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Blasphemy
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Macbeth IV, 1Am I, with the title of this blog Liver of a Blaspheming Jew, calling myself part of a witches brew used to summon the power of an evil demon? No doubt there will be some who see me that way. But that is certainly not my intention. I’m an atheist, which means I don’t believe in any supernatural super powerful entities. So I could no more call upon Hecate, as Shakespeare’s witches do, than I would call upon Christ. Both are fictions to me. Jesus may or may not be fictional, but Jesus as God (or maybe one third of God) is, to me, a fiction.
Merely by stating my atheism I am blaspheming according to most religions. Shakespeare’s blaspheming Jew may have only been blaspheming against all non-Jewish versions of God, but I am going a step beyond this. I don’t believe in the Jewish god either. But I intend to be more active in my blasphemy here then politely saying that I don’t believe in any of them. I am going to actively criticize common notions of God and religious ideas.
Why blaspheme?
It is then reasonable to ask why I would deliberately set out to blaspheme.
Seeking to upset God?
I’m not doing it to upset or challenge God. After all, I don’t believe in any gods; so how could I challenge them? If I insult the Tooth Fairy, it certainly wouldn’t be to teach the tooth fairy a lesson. From my point of view there is no way to be disrespectful to any god. Most of you would agree that nothing you could say would upset a Leprechaun. You may upset those who believe in Leprechauns, but you won’t upset any Leprechauns themselves.
Am I out to upset people?
Nothing good comes from upsetting people unnecessarily. Yet blasphemy does upset people. If I could make my points and arguments without upsetting anyone I would. The principle reason why I feel that it is necessary for me to make my arguments is closely related to the need for this section. If I were to write an anti-Socialist or an anti-Libertarian blog (both of which I’m tempted to do), I would not need to explain why I think it is perfectly acceptable to challenge views that some people care passionately about.
I believe in respecting people. But that does not mean that I will pretend to respect ideas that I find ridiculous. And these ideas, no matter how personally felt, have had a tremendous impact on history. And there is every reason to believe that religious ideas and feelings will continue to have enormous on humanity. These ideas are emphatically public ones. They must be subject to the same kind of scrutiny, including ridicule, that any other public idea can be subject to.
For too long we’ve accepted the view that we shouldn’t criticize others’ religious beliefs. Those ideas were off limits somehow. This is something that has to change, and it is changing. This blog is part of that.
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jpgoldberg posted this
