Immaculate Misconceptions
In Christianity, Jesus Christ is the son of God. This is a very peculiar statement if you didn’t grow up with it. Frankly, it’s a downright ambiguous statement even if you did. Christians themselves, highly varying by sect, interpret this in many different ways.
Taken too literally, however—as is all too easy to do with no Christians around to correct someone’s wrong assumption—it rather makes the Christian God sound like Zeus, who one day took human form, walked up, impregnated a human woman with holy sperm, & created a demi-god. And then left.
Even to Christians—but certainly to Muslims—that god would not be God. That would be an intolerable blasphemy against the unknowable power & Mystery of the divine. People who worshipped that god would be pagans…or, infidels. Any suggestion that there is any similarity between that “Christian” god & the Islamic God, therefore, would be instantaneously & deeply offensive….& require a 4 hour conversation in Indonesian to remedy, as a Lutheran friend of ours just did.
And it seems she did. At the end of this conversation (by her report), the previously-offended man agreed that in fact the Christian God & the Islamic God DO sound remarkably similar. Which many religious scholars from the world's three main monotheistic religions—Islam, Christianity & Judaism—more or less take as read. They continue to talk.
Do such conversations make a difference in the world, where there is an endless re-supply of wrong ideas about totally basic things? I like to think so. I bet every one of us knows a guy, who knows a guy, who once talked for hours with a Whosit who was great, very cool & smart & funny & nice--not at all like what we'd thought of Whosits all this time--& so now we like Whosits, too. We make important decisions based on our stories.
That’s a talkative guy; maybe he’ll tell different stories about Christians now. Better than nothing.
Taken too literally, however—as is all too easy to do with no Christians around to correct someone’s wrong assumption—it rather makes the Christian God sound like Zeus, who one day took human form, walked up, impregnated a human woman with holy sperm, & created a demi-god. And then left.
Even to Christians—but certainly to Muslims—that god would not be God. That would be an intolerable blasphemy against the unknowable power & Mystery of the divine. People who worshipped that god would be pagans…or, infidels. Any suggestion that there is any similarity between that “Christian” god & the Islamic God, therefore, would be instantaneously & deeply offensive….& require a 4 hour conversation in Indonesian to remedy, as a Lutheran friend of ours just did.
And it seems she did. At the end of this conversation (by her report), the previously-offended man agreed that in fact the Christian God & the Islamic God DO sound remarkably similar. Which many religious scholars from the world's three main monotheistic religions—Islam, Christianity & Judaism—more or less take as read. They continue to talk.
Do such conversations make a difference in the world, where there is an endless re-supply of wrong ideas about totally basic things? I like to think so. I bet every one of us knows a guy, who knows a guy, who once talked for hours with a Whosit who was great, very cool & smart & funny & nice--not at all like what we'd thought of Whosits all this time--& so now we like Whosits, too. We make important decisions based on our stories.
That’s a talkative guy; maybe he’ll tell different stories about Christians now. Better than nothing.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 10:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home