Christianity Without God by Maguire Daniel C

Author:Maguire, Daniel C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW

Once again, beliefs and myths do not arise from a contextual void. Nothing is intelligible outside its history said the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and that includes religious dogmas like afterlife. When Herod Antipas heard of Jesus condemning adultery, he thought that John the Baptist has returned from the grave to torment him. Resurrection was a plausible happening in that culture.

Luke has the story of a nasty rich man named Dives, a biblical Ebenezer Scrooge. He lived in wealth and showed no compassion for the poor. He was cast like old Marley into Hades and there became aware of how the poor he scorned were basking in the embrace of Abraham in heaven. He wanted to warn his relatives so they would not share his fate.

Luke was not being original when he penned this parable. He was borrowing from a tale in the “Egyptian Book of the Dead,” from the second millennium BCE about a rich man repenting his sins in the court of Osiris. Again it shows the emergence of what Robert Wright calls “morally contingent afterlife,” afterlife prospects used as discipline in this life. This came to be the standard perception in the Christian story.

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