Writings on Religion and the Unity of the Human Race
Page Index:
Quotes from Various Authors
Parody Ad
The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair - Chris Hedges
Don't Bow To God's Bullies - By Rev. Jim Rigby
The Relgious Left Fights Back - Van Jones
Opium of the People - Bill Wiser
God's All-Embracing Love - Blumardt
Pat Robertson is not a Christian
Pat Robertson is an Embarrassment to the Church - Jim Wallis
The Two Great Religions - John Stoner
The Jesus we haven't followed - Alven Alexsi Currier
Who Can We Hate? - ECAPC
Quotes on Religion and the Unity of the Human Race
"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out he hates all the same people you do." -Anne Lamott
"How did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-America? It is time to take back our faith... Any Gospel that isn't 'good news' to poor people is simply not the Gospel of Jesus Christ." - Jim Wallis, Sojourners
I do not believe in people telling others of their faith, especially with a view to conversion. Faith does not admit of telling. But when it is lived it becomes self-propagating. - Mohandas K. Gandhi
“People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce men and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?” - From Seeds by Thomas Merton
"Now, for all its failings and its perversions over the last 2,000 years—and as much as every exponent of this faith has attempted to dodge this idea—it is unarguably the central tenet of Christianity: that everybody is equal in God's eyes. So you cannot, as a Christian, walk away from Africa. America will be judged by God if, in its plenty, it crosses the road from 23 million people suffering from HIV, the leprosy of the day.
What's up on trial here is Christianity itself. You cannot walk away from this and call yourself a Christian and sit in power. Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world—and stop being its apologist." - Bono
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others...But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness. - M. Scott Peck
"Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow and to love him as they love their cow - they love their cow for the milk and cheese and profit it makes them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God when they love him for their own advantage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have on your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost truth." - Meister Eckhart
True evangelism, based on the example of Jesus, does not suggest the "missionary zeal" of self-righteous proselytizers. It implies, on the contrary, the kind of all-embracing universality evident in Mother Teresa's prayer: "May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in." Not just fellow nuns, Catholics, Calcuttans, Indians. The whole world. It gives me pause to realize that, were such a prayer said by me and answered by God, I would afterward possess a heart so open that even hate-driven zealots would fall inside. - David James Duncan
"I believe it to be a great mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it.... We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference." - Dorothy Sayers
"Nothing has proved harder in civilization than seeing God or good or dignity in those unlike ourselves. There are surely many ways of arriving at that generosity of spirit, and each faith may need to find its own way. I propose that the truth at the heart of monotheism is that God is greater than religion, that God is only partially comprehended by any one faith... What would such a [broader] faith be like? It would be like being secure in my own home and yet moved by the beauty of a foreign place knowing that while it is not my home, it is still part of the glory of the world that is ours. It would be knowing that we are sentences in the story of our people but that there are other stories, each written by God out of the letters of lives bound together in community. Those who are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faiths of others. In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need now the confidence to recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference." - Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth
Strife - in philosophy, religion, and politics - has certainly gained so much ground that it is impossible for us to reconcile with one another. But it is possible to find reconciliation...by means of the foundation of all things, which is God. For he does not cease to be the same for all men irrespective of our differences, and his earth bears us all, even if we preferred to see that the ground would cleave asunder beneath our enemies.
The sun sends his rays upon us directly, paying no heed that we look askance at one another. The rose smells sweetly to both the Jew and the Christian - and to the Muslim too. And so God is God of all, and whatever he says, he says in the same manner to all that are ready to listen. If then we look to our own rules, books, and works, which we have made ourselves and which differ in many thousands of ways, we are irreconcilable. But if with due attention and honor we accept God’s ideas regarding our lives... reconciliation is easy. - J. A. Comenius (1592-1670)
"All human beings are like the organs of one body: when one is afflicted with pain, the others cannot rest in peace." - Sadi Shirazi, Mediebal Iranian poet
"Laying the foundations for one world is the most important task of our time. These foundations are not negotiated statements and agreements. These foundations are, rather, in the stockpiling of trust through dialogue and the creation of relationships that can sustain both agreements and disagreements. Moving forward... in dialogue with those other faiths we will create the foundational relationship of One World. Moving forward alone, we will not." - Diana Eck, Harvard Divinity School
"Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world - and stop being its apologist." - Bono
"Nothing is more dangerous to the advancement of God's kingdom than religion. But this is what Christianity has become. Do you not know that it is possible to kill Christ with such Christianity?" - C. F. Blumhardt
"God does not condemn us to Hell; God wishes all humans to be saved. He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept the love and do not respond to it. And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of Hell. Hell is not a place where God puts us; it’s a place where we put ourselves. The doors of Hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside." - Kallistos Ware
"In a word, God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him. It is in fact absurd and impossible to try to grasp God as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds." - Thomas Merton
"We want to be part of the stream of the Spirit. We envision a genuine school of life, where the simplest work becomes a physical and artistic experience, where a new man can emerge, a creative man whose culture expresses what is real. We do not need theories or idealistic goals, or prophets or leaders. We need brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to live Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We need to show that a life of justice and forgiveness and unity is possible today." - Eberhard Arnold, 1920
"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture." - Thomas Merton
"We are trying to make the point, by our lives, by our work, that personal responsibility comes first. We are born alone, we die alone, we must each of us do what we can for God and our brother—not God and country, but God and our brother, as Christ put it." - Dorothy Day
"Call on God, but row away from the rocks." - Hunter S. Thompson
"There is a certain innocence in not having a solution. There is a certain innocence in a kind of despair: but only if in despair we find salvation. I mean, despair of this world and what is in it. Despair of men and of their plans, in order to hope for the impossible answer that lies beyond our earthly contradictions, and yet can burst into our world and solve them only if there are some who hope in spite of despair.
The true solutions are not those which we force upon life in accordance with our theories, but those which life itself provides for those who dispose themselves to receive the truth. Consequently our task is to dissociate ourselves from all who have theories which promise clear and infallible solutions, and to mistrust all such theories not in a spirit of negativism and defeat, but rather trusting life itself, and nature, and if you will permit me, God above all. For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest and most ridiculous of all the false gods. We can call ourselves innocent only if we refuse to forget this, and if we also do everything we can to make others realize it.” - Thomas Merton
In the public square, religion has to be disciplined by democracy. That means you don't enter the public square and say I'm religious so I ought to win. Or God has spoken to me directly and I have the fix for Social Security. You say my faith motivates me. It shapes my convictions or it compels me to act on behalf of the poor or peace or whatever. - Jim Wallis
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The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
By Chris Hedges, AlterNet
Posted on January 19, 2007, Printed on January 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46908/
The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.
During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.
Jeniece Learned is typical of many in the movement. She stood, when I met her, amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in the lapels of their jackets or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder length hair. She was carrying a booklet called "Ringing in a Culture of Life." The booklet had the schedule of the two day event she is attending organized by The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event was "dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss."
Learned, who drove five hours from a town outside of Youngstown, Ohio was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inserted in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women, when the speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, asked if there were any "post-abortive" women present. Learned ran a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she attempted to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions.
She spoke in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence, rather than birth control, as the only acceptable form of contraception. And she had found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her. The battle against abortion is one of the Christian Rights's most effective recruiting tools. It plays on the guilt and shame of woman who had the abortions, accusing them of committing murder, and promising redemption and atonement in the "Christian" struggle to make abortion illegal, in the fight for life against "the culture of death."
Her life, before she was saved, was, like many in this mass movement, chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She was sexually abused by a close family member. Her mother periodically woke Learned and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent. The children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a strange apartment in another town. Her mother worked nights and weekends as a bartender. Learned, the oldest, often had to run the home. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something Learned also considered. As a teenager she had an abortion.
She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College several years later when she saw an anti-abortion film called The Silent Scream. "You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get away from this suction tube," she said. "And, its mouth is open and it is like this baby is screaming. I flipped out. It was at that moment that God just took this veil that I had over my eyes for the last eight years. I couldn't breathe. I was hyperventilating. I ran outside. One of the girls followed me from Living Alternative. And she said, 'Did you commit your life to Christ?' And I said, 'I did.' And she said, 'Did you ask for your forgiveness of sins?' And I said, 'I did.' And she goes, 'Does that mean all your sins, or does that mean some of them?' And I said, 'I guess it means all of them.' So she said, 'Basically, you are thinking God hasn't forgiven you for your abortion because that is a worse sin than any of your other sins that you have done.'"
The film brought her into the fight to make abortion illegal. Her activism became atonement for her own abortion. She struggled with depression after she gave birth to her daughter Rachel. When she came home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She thought she saw an 8-year-old boy standing next to her bed. It was, she is sure, the image of the son she had murdered.
"I started crying and asking God over and over again to forgive me," she says. "I had murdered His child. I asked Him to forgive me over and over again. It was just incredible. I was possessed. On the fourth day I remember hearing God's voice. 'I have your baby, now get up!' It was the most incredibly freeing and peaceful moment. I got up and I showered and I ate. I just knew it was God's voice."
In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed though during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits.
There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.
Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.
All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.
They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.
Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
The Radical Christian Right Is Built on Suburban Despair
By Chris Hedges, AlterNet
Posted on January 19, 2007, Printed on January 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46908/
The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.
This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker's paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.
During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.
Jeniece Learned is typical of many in the movement. She stood, when I met her, amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in the lapels of their jackets or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder length hair. She was carrying a booklet called "Ringing in a Culture of Life." The booklet had the schedule of the two day event she is attending organized by The Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation. The event was "dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss."
Learned, who drove five hours from a town outside of Youngstown, Ohio was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inserted in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women, when the speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, asked if there were any "post-abortive" women present. Learned ran a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania in Sharon, where she attempted to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of abortions.
She spoke in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence, rather than birth control, as the only acceptable form of contraception. And she had found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her. The battle against abortion is one of the Christian Rights's most effective recruiting tools. It plays on the guilt and shame of woman who had the abortions, accusing them of committing murder, and promising redemption and atonement in the "Christian" struggle to make abortion illegal, in the fight for life against "the culture of death."
Her life, before she was saved, was, like many in this mass movement, chaotic and painful. Her childhood was stolen from her. She was sexually abused by a close family member. Her mother periodically woke Learned and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent. The children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a strange apartment in another town. Her mother worked nights and weekends as a bartender. Learned, the oldest, often had to run the home. Her younger sister, who was sexually abused by another member of the family, eventually committed suicide as an adult, something Learned also considered. As a teenager she had an abortion.
She was taking classes at Pacific Christian College several years later when she saw an anti-abortion film called The Silent Scream. "You see in this movie this baby backing up trying to get away from this suction tube," she said. "And, its mouth is open and it is like this baby is screaming. I flipped out. It was at that moment that God just took this veil that I had over my eyes for the last eight years. I couldn't breathe. I was hyperventilating. I ran outside. One of the girls followed me from Living Alternative. And she said, 'Did you commit your life to Christ?' And I said, 'I did.' And she said, 'Did you ask for your forgiveness of sins?' And I said, 'I did.' And she goes, 'Does that mean all your sins, or does that mean some of them?' And I said, 'I guess it means all of them.' So she said, 'Basically, you are thinking God hasn't forgiven you for your abortion because that is a worse sin than any of your other sins that you have done.'"
The film brought her into the fight to make abortion illegal. Her activism became atonement for her own abortion. She struggled with depression after she gave birth to her daughter Rachel. When she came home from the hospital she was unable to care for her infant. She thought she saw an 8-year-old boy standing next to her bed. It was, she is sure, the image of the son she had murdered.
"I started crying and asking God over and over again to forgive me," she says. "I had murdered His child. I asked Him to forgive me over and over again. It was just incredible. I was possessed. On the fourth day I remember hearing God's voice. 'I have your baby, now get up!' It was the most incredibly freeing and peaceful moment. I got up and I showered and I ate. I just knew it was God's voice."
In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed though during President Clinton's Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits.
There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us "an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics."
The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.
The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.
Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.
Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to "secular humanists," to "nominal Christians," to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.
All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.
They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.
Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
Don't Bow To God's Bullies
by Rev. Jim Rigby, HuffingtonPost.com
Read this online at http://www.alternet.org/story/37565/
Whereas American theology was born out of a hope for democracy, much of it is wedded to a picture of Christ as a benevolent dictator. Should we be surprised that a hierarchical cosmology would produce hierarchical churches and nations? Should we be surprised that religious nations that picture Christ as a loving dictator have produced conquistadors, inquisitors and crusaders?
What else could they produce? As the tree is, so shall be the fruit. The word "Lord" was not in the original Bible. It is an English word from feudal times. Whereas the Greek word kurios had a range of meanings, from a title of respect to a title of leadership to a name for the sacred, the English translation "Lord" refers specifically to a male European land baron. Many people have softened that interpretation in their own minds, but in times of great stress, such nuance falls away and many Christians seek a white male king. He may be called "Pope" he may be called "the decider President," he may be called "televangelist," but the title only masks what he is, a benevolent (or not so benevolent) dictator.
Neither Calvin nor Luther spoke English, but they helped the Popes lay the groundwork for the view of God as a cosmic dictator. From Popes, Luther and Calvin we have some of the ugliest slurs ever recorded against women, intellectuals and those who refused the church's message. How did Christians hold slaves, oppress women and slaughter nonbelievers? Perhaps they could not see Christ in non-male, non-European, and non-Christian people because they were limited by their theology. Their "Christ" was merely a glorification of the most powerful member of their own culture.
To picture God in terms of power is also one of the great bait-and-switch gimmicks of all time. People within the power hierarchy proclaim that God is the ultimate authority, and then appoint themselves as God's interpreters and enforcers. They are God's humble bullies. It has been one of the most successful con games of all time.
The real Jesus was born illegitimately. He called himself "the human one." Just like Buddha, his authority came from truth, not power. He taught whoever has love has God. He said those who work for the common good are his church.
The real Jesus was an anarchist. He spent his life refusing to claim power over anyone. He said that God is understood in terms of love not power. We add nothing to the majesty of "the human one" by adding a throne or a crown. If he did not want to rule over others in life, why should he want it in death? That is why Jesus is called "lamb of God"; he spoke not as the king of the universe, but from its heart.
If you want to know why Americans are so frightened and why we are attacking anything that would challenge our dominance over others, read the Bible. Like Cain we have murdered members of our human family. Even when we silence our victims, the ground beneath our feet cries out against us.
Today's church lifts its arms to praise Christ wearing liturgical garments woven in sweatshops. So called "Christian America" is still a nation built on the work of slaves. We do not see them because they toil invisibly in other countries. Today's church doles out bits of charity from booty stolen from God's powerless people the world over. Anyone who claims to believe in a just God, or even in justice itself, has to know at some level that the prayers for liberation coming from third world countries will be heard and answered. At some level, people of faith have to know that unless America repents of the sin of empire we are a doomed nation.
Whatever prophetic voices survive in the church must take a message to the mainstream denominations. "We are guilty of our leaders' crimes. Just because we are silent and passive does not mean that we are innocent. If we have any status in the power hierarchy, we are partially responsible for its misdeeds."
I realize that most of the church consists of wonderful and compassionate people, but that does not matter if we turn over our power to those less charitable. The moderate mainstream church is helpless against fundamentalism because it is built on a nuanced version of the same cracked foundation of a theology of power.
Whether or not we can change America in time to avoid a political and ecological apocalypse, it is never too late to do the right thing. All of us can begin to plant seeds of a better future for our children's children. For Christians today, that means suffering the consequences of refusing to bow to the dictator Christ of this culture.
The Rev. Jim Rigby is pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Austin, Tex. He can be reached at jrigby0000@aol.com.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
The Religious Left Fights Back
By Van Jones, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2005, Printed on July 28, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23725/
Rabbi Michael Lerner is stirring up trouble again - thank God.
Earlier this week, Lerner was the main organizer of a national gathering in Berkeley, California, for the religious Left. His "Spiritual Activism" conference was intended to help launch a much-needed new initiative: the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP).
Lerner has been the spark-plug for many progressive, faith-based undertakings over the years, including Tikkun magazine. But this latest effort is an order of magnitude more challenging than anything he has attempted thus far. And given the stakes for our ailing would-be democracy, the birthing of NSP may prove to be his most important calling.
Lerner wants to help forge a new alliance of "religious, secular and spiritual, but not religious, progressives." This alliance will someday expose and challenge the cancer of American consumerism. And it will oppose the religious Right's abuse of scripture to promote war, intolerance and ugly corporate agendas.
By itself, those two goals would warrant full-throated support from all progressives. But don't be surprised if the good rabbi's efforts also draw some serious "boos" from many parts of the Left, as well. That's because Lerner's bravest and hardest work is aimed much closer to home.
He wants to do more than just minister to the mall-lobotomized masses or give the fundamentalists a well-deserved spanking. He also wants to challenge the Left's chronic and toxic bias against religious feeling, expression and people.
Lerner hopes to end "religio-phobia among progressives." And such efforts will not be welcome among a great many rabidly secular progressives.
As for me, I will be praying for the Rabbi's success. I am an African-American Christian who was raised in the American heartland. When I moved to the cosmopolitan coasts of Connecticut, and later California, I ran headlong into shocking levels of anti-religious bigotry among progressives.
I literally have had liberals laugh in my face when I told them I was a Christian. For awhile, I felt self-conscious about telling other activists that I preferred not to meet on Sunday mornings, because I wanted to go to church.
It is still commonplace to hear so-called radicals stereotyping all religious people as stupid dupes -- and spitting out the word "Christian" as if it were an insult or the name of a disease. I thought progressives were supposed to be the standard-bearers of tolerance and inclusion.
I certainly know the monstrous crimes that have been committed through the ages in the name of religion, or with the blessings of religious people. But I know a few other things about religion, too.
I grew up in the Black churches of the rural south, listening to the stories of my elders. As children, we heard about the good, brave people who had poured their blood out upon the ground so that we could be free. We learned how police officers had clubbed and jailed them. We learned how Klansmen had shot and lynched them. And how the G-men from Washington had just stood by and doodled in their notepads.
We learned of marches and mayhem, freedom songs and funerals. We saw images of billy-clubbed Black women on their hands and knees, searching for their teeth on Mississippi sidewalks -- crawling while still clutching their little American flags. We felt pity for the children who spent long nights in frigid jail cells, wearing clothing soaked by fire-hoses, while their bones -- broken and untended -- began to mend at odd angles.
We saw pictures of Black men, like our fathers, hanging by their necks -- their faces twisted, their bodies rigid, their clothes burned off -- along with their skin. And we saw photos of carefree killers, sauntering home out of Alabama courtrooms -- their faces white and sneering and proud.
We learned how the very best of humanity had faced off with the very worst of humanity -- each circling the other under the same summer sun. That epic struggle had elevated southern back roads and backwaters onto the Great World Stage. And the fate of a people -- along with the destiny of a nation -- hung in the balance, for all to see.
In the end, we children cheered, for the righteous did prevail. More than that, they performed one of the great miracles in human history: They transformed American apartheid into a fledgling democracy, tender and delicate and new.
All progressives today proudly celebrate that achievement -- and rightly so. But one key fact seems to escape the notice of today's activist crowd. The champions of the civil rights struggle didn't come marching out of shopping centers in South. Or libraries. Or high school gymnasiums.
To face the attack dogs, to face the fire-hoses, to face the billy-clubs, these heroes and she-roes came marching boldly out of church-houses. And they were singing church songs. They set an example of courage and sacrifice that will endure for the ages. And as they did it, they prayed on wooden pews in the name of a Nazarene carpenter named Jesus.
The implications are clear for those who seek today to rescue and redeem U.S. society. The facts are simple and profound: The last time U.S progressives captured the national debate and transformed politics, people of faith were at the center of the movement, not stuck in its closet.
As a descendent of enslaved Africans who were told that God (and not capitalist greed) required their degradation, I know the crimes of the Christian church as well as anyone. But as a child of the civil rights movement, I also know the power of Christian faith, the power of moral appeal and the power of spiritual strength -- to break asunder the bonds of servitude.
And in our do-or-die effort to set things right in America, it is time for U.S. progressives to return to the bottomless well of soul power that sustained the slaves and defeated Jim Crow.
That is why I applaud Rabbi Lerner's efforts. He is standing in a long tradition of faith-honoring Americans, who have helped lead the charge from barbarism toward democracy. In the 1800s, escaping Africans fled enslavement through the bedrooms and basements of Quakers, along the famous Underground Railroad. In the 1980s, religious congregations led the Sanctuary Movement. Their efforts opened up U.S. cities to Latinos who were fleeing U.S. President Ronald Reagan's violent and covert interventions in Latin America.
The Rabbi's new efforts also resonate today. Reeling from the steady string of recent defeats, even the most hard-core U.S. activists are seeking deeper meaning and spiritual sustenance in their lives. At the same time, previously apolitical "spiritual types" are getting involved as activists for the first time -- to defend the Earth and her people from the predations of the Bush agenda.
Rev. Jim Wallis' most recent book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, struck a chord this year and became an instant bestseller. Rev. Frances Hall Kieschnick (spouse of Working Assets wunderkind Michael Kieschnick) is taking steps to start a Beatitudes Society, to give more voice to progressive people of faith. Similar efforts are springing up on smaller scales all across the country.
Somewhere, in all of these stirrings, I see the seeds of a wisdom-based, Earth-honoring, pro-democracy movement -- one that affirms and applauds religious and spiritual impulses, while opposing fundamentalism, chauvinism and theocracy. Over time, this kind of progressive movement has the potential to win -- and win big -- in the United States. To be honest: it is probably the only type of progressive movement that stands a chance in a country as religious as ours.
Such a movement is within reach. But progressives must abandon the old pattern of reducing the Great Faiths to their worst elements, constituents and crimes -- and then dismissing all other facts and features. It is not just stupid political strategy. At a moral level, it is a form of blindness and bigotry that is beneath all of us.
My prayer is that a critical mass of progressives can agree on two basic premises.
Number one: Any progressive approach to "faith in politics" that ignores the awful crimes of religiously-inspired people is dishonest, inauthentic and can never achieve emancipatory ends.
Number two: At the same time, any approach that fails to honor and embrace the positive contributions of religiously inspired people is also wrong-headed, and it foolishly and needlessly shuts progressives off from our own history, achievements and present sources of vital support.
I believe that Rabbi Lerner has come up with a thoughtful, sensitive and wise approach, worthy of broad-based affirmation. He aims to: "build an alliance between secular, religious and 'spiritual but not religious' progressives -- in part by challenging the anti-religious biases in parts of the liberal culture (while acknowledging the legitimacy of anger against those parts of the religious world that have embodied authoritarian, racist, sexist, homophobic or xenophobic practices and attitudes").
That is a formulation that the vast majority of progressives should be able to adopt, affirm and cheer about. And I proudly say to it, Amen, brother Lerner ... Amen!
Attorney Van Jones is the national executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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Opium of the People
Bill Wiser
"Nothing is more dangerous to the advancement of God's kingdom than religion. But this is what Christianity has become. Do you not know that it is possible to kill Christ with such Christianity?" - C. F. Blumhardt
Maybe Karl Marx got it right after all. His notorious “opium of the people” is worth reading in the context of the surrounding sentences in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Placing this paragraph within the context of contemporary America is even more instructive:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.
Real happiness, Marx is saying, does not come from the “high” of illusion, but from living in conditions that no longer produce the craving for a drug-induced release. But before getting down to the business of addressing the hemorrhaging deficit, a war without end, the failure to provide adequate schooling and health care for millions of children, and the dichotomy of galloping consumption and disappearing resources, we have to deal with the pernicious source of the illusion: civil religion, America's opiate.
Civil religion, said Rowland Sherrill, the late professor of Religious and American Studies at Purdue University, is the “mysterious way that religion, politics, ideas of nationhood, patriotism, etc.—energized by faith outlooks—represents a national force.” Few of us give it much thought, Sherrill said, “but we live in it, and we appeal to it all of the time.”
Whether you agree or not, America's drug of choice—this deadly cocktail of patriotism, religiosity, moralism, and nationalism—calls itself Christianity. And never have we been subjected to such doses as during the recent elections. After drinking ad nauseum, our family turned to the “Song of Mary” in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke. It was like diving into ice-cold water—painful, but instantly invigorating and reviving.
…He has scattered those who are proud in their thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty-handed…
Any who would claim the name of Jesus would do well to ponder these words, particularly as we approach the weeks of Advent—set apart in the Christian calendar as a time of consideration and preparation for Christmas. These words are revolutionary, rather than illusionary. They offer hope to anyone ready for a change more radical (from the Latin, “more at root”) than Karl Marx envisioned, to all who will not rest until the conditions Mary describes become reality.
If we can do away with the illusion of religion, we will be ready for the real thing—for God to take hold of us and change everything in us and around us. It will be painful (for who is not “proud in their inmost thoughts”?), but absolutely invigorating and reviving.
originally posted at Bruderhof.com
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Recommended reading: "Adventures in Missing the Point - how the culture-controlled church neutered the Gospel" by Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo click book cover to order from our Reading Room
If you’re brave enough to take an honest look at the issues facing the culture–controlled church–and the issues in your own life–read on.
Do you ever look at how the Christian faith is being lived out in the new millennium and wonder if we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing? That we still haven’t quite "gotten it"? That we’ve missed the point regarding many important issues?
It’s understandable if we’ve relied on what we’ve been told to believe or what’s widely accepted by the Christian community. But if we truly turned a constructive, critical eye toward our beliefs and vigorously questioned them and their origins, where would we find ourselves? Best-selling authors Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo invite you to do just that. Join them on an adventure–one that’s about uncovering and naming faulty conclusions, suppositions, and assumptions about the Christian faith. In Adventures in Missing the Point, the authors take turns addressing how we’ve missed the point on crucial topics such as:
Salvation, The Bible, Being Postmodern, Worship, Homosexuality, Truth, and many more…
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God's All-Embracing Love
These excerpts are from Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt's letters to his son-in-law, Richard Wilhelm, a missionary in China.
God's love tears down old divisions. No longer religion against religion, Christians against non-Christians, but justice against sin, life against death. His love embraces everyone. Therefore, every person you encounter should be your concern. Do not settle for less. The whole world must see the glory of God. I long to see you free to and share in the gifts God gives the Chinese. This is our hope, but its fulfillment will have to be fought for.
God protects the oppressed. He will see to it that they receive his blessing. Today his spirit moves upright hearts everywhere, without asking what kind of a religion they cling to. Our task is to spread the gospel of Christ, not the gospel of Christians. Christ does not want separation. This is difficult for us to keep in mind. It is not easy to interact with sinners without yielding to the pressure of either compromising or distancing oneself. I hope, however, that we - you in China and I in Europe - will experience the all-embracing, creative power of Christ.
This is why I choose stand on the side of the humble, working class. Tragically, the church has abandoned them to darkness. Yet this same church lives with this darkness, and in so doing absorbs the very same sinful principles that rule the world. Christians should serve, not rule. Their acts of violence make them worse than the so-called heathen.
The chief thing is to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, not an apostle of the European Christian world. Have patience, and whatever you do, stay clear of forming a party. Your work must embrace the whole, then your integrity will win you everyone's trust.
Excerpted from The Hidden Christ, available FREE in e-book format from Bruderhof.
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DOES THE WORD CHRISTIAN MEAN ANYTHING?
Published on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Pat Robertson is Not a Christian
by Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler
Pat Robertson suggested this past Monday [08/22/05] that the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, be assassinated by operatives of the United States government! Though his comments are newsworthy because of his following in the 700 Club and his political stature and role in the political religious right, his comments however are out of synch with everything that has been handed down to us from the teachings of Jesus Christ. What I am suggesting here is that Pat Robertson and individuals of his ilk are not practicing or preaching Christ but have become adherents of a political movement in this nation that attempts to use Christianity towards their own narrow political ends.
I believe that there is a role for Christianity in the events of the world, but the teachings of Christ leads us to love one another, strain and stretch to understand each other, and dare to know each other enough that we come to an understanding of one another and from that create a world that is not built on might and winning but on understanding and unity. Clearly the comments of Robertson defy the framework we find in the gospels of Jesus Christ.
Some may argue that Christ existed in another time and did not have an understanding of the kind of world we exist in today. But any follower of Jesus knows that as he was human and he was also fully God, and therefore his understanding of the world, humankind and our needs were not captive to a time but applies to all time! Knowing this I do not see anywhere in the gospels of Christ that he condones, suggests or advocates murder or political assassination! Instead Jesus reminds us to beware of Pharisees, and Robertson, Dobson and others have become the Pharisees of our contemporary world!
What do we find in the Good News of Christ? We find love is expressed continually and unceasingly. The gospels admonish us to do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. We finds words in the gospels that define the mission of Christians as the elevation of the poor, freedom for those who are oppressed, salvation for the lost, and hope for the hopeless. Jesus says come unto me all of you who are weak and heavy laden and I will give you rest. He does not say come to me those who are looking for political expediency and I will show you who to and how to assassinate!
Sure there has been trouble in Venezuela, and some will suggest that it is communism struggling to raise it head. Others will suggest that the poor of Venezuela have been poor too long in a nation that is the 5th largest oil producer in the world. Some will suggest that too much of the resources have been in the hands of too few, and that the poor of the land have found hope in a political leader, Hugo Chavez. I would not suggest that Chavez is a saint, for no person is perfect, but I do know that Chavez was elected even while the greatest power in the world, the United States government, did everything possible to thwart his election. This is hardly the neighborliness that Jesus Christ calls us to emulate.
I am continually amazed at how so many preachers have ceased to preach Christ, or to proclaim him out of the rich simplicity of his teachings and have resorted to a kind of theology that is not gospel based but is based on a narrow point of view that keeps the powerful powerful and the poor poor!
Therefore, it is impossible to justify the comments of Pat Robertson. His comments are not of the gospel he claims to preach, nor of the teachings of Christ that any Christian claims to love. Instead what Robertson has to say is based on a paradigm from the most conservative voices in this country, and those voices have no God except themselves and no soul except their selfish point of view!
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0823-32.htm
Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler is National President, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice and Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ Washington, D.C.
Stoner: The Two Great World Religions
Maybe in the end there are only two great world religions.
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THE TWO GREAT WORLD RELIGIONS
by John K. Stoner
posted on Every Church a Peace Church
In the end perhaps there really are only two great world religions: the one whose god says "Love your enemies" and the one whose god says "Kill your enemies."
This idea comes from Jesus, at the time in the synagogue when he posed what to him was the Big Question: "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?" (Mark 3).
Someone may quickly say there is another great world religion, which has no enemies, and does not use "enemy" language. Which may be fine, if it is not too hasty to say also that this religion has no good and evil, no right and wrong, no sick and well, no left and right, no up and down. There are some things which don't go away just because we don't call them by their names. So what shall we do about things which don't go away, like friends and enemies?
I am taking up again that troublesome teaching of Jesus which invites us to "love our enemies." (Matthew 5). My response is in two parts. First I ask, “should we love our enemies?” Second, I ask “How could we love our enemies?”
For the sake of the discussion, let's assume that since Jesus commanded it, on some grounds and in some way, we should love our enemies. That is, we should wish them well. We should desire for them the discovery and fulfillment of who they could become as compassionate and loving human beings.
Now let's go to the harder question, how could we love our enemies? That is, where would the energy, the capacity, the resource, the ability to love our enemies come from?
The answer to that question cannot be simple, it cannot be small, it cannot be easy, but again at least for the purpose of the exercise, let us assume that there is somewhere, somehow an answer, an enabling power to do essentially what Jesus taught--to love our enemies. The purpose of loving our enemies, of course, is not vague or ill-defined. The purpose of loving our enemies is to do what was central in the life and teachings of Jesus, namely, to overcome evil with good. I suspect that overcoming evil with good is pretty close the center of all great religions. So where would we get the energy to do that?
What does Christianity, your church, or a peace church, say or offer by way of enabling people to love their enemies-- enabling them to overcome evil with good?
The church says the message of Jesus is “good news. What is the good news in Jesus’ message?
Well, here is a clue. We have reason to be glad that "God sends his/her rain on the just and on the the unjust" (Matthew 5) if we stop a moment to wonder which of those two categories our lives fall into. We are not always just, but we are always in the care of God. We are, indeed, always loved by God. This is good news.
This idea of God's generous, non-discriminating love is worth pondering. Where would I be if God were not kind to the unjust, the selfish and people who do some very bad things?
The apostle Paul said that God shows God's love to us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5). Jesus died refusing to resist or kill, but instead loving, those who were bent on his destruction. We are told he died with these words on his lips: "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing" (Luke 23). We have reason to be thankful that Jesus, as well as a lot of other people, like family, friends and neighbors, say those words about us from time to time, rather than pursuing the maximum penalty for our behavior.
Have you ever been loved more than you deserved?
A person who must answer that question in the negative is not a good candidate for loving their enemies.
If we have not experienced generous love, how could we give generous love to others?
Have I ever been loved more than I deserved? Thinking about that, I've said to myself: "Well, no, I'm a human being. I'm me, I'm not so bad, I deserve all the love I get, and most of the time, more than I get!"
But then I think of how I've been loved by my parents, my wife, my children, my co-workers, my friends--and I say, "Oh my goodness, they love me time after time more than I deserve." And I think of the love that first thought of my existence, and loved me into being. I think of God the creator--then I find that the very beginning of my existence and the life that I live every day is the free gift of a loving Creator.
When I do or say something careless or hurtful to someone near me, if they pass over it silently, or even explicitly mention it and say "That's OK," I know that I have been loved more than I deserved. I have been forgiven, rather than held to an absolute standard of retribution for what I have done--which retribution we often call "justice."
So here is a useful exercise: to reflect calmly, honestly, and at some length on the possibility that I have been loved more than I deserved. To
-- name some specific times when that happened;
--think of the biggest forgiveness I've ever experienced
--think of how those experiences have shaped who I am
--think of who I would be without those experience of being loved more than I deserved.
To know that we have been loved as enemies by God is know something of the true character of God, and the quality of true love.
And to know that we have been loved this way, this much, is the first, and no doubt the essential, step toward being able to love our own enemies.
We are energized to love our enemies by the experience we have of being loved as enemies. This works for us. So then, our enemies being loved by us could also work. There is power in that thought.
But still it is not easy.
Someone has coined the phrase "compassion fatigue," This is a short way of saying it is hard to keep on caring deeply, decade after decade for the victims of state sanctioned and terrorist violence. And hard to keep on believing that those who inflict the sufferings and deaths are themselves redeemable. When you remember the theft of the land from the Native Americans, and slavery, and you look a imperial militarism today--can you keep on believing that the United States is redeemable without ever weakening, without ever wondering?
Jesus is so troublesome. “Love your enemies!” Why couldn't he have made it easier?
Having asked that, I wonder, "Is that what we really want--easier?"
But again, we have been deeply loved-- God has forgiven us a thousand times, and if we don't know that, don't feel that, the first order of business is to get enough in touch with ourselves that we know that we are sustained every day by a love which forgives our offenses and overcomes our weaknesses. Experiencing that love as God's gift, and the gift of people around us, we gain energy to forgive others, to expect their improvement and transformation, time and time again. Jesus is indeed troublesome, but in the end his burden is light because he always gives more than he asks. And he asks us to do only the same.
We find energy to love our enemies also in our desire to see a changed world. We see the world stumbling over the fact that people are not very good or loving. So here is a challenge: How many of us who wish that people were born more good or more loving are willing to commit some energy to the end that people would become more good and more loving?
Our own experience here again may be a good, if not indeed the best, teacher. Some of us, to be sure, think that we were born good, and there is some important truth in that perception. But the rest of us know that the goodness doesn’t describe everything about ourselves, and we suspect that it doesn’t describe everything about most of the people we meet. At the same time, we’ve had the experience of some improvement in our own attitudes and our actions. We have in some ways become better and more loving people; any satisfaction we feel about the changes we have made over the years are no doubt related to our sense that we are a little more loving, and a little better people than we once were. And so we believe that people can change and the way they engage the world can change.
In summary, if religion is about worshipping God, knowing something about “who” God is, and ordering our lives accordingly, there really are only two great world religions.
The god of the one says “resist evil, kill your enemies.” The god of the other says “resist evil, love your enemies.”
The central religious question of our time is what to do about enemies, or put another way, how to resist evil. The great divide between religions is the great divide between the answers given to that question.
The practice of loving enemies points a direction toward unity in worship and toward the creation of the beloved community.
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Pat Robertson: An embarrassment to the church
by Jim Wallis
Pat Robertson is an embarrassment to the church and a danger to American politics.
Robertson is known for his completely irresponsible statements - that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were due to American feminists and liberals, that true Christians could vote only for George W. Bush, that the federal judiciary is a greater threat to America than those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center Towers, and the list goes on. Robertson even took credit once for diverting a hurricane. But his latest outburst may take the cake.
On Monday, Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Robertson is worried about Chavez's critiques of American power and behavior in the world, especially because Venezuela is sitting on all that oil. We simply can't have an anti-American political leader who could raise the price of gas. So let's just kill him, the famous television preacher seriously suggested. After all, having some of our "covert operatives" take out the troublesome Venezuelan leader would be cheaper than another $200 billion war, he said.
It's clear Robertson must not have first asked himself "What would Jesus do?" But the teachings of Jesus have never been very popular with Robertson. He gets his religion elsewhere, from the twisted ideologies of an American brand of right-wing fundamentalism that has always been more nationalist than Christian. Apparently, Robertson didn't even remember what the Ten Commandments say, though he has championed their display on the walls of every American courthouse. That irritating one about "Thou shalt not kill" seems to rule out the killing of foreign leaders. But this week, simply putting biblical ethics aside, Robertson virtually issued an American religious fatwah for the murder of a foreign leader - on national television no less. That may be a first.
Yesterday Robertson "apologized." First he denied saying what he had said, but it was on the videotape (it's tough when they record you breaking the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus). Then he said that "taking out" Chavez might not require killing him, and perhaps kidnapping a duly elected leader would do. But Robertson does now say that using the word "assassination" was wrong and that he had been frustrated by Chavez - the old "my frustration made me say that somebody should be killed" argument. But the worst thing about Robertson's apology was that he compared himself to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German church leader and martyr who ultimately joined in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler.
Robertson's political and theological reasoning is simply unbelievable. Chavez, a democratically elected leader in no less than three internationally certified votes, has been an irritant to the Bush administration, but has yet to commit any holocausts. Nor does his human rights record even approach that of the Latin American dictators who have been responsible for massive violations of human rights and the deaths of tens of thousands of people (think of the military regimes of Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala). Robertson never criticized them, perhaps because many of them were supported by U.S. military aid and training.
This incident reveals that Robertson does not believe in democracy; he believes in theocracy. And he would like governments, including our own, to implement his theological agenda, perhaps legislate Leviticus, and "take out" those who disagree.
Robertson's American fundamentalist ideology gives a lot of good people a bad name. World evangelical leaders have already responded with alarm and disbelief. Robertson's words will taint and smear other evangelical Christians and put some in actual jeopardy, such as Venezuelan evangelicals. Most conservative evangelical Christians are appalled by Robertson's hateful and literally murderous words, and it's time for them to say so. To their credit, the World Evangelical Alliance and the National Association of Evangelicals have already denounced Robertson's words. When will we hear from some of the groups from the "Religious Right," such as the Family Research Council, Southern Baptists, and other leaders like James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Chuck Colson?
Robertson's words fuel both anti-Christian and anti-American sentiments around the world. It's difficult for an American government that has historically plotted against leaders in Cuba, Chile, the Congo, South Vietnam, and elsewhere to be easily believed when it disavows Robertson's call to assassinate Chavez. But George Bush must do so anyway, in the strongest terms possible.
It's time to name Robertson for what he is: an American fundamentalist whose theocratic views are not much different from the "Muslim extremists" he continually assails. It's time for conservative evangelical Christians in America, who are not like Islamic fundamentalists or Robertson, to distance themselves from his embarrassing and dangerous religion.
And it's time for Christian leaders of all stripes to call on Robertson not just to apologize, but to retire.
This opinion piece was posted in SojoMail. To subscribe, click to http://www.sojo.net
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The Jesus we haven't followed - Alvin Alexsi Currier
This article is excerpted from a sermon Alvin Alexsi Currier preached to expatriated Americans at St. Andrews Anglican Church of Lakeside, Jalisco, Mexico on August 21, 2005. He writes, "The sermon was very well received by about half of the congregation. Another third or so remained sort of neutral or didn't quite understand what was happening. And about twenty percent exploded. Actually they ended up by shooting themselves in the foot, in that they forbid that the sermon be posted on the church website or published in hardcopy. This censorship is stirring up a bit of a storm, with people seeking copies of this ‘censored sermon’ to see what it is all about."
Teachings about Jesus are alive and well in our churches. What haunts me this morning is the question of what has happened to the teachings of Jesus?
Is he not the one who warned that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God? Is he not the one who admonished Peter: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword”? Did he not command us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves?
What has happened to these teachings? The answer to this question is disturbing, for the truth seems to be that we as Christians have preferred to focus on what Jesus did for us, rather than follow what he preached, taught, and commanded us to do in his name.
The reason for this is clear: The teachings of Jesus are radical. And because his teachings are so challenging and radical, it is much more comfortable to focus on a quiet, private, personal relationship with the Lord than it is to follow his teachings that call for a public prophetic witness.
The teachings of Jesus are radical because Jesus took the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and pushed the definition of who is our neighbor, out, out, and still further out, until it reached to the ends of the earth and included all of humanity—all of God’s children.
We do a fairly commendable job of loving our neighbor in the next pew or row of chairs, and we do a fairly decent job of loving each other of us who live together here in this expatriate community. And actually, we do a rather admirable job of loving and serving the Mexican world all around us. But the teachings of Jesus reach out to encircle a world much wider, broader, and deeper than these little concentric circles of our community.
The good shepherd is not content with the ninety and the nine; he goes out, out, out, until the last of the lost is found. Foxes have holes and birds of the air have their nests but the Son on Man, goes out, out, out, and has no place to lay his head.
The world is awash with the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, sick, and imprisoned, and Christ calls us to go out, out, out, even unto the least of these our brothers and sisters.
What is radical about the teachings of Jesus is that he took the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and once he had extended that command to cover the whole of the human race, he commanded us to go down, down, down to the least, last, lost, and poorest one of these our brothers and sisters.
Down, down, down to the wounded Samaritan lying unconscious beside the road. Down, down to the woman taken in adultery encircled by the mob yearning to stone her. Down to the thief hanging on the cross. Down to the starving, fear-ridden faces on the scorched earth of Darfur. Down to the destitute hopelessness of those trapped in the sprawling slums of a hundred festering cities. Down to the terrified faces of soldiers and civilians alike caught in the bloodstained carnage of war in Iraq.
Yes, the teachings of Jesus are radical. The simple truth is that the teachings of Jesus pull us inescapably toward confrontation with the explosively loaded and emotional issues of our lives, culture, nation, politics, and the world.
A Christian community that confesses Jesus Christ as its Lord and King and yet shies away from wrestling with his teachings will soon atrophy and dwindle away into irrelevance. It is a testimony to the health of this congregation that it recently faced, both courageously and boldly, the issue of homosexuality.
It is an undeniable truth that the teachings of Jesus commission us to this prophetic ministry. It is an equally undeniable truth that obedience to this prophetic ministry is one of the hardest parts of our Christian calling.
I am not a hero. I confess to wrestling constantly with potent insecurities, but as I was given this text to preach on, and as I came to struggle over the last three weeks with what it means to confess Jesus, both as the Son of the Living God, and as my Lord and King, suddenly, but very simply, it became utterly clear to me what I knew I had to do.
All of us live daily with the escalating horror of the war in Iraq. Whether we are citizens of the United States or the United Kingdom who have armed forces that are fighting over there, or whether we are from the countries such as Canada or Mexico that have refused to join in the conflict, all of us cannot escape from a daily confrontation with that scene of horror, carnage, and death.
I went to Germany as an exchange pastor some forty-six years ago. One evening while I was visiting with the young German pastor with whom I was exchanging, he told me about his experience in his home city of Karlsruhe on Kristalnacht, that infamous night in November of 1938 when Nazi thugs and mobs all over Germany smashed and burned Jewish synagogues. He said that when he arrived at his school the next morning his teacher entered the room and spoke only one sentence. Shaking with emotion he said: “What happened last night is wrong, wrong, wrong!” Then he dismissed the class.
The incident behind that story took place nearly sixty-eight years ago, but throughout my long life it has always been my own personal example of the prophetic stance and personal witness that our Lord might someday call us to.
Now my time has come.
As I wrestled with this text and this sermon over the last weeks I became convinced by both my conscience and my heart that I was called to raise with you this morning, and from this pulpit, the following question: If we confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, then must we not also follow his teachings?
And does not following his teachings mean that we must also question our support for, or our failure to condemn, the horror, carnage, and death of the war in Iraq that was initiated, and is now being prosecuted, wholly or at least partially, in our name?
And as I wrestled I also became convinced by both my conscience and my heart that I was called to bear a prophetic witness from this pulpit, this morning, to my own personal conviction that in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and following his teachings, we must now boldly cry out to the world that this war in Iraq is wrong, wrong, wrong. So help us God. Amen.
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