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I teach religion for a living, but I also recognize it to be the most dangerous craft in all the world. Unless one is terribly disciplined, belief soon replaces awareness, ritual soon replaces creativity and the desire to dominate soon replaces service.
All religion should bear the warning label crafted by Ruth Green, “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”
“I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.” -Lady Gaga
The myths and practices of religion can take us deeper into the fountainhead of our own being. Let us grant that most religions have lost that great art and now wander in a hall of broken mirrors. I would never defend the superstition and cruelty that is now sometimes called “religion,” but I want to ask if the great art can be restored.
Our mammalian depths do not go away just because we learn the lessons of science. The question is, are we better off ignoring our deepest impulses, or understanding and harmonizing them? It does not have to be called “religion,” but I fear for the sanity of my species if we do not remember the art that reveals to us our irrational roots into life and nature. There is one insanity that comes from surrendering to our irrational impulses, and another that comes from believing we can live in the bloodless light of pure reason.
Karl Marx believed that capitalist culture drifts toward a “false consciousness” where products and production systems replace relationships between actual human beings. Marx would probably not have been surprised to find that the United States has come to believe corporations are “persons” with rights over and above those of actual persons. He would understand that wealth and status have become ends in themselves displacing any duty some individuals feel to the common good. But, I think even Marx would be surprised with recent court rulings saying that companies can hold religious beliefs and therefore should not be required to provide reproductive healthcare. The court has never said that a pacifist religion could take away the constitutional right of its workers to bear arms, only that anti-choice business owners can take away a woman’s right to birth control and abortion.
If I had to choose between Christian fundamentalism and atheism I would choose the latter in a heartbeat.
I am not of that faith that claims to love others and then tries to cast them in its own image. If I love a Jewish, Muslim or atheistic person, I love them as Jewish, Muslim or atheist, not merely as a potential Christian.
If religion is to be the tie that binds, we must stop trying to convert others to our own idea of unity and enlarge our idea of who we are until we realize we are all branches on the same vine.
As expected, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. That ruling means the new law will go back into effect today and will effectively prevent the full range of services from being provided at one third of Texas reproductive healthcare clinics.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has long been expected to be the battleground for various civil rights issues. Abortion has been a central litmus test for judges appointed to the court. The ruling of the court shows a troubling affinity with anti-choice strategies that leave Roe vs. Wade intact, but make abortion inaccessible until the law can be challenged at the Supreme Court.
The anti-choice strategy of harassing clinics while waiting to overturn Roe has been incredibly successful. In addition to banning abortions after 20 weeks and making abortions much more expensive, the new law puts pressure on hospitals to distance themselves for abortion providers or face the same kind of protests, vandalism and vilification that has had a withering effect on abortion clinics for decades.
A central question at stake in the struggle for reproductive rights is whether women are persons in the constitutional sense of belonging to themselves. Do women have inalienable rights that cannot be put up for a vote, or are their bodies a kind of community property? If a woman’s most personal decisions are to be determined by political and judicial means, then she has been ruled incapable of moral agency.
The only two options now left for Texas women are solidarity or servitude. It is an historic time of crisis in the battleground state of Texas. No one should serve over the women of Texas who denies their right to constitutional personhood. Either Texas women unite to drive misogynists out of the Texas Legislature once and for all, or they will face a future defined by the very men who are insulting and assaulting them at every turn.
“Camp Casey” was a gathering place some years back for the peace movement in Texas. We had gathered to deliver a letter to President Bush asking him to end the war in Iraq. On the march to deliver the letter I was walking with a woman who had lost a son in the war. I will never forget how heavily she leaned on me as we walked. She said that some days she was so sad she didn’t think she could get up and get dressed. Then she said, “when I do something, anything, I feel better.”
As a preacher, I’ve noticed over the years that congregants who find sermons on social justice tiring and depressing are usually already tired and depressed when they get to church. But, they are not tired for the reason they suppose. Generally, the people who least want to hear about the world’s problems in church, are also the ones who are doing the least to make a difference outside of church. I believe their lack of commitment causes their lack of energy, not the other way around as they assume.
Never assume the life of an activist is a burden. It is apathy that is the burden. It is the activist’s vision of a better world that gives them energy to go on. They do not carry the world on their shoulders as it would appear. Acting on their highest vision is what carries them.
It is not compassion that drains our will to live, it is our willingness to live selfish little lives. As soon as we arise in resistance on behalf of our brothers and sisters, we remember our power, we remember our nobility, we remember the greatest joy of all is human solidarity.
We have all heard the warning that frogs put in a pan of water will remain there so long as the water is brought to a boil very slowly. The analogy is often used to call people to action in slowly developing crises such as climate change. Fortunately or unfortunately, the analogy is a wive’s tale according to Snopes (see link below). Frogs will not sit while their environment slowly becomes lethal. Apparently human beings are the only species that will do that.
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp
“Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego (Brad Werner) walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”. -Naomi Klein
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
-Wendell Berry
I wonder if it would be helpful in political discussions to divide the topic of politics into two categories. If by “government” we meant the actual constitutional democratic process of decision making, infrastructure, and programs that tend to the welfare of the people. And, if by “state,” we meant systems of control like police, military, prisons, and spying both foreign and domestic. If the idea of governance was divided thus, I wonder if many groups who now find themselves in opposition might find common cause by asking how we can shrink the state without destroying the government?