Some religionists in Texas believe they should have editing rights to impose creationist ideology upon science textbooks. I wonder how they would feel if the shoe were on the other foot and Bibles had to pass a scientific panel before they could be published? Jesus’ parable about the mustard seed would have to be edited out. Jesus claimed claimed the mustard seed was the smallest seed, which simply isn’t true.
Science is not a theory, it is an empirical method. Therefore, religious assertions have no place in scientific textbooks. But religion isn’t a theory either. Religion is a sense of reverence for whatever has given us being. We demean and ultimately destroy religion when we turn it into a mythological explanation that has to lie about the world to find its place in the conversation.
“…The U.S. spends far and away more on health care than any other. And yet it has among the lowest life expectancies of any developed country. People live longer in pretty much every country in Europe, including Greece, where the economy has been wracked by austerity for years.
“What bothers me most is not that we’re all the way on the right, or even that we are lower than we should be,” Aaron Carroll, professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote on his blog of the chart. “It’s that we are all alone. We are spending so, so, so much more than everyone else.”
…The U.S. ranks 46th among 48 developed economies in health-care efficiency, according to a Bloomberg ranking, below China, Iran, Colombia and, you know, pretty much everybody else.
Why is our system so terrible? Largely because it is built for profit. Unlike many other countries, the government has no role in either providing care or setting prices, and so prices skyrocket.” -Mark Gongloff
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/22/american-health-care-terrible_n_4324967.html
“We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways.” -Bishop Oscar Romero
Christmas, as it is usually celebrated, is an homage to the religion of Capitalism not of Jesus. Even the attitude of sharing some of our materialistic riches with the poor has not understood what it means for the new ruler of the world to be born in a cattle stall. In liberation theology, Christmas is not just the story of an historical virgin birth, it is a revelation of how the sacred eternally enters our lives. The symbols of Christmas are not historical. We cannot know if any of them happened. They are symbols of a new vision of humankind where all have equal worth. One does not need to believe in Jesus or even God to understand. But one does need to believe in love.
The poverty of the Christ Child and the cold dark silence of the manger scene are a world apart from everything we associate with Christmas- lights, music and lavish gifts. When we look at the people in our manger scenes, we should not think of America. The faces in our nativity scenes represent the “little” people who work in our sweatshops and cower under our drones. In the modern Christmas story, we are the Roman soldiers, we are Herod, we are the owner of the hotel asked to make room for the poor. We must look beyond the horizons of our role in society if we are to enter this eternal story.
It is not enough to throw charity at the poor at Christmas. We must realize they are our brothers and sisters. We must pledge ourselves to building a new world where our brothers and sisters will have hope and dignity. We realize the impossibility of our calling, but that is the star we will follow. We, the rich and powerful, only enter the story of Christmas if we see the face of divinity in the face of the poor.
If we do not find Christ resurrected as the oppressed of our day, we will know nothing of the true Christ and nothing of the true Christmas.
The appeal to history is most often a circular argument. History is usually but the name given to the official narrative of a culture. In our case, American history gives very little time to the voices of the people it has enslaved or plundered. If they are there at all, they are secondary voices, which implies their descendants are also adjuncts to the real heroes of history which are of European descent.
So it is no wonder that white Americans study history only to discover that we are that the best of nations and that ours is the only political and economic system that has ever worked. When the minority report is treated as an asterisk in history, you can bet the rights of minority groups will also end up consigned to the footnotes.
"Children were encouraged to develop strict discipline and a high regard for
sharing. When a girl picked her first berries and dug her first roots, they were
given away to an elder so she would share her future success. When a child
carried water for the home, an elder would give compliments, pretending to taste
meat in water carried by a boy or berries in that of a girl. The child was
encouraged not to be lazy and to grow straight like a sapling." -Flat-Iron, Sioux Chief
“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts.” ― Richard P. Feynman
Religion and philosophy run particular dangers of bewitching us. The universe does not divide neatly into nouns and verbs and so we always feel an ambiguity when we actually experience the world as opposed to just thinking or holding beliefs about it. Creeds and philosophies, however rational, cannot capture the world of experience. They give us a flattened simplified symbol to help us find our way much like a map. Clutching to a creed in order to feel certain is like covering our face with a map so we do not see the chaos before us. If the map ever replaces the territory in our minds, we are lost by definition.
“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"The white people, who are trying to make us over into their image, they want us
to be what they call "assimilated," bringing the Indians into the mainstream and
destroying our own way of life and our own cultural patterns. They believe we
should be contented like those whose concept of happiness is materialistic and
greedy, which is very different from our way.
We want freedom from the white man rather than to be intergrated. We don't want
any part of the establishment, we want to be free to raise our children in our
religion, in our ways, to be able to hunt and fish and live in peace. We don't
want power, we don't want to be congressmen, or bankers....we want to be
ourselves. We want to have our heritage, because we are the owners of this land
and because we belong here.
The white man says, there is freedom and justice for all. We have had "freedom
and justice," and that is why we have been almost exterminated. We shall not
forget this."
I have heard this story of a biologist who studied howler monkeys. Every evening, as he returned to his cabin, one or more monkeys would gather to throw dung at him. One evening he was in a particularly bad mood and threw some of the monkey dung back. Before he knew it, every monkey in the community had gathered to throw dung at him. The biologist said the lesson of the story was not to get into a dung throwing contest with howler monkeys because they will never tire of it and you quickly will. I have found the idiom applicable to we human primates as well. When humans are happy we are peaceable and wise. When we are unhappy we can get addicted to petty squabbles. Returning tit for tat reduces us all to unhappy monkeys.
Sam Walton was not an evil person. He wanted to provide Americans with decent products at low prices and get very rich in the process. The Walmart story is a parable teaching why capitalism is a bad, and I would say an evil, organizing principle for human groups.
Here is Webster’s definition of capitalism:
“An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.”
However good that definition sounds, it also means the most important decisions are immune to democratic processes. Free markets and democracy are contradictory terms. In a purely capitalist system a city council cannot come together to demand that a corporation not poison their water supply with pollution. Any such democratic effort would fall under the term “government regulations” and would be seen as an assault upon free enterprise.
I mention Walmart because last year one of the many unsafe factories Walmart used in Bangladesh collapsed killing more than 1, 100 workers. Journalists then “discovered” the horrific factory conditions in Bangladesh that allow for such low prices. But how are we so surprised by what we already know about the true cost of our standard of living? It is more cost effective to get one’s garments from substandard working conditions in a poor country where the workers cannot ask for fair pay or safe working conditions. Bangladesh has some of the lowest wages in the world. Issues like worker safety barely even register. Therefore it is a perfect place for Walmart to procure inexpensive garments.
After the tragedy, to its credit, Walmart did an audit of 75 of its factories. I have no doubt improvements will be made, but when are people going to realize that we can never be vigilant enough to make free markets humane? Workers in Bangladesh will receive large raises and better conditions, but when the spotlight moves somewhere else, the pursuit of profit will necessitate deregulation. It will always be a matter of time until such tragedies are duplicated. The system will return to cannibalizing human beings because that is what it is designed to do. Capitalism has only has one value and that is profit by private entities.
Free markets and democracy are contradictory terms, which is why rich businesses like Walmart seek out dictators to do business with, and why they draw an organizational flow chart with multiple sub-contractors that will make it very hard to trace the line between their own private profit, and the misery of the factory workers who make their cheap goods.