있는 그대로의 나

남보다 자기를 낮추는 것은 결코 겸손이 아니다. 그것은 위선이다. 남을 자기보다 못하다고 여기면서 자신을 낮추어 허리를 굽혀 인사하는 것은, 마치 한 표를 얻기 위해 허리를 굽신 거리는 정치꾼과 같다. 남을 섬긴다는 것도 결코 겸손이 아니다. 우리에게 섬겨야 할 대상이 어디 있으며, 우리가 섬김을 받아야 할 만큼의 자격이 있는 것일까. 겸손이란 자연처럼 있는 그대로의 자기 모습을 숨김없이 보여주는 일이다. 우리가 진심으로 남을 변화시키려면 먼저 그를 사랑해야 한다. 남을 사랑하려면 그를 있는 그대로 인정해야 한다. 남을 있는 그대로 인정하려면 먼저 나를 있는 그대로의 모습으로 드러내 보여야 한다. 나를 있는 그대로의 모습으로 드러내 보이는 일이야말로 '겸손'이다. -최인호, 수상록<문장>에서

Why Christianity Fails

Is it moral to believe that your sins can be forgiven by the punishment of another person? Is it ethical to believe that? I would submit that the doctrine of vicarious redemption by human sacrifice is utterly immoral. I could say, if I really loved someone who'd been sentenced to prison, "If I could find a way of serving your sentence, I'd do it." I could do what Sydney Carton does in A Tale of Two Cities. "I'll take your place on the scaffold," but I can't take away your responsibilities, I can't forgive what you did, I can't say you didn't do it, I can't make you washed clean. The name for that in primitive Middle Eastern society was scapegoating. You pile the sins of the tribe on a goat and you drive that goat into the desert to die of thirst and hunger; and you think you've taken away the sins of the tribe: a positively immoral doctrine that abolishes the concept of personal responsibility on which all ethics and all morality must depend. It has a further implication. I'm told that I have to have a share in this human sacrifice even it took place long before I was born. I have no say in it happening, I wasn't consulted about it. Had I been present, I would've been bound to do my best to stop the public torture and execution of an eccentric preacher. I would do the same even now. No, no, I'm implicated in it myself, I myself drove in the nails, I was present at Calvary. It confirms the original filthy sin in which I was conceived and born the son of Adam in Genesis. Again, this may sound a mad belief but it is the Christian belief. Well, it's here that we find something very sinister about monotheism and about religious practice in general. It is incipiently at least, and I think often explicitly, totalitarian. I have no say in this. I am born under a celestial dictatorship which I could not have had any hand in choosing. I don't put myself under its government. I am told that it can watch me while I sleep. I'm told it can convict me of, here's the definition of totalitarianism, thought-crime- for what I think, I may be convicted and condemned. And if I commit a right action, it's only to evade this punishment and if I commit a wrong action I'm going to be caught up with not just punishment in life but even after I'm dead. In the old testament, gruesome as it is, recommending as it, of genocide, racism, tribalism, slavery, and the displacement and destruction of others, terrible as the old testament gods are, they don't promise to punish the dead. There's no talk of torturing you after the earth has closed over the Malachites. Only told when gentle Jesus, meek and mild, makes his appearance are those who won't accept the message told they must depart into everlasting fire. Is this morality? Is this ethics? I submit not only is it not, not only does it come with the false promise of vicarious redemption, but it is the origin of the totalitarian principle which has been such a burden and shame to our species for so long. I further think that it undermines us in our most essential integrity. It dissolves our obligation to live and witness in truth. Which of us would say that we would believe something because it might cheer us up? Or tell our children something was true because it might dry their eyes? Which of us indulges in wishful thinking? Who really cares about the pursuit of truth at all costs and at all hazards? Do you not hear it said repeatedly of religion and by the religious themselves that, "Well, it may not be really true. The stories may be fairy tales. The history may be dubious. But it provides consolation." Can anyone hear themselves saying this or have it said of them without some kind of embarrassment? Without the concession that thinking here is directly wishful that yes, it would be nice if you can throw you sins and responsibilities on someone else and have them resolved. But it's not true. And it's not morally sound. On our basic integrity, knowing right from wrong, and being able to choose the right action over wrong one, I think one must repudiate the claim that 'one doesn't have this moral discrimination innately but no, it must come from the agency of a celestial dictatorship which one must love and simultaneously fear.' What is it like? I never tried it. I've never been a cleric. What is it like to lie to children for a living and tell them that they have an authority that they must love (compulsory love-- what a grotesque idea) and be terrified of at the same time. What's that like, I want to know. And that we don't have an innate sense of right and wrong. What is it like? I can personalize it to this extent. My mother's Jewish ancestors are told that until they got to Mt. Sinai, they've been dragging themselves around the desert under the impression that adultery, murder, theft, and perjury were all fine. They get to Mt. Sinai only to be told it's not kosher after all. I'm sorry. Excuse me. We must have more self respect than that for ourselves and for others. Of course the story's a fiction. It's a fabrication exposed conclusively by Israeli archaeology. Nothing of the sort ever took place but suppose we took the metaphor. It's an insult. It's an insult to us. It's an insult to our deepest integrity. You're a clot of blood, a piece of mud. You're lucky to be alive. God fashioned you for his convenience even though you're born in filth and sin and even though every religion that has ever been is distinguished principally by the idea that we should be disgusted by our own sexuality (name me a religion that does not play upon that fact). So you're lucky to be here, originally sinful, and covered in shame and filth as you are. You're a wretched creature. BUT take heart, the universe is designed with you in mind and heaven has a plan for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I close by saying, I can't believe there's a thinking person here who does not realize that our species would begin to grow something like its full height if it left this childishness behind, if it emancipated itself from this sinister,childish nonsense. -Christopher Hitchens

불타는 그들의 신앙을 추상적인 범신론에서 위장된 무신론으로 바꾸었다. 해탈이란 이름을 가진 욕구의 선택법. 천 개의 작은 욕망은 버렸으나 그 모든 것을 다 합친 것보다 더 큰 욕망을 얻었다. 해탈을 향해 타오르는 그 치열한 욕망은 어쩔 것이랴. 만 개의 번뇌는 껐지만, 그걸 위해 타오르는, 하나지만 만 개를 합친 것보다 더 세찬 번뇌의 불길은 어쩔 것이랴. -이문열, <사람의 아들>에서

Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. - Robert Ingersoll

Noam Chomsky

I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that. My view could be wrong, of course, but my position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief. While I think in principle people should not have irrational beliefs, I should say that as a matter of fact, it is people who hold what I regard as completely irrational beliefs who are among the most effective moral actors in the world, in many respects. They're among the worst, but also among the best, even though the moral beliefs are ostensibly the same. Take, say, the solidarity movement in Central America, which I think is what you probably had in mind. To a large extent, it comes out of mainstream Christianity, based on beliefs that have had outrageous human consequences in the past, and that I think are totally indefensible. In this case, they happen to lead to some of the most courageous, heroic, and honourable human action that's taking place anywhere in the world. Well, that's how life is, I guess. It doesn't come in neat little packages. [The US] is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment. You get extremely strange results. For example, I think about seventy-five percent of the population has a literal belief in the devil. There was a poll several years ago on evolution. People were asked their opinion on various theories of evolution, of how the world came to be what it is. The number of people who believed in Darwinian evolution was less than ten percent. About half the population believed in a church doctrine of divine-guided evolution. Most of the rest presumably believed that the world was created a couple of thousand years ago. This runs across the board. These are very unusual results. I don't see how one can "believe in organized religion." What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines. Who wrote the Bible? Current scholarship, to my knowledge, assumes that the material that constitutes the Old Testament was put together from various oral and folk traditions (many of them going far back) in the Hellenistic period. That was one of several currents, of which the collection that formed the New Testament was another. Biblical archaeology was developed early in this century in an effort to substantiate the authenticity of the Biblical account. It's by now generally recognized in Biblical scholarship that it has done the opposite. The Bible is not a historical text, and has only vague resemblances to what took place, as far as can be reconstructed. Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of "support for Israel" -- support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven -- or so I understand, again, not from close reading. They have provided enormous economic aid, again of a dubious sort. One of their goals seems to be to rebuild the Temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which presumably means war with the Arab world -- one of the goals, perhaps, in fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon. So they strongly support Israeli power and expansionism, and help fund it and lobby for it; but they also support actions that are very harmful and objectionable to most of its population -- as do Jewish fundamentalist groups, mostly rooted in the US, which, after all, is one of the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies in the world.