January 2, 2012

  • Church

    Discord's family invited me to church, and so yesterday morning, I went to church and listened to a sermon.

    Holy project to infinity, it was the most despairing thing I'd heard in a long whiles. Yesterday's theme was that humans were helpless and could only be saved by belief in Jesus. The speaker emphasized over and over that we could not save ourselves by our own power, and that salvation was from accepting Jesus as one's savior, rather from following laws or attending church or doing good deeds. We were each given a little pamphlet with some quotes, the most thematically-relevant one reproduced below:

    "A truly humble man is sensible of his natural distance from God; of his dependence on Him; of the insufficiency of his own power and wisdom; and that it is by God's power that he is upheld and provided for, and that he needs God's wisdom to lead and guide him, and His might to enable him to do what he ought to do for Him." --- Jonathan Edwards

    Contrast to that the opening of the second stanza of L'Internationale, the anthem of communist nations:

    "There are no supreme saviours
    Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.
    Producers, let us save ourselves. . . ."

    All the while, the words learned helplessness echoed in my mind's voice, over and over. Why are you telling your congregation that they are helpless? And I thought about us as a species, we who are constrained always by the workings of the physical world, we who can do nothing more than put some of the things around us in different places. By understanding the workings of the world, we manipulated the objects around us so that when we released them, they fell in certain ways, triggered certain other objects to move, causing things to come into contact or break contact, and it all happens in a way that is useful to us. We programmed the world around us. Everything we discover is a bit more of the language that the universe is programmed in that we become a master of, and then we use it to program the universe to our will. We humans built buildings rising towards the sky. We humans looked at birds and found a way to fly. We humans sent the Voyager space probes out into space. All throughout history, we have looked at the world and bent it to our will. And then, the church speaks, and it says, you need a supernatural force to save you because you cannot save yourselves.

    But I've grown all too used to humankind being grand adventurers, heroes who struggle relentlessly in a confusing world, and ultimately, we progress.

    It saddened me that the speaker spoke so fervently of such a pessimistic vision of humans, and it seemed to him like a glorious thing. It seemed that he felt honored and fortunate to think of us as such. He had outsourced his salvation to another source. He found it beautiful. I was frightened to think that perhaps all the people in the room were feeling deeply moved by such a message as that one! I hoped that some of them would think, no, I want to be in control. But I guess if they've been to enough church sessions, they'd just dismiss it as human folly or something. Why, why are we supposed to glory in our misery?

    As we walked outside, I looked at the bright bright sky. The world is beautiful. It is beautiful if there is a god, and it is beautiful if there isn't.