Minister John K. Williams warns about the dangers of clinging to a religion that denies knowledge and outlaws doubt.
As a matter of historical fact, what is commonly called "the old time religion" is not really old at all. It began in the late 18th century and became a widespread phenomenon by about the middle of the 19th century, albeit only in English-speaking nations.
By the end of the 19th century the adherents of the new revivalist gospel - people who typically knew little or nothing of church history - claimed that their religion was the original and only authentic understanding of Christianity.
So they called it, "the old time religion". In one of their hymns they sang that this "old time religion" was "good enough for Moses", even though Moses lived some 1200 years before Jesus and sang also that it was "good enough for Joshua", even though Joshua was a primitive Hebrew general who ordered the massacre of every man, woman and child in the city of Jericho. The content of the so-called "old time religion" is simple. Its basic presumption is the insignificance of human beings' present, earthly existence and preoccupation with a future existence.
But one cannot deny that this "old time religion" concerned and concerns itself with some matters other than escaping the fires of hell. It has converted many a drunkard to sobriety. It has sometimes made people kinder in their daily lives. It's social influence has, here and there, been good.
So is there any harm to it? I believe there is. A religion must be judged by thinking and informed people, not by what it, in the absence of available alternatives, might have done, but by what it does today.
First, the "old time religion" is in conflict with the little we human beings can claim, after millenniums of experience and experiment and thought, to know about the cosmos of which we are a part and about the processes that brought us to birth.
From its beginnings, the assertions of the "old time religion" were based on ignorance, even ignorance as to the nature and selection of the library of diverse books we call the Bible.
A religion that requires men and women - and boys and girls for that matter - to treat improbable conjectures as established, sure and certain truths, is destructive.
An evangelist who preaches the "old time religion" is asking hearers to stake the living of their lives upon beliefs for which there is no evidence whatsoever and that fly against humankind's painfully acquired knowledge of the world and of themselves. That is not simply, as we today are taught to say, a "big ask" but an outrageous ask.
The problem is not merely intellectual. The conscience is involved. Personal integrity requires that truth be believed and the false be rejected. The attainment of truth is possible and truth matters. An all-but-forgotten, late 19th century liberal Christian theologian, John Oman, had it right. Wrote he: "There is no graver moral peril than an attempt to manipulate truth, and the peril is in no way lessened because the task is piously performed."
A second problem, related to the first. The "old time religion" has it that questioning, that doubt, is itself a sin. But doubt, as Galileo asserted, is the parent of discovery.
The planet Earth is flat. The sun orbits that planet. So it once was said and so most people believed. But some - faithful to an inner voice that lured them to seek for the truth - doubted and asked questions and sought to answer them.
Jesus himself was a magnificent doubter. Wild ideas of a war-making Messiah who would overthrow the Roman occupiers of Israel were rampant in his day. He doubted them. He saw religious leaders trusting in long prayers, dietary laws and rigid Sabbath rules. He doubted the lot. Samaritans were an inferior race, according to many of Jesus' contemporaries. He doubted it, and went on to affirm that a good Samaritan was miles ahead of a bad priest.
To teach a child to accept as true what are but fantasies and to further teach that child that questioning any one of those fantasies is a sin, is to perpetrate an evil.
Let me lay my cards on the table. I am, unapologetically, a "religious person". For me, the stories and symbols that best point me to, and enable me to stutter about, the sacred, about the holy, about "God" are the stories and symbols and images defining the Christian faith. I am a bloodied but unbowed liberal Christian.
I regard the "old time religion" as, in the final analysis, irreligious, as utterly lacking in a sense of awe and wonder and reverence and thankfulness and humility.
Engage in a thought experiment with me. Trace your genealogy. You - the unique person you are - are here. You did nothing to exist. One of millions of spermatozoa from your father - the sperm that had you in its back pocket - succeeded in making its way to one particular egg released by your mother. That egg became one of the few embryos that survived their initial development, became a foetus and was born.
The odds against that are considerable. But think further back. The same odds-defying improbability applies to your grandparents. It likewise applied to the 400 to 500 generations giving birth to your grandparents.
At each point, one sperm of countless spermatozoa made its way to and fertilised one particular egg. The resulting embryo survived, in spite of the odds, and a fully developed child was born. In each case, that child survived, defying a staggering infant mortality rate, plague, famine and myriad other hardships simply to reach puberty, make love, and give birth to a child.
And that is only your human ancestry. Factor in the millions of years of evolutionary development that preceded the emergence of humanity.
And keep going back, back to the so-called "Big Bang". Or merely go back to the appearance of stars within which such elements as iron - part of your make-up - came into being. You are a child of stardust. Surely cause for awe and wonder and thankfulness. Of that mind-blowing, staggering, wonderful awe and thankfulness and humility, religion is born.
Dr John K. Williams is a retired Uniting Church minister. The above is an edited extract of an address to St Michael's Church in Collins Street yesterday.
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