What is the whore of Babylon - part 3

For a thousand years the whore dressed up in church clothes and did a pretty good rendition of a "nice" girl. Then the church did something that began the process of flushing them out into the open: the church decided that it couldn't be wrong anymore.

The official claim of Papal infallibility (the notion that a pope can never be wrong while carrying out his official duties) didn't come until the 1800's, but it had been the normal working order since medieval times. The medieval church was the one that decided to consolidate its power and prestige, and to do that it couldn't go around admitting that it made mistakes.

Now the church in Western history had actually been the prime supporter of scientific progress, and that lasted up until Renaissance times. Most of the Western advances either came at the hands of monks or through the support of some church agency. But once the church leaders decided to agree with certain scientific theories it was stuck, because now if you remember, it could no longer admit to being wrong. Thus Copernicus and Galileo and a host of others would make discoveries and then find themselves in the peculiar position of either keeping their finds to themselves or going to prison.

At this point there is something that needs to be clarified. I've previously said that all the world's major religions have a gnostic variant, and that's true... to a point. It ceases to be true if you consider Mormonism a 'major world religion'. Gnostics don't care much for the Mormon faith. You see, it's hard for a gnostic to put much stock in a system of knowledge if that system has no internal logic and can be best described as... well... stupid.

Mormonism works very much like a classic mystery religion. For the Mormons, as you progress in the faith, you get to go to a special study room and see presentations on all the really "special" elements of the faith -- this involves a churchmen giving a multimedia presentation on how you are going to one day zip around the cosmos keeping your long-suffering wife pregnant for all eternity. The Mormons lose members as they teach these special "truths". A good number of ex-Mormons describe the difficulty in putting their faith in a system that made no logical sense.

Christianity is not Mormonism. At least, it's not supposed to be.

The Christian Bible invites skepticism. It holds itself to the standard of logic, so much so that John actually refers to God as the great "Logos" or logic in the first chapter of his gospel -- your Bible likely translates this as "Word" as in, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made man...." and "Word" isn't a bad translation since most folks would scratch their heads if it read, "In the beginning was the 'Logic', but you need to understand 'Word' is correct because of what a 'word' is; it's a discrete piece of rational thought. In other words it's the difference between "hello" and "olhel" where the first one contains a rational thought and the second one doesn't. What I'm trying to say is that the Bible makes a very fundamental claim to logic and reason. A Mormon can look you in the face and explain why they accept Mormonism in spite of the logical inconsistencies in the Book of Mormon and the lack of any archaeological support. A Mormon has "faith" and it's okay for their faith to run contrary to logic and observation. A Christian does not have this luxury.

Case in point -- right now professing Christian Kirk Cameron is going around handing out copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species that have a preface which tries to undermine the theory of evolution and in stead prop up the "Christian" theory called young earth creation. Now, I guarantee that Mr. Cameron has no little, and very possibly no idea where young earth creation comes from and that he likely doesn't care; he has faith, and why should rational observation stand in the way of something grander like faith.

Most people think that young earth creation comes from the Bible. It doesn't. It comes from a man named James Ussher, an Irish Archbishop in the 1600's, and no, he did not say that the world was formed in the year 4,000 BC. What he actually said was that the world was formed on October 22, 4004 BC... in the evening... I am not joking.

The way he came up with this astonishingly precise figure was to add up the ages found in the Genesis genealogies, apply it to the Julian calender and voila, an exact date of world creation. His timeline found popularity and was inserted into the back of the King James Bible, at a time when everyone was buying and reading the King James Bible. Now Christians are funny in that sometimes we don't always discriminate between "Scriptural" and "Biblical" and by that I mean that we often tend to assign the same sort of 'infallibility' to the footnotes, inserts, maps, and whatnot, that we do for the actual text.

I personally have no problem attempting to defend the claim that the writers of Scripture were divinely inspired, I would have a much harder time trying to lay that at the feet of the modern day Biblical scholars. But Renaissance believers had no prior experience with Biblical scholarship and they accepted what they were given, cover to cover. The 4004 date became institutionalized as if it were the work of an apostle, rather than a Renaissance Catholic archbishop. "Faith" has keep it alive since. But I will give Archbishop Ussher this: working with the assumptions of the time his theory was actually semi-logical. That's three and a half centuries ago. Today, it's nothing short of ridiculous.

Next post, I pick up with creation/evolution and hopefully start explaining where those pesky gnostics went after Renaissance times.