The famous philosopher Schopenhauer was proclaimed a pessimist and in his philosophy there are a multitude of references to Christianity.
My personal agnostic viewpoint is that Christianity is a highly realistic view of man and his animal nature, his suffering and inevitable death.
If you believe in our evolution through natural selection, we are indeed heroic and miraculous.
The staggering odds of existence and sentience is astonomical and pain and suffering are the wages we pay.
I am aware of that. The point of my post was to challenge that facile assumption and to point out that the "optimistic"/"pessimistic" dichotomy also exists among the various forms of chr*stianity. Evidently I didn't make my point very well.
The famous philosopher Schopenhauer was proclaimed a pessimist and in his philosophy there are a multitude of references to Christianity.
My personal agnostic viewpoint is that Christianity is a highly realistic view of man and his animal nature, his suffering and inevitable death.
Judaism held this view before chr*stianity existed, though there are holy people such as Elijah who passed from the earth without actually dying ("`od 'Eliyahu chai"). The story of Adam's and Eve's sin in the Garden and the reduction of man from immortal to mortal (as well as his evil inclination becoming so much stronger than his good one) is from the Jewish Bible, not the "new testament." However, the idea that after a long historical descent an apocalypse will take place that will perfect the world is found also in the most "pessimistic" versions of chr*stianity.
If you believe in our evolution through natural selection, we are indeed heroic and miraculous.
If the universe is a random, meaningless coincidence, then nothing can be called either heroic or miraculous (except the initial existence of any sort of reality to begin with, which no form of scientism can pretend to explain). Why is the suffering of humans any different than one ant colony wiping out another or a "meteorite" killing off the "dinosaurs" or the explosion of some piece of rock in outer space? (As you can see, I interpret the Bible quite literally, especially the Torah).