The Failure of Christianity

Here is Emma Goldman's 1913 take on the much-ballyhooed Sermon on the Mount:

Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance. What is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful and beautiful come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world. Every one knows that nothing good ever came or can come of the poor in spirit; surely never liberty, justice, or equality.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it.

Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the "redeemer" of the people.

"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."

But did not Christ exclude the possibility of righteousness when he said, "The poor ye have always with you"? But, then, Christ was great on dicta, no matter if they were utterly opposed to each other. This is nowhere demonstrated so strikingly as in his command, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

The interpreters claim that Christ had to make these concessions to the powers of his time. If that be true, this single compromise was sufficient to prove, down to this very day, a most ruthless weapon in the hands of the oppressor, a fearful lash and relentless tax-gatherer, to the impoverishment, the enslavement, and degradation of the very people for whom Christ is supposed to have died. And when we are assured that "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled," are we told the how? How? Christ never takes the trouble to explain that. Righteousness does not come from the stars, nor because Christ willed it so. Righteousness grows out of liberty, of social and economic opportunity and equality. But how can the meek, the poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of affairs?

"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven."

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder.

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/failureofchristianity.html

Simpler times, simpler times...

She seems to have the depth of Pat Buchanan's speechs - although a different view

And I don't disparage her interpretation of the Beatitudes, as they were based on translations in use at the time. I will not deny that these, and many other verses, have been used throughout the Common Era to keep people down. But since I believe Christianity, as all patterns of thought, is evolving, I can also see where the Beatitudes have been used to promote social justice, "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God"--the most obvious---but also "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled"--that one was the rock that people working for Civil Rights clung to from the time of Reconstruction through the 1960s.

So appreciate the fact that, though Christianity has been used to keep people down, it has also been used to bring people up--it depends upon the motives of the people more than the words.

But speaking of words--there is now a translation of the Beatitudes directly from Aramaic to English--"Prayers of the Cosmos" by Neil Douglas-Klotz, which gives yet another way of looking at these famous phrases. Douglas-Klotz gives several translations for each line, but one stuck home as really describing what happened to Emma Goldman:



Blessings to those who are dislocated for the cause of justice; their new home is the province of the universe. (p.68)

...it's obvious this woman doesn't get it.