jimrigby.org

No fundamentalist walking the earth follows Jesus, not a single one. Instead, fundamentalists cut the Bible into verses, and then rearrange those verses like Legos to build a robotic Jesus who no longer calls us turn the other cheek, nor share, nor refrain from judgment. Fundamentalists can be truly wonderful as individuals, but together their literalism and sectarian arrogance spell misery to all those who are different. Fundamentalism is only related to Jesus in the same sense that a fish stick is related to a fish.

(Jerusalem) In a discovery sure to reshape how we view Jesus, NRA archeologists have discovered what they believe to have been a concealed firearm used by Jesus. The primitive gun was made is out of clay and appears to have fired very hard pieces of bread for bullets.

NRA scholars had long suspected that the “rod” of Moses was actually a handgun, but until now no one had actually found a firearm used by a biblical figure. Hugo Grunt, who headed the dig, made the following statement:

“Liberals have long pictured Jesus as a pacifist sissy. We now know the truth. When Jesus said, “turn the other cheek,” he must have meant to fire your rifle with the other arm, which would entail a turning of the cheek. And when he said when he said, “resist not evil” he must have meant “let your gun do that for you.”

The revelation is sure to redefine Christianity as radically as when Republican biblical scholars, defending Reagan’s cuts to school funding, revealed an ancient document showing that that what Jesus actually said was not, “Suffer the little children to come onto me,” but “let the little children suffer, period.”

In a particularly moving moment Professor Grunt wiped a tear from his eye and said, “We are realizing that Jesus was actually just like us at the NRA. It is very likely that the cross itself was not a sign of redemptive suffering, but was actually represented the crosshairs of Jesus’ rifle. From now on, such traditional phrases as “resting in the arms of God” will have a whole new meaning.”

Our church will soon present an overture to our Presbytery that we hope will go before the national church. The overture will simply allow a church to use non-sexist language in every aspect of its life. To be clear, we are not asking for other churches to use non-sexist language, only that we not be asked to violate our conscience by being required to call God “Father” or Christ “He.”

As it stands, Presbyterian Churches are required to use male language for God in the baptismal and ordination vows. We, at St. Andrew’s can no more say that God is male, than we would say God is Caucasian. We are asking the denomination to carve out a place for those of us who can no longer use sexist language, and therefore can no longer use the traditional vows of the church without retranslating them to be inclusive of all humankind. To this end, we are asking members of our church to write testimonials about the difference inclusive language has made in their lives. We will present those testimonials as an addendum to our overture.

While most of the people who come to this blog are not Presbyterian, and many not Christian, I would love to enter into that conversation here as well. So I am requesting testimonials to the good that non-sexist language has done, or the harm that sexist language has done in people’s lives.  Rape and domestic violence are the inevitable products of a male centered worldview that is protected and guarded by the words we use. There is no possible sexism that can be more universal or fundamental than the claim that the sacred is male. Perhaps by sharing our stories we can help people begin to feel the pain they are inflicting when they uses sexist language in religion, or in ordinary life.

The modern university was born out of humanism’s rejection of the feudal worldview where education was reserved for the children of aristocrats and the plentiful poor were, by cosmic design, uneducated pawns of the powerful. But political systems are like ties. What was old becomes new again. Our nation, weary of the work that would be required for humanism’s dream, has returned to a new form of feudalism where the power of kings and queens is replaced by the wealth of a new aristocracy, and thrones have been replaced by the board rooms of those imaginary royal persons we call “corporations.’

It was Jefferson who said that democracy rises and falls with public education, and it was the website of the conservative magazine Forbes which has said there is a “stealth campaign” to privatize public education.

The University of Texas has undertaken a study of the possibility of privatizing such services as housing, food and parking. The same model was applied to Texas A&M where a similar group of business people showed how money could be saved by privatizing services. Workers were guaranteed that they would be able to keep their same jobs under the new private ownership for at least two years. As a formality, they would be asked to re-apply for their jobs, but the deal was presented as a win/win for everyone. When the smoke cleared, only 600 of the 1,647 employees were kept on and local businesses were replaced by cheaper resources from elsewhere.

It is not accurate to say the corporation lied to A&M, or that they are now lying to UT. Corporations cannot lie because they have no concept of truth. Corporations have neither hearts nor minds. They are persons only in an attenuated legal sense. Corporations are not democratic, but feudal, in structure. They are actually much worse than the old feudalism because Kings and Queens were human and so might show mercy from time to time. Corporate capitalism is a bloodless soulless abstraction where no one is allowed to intervene for such nonmarket issues as the welfare of human beings.

Corporate capitalism is like a tick that can only sense blood and has no concern from whom that life essence is drawn.

When “public” universities are bought by “private” interests, there will be an unavoidable conflict of interest. Either the private owners will be asked to lose money for the public good, or the “public good” will be defined by those corporate entities whose only charter is to make money for shareholders. Inevitably, professors will spend more and more time doing research that brings profit to corporate sources of funding, and less and less time actually educating students. Before long, corporate sponsors will point out that food services and housing are beneath market levels and so prices will rise to be competitive with private institutions. As a result of being unable to meet market levels of spending, poorer students will return to their feudal role as uneducated pawns of the wealthy.

Let us trace out where this train will inevitably lead. In many ways, the tracks have already been lain, and universities are already a painted harem for corporate interests. As you watch the privatizing of the public realm, please know you are watching the democracy being sold at a yard sale. Also know that you must choose between two these two visions of the human condition, the humanist dream of a democratic egalitarian humankind, or the new feudalism that believes some were born to lead and others born to serve.

(This piece is an elaboration of a talk I gave yesterday at UT for Save Our Community Coalition. Details of the A&M privatization were drawn from the Texas State Employees Union website.)

This is a Valentine Card to everyone who will eat lunch alone today. It is for everyone who will be asked by the “greeter” of that restaurant, “just one?”

The secret of this day is to step out side this culture’s obsession with romantic love and to go deeper into the love you have for every person, plant and animal. You need not experience less love because it has not come to you in an officially sanctioned package. Instead, this can be a day to realize that the pain of loneliness is very helpful in identifying the prison of the ego. It is the part of you that hurts this day that you have held back from the river of life. When you sit in a woods or by a river, you dissolve into reality, but you can only do so when your ego is silent. The ego you have learned from experience is not your true self. If you want to know who you really are look at the periodic chart and realize you are seeing the bare surface of your mysterious source. Consider what you know of physics and realize your home is deeper still. You are the universe rising up to see itself and rejoice. You are nature rising up in the form of a gardener,  the stars rising up in the form of an astronomer, life itself rising up in the form of a prophet.

You do not need another to validate your love of the all. If you are feeling the pain of loneliness this day, unshackle your heart. The small loves you have been denied are an opportunity to dissolve into the one big love.

 Dear sir or madam (but probably sir),

I have noticed that you have a vacancy in your church and I would like to apply for the job of Pope. I realize not being a Cardinal, or even Catholic, is a drawback, but I believe I have some great suggestions that will more than outweigh those negatives.

Any incoming Pope will face severe challenges: Preaching humility, while living a palace; promoting scholastic reason, while still making magical claims; remaining credible attacking homosexuality, while wearing  a sparkly dress and what looks like Dorothy’s shoes from the Wizard of Oz.

My own Presbyterian denomination has much to teach about hiding injustice behind the robes of sanctity. For example, we have no formal prohibition against female clergy, but our insistence on sexist language for God ensures that woman clergy are, well women clergy. Our language lets the little ladies know they are always on male turf.

The next Pope will have to do something about uppity Catholic women. Those nuns driving around the country are an embarrassment for us male clergy everywhere. They are smarter than we, better informed on social issues, and, unfortunately, living in the real world. The new Pope will need to discredit them even more effectively than did the former Pope. As Pope my first order of business would be to say that women should not be allowed to drive. At first it will sound strange, but after a few centuries it will make as much sense as saying that women can’t sprinkle baptismal waters on a baby’s head or pass out the holy crackers.

To convince American women that 80 year old celibates know more about sex than they do is a tough sale, which is why I will also declare that, in the womb, the soul enters the body through the man’s peepee.  I haven’t found it in the Bible yet, but what other reason could there be for saying that men can handle ordination but women are not?

 My second act will be to take back the church’s apology to Galileo. I realize that will re-saddle us with a geocentric universe, but we cannot admit that the Bible is wrong about astronomy and also say it is infallible about human sexuality. Unfortunately some of the best philosophers and skeptics of all time came from the Catholic Church. We must make sure that such anti-magic forces do not rise up again in the Catholic Church. If minds like William of Ockham emerge again and start testing our truth claims by the scientific method, well you know where that would lead.

To face this grave threat I plan to appoint magician David Blain as my official theologian. I figure if he can make it look like a tiger disappeared he can make our magical claims sound credible. Obviously, the new theology will require new expenditures in pyrotectics, but that will be considerably less expensive than bringing our theology into the real world.

My final challenge will be condemning poverty without playing into those radical Catholics who teach liberation theology. These radicals usurp our noble efforts at charity with an ungodly call to undo the actual sources of poverty. We would very quickly lose our welcome in any country in the world if we ever actually confronted the sources of poverty.

To face this third challenge, I propose more statues of the saints. I realize they lived lives of poverty and most of them would not be welcome in any modern denomination, but remember one important fact. They are dead. They cannot speak, which means we can speak for them. By lifting up their forms we distract the people from their radical messages. I recommend such statues placed next to our most vulgar expressions of wealth like chandeliers, fancy chairs and such. Perhaps a golden statue of a saint St. Francis will be enough to distract the people from his bad example.

These are a few of my ideas. I hope you will consider me for the job of Pope. We can discuss other details like vacation and my Pope name later.  Until then, I am

respectfully yours,

Rev. Jas. Rigby,

(Pope Jimmy I?)

If Americans do not learn to think outside of nationalism, corporate capitalism, and partisan politics, our elections are little more than arguments about who will be driving the bus when it goes over the cliff.

“Pentecost” is often interpreted as a magical event where people spoke in tongues. A deeper interpretation of Pentecost was that people coming together from every possible human condition felt a unity that transcended the limitations of their own language.

The following poem comes from a Jewish American hoping to reach across the divide on the subject of Gaza. Obviously that is not possible so long as either side has a vocabulary that can only express its own pain. Anyone who sets out on the course of peacemaking must realize we carry the seeds of discord in our very language. We must all commit ourselves to learning a larger language in which we can express and hear not only our own group’s hope and pain, but that of the entire species. Most importantly we must be willing to hear what our “enemy” is saying. To disagree is one thing, to not be able to even hear what someone is saying is another.

When the Gaza war began in November 2012, American Jews’ lack of an embracing moral language, a language that could acknowledge all viewpoints, sufferings, terrors, humanity, became painfully obvious. To speak of the civilians dying in Gaza was, to many American Jews, to attack Israel and deny its legitimate rights to exist and defend itself from missiles. We seemed to have no language in which which we could speak both of Israeli families huddling in bomb shelters as far north as Jerusalem and children crawling through Gaza rubble.

Poets can’t protect families from bombardment, negotiate cease-fires, resolve disputes, make peace or establish justice. But we can expose and stretch the limits of language, and challenge ourselves and our readers to imagine more honest, compassionate, embracing tongues in which to address this unspeakable tangle of fear, injustice, and brutality.

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/tikkundaily/enlarging-our-moral-language

I am still waiting for a president who does not put the wants of the rich on the same scale as the needs of the poor.

As long as this current President is willing to meet this current Republican Party half way, he is half the leader we need. What we need is someone who not only speaks like Obama speaks, but someone who will go directly to the people to show us how we can actually live out those ideals.

This is a nation that voted for Obama when he seemed in favor of internationalism, transparency, universal healthcare and against militarism and corporate greed. To say he did not have the support to create change is delusional. He could not bring change because he continued to play the same old rigged game.

We need a president who addresses the nation directly to explain how we have been robbed, and to show us who did it. This cannot be done by someone who is more concerned with working cooperatively with the fox, than with protecting the hens. We need someone who will place so much pressure on Washington that they have no choice but represent us. We need someone who will say what we all know, our democracy has been bought, and the citizenship must collectively rise up if we are to regain control over our own lives.

We need someone who not only has the rhetoric of MLK, but someone who has the same prophetic commitment to justice for all. We need someone who will go directly to the people that voted against war and explain how we can dismantle the industrial military complex without compromising national security. We need someone who will go directly to the people who voted for universal health care and explain to them how they were robbed by the banks and by Wall Street and by big pharma.

We don’t need a political compromiser who will sell out the weakest and most vulnerable so he or she can pass tepid legislation, we need a Moses who will call us out of our captivity.

The word “sodomite” is based on a misunderstanding of the biblical text. Sodom was a rich city in the ancient world known for its luxurious living and for its cruelty to the poor and to outsiders. Several Hebrew prophets addressed the sins of Sodom but none of them referred to the modern interpretation that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality. In fact, that interpretation implies that the gang rape of strangers would have been just fine if the victims had been women.

More and more biblical scholars are coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the real “sodomites” have not been faithful loving gay people, but an inhospitable church.