The voices had a little conversation in my head the other day. (In order to understand this post, you need to realize that the voices are my inner representations of people or ideas. When I say the atheist said this, or so and so said that, it’s just a form of play acting.)
I was listening to Handel’s Messiah (I believe it was “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”) and the atheist/skeptic chimed in with a criticism of the idea of sacrifice.
“It’s barbaric and primitive to think that God would require an animal, or worse, a human sacrifice before he could forgive sin.”
The fundamentalist was about to break in with a defense, but I had only recently listened to a Jordan Peterson lecture that was still ringing in my ears, so Dr. Peterson replied.
“Why do you assume that it’s God that requires this? If mankind has a collective sense of justice and reciprocity, it’s likely that we would project this onto God as a representation of our inner demons. Some people, you know, can’t bear to be forgiven without making amends.”
“Exactly,” the atheist replies. “All this ‘sacrifice for sin’ stuff is a sick, primitive attitude that we can safely do away with.”
“What makes you think those same dark themes aren’t still around?” Dr. Peterson replies. “Have washing machines and cell phones changed the human psyche that deeply? I don’t think so. In fact, I can guarantee you, from decades of clinical practice, that there’s a dark undercurrent to human psychology that would scare you half to death if you got the barest glimpse of it.”
“Then it’s something we need to grow out of,” the atheist replies, “just like tribalism and sexual taboos and such.”
“That’s a lot harder than you think,” Dr. Peterson replied. “And it’s curious to me that you think it’s better to believe that this darkness is in man rather than in God. If there was some blood-thirsty, vindictive God out there who required sacrifices, at least we could reject him and move on — like the Klingons, who killed their God [Sorry, the Star Trek voice blended with Peterson’s voice there for a moment]. But if the problem is in man, then we can’t be rid of it that easily.”
At this point, the liberal Christian joined the conversation.
“Maybe God condescended to our weakness and expressed himself in those terms because he knew it was the only way for us to heal. Let’s accept atheist’s premise that a just God wouldn’t really require such things, but he accommodated us in the hope that we would eventually grow out of it.”
“Grow out of that and other things,” the atheist said with some snark.
“Neither of you are getting the saddest aspect of this story,” the prophet chimed in. “It is man’s dark psychology — not God’s justice — that requires sacrifice, but God’s condescension is not simply His decision to go along with some foolishness for a while. He participated in it. What do you think it means that Christ took on the sins of the world? That’s not only our sinful actions and thoughts, but our deep dysfunction as well. He looked down on a dreadfully sick humanity and said, ‘this is what they need to be healed,’ so He sent His Son to die for our sins. All of them.”
Fundamentalist can’t take this. “Scripture is quite clear on this point. ‘Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.’ I like your idea that ‘taking on the sins of the world’ has a deeper psychological meaning than we might have suspected, but you can’t get around the idea of substitutionary atonement.”
“If you read the Bible your way then you can’t,” Dr. Peterson admitted. “But that way of reading the Bible is not holding up very well in the modern world.”
“Let me hear more about this,” Dr. Peterson says to the prophet, pulling him aside for a private talk. “What you’re saying might help to harmonize Jung and the Bible and still have room for belief in God.”
Then Nietzsche joins in the conversation and says, “God is dead.”