"Yes, you heard me right. I propose the serious and sustained reading of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as a Lenten penance."
"You've got to be kidding, That's positively outrageous.."
"Perhaps it is. But I'm on kidding. I'm quite serious."
"But you've named three of the most militant atheists of modern times, three founding fathers of secular humanism."
"I know, though I like to think of them as great modern theologians of original sin. In any case, it is precisely their critique of religion that I recommend for Lenten reflection, more specifically their critique of the Christianity of the Christendom in which they lived as unbelievers." ...
Perhaps we need to see Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, along with Luther and Barth, as expressing a Promethean protest against all the Zeuses of instrumental religion, the piety that reduces God to a means or instrument for achieving our own human purposes with professedly divine power and sanctification.
Merold Westphal
I think grade school introduced me to more about the Divine than church, Sunday School and even Bible School combined. These establishments only tried to reinforce in me what my parents brought to the table.
I can imagine them saying maybe not so much in words...
"This is how we see God... so this is all we have to pass along to you. All we can give you is what we embrace ourselves."
It was in Grade School that I was introduced to the way the Greeks looked at the Divine. It was in Grade 5 when I learned about characters like Zeus and Prometheus. Those stories captivated me so well that they are still residual in my memories as much as the stories of Jonah, Moses and Abraham.
No one in the bible introduced me to the reason for fire, but the Greeks had a story.
Prometheus was the God of Fire. The story has it that Zeus, the King of the Gods hid fire from the mortals. Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and brought it to the Earth. This angered Zeus and he inflicted severe punishments on the Earth and on Prometheus as a result. As an eleven years old, I can still remember the picture I had in my head of a figure of a man, but was identified as a god was tied to a rock where a scavenger bird came every day and ate from his insides. I looked up the story to refresh my memory and it was his liver that an eagle ate. It was replenished every day so the eagle could torment Prometheus again the next day with the same torture. This went on for thirty thousand years. (Ouch!)
That picture didn't leave my mind. I wondered what Prometheus had to gain to bring fire to the humans. Was it some kind of rare compassion, because the gods weren't big on compassion for humans. That was obvious in the stories I read. Whatever the reason, he did it and he suffered.
Today, I am grateful for fire. It keeps my house warm in the cold winters. Fire also gives me peaceful pleasure when I sit by the camp fire on the deck and watch the flames dance. I take for granted that this is a gift that might have cost somebody something. In the bible stories... fire just was. But in the story of Prometheus, I was given a character that sacrificed himself for my comfort and enjoyment. That is why I don't forget that story.
My infatuation with Greek Mythology carried on to my teen years when with an animated Hercules (or Heracles in the Greek) and then in my early adult years when Kevin Sorbo brought the character to life in "Hercules, the Legendary Journeys" . I again found myself enamoured by a son of Zeus who put humans ahead of the gods that tormented them.
"Salieri presents us with a vivid picture of the piety that reduces God to a means to the believer's own ends. Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche find this sort of piety to be the rule rather than the exception. Behind what professes to be love of God and neighbour, they regularly find love of self, disguised beyond recognition, at least to those who perpetrate this pious fraud. To see our three atheists as critics of instrumental religion could be to make them instruments for self-examination and sanctification. Reading them at any time of the year could be a Lenten spiritual exercise that could lead to godly sorrow and repentance 'that leads to salvation and brings no regret.'" Merold Westphal
I think of all the people who have sacrificed and endured wrath from "the gods" because they were bringing fire to humanity.
I find myself a grateful recipient of a different kind of fire now. The fire of wisdom, the fire of knowledge, the fire of freedom from religious conformity, the fire of critical thinking, the fire of doubt in the presented portrait of the divine. And in sitting by that fire, I am not lost or wasted upon. I am warmed and enriched.
Thank you to all the "Prometheuses" out there.
