jimrigby.org

I have been in many interfaith groups over the years. Typically, such gatherings consist of learning each other’s history, sitting in each other’s worship and having times of fellowship. These are noble efforts, but I do not believe they will bring lasting unity among the religions so long as each faith carries the seeds of discord within its own self-definition. This is a problem no interfaith group would mention, much less address. Allow me to name the heresy:

So long each religion refuses to renounce the idea that it’s leader is the only true guide,

So long as each religion refuses to renounce that idea that they are God’s only chosen people.

So long as each religion believes that God has given them an actual tract of land,

So long as each religion believes their scriptures are to be taken literally, thus overriding human reason, and trumping the needs of the common good,

So long as these factors remain in place, we can have all the interfaith picnics and worships we want, but will still carry daggers in our hearts and will pass them on to our children. The roots of religious intolerance do not lie in hatred, nor even in ignorance, but in our claims of special privilege over one another.

Whichever side of the gun debate you find yourself on, it is important to feel our nation’s gun wound. The Brady Campaign website has a daily count for gun deaths in the US. Our average is 268 people shot every day, or 97,820 shot every year. So far this year, at the end of our first month with one day to go, we have lost 8,189 Americans to gun deaths this year.

http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/gunviolence

One of the central aspirations of this blog has been to bridge the gulf between theist and non-theist approaches to life. My assumption is that our scientific understanding of life need not, and should not, rob us of community and of a shared wonder through all the stages of life’s journey.

So I was delighted to run across this Huffington Post article about an atheist church which has been started in Calgary, Canada.

Korey Peters had left Christianity years ago. He simply could not believe in God. But he also realized the poverty of living life in his head. He missed the music, the fellowship and, in a word, the art of religion. So he began a church for non-theist people who want to share life together in community.

I am so grateful for this wonderful example of what I have been trying to say for some time. Religion is not centrally about dogma, superstition or moralism. Healthy religion is reverence for life shared in community. The rest is optional.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/30/calgary-secular-church-first-atheist-church-alberta_n_2583930.html?utm_hp_ref=religion&ir=Religion

I have to admit I don’t understand the fear that needs to hide behind a gun. I understand the need to feel safe, which includes a right to self-defense, but I do not understand how any talk of curbing gun violence triggers such hysterical and irrational reactions from some gun advocates.

The people that heckled the grieving parent of a child shot down at Sandy Hook School when he tried to speak to the Connecticut legislature in no way represent responsible gun owners, but they do represent the part of gun advocacy I understand least. I understand wanting to defend one’s home, or to hunt, or simply to collect guns as a hobby. What I do not understand is the unwillingness of rational gun owners to have a conversation about why private ownership of nuclear weapons, or tanks, or military grade machine guns is a bad idea. Very few gun owners would defend private ownership of those kinds of weapons, so why are they not rising up to refute the insanity of the NRA?

I am not a gun owner, but I am willing to concede and defend another’s right to bear arms. It seems to me the other side of that conversation would be for gun advocates to admit that there is a limit to the kinds of weapons that can be privately owned in a civilized society. If I were a gun advocate, I would feel it my duty to denounce the people who heckled a grieving parent simply because he wants to limit gun violence. It is one thing to disagree, but we usually heckle only when we cannot bear to hear the truth another has to say.

“A conservative is someone who believes nothing should be done for the first time.” -Anon

It foolish to use words like “conservative” or “liberal” as if they were objective descriptions. All of us are a mixture of both approaches. And we all begin to measure from our own subjective experience, not some external objective source of reference. Still, if we are to speak within our culture, we need to use the words of our culture and to understand we are painting caricatures not actual portraits.

The conservatism into which I was raised was much more than a political viewpoint. I was taught a kind of deference to the ancients that surrendered to them my most important decisions. The older a source, the more authority it was said to have. The Bible was presented as an authority, not so much because of it was reasonable, but because it was ancient.

When Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia said the other day that the Constitution is a “dead, dead, dead document” I shuddered. I heard him saying that our constitution is not a living work of the people but a finished work of the dead. Ever the dutiful conservative, Scalia seemed to say that reason died with our forebears. We may copy their words, but never their revolutionary spirit.

He had put in a nutshell why I am not a conservative. Like Paine I believe the dead should not outvote the living. I believe that none of us looks at an ancient text objectively. If the point of reading any ancient document were accessible on the face of it, why go to law school or seminary? Any rank amateur could read the plain meaning of a text.  As Scalia must surely know, no text is self-explanatory. We all bring filters to the task of interpretation. Furthermore, our animal natures cannot help but slip our opposable  thumbs onto the scale. If we do not bind ourselves to an extra-personal and extra-cultural reference point, we will all cheat. If we do not realize our own subjectivity and our culture’s, our prejudices set sail under the banner of conservative objectivity.

(FYI I’ll soon do a follow up blog on why I am not liberal)

Human Rights have been under assault from every angle in recent years. Next month St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church will host a conference on this important topic and help us chart a response.

Friday night at 7:30 Jim Taylor will speak on “The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.” Taylor has taught on this subject for 40 years and has donated his library to our church. The writings, tapes and CD’s cover the writings the speeches and the music of human rights movements spanning from civil rights, women’s movement to the struggle for GLBT equality.

Saturday, beginning at 9am, we will have wonderful workshops with speakers from around the nation teaching on issues spanning from immigration and detention issues, women’s rights, worker’s rights, marriage equality and the indigenous struggle.

A ten dollar donation is suggested, but no one turned away for lack of money.

For reservations or for more information call St. Andrew’s at 251-0698, or email us at “staopen.com”

A poll released last week seems to show that many Christians want religious liberty for themselves but not for others.

 “While these Christians are particularly concerned that religious freedoms are being eroded in this country, “they also want Judeo-Christians to dominate the culture.”

The poll showed that half of Americans worry that their religious freedoms are under attack which, for many, means not being allowed to make their own religious views the norm. The pollsters point out that a consistent view of religious liberty would have to include freedom from religion as well.

 “They cannot have it both ways… This does not mean putting Judeo-Christian values aside, but it will require a renegotiation of those values in the public square as America increasingly becomes a multi-faith nation.”

“Asked for their opinion as to why religious freedom is threatened, 97 percent of evangelicals agreed that “some groups have actively tried to move society away from traditional Christian values.”

The poll also revealed that almost a third of those asked blamed gays and lesbians for the cultural shift.

“And 72 percent of evangelicals also agreed that gays and lesbians were the group “most active in trying to remove Christian values from the country.” That compares to 31 percent of all adults who held this belief.”

There is a huge gulf between conservative evangelicals and the rest of Christendom, but their numbers are so large that they seem to be speaking for us all. A chart showing the break down of those differences is included below.

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/01/23/poll-shows-a-double-standard-on-religious-liberty/

As was pointed out a while back there is actually a bar and grill called “Rev. Jim’s Dam Pub” out by the lake. I called them yesterday and they said they would be happy to host a gathering of our blog community. I told them I had no idea how many people might be interested, but I since I promised the group a party when we hit 1,000 people I figured I should at least offer. What does a happy hour the last week of February sound like? Or would people rather meet at a place in town? Maybe we could Skype it to those from far away places.

When a President takes the oath of office using a bible, it is a perfect symbol of bad religion.

Obviously, using a Christian Bible is inappropriate because many citizens aren’t Christian and deserve a President who serves them equally, but the act is also bad Christianity as well.

What does it mean for a President to take an oath on a book that forbids the taking of oaths?

 “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to God.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is God’s footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this is evil.(Matt. 5:33-37)

When we deal with the Bible, not as a message but as a holy object, are we not exhibiting the rankest form of superstition? Is not the surest way to deny the Bible’s message to raise the book unopened and place it upon a pedestal?

What does it mean when we use the Bible to pledge allegiance to something else? In other words, when the President places a hand on the Bible and pledges allegiance to the constititution, does that not make the Bible a kind of magical tool cast to the service of our nation?

The Bible contains a latent call to a new vision of human government. It is not everywhere clear, but the plot line of the Bible is a movement toward universality. The Kingdoms of Earth are to become a “Kindom” based on justice and compassion. Nationalism is inconsistent with that universal message. It is arrogant heresy to ask God to be on our side and not someone else’s. Perhaps the President should put a hand on the constitution and pledge allegiance to universal justice instead.

Finally, what does it mean when a president uses the bible of the American prophet Martin Luther King without the same radical commitment to undoing predatory capitalism and military empire? Is it not diluting the one medicine that could heal this country? To pledge ourselves to the goals of Martin Luther King is mockery so long as we are also pledged to the methods he abhorred.