Surfin' the drift

And the greatest of these is ...

The biggest gripe I have with organised religion is that it puts blinkers on people. Smart people, learned people and perhaps even otherwise wise people. Everything tends to get rendered in right and wrong, good and bad or black and white - I prefer to paint my pictures in shades of grey.

In any event, I have always been intrigued by the bit that goes “and the greatest of these is love”. You hear it at weddings, every fifth Sunday of the month and sometimes even at funerals. If it’s in the book, it must be good (if it is not, then it is profane which is not as bad as it sound - just means outside - rather than inside). Blinkers.

There was a point in my past when the only version of the Bible I used for both religious and non-religious purposes was the King James Bible (I recently read a cracking good book on the politics of that version of the book but that is another story). In this version, the word is rendered as “charity” not love. Now charity is or has become a bad word - synonymous with donation and self-aggrandisement.

This is where it gets interesting. Two dozen of the smartest, most learned and wisest people in renaissance England with all those degrees from Cambridge, the rest of the Europe as well as the other place - and they chose the word “charity”. But they were right and when the placement of your head depends on you getting the word of God absolutely accurate (bit of an irony - the word of God is after all revealed not created but not as ironic as the blade of the executioner’s axe) then they were not about to make silly mistakes.

There are or were four Greeks words for love (apart from the kind of Greek love that dares not speak its name) - eros (which we all know about and if you don’t, you don’t get out of the house often enough), storgos (as in ice-cream or parents or children), philia (as in friendship or brotherly love) and agape (which is what we are talking about here).

Now agape was a virtually unused word until Paul started bandying about in his letters and the root of which lies in the Greek words for benevolence and good will. Neither of these words sound like very much and at one level, I don’t think it is about very much. Paul is comparing agape to two other things - faith and hope. He says there are three things which last (I’ll come to this later) and of these three, the most important (and not the greatest) is good will.

What of the things which do not last? The context of this epistle was that the people in Corinth (which was not very dissimilar to modern day Los Angeles or the Costa del Sol) who went to church were having an unholy bun fight about whose gifts were the greatest. Think of a room full of rappers dissing one another but minus the guns. So Paul (whom I am convinced started out as and perhaps remained a Roman spy to the end) in a fit of righteous indignation shoots off a rocket of a letter in chastisement. Whose yo' Daddy, boy?

The best bit of the letter (and I have paraphrased this) is the beginning of the same section and it goes - if I (by which he means you) preach like an angel or make prophesies and all that cool shit but do not even have a shred of good will for your fellow men then you are no more than an irritating noise. All this standing up and making noise (self-aggrandisement, again) will not last, they will pass into nothingness. Ain't that a fact, m**********r? There are only three things which last and the most important is good will towards your fellow men. Not too much to ask, is it?

This is the most telling indictment against organised religion I have ever come across and as it is in the book, it cannot be profane, can it? The man told it like it was - these people who went to church were distinctly lacking in the most basic benevolence towards the other members of the flock. Now I don’t think this is the exclusive preserve of the early Christian church (there must have been a few massacres in mosques and who can forget the one in the Shaolin temple at the hands (literally) of the White Lotus clan) but hey - plus ca change and all that.

That’s why I don’t go to church any more on a Sunday morning or at Easter or even Christmas (even though I love - like as in storgos- Christmas carols and Gregorian chants, icons and even a little bit of incense).

Here endeth the lesson - go in peace. And consider the lilies in the fields and the birds in the air.

posted by porcorosso @ 10:26 PM