Ex Cathedra

Another provocative article in Religion Dispatches. Pat Robertson is clearly a monster, but he can be left out of the discussion.

Atheists (“religions can and often do lead to evil”) miss the point just as badly as believers (“my religion leads to good and may be necessary for good”).

What intrigues me is that sincere Christian belief motivates both the spiritual warriors’ enthusiastic participation in oppression and Sarah Posner’s reaction against that oppression. It’s not a matter of use versus abuse. Both are sincerely motivated by Christian religious values. The religion is the same, but the actions are opposite.

The scandal here is that religious values aren’t just in conflict with human values. Religious values appear to be orthogonal to human values, as though they operate in different domains.

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” ~ Pat Robertson

Where was I when all this was going on?

Martin Luther, that is. I expect he won’t mind the familiarity, being all dead and stuff. This is simply brilliant:

One must deal cleanly with the Scriptures. From the very beginning the word has come to us in various ways. It is not enough simply to look and see whether this is God’s word, whether God has spoken it; rather we must look and see to whom it has been spoken, whether it fits us. That makes all the difference between night and day” ~Timothy F. Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 2nd ed, p. 10)

That simple pair of exegetical principles undoes much of the damnfoolishness that’s sprung up around the interpretation of scripture.

Even though I’m a nonbeliever myself, I can recognize good work in theology. That’s good work.

The problem with believers isn’t that most of them are evil, They aren’t. The problem is that most of them are tribal.

The purpose of the Mosaic law was to separate the tribes of Israel from everybody else in the world. It worked. Though Jews were assimilated, Jewry survived. You can’t say that for the Babylonians.

The offshoots of Judaism developed their own tribalism. Christendom became a giant tribe, eager to take up swords to extirpate the outsiders, be they Turks, Vikings, or Native Americans.

That’s the problem. When anything takes precedence over doing the right thing, Katie bar the door.

The whole idea that there are ultimate values like tribal identity and salvation and eschatology that transcend right and wrong undermines morality. Religion is predicated on “We’re OK, they’re not OK” based on those transcendent values, not on whether we do right or wrong.

Morris Dees learned his values in a Southern Baptist church. When he went after other white Christians in the Klan, the church he grew up in kicked him out. The tribe easily included Klansmen, but excluded Dees.

A believer who tries to do what’s right instead of what makes her fit into the tribe has my admiration and sympathy.

“With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,”

A neglected phrase from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It follows “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Some quotations even omit it, but when I first saw it on a monument at Gettysburg, it grabbed my attention and still hasn’t let go.

Lincoln spoke in the language of the conventional pietism of his time. He wasn’t talking about tables of rules to be followed by rote. A person who was confident that he had all the answers couldn’t have written those words. He understood morality as a dynamic process in which we struggle to make moral decisions and perform moral actions and hopefully get better at it.

I think the Great Emancipator was also the Great Humanist.

You spend enough time inside an authoritarian system, all you see is the inside of the system.

Switching from one system to another (Hitlerjugend to Roman Catholic Church, Boy Scouts to Lockheed War Systems) is relatively easy. Same gauges and levers.

Stepping outside the system to evaluate its actions is hard. Do red blood cells know they’re feeding a finger that’s pulling a trigger?

Your ability to tell the difference between right and wrong disappears in the complexity of the system and the necessity to keep it running.

Whatever keeps the system just as it is becomes the definition of good.

The Pope’s problem is the nature of authority and conservatism. Is that our problem too? What systems are we trapped inside?

In the cross of Christ we’d glory
Alleluia
But we don’t believe the story
Alleluia
For our sins He can’t have died
Alleluia
In them we’re well satisfied
Aaaalleluuuuuia

Easter is that magical time of year when the ghost of Jesus rises from the grave to feed on the flesh of the living, so we all sing Easter  carols to lull Him back to sleep – after Peter Griffin

On the other hand, the season has been the inspiration for some pretty terrific music (BWV 4)

The big news of the year had to be archaeologists in Jerusalem digging up the corpse of Jesus.

Christians were thrilled to find out that Jesus was real, not just a mashup of myths going around the Middle East at the time.

Christians were not so thrilled to find out that when Jesus died, he stayed dead like everybody else who ever lived.

The Vatican announced they are still hopeful the corpse will revive and go hunting for braaaains.

When believers say atheism is “just another religion” are they saying atheism is a good basis for a life that’s intellectually rich, moral, and meaningful? Not a bit. They’re trying to put atheism down. They’re saying “you’re just as bad as we are.” That isn’t the kind of argument confident people make. It makes you wonder how trustworthy they think the religious way of knowing really is.

I heard a joke when I was 9 or 10 years old that inoculated me against teleology: Why is a turd tapered at the end? That’s so when you’re done shitting, your asshole doesn’t slam shut

The reason it’s a joke is that even at that tender (yet disgusting) age, we all knew that things can have causes but needn’t have purposes, and that thinking teleologically is stupid.

I’m sure you won’t have any need for this example, at least if you have any sense. Just think of it as something you found while you were walking the dog: something that shows no evidence off intelligent design.