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Dear david f and Suzeonline,

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I don’t want to be a spoilsport on such an auspicious occasion but I must confess that where you see social cohesion, I see communitarianism and growing intolerance among different religious communities.

I guess it’s a question of viewpoint: whether one looks at it from the inside or the outside.

It has nothing to do with religious belief or disbelief, just a question of perspective.

Both viewpoints are equally valid and true.

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Dear Banjo,

There is both cohesion and intolerance. Without cohesion in a group we are just a collection of atomised individuals who don't relate to each other. With cohesion necessarily comes intolerance as bonds within groups are purchased at the price of intolerance for those outside the group. The Nazis had a great love for each other. Cohesion and intolerance always co-exist.

Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote in "A History of Christianity":

"For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes."

Christian love and Christian intolerance go together. However, a world of atomised individuals is worse in my opinion.

The right balance between cohesion and intolerance is that which minimises human suffering.

Dear David and Banjo,

“Christianity and Judaism has one vision of God as being self-sacrificing love - God the merciful, the compassionate, according to the Islamic formula - and another vision of God as being a jealous God. … The jealous God’s chosen people easily fall into becoming intolerant persecutors … Perhaps the two visions of God, which I have called irreconcilable in the Judaic group of higher religions, have their roots in nature-worship and in man-worship respectively … the vision of God as being self-sacrificing love has, at any rate, one of its roots in the previous worship of a vegetarian-god who dies to give Man sustenance … The vision of God as being a jealous god undoubtedly has at least one of its roots in the worship of the tribe in the form of the god of the Chosen People, representing their collective power.”

(Arnold Toynbee, Christianity among the religions of the world, Charles Scribner’s Sons 1957.)

Dear George,

If we go by the Bible there are many Gods. There is the insecure God who keeps testing to see if his followers are true to him. He demands Abraham sacrifice his son. He allows Job to be put through trials to see if Job will forsake him. There is the God subject to unreasonable fits of anger who eliminates almost all life on earth by the flood and destroys the unity of humankind by creating different languages at Babel. There is the reasonable God who can discuss with Abraham how many righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah are required to save the cities from destruction. There is the Zeus-like God who impregnates a human female. One of the things that led me to atheism is the description of God as loving and kind which is contradicted by the many actions which are not consistent with that description. One aspect of God is inconsistent with another act of God. Those who believe the Bible might say the ways of the Lord are beyond human understanding. The explanation that seems more reasonable to me is that the God of the Bible is a farrago of inconsistent legends brought together.

Dear david f,

>>One aspect of God is inconsistent with another act of God. <<

I think the Toynbee quote is not about biblical exegesis, how to understand, interpret, this or that biblical story so as to bridge over the apparent contradictions, but about how he sees these two “irreconcilable” overall visions within the “Judaic group of higher religions”.

I like Toynbee’s insights, others might not. I do not think this irreconcilability he saw led him to outright atheism. The same as one would not reject contemporary physics because of the apparent “irreconcilability” of gravitation theory and quantum mechanics but tries to find a “higher” vision (theory) of the physical world that would bridge over this irreconcilability [Similarly one does not reject special theory of relativity as contradicting “common sense” because “common sense“dictates that if A moves with speed 2c/3 and B with the same speed in the opposite direction then the relative speed of A with respect to B is 4c/3 > c. ]

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Dear George,

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You quote from Toynbee’s “Christianity among the religions of the world” :

« Christianity and Judaism has one vision of God as being self-sacrificing love - God the merciful, the compassionate, according to the Islamic formula - and another vision of God as being a jealous God. »

Allow me to suggest, in this case as in the previous, that the difference is in the eye of the observer, not in the observed.

Need I add that I do not find this surprising as it is my firm conviction that the God image is merely a projection in the mind’s eye of each observer - or, should I say, believer - and tells us nothing of the character or personality of the “objective” God, if, indeed, there is any such entity.

I find eminently appropriate Toynbee’s choice of the term “vision” to describe this particular phenomenon.

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