“Hang out with Jesus, he hung out for you.”
“Many people planning to repent on the 11th hour, die at 10:30.”
“If your faith is big enough facts don’t count.”
“If man (sic) evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?”
“Who’s your daddy?”
“Judas left early, too.”
“Is touching yourself worth an eternity in Hell?”
“Gods love is unconditional as long as you are obeying Christ.”
“Pastors feed and lead, members swallow and follow.”
“The Easter bunny didn’t rise from the dead.”
“If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted.”
“God bless our troops especially our snipers.”
“Reason is the greatest threat faith has.”
“Who needs healthcare when you have Jesus?”
“Drop and role doesn’t work in hell.”
Religious truths are not false, they are revelations about our human subjectivity. The old saying “a watched pot never boils” is false objectively but is often true of our subjective experience. The “world” of our deepest inner sensations is not a blank slate, and reason can only guide us so far into that cave. Just as we never discover our night vision if we are unwilling to lay down the garish light of day and sit for a time in the dark, so it is a very different kind of “light” that pierces the veil of human sentience. We need one kind of lantern if we are seeking truth about our exterior world, and quite another if we would come to know the treasures within.
“Watch your thoughts; they become your words…
Watch your words; they become your actions…
Watch your actions; they become your habits…
Watch your habits; they become your character…
Watch your character, for it will become your destiny.”
-Rabbi Hillel
When I arrived at college I began to read the scriptures of other world religions. It was reading the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism that helped me understand that Christ was speaking, not as the monomaniacal leader of my own religious sect, but from the heart of being itself. Just as Jesus had his “I am” sayings, so Krishna said, “I am the soul of all beings… seated in the hearts of all living entities. I am the beginning, the middle and the end of all beings.” It was the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads that convinced me that Christ was calling us not to Christianity, but to life itself.
Understanding our own privilege is very difficult. For one thing the culture disguises it. For another, if we are white or male or rich we probably do not want to see it. Is their anyway to get past these defenses?
To understand the systemic nature of oppression, pretend that you were born on a monopoly board. Pretend you are a poor black female Muslim lesbian, which for our purposes, is like being born on Baltic Avenue or some other square that does not derive automatic value in the game. Now, imagine your opponent is a rich white Christian heterosexual male, which is a bit like being born Boardwalk or Park Place. Imagine further that your opponent has inherited the houses and hotels of his parents.
Your opponent insists you are being treated fairly because you get the same number of dice rolls, and the same two hundred dollars when you cross “go.” He speaks of competition, but refuses to look down at the Monopoly Board and admit his advantage. You can work much harder than he does, but if he lands on your property it is a minor inconvenience. If you land on his property, even once, the game is over.
Your opponent may speak of freedom and initiative but you both know that unless there is some strange twist of fortune, he was born to win and you were born to lose. That, in a very small and trivial way, is what it is like to be born into systemic oppression.
I do not believe piety requires the notion of a personified deity. There are those who sense the sacred all around them without such images. In fact, many of those who must declare themselves to be atheists in this culture, would be considered great mystics in a culture with a wider religious imagination.
Jürgen Habermas once gave an obituary to the philosopher, Richard Rorty which makes this point very clear, at least to me.
“One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky.’ In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky’s dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
If anyone cannot hear the same music of the Sermon on the Mount, or Isaiah, the Bhagavad Gita, or Buddha’s Dhammapada playing behind the words of that charitable atheist, we might question whether they have ears to hear.
Literalism is a tag on the toe of dead religion.
To insist that the events of scripture are of no worth unless they physically happened is the very essence of materialistic philosophy even when said in defense of the faith.
A playful religion is the cradle of spirituality, as orthodox religion is its tomb.
A God that must be defended is already dead.
“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
– Howard Zinn