| Home > Community Forum > Monthly Archive |
March 29, 2007
A World Where Lies Are True
Posted by Jesus Politics
Is there any doubt that the Christian Right is working hard to undermine science? In his column this week on Truth Dig, Chris Hedges puts it all into perspective.
Some excerpts:
The danger of creationism is that, like the pseudo-science of Nazi eugenics, it allows facts to be accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained ideology. Creationism removes the follower from the rational, reality-based world. Signs, miracles and wonders occur not only in the daily life of Christians but in history, science, medicine and logic. The belief system becomes the basis to understand the world. Random facts and data are collected and made to fit into this belief system or discarded. When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard to determine truth, in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of the events of the day, the world becomes a place where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text. [ ]
And yet, coming from the modern age, these Christo-fascists cannot discount science. They employ jargon, methods and data that appear to be science, to make an argument for creationism. They have created parallel research and scholarly institutions. They pump out articles in self-published journals to provide “evidence” that homosexuals can be cured, that global warming is a myth, that abortion can cause breast cancer, that something they call “post-abortion syndrome” leads to deep depression and suicide and that abstinence-only education is an effective form of birth control. This pseudo-science has seeped into the public debate. It is disseminated by nervous and timid media anxious to give both sides in every argument. Those who have contempt for facts and truth, for honest research and inquiry, are given the same platform by the press as those who deal in a world of reality, fact and rationality.
The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to legitimize itself. It achieves this imprint by discrediting real science and claiming creationist science as true science. All attempts to argue the creationists out of their mythical belief, to persuade them with logic, evidence, scientific inquiry and fact, will fail. They have created a “fundamentalist science.” They know they cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence that let them believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the midst of their flight from reality, to reassure their followers that science, science not contaminated by secular humanists and nonbelievers, is on their side. In this they are a distinctly modern movement. They seek the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements, which co-opt the disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give a modern veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief systems, systems that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth. The “paraprofessional” organizations formed by the Christian right, organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers and scientists, mimic the activities of real professional groups. They seek to challenge the legitimacy and the power of the traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures and methods employed by the non-totalitarian world, the use of pseudo-science to dress up fantasy, is slowly undermining our legitimate scientific and educational institutions. It is destroying the foundations of our open society. It is ushering us into a world where lies are true.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 05:24 PM | Comments (3)
March 23, 2007
Why Do Straights Hate Gays?
Posted by Jesus Politics
This is the question gay activist Larry Kramer asks in a recent column. It is indeed worth pondering.
Some excerpts:
DEAR STRAIGHT PEOPLE,
Why do you hate gay people so much?
Gays are hated. Prove me wrong. Your top general just called us immoral. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is in charge of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian troops, some fighting for our country in Iraq. A right-wing political commentator, Ann Coulter, gets away with calling a straight presidential candidate a faggot. Even Garrison Keillor, of all people, is making really tacky jokes about gay parents in his column. This, I guess, does not qualify as hate except that it is so distasteful and dumb, often a first step on the way to hate. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tried to duck the questions that Pace's bigotry raised, confirming what gay people know: that there is not one candidate running for public office anywhere who dares to come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us. [ ]
Parts of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. are joining with the Nigerian archbishop, who believes gays should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we'd have to worry about Episcopalians?
[ ]
Do you consider it acceptable that 20,000 Christian youths make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls? This is not free speech. This is another version of hate. [ ]
Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don't those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? [ ]
Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don't see much change coming.
I think your hate is evil.
What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.
And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.
You may say you don't hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what's the difference? Our own country's democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 03:05 AM | Comments (21)
March 22, 2007
The Christian Peace Witness and Beyond: Get Ready for a Radical Christian Message
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Throughout Western history, some have tried to use the power of the Christian message for their own ends or purposes. So it is with today's Christian Right-- which has (somewhat absurdly) tried to reduce the Christian message of hope and love to a paltry mean-spiritedness toward gays and women (even women who are victims of rape). But the times they are-a-changin' for Christians-- even formerly conservative Evangelical Christians. This week, thousands of Christians rallied against the failed Iraq War in Washington, DC. And that is just the tip of a huge iceberg.
In President Ford's staunchly Republican hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, thousands flock each week to hear Rob Bell's radical message of joy and peace. Zack Exley was there to witness:"Three thousand people were on their feet, singing powerfully and worshiping in an explosive expression of collective joy that simply does not exist in the left of this era. There were certainly some "hipster Christians" in the crowd (tattoos, goatees, etc.), but overwhelmingly the congregants were mainstream-looking Michiganders."
And as Exley's insightful In These Times article below notes, left leaning Christians have been regularly attracting bigger and more passionate crowds than the Christian right recently. In St.Paul, MN, Jim Wallis had much a much bigger crowd in back to back nights than James Dobson. "One of the Dobson organizers came over and told me, 'If they make us keep focusing on just two issues [abortion and gay marriage], they're going to lose all of us,'" he says. But some people I know actually take the ministry of Jesus seriously. This can lead to some very radical and even lefty behavior.
Just this week, my good friend, Rev. Tim Simpson of the Christian Alliance for Progress (and more than two hundred others) got arrested for protesting the Iraq War. Again--Tim got arrested--again. From the very beginning of this project last September in his first visit to a DC jail, Tim, who is nearly blind, and the Christian Alliance for Progress have taken a leading role in the planning and implementation of the Christian Peace Witness (CPW) for Iraq. This was an amazing effort for my friend from Jacksonville, but Tim is one of many who feels called to act as a Christian peacemaker.
And as Bernice Powell Jackson noted at the CPW service held at the National Cathedral in Eashington DC., "Hope, for Christians, can never just be a word – it must become an action. Hope for Christians must be a public commitment to follow Jesus in the non-violent struggle for justice and peace. Hope for Christians must be a public sharing of the love of Jesus. Hope for Christians must be a public witnessing to the power of love to overcome hate, to overcome cynicism, to overcome war, to overcome death itself."
Amen.
Here is an excerpt from the excellent In These Times article c/o AlterNet
What Lessons Can Progressives Learn from Evangelicals?
In Grand Rapids, Mich., a 36-year-old evangelical pastor named Rob Bell regularly describes his ministry as "revolutionary," "radical" and "an insurgency." Far from alienating people with such language, Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church draws thousands of new worshipers each year from the mostly conservative and white suburbs of west Michigan. In one recent sermon, available as a podcast from MarsHill.org, Bell tells his congregation that the only time Jesus speaks of God directly taking someone's life is the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-22), a story about a man who builds bigger barns to store a surplus harvest instead of sharing it with those in need. He closed the sermon by listing a dozen places around Grand Rapids where congregants could unload their own surplus wealth.
In his book Irresistible Revolution, 30-year-old author Shane Claiborne, who is currently living in Iraq to "stand in the way of war," asks evangelicals why their literal reading of the Bible doesn't lead them to do what Jesus so clearly told wealthy and middle-class people to do in his day: give up everything to help others.
The popular evangelical Christian magazine Relevant, launched in 2003 by Cameron Strang, the son of a Christian publishing magnate, contains a "Revolution" section complete with a raised red fist for a logo. They've also released The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Your World, a compilation by radical, Christian social-justice campaigners from around the world.
Bell and Claiborne are two of the better-known young voices of a broad, explicitly nonviolent, anti-imperialist and anticapitalist theology that is surging at the heart of white, suburban Evangelical Christianity. I first saw this movement at a local, conservative, nondenominational church in North Carolina where the pastor preached a sermon called "Two Fists in the Face of Empire." Looking further, I found a movement whose book sales tower over their secular progressive counterparts in Amazon rankings; whose sermon podcasts reach thousands of listeners each week; and whose messages, in one form or another, reach millions of churchgoers. Bell alone preaches to more than 10,000 people every Sunday, with more than 50,000 listening in online.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 01:36 AM | Comments (4)
March 15, 2007
Is the Gay Rights Movement Reeling Backward?
Posted by Jesus Politics
Chris Hedges continues to write challenging pieces on Truth Dig. One may be tempted to accuse him of being too pessimistic, but given how we are often prone to overlook or deny the presence of hate-based religion, Hedges' voice is useful in jolting us toward a reality we do not always want to confront.
But what is important is not this specific incident, or any other recent examples of public intolerance, but the seismic shift in public mood in much of the United States, a shift largely engineered by the radical Christian right. The Christian right has begun to strip gays and lesbians of their constitutional rights and render them second-class citizens. The gay rights movement, which made many gains over the past couple of decades, is reeling backward. And the mounting persecution of gays and lesbians is ominous not only for them but for the rest of society. [ ]The Rev. Mel White, who founded Soulforce and is one of our country’s most important if unacknowledged civil rights leaders, has spent most of his life, since coming out as a gay man, mounting nonviolent protests against these “Christian” bigots. But he and most gays and lesbians who resist usually resist alone.
"They [the Christian right] want to end homosexuality in America,” White told me, “and by doing that one step at a time, first the federal marriage amendment and then comes no adoption, no service in the military, the restatement of the sodomy laws and driving us back into our closets, or worse. They do not want to compromise, but they begin with compromise, after compromise, after compromise.”
The advance, White says, is demoralizing the gay community, which he warns “is losing the will to fight.”
"It’s safer back in the closet anyway, and since we can pass, or the gay leaders can pass, the ones who wear suits and have good jobs and have plenty of money, they will go underground,” he said. “It is the gay people out there in the hinterlands who have no options. They are being rejected by their families, discarded by their parents, kicked out of their jobs, harassed, ‘outed’ and killed. The gay leaders don’t have a clue about this suffering.” [ ]
“What frightens me most are gay people who don’t understand what’s happening and who are unwilling to take a stand,” he said. “Once they take away our rights they’re going to start wanting to register us because we’re the ones who have the most sexually transmitted diseases. They’re going to say ‘we want to register you so we can give you special medical attention.’ Quarantine comes next, along with taking away our children, the children we’ve adopted. They will take away the partnership rights the corporations put in place, because they can put pressure on the corporations. My bleakest description is that we’ll not only be driven back into our closets, but we’ll have to leave the country. Right now, we have to leave the state of Virginia, because of the law that says we can’t have any agreements, or any contracts, or any powers of attorney that represent marriage. So every gay person who has a business here lives in fear.”
My ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, told us to watch closely what the Christian right did to homosexuals. He had seen the same tactic in Nazi Germany, where he spent 1935 and 1936 working with the underground anti-Nazi church known as the Confessing Church. The Nazis also used “values” to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute’s library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of these Germans’ civil rights was largely cheered by the public and the German churches. But it legitimated tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said homosexuals would also be the first “social deviants” singled out and disempowered by the Christian right, but not the last.
Should another catastrophic attack such as 9/11 occur, should we enter into a period of prolonged instability and fear, what will prevent these preachers from calling for the punishment, detention and quarantining of gays and lesbians, as well as abortionists and Muslims and other nonbelievers to safeguard the nation? What will staunch hate crimes and physical attacks against those deemed immoral by fearful and angry Christians, against those whom these preachers have condemned as responsible for the nation’s abandonment by God? How will the nation function rationally if homeland security depends on an elusive piety as it is interpreted by the Christian right? And most ominously, the fringe groups of the Christian right believe “Bible-believing Christians” have been mandated by God to carry out Christian terrorism, to murder doctors who perform abortions and godless Muslims. In a time of anxiety and chaos, of overwhelming fear and uncertainty, how many more will be prodded by this talk of terror and divine vengeance to join the ranks of these Christian extremists?
Posted by Jesus Politics at 05:56 AM | Comments (8)
March 09, 2007
Libby Verdict: Where My Sympathies Lie
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Where My Sympathies Lie
"On a personal note, I was sad. I was sad for a man who had worked in my administration, and particularly sad for his family," Bush told CNN en Espanol in his first public comments on Lewis "Scooter" Libby's guilty verdict.c/o IOL
I don’t feel one bit sorry
for Libby's crimes against the FBI--
if you think about it, that State of the Union
alone could make you cry.
The President lied about Saddam
and yellow-cake from Niger—
Wilson had told him it was bogus,
but Cheney and Bush were in a rush to war.
I don’t feel sorry for Scooter Libby--
I feel sorry for our troops, sent to Iraq
without a reason, without a plan--
see-no-evil Rumsfeld as their main man.
I weep for two million Iraqis
who are now refugees
and countless thousands of others
loved ones will never again see.
And for all of those amazing Doctors
on the front lines
who day after day try to save bodies
mangled by IED’s, bullets and mines…
And I weep especially
(most nights when I watch the Newshour)
for the Three Thousand
One Hundred and Eighty Nine
their best efforts could not save.
I feel sorry for the children
who will never know
how much their lost fathers
and mothers
loved them so.
I feel sorry for my friend Jane,
whose son is a Blackhawk pilot
heading out for his third tour—
each time wondering, how many more?
And I feel sorry for my own kids,
who will be paying for this
unnecessary, trumped-up war
that has made things
so much worse than before.
But once again, let me stress:
I don’t feel one bit sorry
for Scooter or Cheney
or the others who lied us
into this unending mess!
I’m told the guidelines
would give Scooter at least
a year and a half—maybe he could trade that
for time in Ramadi, Baghdad or Najaf.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 12:06 PM | Comments (5)
March 08, 2007
The Human Hybrid Known as a Green Evangelical
Posted by Jesus Politics
Laurie Goodstein from the New York Times highlights today the pioneering environmental work of Rev. Jim Ball. Some excepts:
THE Rev. Jim Ball is an evangelical Christian minister whose pulpit is parked in front of his townhouse. It’s a deep blue hybrid Toyota Prius, but it is not just any Toyota Prius. It is the original “What Would Jesus Drive?” car.Four years ago Mr. Ball, the executive director of the nonprofit Evangelical Environmental Network, and his wife, Kara, drove the Prius from Texas east across the Bible Belt in a provocative stunt that, in keeping with the core mission of his organization, awakened evangelical churches to the threat of global warming. It also awakened Americans to the existence of the human hybrid known as a Green Evangelical. [ ]
Raised in Texas as a Southern Baptist, he knew that conservative evangelicals had long been allergic to anything like environmentalism, associating it with hippies, communism, feminism, anti-corporatism, gun control and nature-worshipping paganism.
Mr. Ball spent the last seven years inviting evangelical pastors to sit down with climate scientists who shared the same born-again faith and corporate executives who were making an effort to reduce pollution. Progress was slow and he did not convince them all, but in the last year he has led an effort that has persuaded more than 100 influential evangelical pastors, theologians and organizational leaders — many of them political conservatives — to sign an “Evangelical Call to Action” on climate change.
Since his leading role in the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign, Mr. Ball has preferred to stay out of the limelight while pushing his new converts forward as frontmen. He figured that the Rev. Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” could attract far more Christians to the climate-change cause by preaching about creation care than he could. [ ]
In the seminary, he had dismissed environmentalism as unimportant compared to poverty and oppression and war. But while studying for a Ph.D. in theological ethics at Drew University, he was challenged by another student to reread what the Bible had to say about care for God’s creation.
“Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15 to 20 is the touchstone text for me,” he said. “ ‘All things have been created by Him and for Him. All things have been reconciled by His blood on the cross.’ The Apostle Paul tells us we are called to be ministers of reconciliation, and that means caring for all things.”
Thanks to Melissa Rogers for the link.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 06:18 PM | Comments (2)
March 01, 2007
The Privilege of Exclusion
Posted by Jesus Politics
Rev. Peter Laarman, executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting, has posted a recent sermon that is worthy of attention.
Here are a few selections from the sermon's introduction:
By now I guess it’s not news to anyone that within American Christianity the tables have been turned in a dramatic way over the course of five decades. I can sketch these changes very simply. In the middle of the last century—fifty years ago, more or less—the Mainline Protestant denominations dominated the religious landscape. The gleaming Interchurch Center in New York City—475 Riverside Drive, commonly known as the “God Box”—had just been built with money from the Rockefellers. That building functioned as a kind of a Protestant Vatican. The National Council of Churches of Christ, headquartered there, spoke for the major Protestant bodies with considerable authority, as did state and local ecumenical councils, which were then strong and well-funded.
All of that is now gone, almost vanished. [ ]
What happened? Well, the country changed and the culture changed, but Mainline Protestants did not adapt very well. They did not take seriously the possibility that Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals would stage a spectacular comeback, in part by channeling white resentment of the Civil Rights Movement, fomenting anxiety over abortion, and exploiting what many working people viewed as an excessively permissive society in the Sixties and Seventies.
Perhaps more significantly, Mainline Protestants neglected their evangelism, forgot how to tell their own story with conviction and passion. [ ]
My point is not to dwell on the depressing story of how the tables got turned. I want to see instead whether we might find it possible to view the displacement of liberal Protestantism—the near-eclipse of progressive Christianity within U.S. culture—as a kind of blessing in disguise: to see it as a gift to those of us who remain in the progressive camp, bloody but still unbowed.
I want to preach to you the privilege of exclusion.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 04:03 AM | Comments (8)
