** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 670 15 March 2016 HUMAN SACRIFICE

COULD GOD DEMAND THE SACRIFICE OF A HUMAN BEING? IS THAT WHAT THE CROSS IS ABOUT?
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Good Friday – the Cross - falls next week. All about an angry God demanding a human sacrifice?

‘To such depths of evil has religion driven men’, lamented Roman poet Lucretius. Hard to disagree. Because he meant the sacrifice of a daughter, at her father’s hands, commanded by a goddess.

A dark tale from Greek drama. Playwright Aeschylus tells how the death of Iphigenia, the young daughter of King Agamennon, was required by the goddess Artemis. Her father had killed a deer sacred to Artemis, see? To placate the deity no Greek ship was allowed to sail to the Trojan war until the girl had been slain in reparation. ‘Led tremblingly to the altar…falling sinless to a sinful rite’, Lucretius movingly describes the innocent maid’s plight.

Just pagan superstitious stuff? But consider Jephtha’s daughter in the Old Testament. Jephtha, a judge of Israel, had vowed that if God granted him victory over the Ammonites, he would sacrifice whoever he first met on his return home. Tragically, it was his own daughter. (Harrowing account in Judges 12: 29-40.) Note that, unlike Agamennon, Jephtha worshipped the One True God. A vindication of Lucretius’ charge?

The two cases are not quite identical. Iphigenia’s death was at Artemis’ behest but God had not asked Jephtha to make his ill-advised promise. It was the father’s doing. Some rabbinical commentators opine that Jephtha was not obliged to kill. Instead, the girl retired to a mountain in virginal solitude. Alas, the biblical text does not accord with that.

Is Abraham’s example more edifying? The Lord ordered him to take his only son Isaac and offer him as a burnt offering. Abraham obeyed but at the last moment the Lord’s angel stayed his hand. Well and kosher. Only a test. But what if Israel’s God had let Abraham go ahead and kill Isaac? What then?

‘The true God would not have ordered the slaying of the innocent’, you might argue. Hence it could not have happened. But why not? Surely it is not logically impossible. ‘Because God does not - cannot will atrocious acts’, you counter. Kant indeed said that Abraham should have answered God: 'I will no obey you'. But that seems to make God subject to man. That is a God made in man’s conventional image or idea of how the Creator should be like to be humanly acceptable. That is not the Almighty Lord of the Bible but a humanistic construct. In reality, Scripture is full of episodes that cannot be reconciled with common human morality. Like the extermination of whole pagan tribes, women and children included. If you subject the Author of your being to human judgement, you kill him in your own heart, as Kirkegaard wrote.

Greek writers tried to explain away Iphigenia’s awful destiny. Thus Euripides penned an optimistic play, Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Artemis at the last moment, not unlike God’s angel, changes her mind. The innocent girl is rescued and whisked away to the distant land of Tauris. Saved, but with the unhappy task of becoming a priestess in charge of sacrificing foreigners, including Orestes, her own matricidal brother…yack! Luckily another goddess, Athena, intervenes and fixes it all in the end. The Greeks called that stilted solution ‘Deus ex Machina’. In plain English, an unconvincing divine trick.

Lucretius shakes his head. He rejects ‘the blood-curdling declamations of the prophets, their intimidating hocus-pocus’. Heavenly requests are nonsense. There are no gods. No soul and no afterlife. There are only physical atoms of various kinds and their endless, eternal, shuffling configurations. That’s the philosophy of Epicurus and that’s the truth. No reason to fear Heaven’s revenge, because there is no Heaven. Pat.

Yet religion refuses to die. Materialism is rampant and science purports to explain everything but believers worldwide still outweigh unbelievers. And the latter have their own, man-made idols. Call them banks, sex and bombs. You might as well speak of Mammon, Aphrodite and Mars. The gods of paganism truly are back with a vengeance.

Soon it will be Easter. Christianity’s greatest festival. About a man hung on a cross. God’s own son. He had to die. It was his Father’s will. Unlike Abraham’s hand, no deity stopped the hands of those who drove the nails into Jesus’ hands and feet and stuck him on the dreadful instrument of torture, the cross. It had to happen. For man’s redemption. Jesus was a substitute. Died on our behalf. So mankind’s salvation depended on the Cross. Does it bespeak of a primitive, savage and barbarous deity? Like those of Iphigenia and Jepththa’s daughter?

The doctrine of the atonement – the sacrificial reconciliation of man to God via Christ’s death - is difficult. A solution is that Jesus was not a substitute but a representative. He stood for the whole humanity. Also, the greatest example or exemplar of sacrificial love, as Abelard put it. Even materialists, humanists, atheists and some such rabble would appreciate and value a person sacrificing himself for others, I guess.

Fanatical, lethal religion is not dead. Innocent people are sacrificed – murdered - daily in the Middle East by heartless Jihadis who believe themselves to be doing God’s will. In the ‘civilised’ West millions of unborn children are destroyed in their mothers’ wombs…oops! Sorry. My mistake. That is not in the name of traditional faith but of that modern, progressive superstition – ‘a woman’s right to choose’. Much of a muchness, maybe?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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