FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

I have to turn once again to Harper’s, but this time to February’s issue, in particular Matthew Chapman’s article, “God or Gorilla.”

Chapman is a descendant of Charles Darwin and managed to attend Pennsylvania’s recent Dover Panda Trial (a name coined by York Daily Record columnist Mike Argento), which resulted in a ruling that resoundingly and methodically tossed Intelligent Design from biology classrooms.

That explained, it’s not actually the evolution “debate” I want to get into here. Rather, there’s a tiny piece of Chapman’s article which I want to yank out of context.

Somewhere in the middle, Chapman describes filming an interview with a local reverend, being videotaped while doing so, and having a portion of that video (where Chapman describes being an agnostic) played the reverend’s church-going public.

When I upbraided [Reverend] Groves about this — he had not told me I was to be used in this way — he shrugged off my objections and told me it had been “educational.” He and his flock concluded that I had a different understanding of Christianity. Coming from Europe, mine was “more socialistic,” while his was more concerned with “individual salvation.”

Emphasis added there because that’s the bit I want to pull out of context, because it sent me off on something of a mental tangent after I read it.

However, much like my earlier item wherein I pulled out of context a segment from an article about viruses, I’m not sure I’ve quite got my conceptions around where I wanted to take the idea. Other than to say that I’ve been pondering the notion that any system which evinces to focus on “individual salvation” is a system ripe for abuse by those seeking power over other people’s lives.

I know, I know. Someone will chime in with the accusation that any system which is “more socialistic” is a system ripe for abuse by those seeking power over people’s lives. But the thing to remember on that count is that what the reverend in question viewed as “more socialistic” isn’t actually socialistic, but instead a preference towards respect for the social contract.

What I can’t quite figure, in fact, is why a spiritual life devoted to one’s “individual salvation” much qualifies as being Christian at all, given that the man for whom the religion is named tended, in fact, to preach about the social contract.

It keeps seeming to me that any system which demands of its followers a commitment primarily to “individual salvation” runs the rather hazardous risk of being abused by people whose own power and control would be greatly enhanced by keeping people focused selfishly on themselves instead of primarily (or at least to a great extent) with how humanely they treat each other.

Which is not to say that everyone who is concerned with their “individual salvation” also entirely disregards the social contract. It would be pointless to say that, since it simply isn’t true.

But I keep getting stuck on the idea that a focus on “individual salvation” is a focus on protecting one’s own ass in some theorized future existence at the expense of the one we all share in the here and now.

Which is why (although I said this wasn’t going to be about the evolution “debate”) is makes perfect sense for the Individual Salvationists to be the backers of Intelligent Design.

By which I mean, I think, that if the primary concern is with getting an official stamp of approval on one’s soul in order to pass through the mythical gates one day, understanding anything about the way our world in the here and now actually functions — siding, in other words, with the importance of scientific principles and the method that comes with them — becomes almost entirely irrelevant.

All of which is an extraordinarily long-winded way of explaining that I’ve got some kind of thoughts on the notion of “individual salvation” but I can’t quite seem to cobble together just what those thoughts are, or what, exactly, they might mean.