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“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
-Abraham Lincoln,
Paul wrote in Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor master, male nor female. If more Christians understood this one line, there would be no disrespect of other religions, no attempt to control the lives of others, and no war on women’s rights or homosexual persons. If there is neither Jew nor Greek then faith is something deeper than religion. If there is no slave or master, then all people were born for freedom. If there is spiritually no such thing as male or female, how could there be assigned gender roles?
Inner peace that does not lead to world peace is a problem. When I first started playing guitar I thought it was fine to just tune my guitar to itself. That method worked, but it put me out of harmony with every other guitarist I met. In the same way, if you tune your heart to itself and not to nature, and the common good, there will be a dissonance in that peace that will still be in conflict with other people’s idea of peace. That is the problem we have, isn’t it? By “peace” we mean a numbness, a detachment from one another. The peace that transforms the world is a level of communion. It is a profound peace that comes from attunement, not detachment.
We misunderstand the meaning of idolatry when we think the term refers only to the images of other religions. If you are a Christian, your idol may look to you like Jesus, or the church or your interpretation of the Bible. If you are Jewish, your idol may look like Moses, or Israel or your interpretation of the Torah. If you are Muslim your idol may resemble your image of the prophet, or an Imam or some interpretation of the Quran. If you are an atheist, your idol may consist in an obsession to attack the religion of others, or in a belief that reason and science make art and poetry foolish.
The sacred is our sense of unity and reverence before the mystery of being. Idolatry is when belief or disbelief in religious images become an excuse to be cruel and unloving. Whether we attack or worship such images, they may have displaced us from true living and true loving.
Bertrand Russell defined “belief” as thought at rest.Without some beliefs we would be starting from scratch every moment. Beliefs are the memories and assumptions we must make to hold a worldview together from one moment to the next. It is important to test our beliefs whenever we can, but no one has the energy or time to test every belief about every aspect of life.
“Faith” is not so much about belief as it is about value. As William James pointed out, in real life we have to make decisions and, often times, we cannot gain complete information in the time frame allotted. If we were immortals it might be wise to live as skeptics, withholding opinion about anything of which we were not rock certain. We are not immortals, however; and if we care about anything or anyone in this life, we have pressing decisions to make. Faith is whatever we bet our lives on.
In this world of ambiguities, if we wait for the smoke to clear completely, the battle is always over.
I want to thank all the people that have messaged me this week calling me to a more traditional form of Christianity. I hear the concern and love behind those efforts, but I am probably a lost cause. It just seems to me the claim that the author of the galaxies speaks only to us Christians glorifies ourselves, and actually shrinks God to our own petty dimensions. I long ago broke the trance that my own nation and religion are always right, and those of others always wrong. It does not take much imagination to picture being born on the other side of those boundaries, and frankly for any group to assume itself to be the only proper version of humankind seems vain to the point of insanity.
Threatening me with hell doesn’t help either. A torturer God would be beneath contempt. If I am wrong, and God is not universal love, I would rather be tortured forever with Gandhi and Carl Sagan than spend eternity with the Grand Inquisitors of Christendom. So, thank you for your concern, but if seeing Christ in every face is a heresy I am content to be damned.
“In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.” -Nick Turse