While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called “the garden of the church” from “the wilderness of the world.” As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.
Coercing people to follow your religious tenants by force of law makes them push back. Given the explicit mingling of church and state under the latest Bush administration (one of our most disastrous presidencies), is there any wonder that people are turned off by religion. The religiously motivated attacks on September 11 also changed some minds about religion. Many churchs’ involvement in the fight against same-sex marriage turns even more people off. For many, religion became the public face of hatred, violence, and fear.
At the same time, many of us are seeking out even more fundamentalist religion. I guess these are polarizing times. Let’s hope for their sake that they learn from recent history. It would be better for religion observance in America if they took a live-and-let-live attitude toward other people’s behavior.
(via Mind on Fire)
]]>Let’s get some perspective here folks. It’s a fucking cracker! How did a cracker become more sacred than a human life? I thought Christianity had grown beyond its most violent tendencies, but I guess it’s in no position to judge the violence of the Muslim world. 
Yet such thinking is comforting. We quell our childhood fears of being lost in the dark and dreary wilderness of the world by holding to the iron rod of the word of God (1 Nephi 8:19–23). Making choices can be exhausting and frightening. Limiting our choices helps us cope with the complexity of life. We feel mastery over our world by dividing the grey, chaotic unknown into black and white, good and bad, right and wrong as Adam showed his dominion over the beasts of the field by naming them (Genesis 2:19). Having categorized the world, we feel justified in demanding who is on the Lord’s side? (Exodus 32:26)
Our efforts at rationalizing the complex world are vanity. Chaotic Tiamat bides her captivity until she can triumphally raze our flimsy black-and-white walls and introduce us to the full, riotous spectrum of true human experience. We do ourselves harm in putting our trust in the strength of the arms of our own flesh, putting off until it may be everlastingly too late the day when our defenses against the confusing world will be broken. (Jeremiah 17:5).
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman is a case in point. Publishers refused to print it in complete form until almost thirty years after its first edition due to its sexual imagery. Whitman’s poetry was too much for the public sensibility in the era of the Comstock laws.
The great 19th century orator Robert Ingersoll chose to eulogize Whitman with a line drawn from To A Common Prostitute, oft-censored by black-and-white thinkers who object to any mention of prostitution.
BE composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal
and lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle
for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.…
The Christian defenders of common decency missed the harmony between this poem and the teachings of their messiah. The Jesus of the Bible reveled in defying the black-and-white thinking of his era, just as Walt Whitman did. He chastened the Pharisees for their harsh judgments of the prostitute who bathed his feet with tears (Luke 7:36–50). He preached in the Sermon on the Mount that we should give our love to all, like God causes the sun to rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain to the just and unjust (Matthew 5:45).
I can’t say that Whitman had these biblical passages in mind as he wrote his poem, but the parallels in imagery and sentiment are striking. Whitman, a freethinking, freeloving pantheist, challenged the black-and-white, uncompassionate thinking of his Christian readers. His readers failed to recognize that Whitman and Jesus were kindred spirits.
The line that Ingersoll, the greatest orator of his time, said was “great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived” calls us to cast aside our judgments of who is good and who is evil and embrace all in love:
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,…”
]]>It makes perfect sense to me, and it would make an omnipotent God seem like less of a jerk.
]]>Jesus and Mary Magdalene are good, but the actor who portrays Judas owns this movie.
]]>Many Christians are ignorant of the history of Christian theology. They assume that their brand of Christianity is the authentic version. Then they seek to exclude Mormons from the Christian community because Mormons don’t believe in Christ like they believe in Christ. Mormons don’t interpret the Bible the same way, so their interpretation must be the wrong one. These Christians forget that they don’t believe in Christ like other Christians have in the past. They forget that they were once the targets of the Inquisition. All Christians are heretics (even the Catholic and Orthodox Christians since they excommunicated each other) and the sooner they remember that, the sooner we can move on from fighting over fairy tales to more important questions like how to ameliorate poverty.
]]>My takeaway message from that program (and other sources) is that the biblical history of the Israelites before King Hezekiah is not supported by archaeological evidence. In many ways it is contradicted thereby. If we allow the evidence to speak to us, we learn that Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, and Moses all belong to prehistory. Most of the Old Testament is therefore a collection of mythic history which has perhaps some basis in fact, but we cannot tell from the evidence at hand. Any belief in the literal historicity of the early Old Testament is therefore not based on evidence but on word-of-mouth, on a game of telephone that’s been going on for over two millennia.
I can understand turning to the books of the Bible to learn about our cultural forebears’ struggles with morality and the numinous. I cannot understand, however, seeking to claim supernatural authorship for this thoroughly imperfect, human book. The Bible is useful to bring us closer to ancient human beings and their understanding of the world, but it is unconscionable to hold up a collection of their myths as an absolute moral authority. If we let the evidence guide us, we would hold the Bible on par with other myths like the Eddas of the Norse or the tales of the Greek gods: instructive but not normative.
]]>Thumbing through to find the article, I found the magazine to be exactly what I had always expected: pages and pages of augmented women pimping for night clubs, interspersed with one-page articles. The article (once I found it through the forest of silicone) surprised me with its content. It wasn’t one of the same stereotyped critiques that I’ve read too many times. Its basic premise is that while atheism makes the most sense, it has yet to catch up to Christianity on what people really want: kitsch.
No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers—one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?
If proponents of atheism want to make it more popular, Mr. Beato says they should follow the example of Christian entrepreneurs:
At last year’s International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia, hundreds of vendors displayed a rich, vast Eden of Christian pop-culture products that were just as slickly produced, just as fashionable and entertaining as anything secular pop culture has to offer. Atheists, meanwhile, are still in the pop-culture Dark Ages—their T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing, their tchotchkes aren’t as diverse, their rock bands are not spreading their 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up the stockings of nonbelievers with atheist junk that is just as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.
It makes an odd kind of sense to me. But perhaps atheists are catching up after all.
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