Most Christians are taught a view of theology that has no ethical implications at all. To be fair, they are taught ethics and morals, but their theology as such is amoral. In that view, the life of Jesus is a story about magic tricks. A man is born of a virgin, performs a lifetime of miracles, dies, and then, gets up from his grave. If you believe the story, you’re saved, if you don’t you’re damned. And I want to say, that’s bad religion and makes for a bad human beings. When we study the life of Jesus, there are clear ethical implications from the day Jesus says he has come to announce good news for the poor, to the end of the story when he tells Peter he can only love Jesus by caring for other human beings. Jesus lived before Christianity. When he spoke he was not referring to any of the creeds, rituals or rules that were the later inventions of the church. Jesus did not come to teach us Christianity, he came to teach us how to love.
”Left” and “right” are points on a continuum of a power struggle between the “haves”. Even if one side advocates for the poor, they do so within the safe confines of their own privilege. The needs of the voiceless and powerless are only respected by those whose minds grow beyond that continuum, as did MLK, when he declared that he had become “a radical for justice.” This awareness does not lead us to abandon traditional politics, instead we keep one foot in and one foot out of the system.
We can only take the Bible literally until we reach the verse that says God is love. At that point, every word dissolves into a hymn of life. At the same moment every other philosophy is transformed from rival to chorus, and we realize we are no longer singing to our own idea of God. At that point, we are singing to an intimate unity within everyone of us but, also, beyond any of us.
On my Facebook page I have the story of what looks like slave labor being used by NATO troops in Afghanistan. I point out that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Whenever our brand of predatory capitalism is successful, it’s because we aren’t counting the slaves.
If you took from U.S. history the enslaved people who built it, and the modern sweatshops that maintain it, the American economy would be a very different story. The real “invisible hand” of our economy is that of our slaves.
Have you ever wanted to go back in time and see what it would have felt like to live in Nazi Germany or Imperial Rome? How could those people be so cruel and ignorant? Is it possible for civilized people like us to understand what such barbarism would look like from the inside out? Thanks to Rodney Beeber for sending this link to help us look through the eyes of a killer.
https://www.justicecoin.com/
I wish for just one day, the church really could remove homosexual influences from its life. I wish that bigoted congregations would have to witness beloved hymns torn out of their hymnbooks because they were written by unknown gay or lesbian believers. I wish every beautiful stained glass window designed by a gay artist would have to be broken, for just one day. I wish all the sick who died with a loving but closeted lesbian minister or social worker by their side could rise from the dead to give thanks to God for that faithful love. I wish for just one day the church could witness the debt of gratitude humanity owes to our GLBT brother and sisters.
Thanks to Nettie Reynolds, T.J. Griffin, and David Marks for setting up this blog. It’s obviously still bare bones, but I’m hoping this will be a place for a meeting of radical politics with the religion of universal love. I’m hoping this can be a place where the scientist, the humanist, the revolutionary, the artist and the mystic can co-habit. I don’t know how we can save our world without all of these elements.