Stumble it!I’m sorry! Really. I am.
posted in Religion by themaiden |I’ve been thinking about apologies, but not the kind in the headline. I’ve been thinking about apologetics– “the study of the defense of a doctrine or belief“.
The term apologetics etymologically derives from the Classical Greek word apologia. In the Classical Greek legal system two key technical terms were employed: the prosecution delivered the kategoria (κατηγορία), and the defendant replied with an apologia. To deliver an apologia then meant making a formal speech to reply and rebut the charges, as in the case of Socrates’ defense.
The term is now almost always applied in religious contexts, but such is not absolutely necessary.
Now let’s talk about Homer– the one that wrote the Iliad, not the one that likes donuts. If we found in Homer a passage where the soul is described as dissipating into the wind at death, and another where it is described as descending to the shadowy underworld, would we go out of our way to reconcile the two concepts? If we noticed that two ancient authors give conflicting reports about the parentage of some god or goddess, would we spend our days reasoning the discrepancies into agreement? If we noticed that the time line in some tale could not possibly be accurate, would we spend generations constructing elaborate corrections? If we found a passage that tells us that Zeus is slow to anger and just, and another that tells us he is short-tempered and vengeful, how many minds would we put to work building a bridge between the ideas that we can somehow argue that the two are not contradictory? How much effort would we waste reconciling peculiarities in the Enuma Elish? How much energy would we expend arguing that when the Egyptians talked about the four corners of the Earth they were really talking about a sphere, and when the Babylonians talked about the ‘dome’ of the heavens they were really describing the solar system as scientists now understand it? How large an edifice of definition, association, and inference would we build to prove that the Egyptian hierarchy of gods, which comes almost in almost as many varieties as there were temples, is in fact utterly self consistent? How much time would it be before we concluded the obvious– that the accounts are just not consistent?
“Not much time” is my guess. Yet apologists, theologians, have spent thousands of years on just these sorts of things. I can’t help but be stunned by the waste of brainpower, and I am left asking ‘Why?” The answer, I think, has got to be this: “To pour oneself into such efforts at reconciliation, you’ve got to start with the assumption, the dogmatic assumption, that your text is absolutely accurate and cannot be wrong.” You are left then, fitting the facts to the text and, of course, fitting the text to itself, even where the fit is tragically bad. Hence the complicated apologetics that would seem so foolish if attempted with such texts as the Iliad or the Book of the Dead.
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