6 March 2024 Matthew 5:17-19
Doubt everything.
Don’t believe anything until you have taken it apart and examined the whole thing, down to its smallest elements. And then say only the things about it that make rational sense.
That is how we got modern science, and modern industry. It is how we got cell phones, and vaccinations, automobiles and airplanes, laptops, superfoods and the internet. That is how we have finally, after centuries of self-induced immaturity, finally grown up.
All these things have been such powerful blessings that we have come to believe that the way we got them is the way we get every good thing. Doubt everything. Don’t believe anything until you have taken it apart and examined the whole thing down to its smallest parts. And then say only the things about it that make rational sense.
So why aren’t we more happy? Why is pornography a billion-dollar industry that still preys upon the vulnerable to make its high-tech products that tempt weak people to poison their most intimate relationships? Why have wars gotten worse? The 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of the world. We learned how to make weapons that can destroy the world several times over, and still threaten each other with them day and night. Why have we created virtual spaces where people mostly yell at each other, virtual spaces that have been made deliberately to be addictive, virtual spaces where children spend 5-6 hours every day, that make children learn less and cry more?
And why do we not doubt these things? Why do we not question the way we got here?
Maybe the way we got here is the problem.
Jane Goodall became convinced that western scientists knew very little about apes mostly because they had been studied in entirely the wrong way – in artificial environments like zoos and laboratories. She believed that we would learn more about apes by living around them, watching them at home, as it were, over many years. Jane Goodall discovered more about apes than anyone previously knew because she allowed the world of the apes to teach her. She didn’t “doubt everything,” try to control everything. She let the world of the apes teach her, and she learned more about apes than anyone ever had (cf. Robert Barron, The Strangest Way, pp. 26-28).
For over a century western intellectuals have thought that we should doubt religion, take it apart and examine it down to its smallest parts, and discard what didn’t make rational sense. That has resulted in the diminishment of religion in the west, and given us a secularism that promised a more sane, tolerant, peaceful, joyful world – a promise on which it has not delivered. Secularism has, in fact, delivered just the opposite sort of world.
So maybe we don’t get wisdom, toleration and joy by taking things apart and examining them rationally. Maybe the way forward is not to devalue and discard the artifacts of Christian tradition. Maybe the way forward is more like Jane Goodall’s with the apes. Enter the world of the Crucified Jew. Live with and among its heroes and traditions. Don’t edit but follow its commandments. Wonder about why it says, “Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19). Ponder the possibility that there is something about heaven and hell that you can’t find in a lab.
Think about why it is that the people who have the most meaning, purpose, joy, and peace in their lives are the people who have lived longest and deepest in the world of the Crucified Jew.
Maybe the way we got here is the problem. Maybe He really is the Way.
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