Archive for Religion

an imaginary war on the imaginary

January 10, 2012 / Admin / No comments

By: Derek Dyson

“There’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.” – Newt Gingrich
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The recent debates leading up to today’s Republican primary in New Hampshire have featured an alarming new talking-point that seems all-too-familiar in the lexicon of the far-right . A “war on religion” or more importantly the Obama administrations “war on religion” has been mentioned multiple times over the last few days. Much like the “war on Christmas” or the “war on drugs”, this war seems to be nothing more than a political scare tactic lightly veiled as a legitimate social concern.This issue is so dire that some candidates have even went as far as calling the Obama Administration the most secular administration in the history of the Republic (if only we were so lucky). But is this really the case?

This alarmist outlook on the secularization of America is nothing new. Beginning in the early Reagan years (some actually argue as far back as the Johnson administration) there has been an active pursuit by those on the right to distort our nations history; all in an attempt to prove that America was in fact founded as a “Christian Nation”. This, despite a preponderance of evidence pointing to the contrary.

Take for example one of our nations founding documents, the Declaration of Independence. Those on the right have attempted to use phrases found in the document such as “natures god” and “endowed by their creator” as proof of their hypothesis.  The problem with this is that it completely overlooks, not only the context of those phrases, but more importantly the deeply held philosophy of its author, Thomas Jefferson.

By all accounts, Thomas Jefferson was a Deist. To him, “natures god” was another way of describing the empirical universe that surrounded him. Not to say that he didn’t believe in a god of some sort, but he in no way believed in a personal god or a god of the Abrahamic tradition. That is, he refused to believe that there was a heavenly father figure that spent time answering prayers or supernaturally intervening in the lives of humans in any way.

Not only did he ascribe to a natural “god” akin to that of Einstein’s, but he also despised religion and the corruption found within religious institutions. In a letter from 1816 he writes “My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there”.  This quote lends a lot to his views on the the authority of the church, but what about the authority of the bible?

Well, if you ever get a chance to make it to the Jefferson wing of the Library of Congress be sure to take a look at his personal bible. In it you will find no miracles. No virgin birth, no water to wine, no resurrection. This is because he cut them out. He literally took a razor blade to his copy of the New Testament and removed the “ignorance, absurdity and untruths” held within. He simply cut out the myths.

The other document constantly quoted by the right on this matter is of course the Constitution. This 222 year old document is the oldest of its kind, written by some of the brightest Enlightenment figures in our nations history. Immense thought and effort was put into every word during its drafting. So much so that only 27 amendments have been made to date. Of those, surely some of them mention Jesus or at least Christianity?

Actually, no. Not at all. The only real mention of religion in the entire document is made to ensure that you have the freedom to practice (or not practice) any faith you choose, and that no single religion or religious affiliation could be a prerequisite for holding public office. This is because its drafters, men like John Adams and James Madison, knew all too well of the horrors found within European governments and the power struggles they continuously had with the church and it’s leaders.

There is another important document from the early days of the republic that those on the right conveniently leave out of this debate. In 1797 congress unanimously ratified and then President John Adams signed into effect the Treaty of Tripoli. In this two page document you will find the phrase “As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion…”. Historians say the phrase was intended to ensure the Muslims of the Barbary Coast that they shouldn’t fear a holy war from the United States.  Although this document is not as important as say The Constitution, it does lend credence to the fact that our founders saw a definite separation between church and state.

So, putting the Republicans alternate history lesson on the founding of the country behind us, what merit (if any) do the current Republican candidates hold on the assertion that the Obama administration is waging a “war on Christianity”? Basically, they only have a couple of policies.

Obamas healthcare plan is in the forefront of this debate because it denies federal funding for religious health institutions that refuse to provide contraception to women. In their view, this denies their first amendment right to free speech, in that It keeps them from openly practicing aspects of their faith.

The problem with this outlook is that from the Obama Administrations stance, it has nothing to do with a war on religion. On the contrary, it has everything to do with the Federal government funding potentially harmful religious practices that could deny things like birth control pills and basic healthcare to a section of the female population that may have no other alternatives.

No one is saying the Catholic Church needs to be handing out Plan B from the confession booth. What they are saying is that if you are going to be a hospital or a pharmacy that receives federal funding, you can’t deny a basic health-care product or procedure from a patient for purely religious reasons.

To me this seems to be more of a slight stint of rationality than a “war on religion”, but I wouldn’t expect those on the right to recognize this.  After all, this is the same supposed “small government” party that gave Catholic missions groups over 200 million dollars in 2004 to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa.  That’s close to a quarter of a billion dollars of federal tax dollars to a group who refuses to recognize the importance of condom use and instead focuses on an abstinence only approach to combat AIDS.

I’m assuming the American public basically funded a soul saving missions trip for the Catholic Church since they obviously weren’t focusing on curbing the AIDS epidemic. A mandate that I can guarantee would not have been backed by any of the founding fathers.

The point here is that President Obama is not anti-religion or even anti-Christian. He’s simply just not an Evangelical zealot and this scares the shit out of the conservative right.  They can continue to paint his administration in this light if they choose, but i like to think that eventually genuine, rational thinking will win out in the eyes of the American public.

The reign of the Evangelical is on the decline politically and socially. Today more college aged Americans identify as Atheist or Agnostic than any other generation in the last 100 years.  More people are getting fed up with the ties between political leaders and their corporate interests (which includes religious lobby’s) every day and many believe we are finally on the verge of a social/political upheaval.

This “War on Religion” is an imaginary war. It’s propagated by neo-cons and religious zealots in an attempt to rewrite the history books of this nation and marginalize the effectiveness of the current President, nothing more.

As the far right continues to push irrational and highly polarizing ideas into the public spectrum, they too will continue to ignore the issues that are truly pressing for most Americans.  Things like education and the economy will take a back seat to their imaginary wars and eventually we will reach a breaking point.  The longer these true issues are ignored the greater the backlash will eventually be and I for one will be cheering on that backlash every step of the way.

Category: Politics, Religion / Tags: ,

christmas charade

December 12, 2011 / Admin / One comment

By: Derek Dyson

Saturday evening marked yet another annual Holiday Parade of Lights in our fair city.  An event where local businesses and organizations strut their stuff through the packed corridors of downtown skyscrapers; sidewalks teaming with bundled up children and enthusiastic adults, each presumably waiting to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus or a fancy float or something.  I’m not quite sure. What I am sure about is that our esteemed Senator James Inhofe and his majestic steed were definitely not present at this soiree.  For the third year in a row he took a stand and refused to participate in the ancient art of parading, basically because someone changed one word to an almost identical word on his event calendar. One of the major sponsors of the parade, This Land Press, has written on this subject extensively so I won’t go into it here. What I will go into is how our Senator, a man who in ‘94 ran on the platform “god, gays and guns” and actually won (way to go Oklahoma voters!), uses his religion as a crutch to make decisions on behalf of our state on a daily basis, while throwing rational thought out the window in the process.

Let’s take this parade for instance. To Inhofe this is yet another secular “War on Christmas”.  A buzz-word that has been touted by every Fox News analyst and AM radio host in the business for the last 10 years.  Calling it a war is probably a little harsh, but if you’re trying to take Christ’s name out of a holiday that is based on the guys birthday maybe it’s warranted, right?  But more so than every other deity and god-man that just so happened to call December 25th his birthday as well?  Especially considering that almost all of them did so long before Constantine and the Roman Empire decided to sign the day over to Christ in the 4th Century.

Lets start with the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. He was born on December 25th and was well known for turning water into wine when he needed to impress party goers. Two-thousand years before him, the Egyptian god Osiris shared this popular birthday, on which he was born of a virgin and visited by 3 wise men.  During his mortal life, he ran around Egypt performing miracles and other magic tricks for the locals until they got mad and executed him. Not to worry, because 3 days later he rose from the dead and returned to Aaru (Egyptian heaven) to judge the masses for their sins.  There are many more, but I don’t want to bore you with a history lesson. Suffice it to say, December 25th has been celebrated by our ancestors for millennia, not because of Christ, but simply because of an astrological occurrence.

Looking to the stars for guidance, primitive man tried to make sense of a world that seemed chaotic and unfair. In turn, they established elaborate myths around these stars to ease their minds. December 25th is the center of many of these myths, simply because it falls around the shortest day of the year, or the Winter Solstice.  In most cultures it signified the “rebirth” of the crop cycle, an encouraging sign that Spring was on its way. It’s really that simple.

If it’s all that simple, why are so many pundits and political elites crying foul?  Why is Jim Inhofe boycotting a parade that, historically, should probably be called “The Pagan Solstice Extravaganza of Wine and Orgies” instead of “Christmas Parade”? Well, that’s simple too. Today in American politics religion is important. So important that 49% of American voters say they would not vote for an Atheist presidential candidate, no matter where that candidate stood on other issues. So important in fact, that guys like Inhofe have to go to extreme measures, more accurately the extreme right, to appease Christian conservative leaders if they want to secure the Evangelical vote.

Shortly after September 11th Pat Robertson interviewed Jerry Falwell, instantly making newsreels because of the incendiary remarks that were made as to why they believed the attacks occurred.  In the interview Falwell boasts “I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.” Not batting an eye, Robertson sits there and willfully agrees.

This is important for two reasons. First because Robertson at that time headed the Christian Coalition, a lobby and activist group that Mr. Inhofe and 41 out of 51 of his Republican peers voted in line with 100% of the time in 2004. Secondly, because six months after Falwells remarks, Inhofe mimicked his words on the Senate floor and took it a step further saying “One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America, is that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them.”  A spiritual door?  So according to Inhofe, god let 9-11 happen because America won’t let Israel nuke its neighbors?  Are those the sentiments of an elected official that you want representing you at one of the highest levels of government?

Well, if you are an Evangelical Dispensationalist and believe that the State of Israel was handed over by god in 1948 in order to spawn the Anti-christ, a necessary step for bringing on the second coming of Jesus and eventually the Rapture, then you’re probably ok with it. As for me, mythological pandering should not be a deciding factor in the diplomatic process, especially concerning the State of Israel.

Inhofe has also attempted to push religiously themed bills through congress.  In 1998 he backed the “Religious Freedom Amendment”, which was an attempt to make things like prayer and religious symbols a staple in the public domain, mainly schools and courthouses.  When asked if he would be ok with providing vegetarian lunches for Buddhists or allowing Muslim students to pray to Mecca five times a day he invoked the ever-present “America was founded as a Christian Nation” response, showing yet another feat of intolerance and cognitive dissonance that is jaw dropping to say the least.

At this point I think it’s important to point out that Senator Inhofe is a ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and an avid climate change denier. In 2009 he compiled a list of roughly 700 “prominent scientists” who disputed claims that global warming was factual and influenced by human activities.  On this list were men like Chris Allen, who has no college education or formal training in climate science and is a major Creationism promoter for the Southern Baptist Church to boot.  Where did Mr. Inhofe get Chris Allens credentials as a prominent scientist? The same place he got many of the names?  From the Discovery Institute’s list of “prominent scientists” who refute Darwinian Evolution by natural selection of course.  It turns out the Discovery Institute is nothing more than a lobby group with deep pockets and a strong anti-science agenda. A group of people who have among other things, attempted to rewrite the textbooks in many public science classrooms and have a history of funding the all-too-real Creation museums situated throughout the Midwest. Each complete with such attractions as the famous picture of Jesus riding a dinosaur with a saddle and an in depth explanation of how Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon in a matter of days.

This is where our Senator finds his scientific experts.  In “museums” that attempt to explain to our children that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that humans kept dinosaurs as pets.  All this work in an attempt to uphold their mythical Bronze-age explanations to some of the most pressing and important scientific questions in modern human history.

If these things don’t disturb you, look at it this way.  One of our most powerful elected officials is at least somewhat of a religious fanatic.  He resides on the foremost committee on environmental protection, yet is so anti-science that he refuses to side with the vast majority of international experts on that very issue. He sympathizes with the leaders of the Creationist movement and denies Darwinian Evolution. A basic biological fact that is noticed as so by 100% of the biologist in the National Academy of Sciences.  He does this outright and with no alternative explanation on either of these subjects. And all for one basic reason.  Because his faith and his Evangelical constituents demand it of him.

On the local level we’ve recently heard about Senator Inhofe because he refused to come to a parade.  This pales in comparison to why he’s known on  the national level.  Nationally he’s known for being one of the most conservative, controversial and anti-science members of Congress, where he sits as a ranking member on two key committees.  At the risk of sounding flippant, I propose that next year Tulsan’s get their priorities straight and instead of asking him to a parade, ask him (and fellow voters) if we should have put him in this position of power in the first place.

 

Category: Politics, Religion, Tulsa / Tags: , ,

The Curse of Literature

September 22, 2011 / Admin / 3 comments

By: Derek Dyson

I can read Moby Dick once and get the gist of the story.  I can read it one hundred times and fully understand the words and phrases found between the first and the last page. But, if I wish to understand the full story of Moby Dick; its symbolic undercurrents and the thoughts of its author, would I not have to look deep into the life and times of Herman Melville?  Would I not need to understand heroic and romantic novels of the 19th century? What about the makings of a fishing community and the type men who worked within them?  An understanding of the role that sea creatures, fables and heroes play in the oceans of which these men draw their livelihood would also come in handy. Without such insight, just simply reading the story would never truly afford me the luxuries held within great literature.  No matter how many times I read those same words over and over, without context and outside information, they could never express the kind of man the author was or even what thoughts he meant the story to invoke in the readers mind. I could read it one hundred times and never truly understand the story.

Would reading this story alone make me an expert on Moby Dick or literature in general? Would I be qualified to teach others on the passions of Herman Melville or the basics of American Romanticism, solely because I had read Moby Dick, even if it were multiple times? The answer to this question is obviously no. I would need to expand my knowledge far beyond that of this single book and into many other fields if I were truly passionate about the subject. In doing so, I would probably run across other authors and novels of this period that were equally as entertaining to read, which may lead me to the conclusion that there are better novels out there; books that may mean more to me than this epic tale ever could have.

There is an old saying in Catholic circles “the Seminary leads you to the cemetery”, implying that the study of religion will eventually kill your faith.  This belief is widely held throughout the Evangelical community as seen in its obvious disdain of Academia or the “Liberal” educational system.  This Anti-intellectualism is seen as a virtue of faith in that the less you know, the more faith you will have.

I find it interesting that even the most learned theologians, the men who have spent their entire lives studying their particular religion, hold beliefs that would be unnoticeable by most if not all of the fundamentalists of that same religion.  The men who know the most about the texts, the authors and their context, actually hold the most liberal views concerning the divinity of those texts and the stories held within them. Yet, the majority of the followers of these same texts know nothing of them, other than the words found within their first and last page. They can quote favorites from Genesis to Revelation, but they know nothing of the authors, the culture of which they lived or the context of which it was meant for its readers.  They know nothing of missing texts, deleted and/or misinterpreted phrases or the political influences that haphazardly combined these stories over the centuries, yet they are content. They read the same chapters over and over, hoping to find new meaning, but never look beyond these pages for any real insight.

Why is this?  Is it because knowledge leads to unbelief? Or because learning that your faith may have been unfounded is hard to accept? It could be because it is easier to believe what you are told than to look for yourself.  I would say that each of these scenerios ring true on some level for the vast majority of Christians in America.  So with this in mind, how does a person who believes the Holy Bible to be the direct and infallible word of god manage to go their entire life without actually looking into the validity of such a claim? Why is it that I am a non-believer, yet more often than not I know more about biblical history than the believer sitting across from me arguing his case?  All the while, men like Marvin Meyers, Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman, men who have dedicated their entire lives to the field of New Testament studies, are vilified by mainstream Evangelicals because of the liberal views they hold on these very texts.  If these men are the experts how could they possibly be wrong?  More importantly, if they are wrong (with their advanced degrees and years of studying in the finest theological seminaries this world has to offer) how could a sane person argue that their background as a dentist or high school football coach or a youth minister somehow establishes them as an authority that can trump the views of these scholars?

The experts say that Mark was the first gospel written. Each of the other gospels borrowed heavily from it as it was the first source. These gospels were written at least 30 years (and as late as 120 years) after the death of Christ by men who never lived within 100 miles of him and more than likely had never heard his name uttered while he was alive.  These are the facts upheld by every major new testament scholar for the last 100 years. Transversely, the Evangelical believes that the gospels (which are the ONLY source we have to learn about the life of Jesus) were written by the followers of Christ, disciples and otherwise, who were with him his entire life.  They believe this despite the fact that none of the disciples would have been literate (fisherman and peasants in ancient Judea didn’t exactly need to be able to read) and certainly none of them would have written in Greek because they would have spoken Aramaic. This is important because every single early copy of any gospel we have is written in Greek exclusively, in a writing style that didn’t exist during the life of Christ. This simply means that when you look at the facts, there are no first hand (or even second or third hand) accounts of the things Jesus had done. We only have parables and anecdotes written at least 60 years after they supposedly happened by men who speak a different language and live in a different culture than he lived.  Not exactly reliable sources, but if you stretch your faith out, you could still believe these accounts were accurate. Then of course you would have to ignore the fact that a large portion of New Testament Scholars don’t believe that, but if you are an Evangelical, you’ve already been doing this for years.

So, what I’m getting at is this: It would be foolish for me to read Moby Dick and say that it is the most meaningful work of literature in the world, divinly transcribed by Herman Melville in an attempt to give my life meaning.  It would seem even more foolish if it was the only book I had read and all of this time I thought it was purely about hunting for whales; ignorantly missing the literary metaphors pointing towards mans struggle for meaning. It too is foolish for a person to claim that there exists a flawless book written by god when all of the evidence points to the contrary. It would be infinitely more foolish for that person to make such a claim if they had never cared to seek out the facts to begin with.

Category: Religion / Tags: , ,
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