"What is representative, however, is their belief that worship largely consists in appeasing the deity. In order to obtain favor, the worshipper must offer the proper sacrifice. Get it wrong and your prayers aren't answered. Or worse."
What is strange here is that Colson seems to think that Christianity offers up a juxtaposition on an adherent's view of divinity, as presented here. As countless people the world over are now aware, through the centuries-long work of zealous missionaries, if we do not adhere to a strict set of morals, thereby sacrificing certain pleasures and behaviors, our prayers will not only not be answered, we will go to a place of eternal suffering. Or worse, indeed, Mr. Colson.
Further, sacrifice is understood in many Pagan and animistic religions to not be exclusively represented by blood, if blood is involved at all, and as maintaining a good relationship with the deity. As a friend, or a family member. I do feel personally obligated to make offerings to my Gods, but not because they will smite me, or send me to hell as with the Christian god, but because it represents a commitment to the philosophies and values they represent, as well as their influence in my life.
Colson goes on to say that,
"It [Christianity] revealed a God who was neither remote nor capricious. He wasn't driven by human-like appetites and petty emotions. He is motivated by love for His people and the good of His worshippers... This God desires 'mercy, not sacrifice,' and to prove how much He meant it, He sacrificed his only Son so as to render all other sacrifices unnecessary."
The beginning of this section is one of the most perplexing as Colson asserts that, unlike the Gods, the god of Abraham and Moses is immune to the need for sacrifice, and the resulting petty reactions of the Pagan Gods. This is is perplexing for two reasons, at least. For one, we clearly see otherwise in the book of Exodus where Yahweh himself speaks,
"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me;" (Exodus 20:5)
If self-described jealousy of a resource that is supposedly unneeded, and the subsequent generation-reaching revenge are not indicative of petty appetites and emotions, then I don't have any idea what is, to be quite frank.
Secondly, if Yahweh was seeking a sacrifice, for unknown reasons, unneeded as they are, that would conquer death, why was death not enough? Why did Jesus not die an old man, warm in his bed? What was the purpose of torturing this man with the worst devices we have, both societal and physical? What was the purpose of executing him in one of the worst ways humans have ever devised? Was it simply less dramatic for him to die of an illness and rise again? If this god has no bloodlust, why was there so much present for this sacrifice that he supposedly has no appetite for?
Colson goes on to assert that Christianity reshaped the Western world in the best of ways, following the Christian-imposed assumption that followers of Gods before Christianity's adherents were superstitious savages, he states,
"The idea of man made in God's image revolutionized ideas about human life and ethics and provided a whole new way of seeing life in the Western world... How ironic that we in the post-Christian West are exchanging belief in the 'personal, benevolent God' of Christianity for a sanitized paganism. Whether it's 'new age' mumbo jumbo or Wicca for Dummies, we have forgotten the dread these beliefs caused our ancestors and the awful things it made them do."
What is so ironic here is that despite all of the horrors that have been committed in the name of various Pagan gods, the very values that we, even as a modern society, cherish about the sanctity of human life and ethics, disintegrated with the advent of Christianity in Europe, and the tight grip the Church would exercise over all of the Western world, including the outright destruction of all civil liberties. These values would not return until that hold loosened centuries later, and had to be rethought and invented as secular to evade the still-looming influence of the Church, and Christianity as a whole.
For all of these atrocities, Pagan worshipers knew they were killing people, goats, plants, and bad habits for their Gods. Colson seems to be unaware that when Crusaders waged war in the name of the Christian god, when the Inquisition burned any man, woman, or child who questioned the Church's authority in the name of Yahweh, and when the United States military inscribes weapons used to kill people of other religions with Biblical quotes, THIS IS THE VERY DEFINITION AND NATURE OF HUMAN SACRIFICE. I can not, and will not, condone human sacrifice, but to blame the Gods for violence and play at the innocence of Yahweh and his followers, given the mirroring track record, is a slight to my Gods that I had to answer.
Colson writes this slandering of the Gods, and does nothing to emulate the teachings of Jesus himself, to essentially say Happy Easter. Many praises to Eostre. Many praises.
