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Christian leaders' Easter messages blast conspiracy theories
 The Vatican and the Archbishop of Canterbury have used Easter messages to denounce the popularity of conspiracy theories. In his Easter Sunday sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams attacked conspiracy theories such as The Da Vinci Code and the so-called "Gospel of Judas". The latter manuscript claims Christ himself asked Judas to betray him. "We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups," Dr Williams said. "This has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it's only natural to expect it when we turn to ancient texts," he said.
| That could be because clergymen like Dr. Williams don't provide a strong and consistent interpretation of the scriptures which would anchor Christianity to Christian thought, rather than to... ummm... whatever the hell else it is that Rowan's interested in. |
Dr Williams says the texts are divisive. "We treat them as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story," he said. Vatican priests also attacked The Da Vinci Code while in his first Easter Sunday sermon in St Peter's Square, the Pope dismissed the "Gospel of Judas".
I'm apparently wrong in my assumption that the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. I believe it's based on an earlier work of fiction in which the Christ family is somehow tied to the Merovingian pretender in France and similar nonsense. I confess I haven't been following the current story, but if it features 2000-year-old bloodlines, secret societies, and the last of the Merwigs, I wouldn't expect the end of civilization as we know it.
The Gospel of Judas is a similarly goofy story, appealing to those of a reflexively Revolutionary turn of mind, rather than to anyone with any sense. There are a number of Gnostic gospels, to include the Gospel of Peter, and they've been available to both scholars and the curious since they were first written. The Judas gospel apparently fell out of favor with the early Christians even earlier than most, which is why the poor condition of the most recent reprints. That's because Judas' sin was one of betrayal, not (like Peter) a lapse of courage or (like Thomas) a lapse of belief.
The also-ran gospels (sometimes referred to as the Lost Gospels) are more contradictory than the four "real" gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John complement each other, while Peter, for instance, shows a rather un-Christlike Christ in many cases. I believe it was the Gospel of Peter that had the young Jesus turning some local bad boys into bears.
The heart of the two stories, though, is what the Archdruid and the Pope are talking about, and it does represent a serious problem to Western Civilization. I've pointed out before that we live in a world where verities are constantly being turned on their heads. It's a world of sympathetic vampires and evil clowns, where Mom's a bitch, apple pie oozes deadly cholesterol and probably alar, and baseball is the haven of millionaire druggies. The Boy Scouts are homophobes, racism is rampant just under the surface of what only appears to be a tolerant and easy-going culture, and marriage either isn't for anyone or it's for everyone, to include a boy and his dog. There are no heroes, everyone has feet of clay, and there's no such thing as progress. One culture is as good as another, and the differences among Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, and any other system you'd care to name are so negligible as not to be worth mentioning.
That's pretty much post-modernism in a nutshell, I think, and it's a perniciously parasitical growth that will eventually kill its host unless it's excised. It will be, I suspect, the next war after the one we're having now with Islam, unless its presence in our cultural system weakens us sufficiently that we lose this one. |
Posted by: Fred 2006-04-17 |
