosophical texts and the interest in ancient texts the Christian humanist Erasmus offered in the sixteenth century or the development of scientific inquiry with Isaac Newton in the late seventeenth century the consistent thread is that of persons of faith seeking to understand. God had created the world and human beings, distinct from all other parts of the creation, bear that creative image of God.

This image of God presents us with two important realities.  First, human beings have an incredible capacity to create and to do good.  Second, these same capacities, limited by our physical nature, usher in the reality of evil.  The faiths that are rooted in the Bible are faiths that understand well the extraordinary beauty and possibility of humans on one hand and of the great tragedy and limitations that bind human possibility with evil on the other.

So rather than look to a pantheon of gods and goddesses to blame for our troubles or  perhaps to re-envision those Greek deities for a way to present a pseudo-tolerance for each other which really amounts to indifference, I would suggest a revisiting the Judeo-Christian vision of the world—a world brilliant and flawed.  And at the center of our reflection about the human predicament is the wisdom of biblical texts about a God who is engaged with humankind in restoring, healing ways.