The Bleeding Man On The Wall

WHEN I WAS A PRESCHOOLER, I was very afraid to enter my grandmother's house, even though she always treated me with loving kindness and tasty treats. Prominently displayed on her living room wall was a large painting of a young long haired man in agony, his hands and feet nailed to a wooden cross, from which his tortured body hung. A crown of thorns adorned his head, from which blood was dripping. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen, and I had already had enough experience watching television to have seen some horrible things, people getting shot to death, and so forth. I tried, but it was impossible not to notice the gruesome painting. I tried not to stare in horrified fascination, but horrified fascination is what I felt. I intuitivey sensed that my dear sweet grandmmother must have had some good reason for having it on her wall, but I could not imagine what, and I was afraid to ask anyone to explain it to me, why it was there and what it meant, perhpap afraid of what the answer might be. Nobody ever mentioned it, nor made any attempt to xplain it to me. I assumed that I was either supposed to ignore it, take it for granted, or figure it out for myself, which, looking back, were exactly what I was supposed to do. Why would any adult, parent or grandparent want to take on the difficult task of explaining a painting of the crucification of Christ to a four year old? Let the child live, and learn. I was too young to undertand it, but not too young to see it. Nobody ever explained it to me, although a few folks tried. I guess I never became old enough to understand, and more than sixty years later I confess I still don't fully understand it. Over the years, as I grew through childhood I gradually pieced the crucifiction story together, and the basics of the religion in which it plays a central role. I was given the choice whether to attend church; I choose not to. I believe that all children deserve the same choice. Throughout my adult life, beginning in high school and college and continuing to this day, I became a hsitorian, and became educated in the history of the Christian religion, and something of a scholar in religious history through independent reading, as part of my broader professional interest in European history. My favorite Christian historian is Bart Ehrman, chairamn of the religious studies department at UNC Chapel Hill, who is widely considerd the most authoratative historian of the early history of the Christian religion. I avidly recommend Ehrman's work to everyone. He is an agnostic, like I am on most days. He entered the doctoral program in divinity studies at Princeton as a born again Christian, and graduated an agnostic. A high percentage of people who graduate from doctoral divinity programs at universities like Harvard and Princeton, where they teach religious studies in a historical, factual, scientific, critical manner, go through the same personal evolution. Comprehensive scholarship in religious studies invariably reveals that religion, all religion, is very much a human process. One never encounters God directly when examining scripture objectively, even when, especially when one reads every word of the Bible in ancient Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and modern English, which one is required to do at Harvard. Interestingly enough, as one reads the Old Testament page by page in order, without skipping around, God vanishes from it. In the book of Esther, God is not even mentioned. It comforts me that there is no evidence, other than people's personal faith, that the Christian religion is true, that Christ died for our sins but only if we agree to worship him, or that after death God judges us and consigns us to either eternal sameness in heaven or eternal horror in hell. Hell as we conceive it does not appear in the Bible either. Only the human mind could even imagine something so horrible as hell, or a good man being tortured to death, at God's instruction, as the only way to salvage the eternal human spirit from eternal damnation. Humanity invented religion, then it invented science, which increasingly, mostly makes the world we live in today, for better or worse. An intelligent species, like an intelligent perosn, must grow up, eventually.