What I am realizing is that the most important doctrine of Christianity is not the power of love, but rather the fear of eternal damnation. Who can think calmly and rationally when the possibility is put on the table of going to Hell FOREVER? You do not win converts through cultivating love in them, through expanding them, but rather by putting the literal fear of God–an ostensibly loving God, who nonetheless was “forced” to create Hell–into them.
Many early Christians were eager martyrs. In his snarky style, Gibbon makes this quite clear. The Romans, for their part, were quite confused. I think it was Marcus Antoninus who said something close to “Surely those who want to die cannot fail to find themselves rope or a precipice?”
Surely we can consider a religion which cultivates an eagerness for death one which is NOT life affirming?
The Catholic Church is not built on love. Of course, there are charities–public charity actually being a key means of developing support in the early years, one which is used in the same manner and to the same effect by gangsters in New York, Italy and elsewhere, who hand out Christmas gifts to kids, and provide food to the hungry–but can it truly be said that the love of love outweighs the fear of eternal pain in most? Once you have been “saved”, of course, it frees you to focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, but does not the power of the Pope to “excommunicate”, which is to say, to condemn to infinite pain, carry more weight? Or did it not, for many centuries?
It seems, increasingly, that given a supposition of eternal hell, that Islam is actually a far more logical religion. Rather than let people be condemned to hell, they go out and conquer them and convert them at the point of a sword. They create an airtight society geared to public piety, and to the continual reinforcement of all the behaviors which will help a person avoid hell.
They avoid a rich, entrenched, politically powerful clergy by conflating temporal and religious power in a Caliph. They avoid ambiguity through a clear text, with clear rules. There can be, in theory, no question if someone is “saved” or not.
Ponder, if you will, the existential angst that must have attended, and continues to attend, the lives of those whose beliefs posit that only a certain number of people can be saved, or even worse that Divine Grace–what a word!!!–alone can save them from a pit that that same divine being created.
These ideas can and have driven countless millions–billions, certainly–mad.
We need to move past the religions of the past. We cannot and will not reconstitute globally even the best religions, such as Buddhism. We need a wedding of society and science, but a science which is honest, which includes the data about an after-life, about psi, about a cosmos which is conscious.
Increasingly, it is my honest belief that Christianity, as it has come to be expressed, has been a curse on humanity, not because of the value it places on love and service, and sacrifice, but because of the doctrine which it alone taught, of eternal suffering.
For their part, the Romans and Jews and many other polytheists didn’t really think about the after-life at all; and among the Asians there were heavens and hells, but none lasted forever.