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Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack

12 Scriptures no fundamentalist believes

(Part 2: “Whoever has love, has God”)

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”  -1 John 4:7

When I arrived at college, I pledged to follow truth wherever it led. I had been raised in a fairly conservative religious fashion and wanted to be open to new and deeper understandings of life and the human condition. Very early on, I ran across a quote by Albert Schweitzer that reset the course of my life. He said there are two religions that call themselves “Christian.” First there is the religion of Jesus as demonstrated in the Sermon on the Mount, and then there are the countless religions about Jesus that various religious traditions have come up with.

If we use his own teachings as the plumb line, it is obvious that Jesus didn’t come to teach Christianity, he came to teach love. Jesus spoke before the New Testament  or any creeds were written so we must not superimpose them upon his simple message of love. Someone does not have to stop being who they are to follow Jesus, in fact we are only asked to be our true selves.  This we can do as a Jew, or a Buddhist or even an atheist.  In fact, Jesus said that prostitutes would enter heaven before the religious bigots of his time. Why? Because if God is love, a loving atheist is closer to God than a cruel theologian.

Jesus even told a story of the last judgment where the people who were saved had never heard of him but showed mercy to others. The people who were damned had mistreated others, but did not see “the least of these” as Christ. (Matt 25:31-46) When Christ speaks of himself he is speaking on behalf of all God’s children whether or not they are Christian.

A path of love will lead us to righteousness, but mere righteousness cannot lead to love. If we pursue righteousness without we become merely cruel. We can still say we love the ones we have judged as sinners, but they acutely feel the torque of the sacred pliers. A religious person who applies loveless rules on others is like a tailor who cuts off parts of the body to make the suit fit better.

So John says whoever abides in love abides in God. Furthermore he says that if someone says they love God but are cruel to people, they are lying. Finally he says that love casts out fear, which means that love casts out the religion of fear and shame altogether.

Introduction

Religion is however we feel our connections to the universe.  Religion can be superstitious or scientific. It can be theistic or atheistic. It can be communal or selfish. Religion is something everyone does, either well or poorly. Religion is our simplified map of world. Philosophy when think about that map, religion is when we feel it.

There are but three religions: and our entire lives are built on one of these three foundations:

There are religions of Fear:

Fundamentalism is what the universe looks like through the lens of fear. Fundamentalism is afraid of change and afraid of strangers. Fundamentalism always feels something has gone terribly wrong. It imagines an angry deity just out of sight. It uses that invisible authority to prove its every claim and justify its every deed.  Because it is afraid, fundamentalism seeks power above all else. It wants to “take America back” or “purify the church from impurity.” It understands the world primarily in terms of power, and seeks to put itself or another fundamentalist in charge.

A conservative is not necessarily a fundamentalist by any means. The difference is fear. Conservatives are concerned with living their own lives, fundamentalists cannot leave people who are not like themselves alone. Even a committed atheist can fall into this trap if, instead of building a compassionate nontheistic worldview by its best lights, it keeps returning to its ridicule of religious people.

There are religions of Desire:

While we won’t be looking at self-defense from this kind of religion, it is important not to leave it out. Worldviews built on desire are usually magical, and self-focused.  A religion of desire does not learn from the world as it is, but seeks to shape the world in its own image. Ideas and practices are chosen for how they make the practitioner feel. Such religion may consist in a personal practice, in chants, beads or in whatever gives the individual a “buzz.” This is the religion of miracles, fortune tellers and success seminars.

There are religions of Love:

By “love” I mean our felt sense of connectedness to each other and to the natural world.  This is the religion of mysticism. “Mysticism” here does not mean “magic” or “supernatural”. Mysticism is an over powering sense of reverence for reality and an awareness that our consciousness emerges from a primordial depth we cannot comprehend.

An astronomer who discovers a new nebula and pauses to say “Wow” is having a mystical moment. Einstein did not believe in a personal God, but used the term “mystical” to imply this dissolving into reverence and interconnectedness. A religion of love can unite the best science and highest reverence, A religion of love can unite the universal and the personal. A religion of love can balance a calling to justice with a deep compassion for all side locked in that struggle.

 Self-Defense Course

For the next two weeks we will be looking at scriptures that refute fundamentalism. We will not be assuming our reader are Christian, but that whether Christian or not they are dealing with people who have fundamentally misunderstood the message of Jesus. My hope will be to disarm fundamentalist misuse of scripture and to point out scriptures that call us to tolerance, scientific honesty, personal responsibility and universal humanism.

Warning label: The truth is we are all fundamentalists when we are afraid or frustrated. Fundamentalism is the name we give our primate instincts and the stored memories of fear and shame that fundamentalism seeks to exploit. The purpose of this guide will not be to give you tools to defeat fundamentalists in a debate. That is as easy as it is counter-productive. An embarrassed fundamentalist is even more dangerous.  Instead, our purpose will be to keep the fundamentalist who is standing outside of you from triggering the fundamentalist who is hiding inside you.

I’m still getting bombarded with comments about the blog on homosexuality. Here is an honest question from a woman wanting to know what to make of Paul’s condemnation of homosexuality in Romans.

Jim,

I appreciate your thoughtful explanation of the cleanliness code, as well as the reminder that Paul called the Old Testament scriptures a shadow of God’s bigger picture. However, I’m wondering how you handle Paul’s other words that specifically pertain to homosexuality within the larger arena of sexual sin? For instance Romans 1:24-28:

“24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. 28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.”

I don’t ask this to be antagonistic. I really do want to know how to reconcile this passage with the idea that today’s understanding of homosexuality has nothing to do with what the Bible seems (at least to many Christians) to teach against.

Thank you.

Laurie

Excellent question, Laurie.

You answer that question by reading one more verse. The first chapter lists what various groups in the early church have against one another. He makes a long list of what the traditionalists say about the Greeks and what the Greeks say about the traditionalists. Then Paul makes his point in verse 2:1- “Therefore, you have no excuse whoever you are when you judge another, by your judgment you condemn yourself since you do the same things.”

In other words his whole point is to get the groups to stop judging each other and trust God’s grace. Anti-homosexuality propaganda has to leave that verse off to make it look okay for them to judge.

Romans is a call to move away from an ethics based on the flesh (physical rules or physical pleasure) to one based on the “spirit” (principles of our common life). The whole point of the book of Romans is to move away from legalism without losing our concern for justice. As in all of Paul’s writing the point is to leave the letter of the law and awaken to the fruits of the spirit (of love).  As he says of this new freedom in Corinthians, “Everything is permitted but not everything is helpful.”

The new purity is not based on what food we eat or parts of the body we touch, but what our lives mean for others. Love will inevitably lead us to righteousness, but righteousness cannot lead us to love.

Earlier this week  a group of students were arrested at the University of Texas demonstrating for worker’s lives.  The students were trying to get the University to make sure its purchases do not come from sweatshops overseas. For most Americans this is a very hard sell. If the price is lower, most people would rather not hear about worker conditions. The University calculated that the cost of making that switch would be $50,000 and was unfeasible in a time of budget cuts The students refused to leave the administrative offices, and were arrested.

The story hit me hard because I had spoken earlier that day at a campus rally for worker’s lives. I had spoken by phone with one of the young organizers who told me that the group had just read Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail and felt that they had to risk the arrests to speak out on behalf of their brothers and sisters trapped in sweatshop conditions.

As I walked to the West Campus to give my speech earlier that day I looked up at the beautiful buildings and realized how easy it is to forget the human toll of making such edifices as inexpensively as possible.  I looked up at the statues of Confederate heroes that adorn the campus grounds and realized how easy it is to pretend that slavery is a thing of the past simply because we have moved it off shore. It is easy to ignore the faces we don’t see, and voices we don’t hear.  But are we really innocent of the sin of slavery just because we pay someone else to hold the whip?

Am I innocent of the blood of those who grow my food, sew my clothes, or build my shelter, if I am unwilling to give up my luxuries for their necessities? What does it say about a university that calculates that the blood of a laborer is not worth the fair price of a tee shirt?

For three years students have implored the administration to respect the lives of workers overseas. For three years the students have been ignored. But these students have changed that equation when they refused to cooperate with the exploitation of their brothers and sisters abroad.  These students have put a face on the people  some do not want to see, and given voice to the people some do not want to hear. These students, through their willingness to be arrested, have made visible the violence that lies behind the inexpensive clothes we wear and the lavish buildings we inhabit. These young students walk in the spirit of the prophets and show the rest of us the path out of our own slavery.

Apparently we hit a nerve.  Yesterday there were over 17,000 hits on my blog still responding to the article “What I Wish the Church Knew About Homosexuality.”

Having weathered this storm before, I knew there are certain patterns to the assaults one can expect after making a Christian defense of homosexuality. The first waves of negative responders assume I am a gay atheist defending my “lifestyle.” These are usually kind but frightened people who are just repeating what they have been heard. Many of these people stay surrounded by other people of like mind and have never really heard how hateful and shallow their arguments sound out of that context.

In this first wave, people often repeat the barely understood Bible verses they have been taught assuming that I just haven’t noticed those places in scripture. When it becomes obvious that I am straight, and a Christian, and ordained, and that I know scripture much better than they do, there is usually a panicked attack which brings the second wave of assaults.

At this point, people quit being nice and say things like I am a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” not noticing that they are the ones with fangs bared. Now it gets interesting. Some of the people go back to their pastors for reinforcement. At this point, the heavy weights start showing up in the third wave one might call “the Bible Bullies.”

“Bible Bullies” are people who, at some point in their lives, realized that scripture can be used as a power tool. In other parts of their life they may be timid and unremarkable, but if they master the obscurities of scripture they can use that knowledge to rise to leadership positions. The problem, of course, is that the only fuels that can drive this kind of power are fear and anger. So they must constantly point out one threat after another, or lose power.

This is why they can’t leave other people alone. Without threats and scapegoats the theologies of fear and anger do not work. So their worldview resembles that of an abusive family. God is presented as a kind of cosmic drunk daddy with a major anger problem, but is the only protection we have from mean ol’ Uncle Satan.

One cannot understand the teachings of Jesus and see the world this way. If one begins with the Sermon on the Mount, one is called to trust, not hyper vigilance. If one begins with the Sermon on the Mount, one is called to a life of forgiveness, not constant judgment.  If one begins with the Sermon on the Mount, it is quite clear that the only “fuel” that can drive this theology is love.

When a Christian (or someone from any other path of love) is confronted by a Bible Bully it is essential not to respond in kind. If you become angry or afraid you are using the fuel that works in their religion, not yours. It helps to remember that we can all be bullies when we are frustrated or afraid, and that what we are really seeing is not a powerful giant, but a frightened little heart.

At 2PM today “United Students Against Sweatshops” will be holding a rally at U.T. to ask the administration to consider workers’ rights and lives when making purchasing decisions. The University has a long standing policy of indifference to the sweatshop conditions that lie behind its polished image. We will hold a rally and then some students have decided to be civilly disobedient, risking arrest, to draw attention to the worker deaths, union busting activities, and lack of transparency that lie behind the University’s policies. Later, we will hold a vigil for any students arrested.

Yesterday was a strange day on my little blog. According to the “stat sheet,”  I usually get four or five hundred daily readers to the site. Yesterday, the site had ten thousand hits.  I have to assume that interest came from an article I wrote about homosexuality. The piece seems to have been picked up by a conservative site, because there were lots of Christians offering to correct the “errors” in my thinking.

There were too many responses to respond to them all, but they were all versions of arguments I’ve heard before.  It gets so tiring to hear the same parroted phrases presented as original thought. My mind went back over decades of conversations on this subject and debates all over the country. It made me tired just thinking about it. It always feels like you are starting over. It is exhausting work to have these conversations, so rather than writing a thousand emails I will try to respond to most of the letters as though I were addressing one person.

The letters usually start with some disclaimer, “I don’t hate homosexuals but…” I know you sincerely believe that, but I wonder what your definition of “hate” would be? If someone you did not even know branded you as evil, worked to ban your marriages, and to take your children, and never gave you a moment’s rest would you feel that they love you or hate you?

The letters go on, “This isn’t my opinion, I’m just defending the Bible clearly says…” Please put down the conservative commentaries you know will reinforce what you believe, and pick up actual unbiased study tools like a concordance. Test yourself to see if you might be wrong. After all we are not debating about you, we are debating about someone else. You should be sure beyond the shadow of a doubt. Any benefit of the doubt should go to the people you are accusing.

The English Bible is a translation. The original languages did not have a word for “homosexual.” The condemnation we see in scripture of what looks like homosexual behavior is from a larger code called the “Levitical” or “cleanliness” code. That code condemned as “unclean” sex between two men, certain foods, women on their period, men with crushed testicles and many other things. It is incredibly dishonest to waive the cleanliness codes for everyone but gays.

This is why, in Hebrews, Paul called such scriptures only a “shadow” of what God had in mind. When, in Acts we are commanded to “call no one unclean,” it is saying that the cleanliness code is no longer in affect.  So please stop saying that people who loved scripture enough to learn the Biblical languages are twisting it, and that the ones too lazy to learn them are the ones protecting it.

Finally, please stop trying to turn the tables and say you are the one being attacked. No one was calling you a “pervert.”  You called someone else that ugly word and we rose to their defense. No one was questioning your right to have personal beliefs that differ from ours. It stops being a question of your personal belief when you start bothering someone else. We aren’t talking about what you personally believe, we’re talking about your efforts to keep your brothers and sisters from having full lives. We are talking about the ugly lies you are spreading about them. We are talking about the lies you are telling about what Jesus said and didn’t say.  Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality, but he directly commanded you not to judge. We are asking you to learn that basic lesson before you appoint yourself judge over the rest of us.

I tripped across a fascinating article from Russia trying to make sense of a new Arizona law that forbids abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Like countless anti-abortion bills, there is an effort to plant “right to life” language in the law that can latter be used to overturn Roe v. Wade. What has these Russians scratching their heads is language in the bill that marks the starting point of life as the first day of the mother’s last menstrual period, which conceivably could be before sex has even taken place. The strange translation makes the article even more enjoyable.

To read article, click here.

In what some are predicting to be the last Summit of the Americas without Cuba, President Obama weathered lectures and interuptions as the other nations of the hemisphere demonstrated what may be a new attitude of defiance to U.S. domination. Hugo Chavez was not at the summit, reportedly for heath reasons. President Santos of Columbia described the blockade of Cuba as a major concern for the other nations. The President of Bolivia described the U.S drug war as a cover for the militarization of the region. Like NATO and the U.N. Security Council, the Organization of American States is increasingly seen as a tool of the U.S. and other traditional colonial powers. On the bright side, leaders were impressed with the first U.S. President to sit and listen to their concerns, but they also made it clear they are no longer willing to be the United States “backyard.”

To read entire article click here.