Forgive me if this was already mentioned in the previous thread and I overlooked it, but I've been reading E. O. Wilson's The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life On Earth, which strikes me as a very good example of a constructive, heartfelt and good faith effort to find the kind of common ground you are talking about.

Ellen,

That is part of the answer, but remember that some people come from dysfunctional families, and some teachers are notoriously frightening to children.

To try to base a theory of everything on childhood experience is reductionistic. You are just creating an alternative fundamentalism.

"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the bible was written, and it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, unthinking, unimaginative among us who would make themselves the guides, the leaders of us all, who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us, who would invade our schools, our libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly."
Isaac Azimov

My sentiments exactly.

OK, we all know about Dubya's mom.  His kindergarten teacher must have been a real creep too!

Jan

"I personally resent it bitterly."

- Isaac Asimov

"Hatred has never been known to have been dispelled by hatred."

- The Buddha

This makes no sense.

No he isn't. He's expressing resentment.

I'm told that a good beating has some success in overcoming obstacles that you would put in other people's paths...but I don't recommend it.

Do you think that exchanging non sequitors is communication on any level?

What is the bitter word?

1) This

2) makes

3) no

4) sense.

Choose one of the above.

cscs
.....Organized religion often seems to be about money and power more than anything else, and it's hard to understand why so many people either don't see that, or choose to ignore it.

As Rev MClaren indicted many Christians do question organized religion.
Take Revs Jackson and Sharpton, for example. Both can bring numbers of people together to address issues ignored by the secular community and MSM.
The recent Jena 6 march was addressing unequal application of justice based on race by a community that felt no need to alter it's actions. Pressure led to a change in the community's approach to the case. The fact that Jackson and Sharpton had actual organizations behind them sped to delivery of the message of what was happening in Jena, La and organizing a response.
When Rev Sharpton ran for national political office, he garnered a minute percentage of votes even from the African-American community in NYC.
The African-American community could easily differentiate the difference between pursuing equal justice and political office.
Karl Rove has stated that he is not particularly religious. I fear the actions of a secular Rove in a position of political power just as much as I fear a Christian Guiliani or McCain.

I'm sorry, I don't understand this - did the Buddha know Isaac Azimov?

What are you talking about?

"Hatred has never been known to have been dispelled by hatred."

- The Buddha

"I'm not a Buddhist."

-Isaac Asimov

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I think your reasons for sticking with your faith are really beautiful and totally appropriate for a discussion forum that really is about more than politics (it's about ideas).

That said, while I admit the beauty of your words and even the beauty of your life, I more greatly admire the beauty of keeping your faith out of my hair.

If quarks and gluons are just grammar to you, that's fine with me. So long as you agree that we teach grammar in our public schools.

I look forward to this discussion turning towards policy because that's where all is typically revealed. It's easy to criticize James Dobson, but are Christians really ready to let nonbelievers live as they choose?

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

OK, I agree with you whole-heartedly about that.

My point is that the strategy one encounters on this site (from Ellen, if I may name names) is that someone will try to counter the fundamentalist mental box by creating another mental box.

This is not in my opinion a profitable way to solve life's problems. If one mental box is limiting, another mental box is also limiting.

Dan - yes, I think my book would be the kind of thing Dr. Wilson is hoping for, and many people on this blog seem to agree with you: our problems - nationally and globally - are big enough that secular people can't handle them alone, and neither can religious people. My hunch is that neither can members of any one political party - which means that we're going to have to find ways to bring people together as never before. Not a small challenge!

"are Christians really ready to let nonbelievers live as they choose?

If Christians are not ready to let nonbelievers live as they choose, they are authoritarians. Some Christians are authoritarians. I am not aware that anyone in todays discussion has defended authoritarianism, unless Ellen's little psychological box is small enough and rigid enough to qualify. Is Ellen's appeal to the influence of mother and teacher authoritarian? Perhaps not. We would need to know more about her position.

Whether it's the screeds (Hitchens comes to mind) of the atheists directed at the believers or the screeds of the believers (Roberts comes to mind) directed at the atheists, in the end it only furthers blind hatred.

I think McLaren is saying that it's time to shine a light on all of it.

I'm with you on this too cscs - I'd like to see this discussed explored further as well.

Couldn't it be said that "organized religions" are as much if not more political entities than they are a spiritual ones. And that the emergence of large super-religions came as populations grew and began to compete with one another. These super-religions seem to have offered an additional bond with which to hold these larger and more dispersed populations together both "spiritually" and politically with their leadership structures and the enforcement of their particular laws. So perhaps people are attracted to these institutions to help provide social structure and stability (at least initially that was the attraction).

In the distant past there were innumerable gods and religions that held sway over the lives of much smaller communities which were fairly dispersed. This seemed to work well at providing those people with the spiritual comfort and social unity they required. Of course when those populations grew and these larger institutional religions emerged, they had to extinguish those disruptive and numerous smaller gods and religions in order to establish their own system and control. It may have been expediency which led the larger religions to borrow or outright steal many of those smaller religions practices and beliefs as they absorbed both the people and their religions. It seems to me those smaller regional religions must have been a much more personal sort of spiritual experience. I'm speculating of course but it may help to explain why there's been a resurgence in "spirituality/paganism" in today's cultures as people are finding less and less personal spiritual comfort from the larger institutional religions. Maybe the process has gone full circle?

It sounds a bit strange but I think large "organized religions" really begin to make much more sense when we remove the cloak of "god" from them and see them as political creatures. At least for me it does.

(sorry for the lateness of this post...work can be so bothersome!) ;-)

Exactly, community service.

I have heard that after Katrina there were three groups of people that the victims could count on for help: the National Guard, the Salvation Army, and the Southern Baptists.

I say this as a person who in some ways is not particularly fond of the Baptists. I do not speak their language, and I have heard my share of aggressive, manipulative Baptist preachers. But you have to give them credit.

Their actions come from the heart. If I were one of the victims of Katrina, I would rather be helped by someone whose theology is faulty than ignored by someone whose theology or philosophy is impeccable.

Thank you for your reply. When I was young, I was very tolerant of people of faith, believers in a god, but in the past few years, I've become almost as intolerant of it as I am to slavery, or war, or any of the other plagues humans visit upon themselves.

I think that morally and ethically I can no longer affect an attitude of equinamity to religion and religious people. It isn't because of their ignorance, although that is part of it, nor is it the penchant for "doing good", it is the complete and utter lack of faith in human beings and the inability to love life and enjoy what we have here and now and make it better for everyone.

It provides humans with the excuse to put off the need to look at ourselves and what we're doing to each other, and rationalizes suffering and pain that humans endure on a daily basis in this world. You mention the "mysterious" and ethereal gift of music emanating from human beings, but it is no mystery to me - music is profound communication. What is mysterious to me is the notion that human beings cannot be capable of creating great beauty and they attribute it to some superstition or supernatural explanation. Human beings are capable of that kind of creation, not because of your god, but in spite of your god. They find that kind of creation in themselves, and while a religion might inspire them, that innate human ability isn't a result of a belief in a god, it is the result of a belief in themselves.

You say that religious people want to help humanity, but I don't believe that to be true. I believe that in spite of their remonstrations and declarations of their love for mankind, the opposite is true - they are contemptuous and disdainful of humanity and see them as incapable of any thought or action that is not imposed by a supernatural phenomenon. They are unable to make that leap from a "love of mankind" to a true belief in the uniqueness and wondrousness of our evolution on this planet as human beings. They are the ones who lack imagination, who are fearful, who hold us back with their superstitions and archaic belief that humans have to, they just have to, have an outside essence that makes it all worthwhile - because without it, for them, it isn't worthwhile.

The observation from the Buddha is just more selfish dwelling on the conceited belief that the individual is just so important and amazing, that he must come back and do it all over again, here or somewhere else. Azimov was right to be resentful, he was right to complain loudly and bitterly that these superstitions are keeping humans from reaching a their own "godlike" state. Until thinking people begin to shout it out over and over again, that superstition and supernaturalism is hampering human beings and is not helping them, that by looking for people "to love" they're neglecting to make themselves loved, that religion is used to inform their neighbors lives instead of their own, we'll never be able to move beyond what and where we are now, to something better for everyone.

So while I used to think that the best course was to indulge religious people in their beliefs, I no longer believe that. I believe that like the abolitionists, the civil rights activists, the women's rights activists, we need to confront them because as I see it, it isn't getting any better, in fact, it seems to be getting worse.

I recently conducted an experiment on myself.

I had found myself complaining a bit lately about how arid and banal I find much of what passes for progressive discourse these days. If one reads progressive magazines and blogs, one finds a lot of sound progressive head on display, but not as much progressive heart. There is a lot of policy talk drawing on the social sciences, and a lot of urbane, witty and ironic commentary with an analytic or journalistic bent. There is a high degree of rage and outrage. But it is not very common to find a writer laying themselves out on the line in a revealing way, and sharing their deeper sentiments and commitments. Nor is it very common to find sensitive discussions of, or even allusions to, literary and artistic works. Yet the moral and political traditions we broadly call “progressive” have an ancient humanistic and artistic cultural heritage to draw on.

So I decided to make a list of literary and other artistic works I personally find very moving. Films, theater works, novels and other literary fiction, pieces of poetry, speeches, musical works (whether not there are lyrics involved) – all were included. I included both high art and popular arts. The only criteria were that the works should be ones I find genuinely affecting; that is, the kind which bring a tear to the eye or a lump to the throat, or raise goose bumps or the hair on the back of your neck. So I didn’t include works that I find intellectually exciting and engaging, or otherwise aesthetically significant, but not particularly moving.

I kept going until I had accumulated a list of about 20 to 30 items. I have to say I was a bit shocked to discover how many of them contained very overt religious content. Not only that, often the most explicitly religious passages were the ones I found most moving.
To take just one example, this passage from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner always gets to me, especially the last stanza:

O Wedding-Guest ! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea :
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company !--

To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay !

Farewell, farewell ! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest !
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small ;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

There are many more like that on my list, although there are also several items that don’t contain any overt religious content. This has been quite a revelation for me, and I’ve been trying to come up with some account of why it is that even though the religious content often relates to many matters that I don’t accept intellectually - on the literal, descriptive plane - they still say something important to me on the poetic, symbolic plane.

It also makes me wonder if one of the reasons for the decline of left-wing thought and influence over the past 40 years or so is due in some way to a destructive and debilitating cultural divorce, or separation, that has made it increasingly difficult for the adherents of progressive secular traditions and the adherents of progressive religious traditions to talk with one another constructively. One of the themes of many religious traditions, for example, is the idea of universal brotherhood and a human family. And belief in this doctrine has helped to motivate some people to participate in progressive causes down through the years. It’s one of the things that distinguishes much progressive thought from conservative traditions of individualism and Social Darwinism.

Obviously, I disagree with much of what you said, but I appreciate your taking the time to spell it out.

In situations like this, one has to get down to specific cases to debate the issues. You have raised so many issues, unpacking all of the implications could be the subject of several blogs.

Some free association here, but one thing that popped into my mind was Arthur C. Clarke's collection The Nine Billion Names of God, and, in particular, "The Star", which I consider the best single science fiction story ever written, although there are many fine competitors. With no spoilers, I shall merely give its unforgettable first line

It is three thousand light years to the Vatican.

Sadness shared is sadness divided. Joy shared is Joy multiplied.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I'm all astonishment. I have never known a born again christian to challenge the bible at all in terms of its ancient historical context - in fact, I've found it quite the opposite, the challenge is for them to understand it in the context of their own small world and its historical context be damned. That is, as I see it, the problem - an embellished narrative of a small group of nomadic tribes without the benefit of knowledge and science with its destructive and archaic laws and superstitious tradition is used as a how-to manual for living in the 21st century. And all of it on account of a god who relentlessly, cruelly and constistently enacted suffering and pain upon the guilty and innocent alike according to their own acknowledgement.

Most of the frustrations we have with religion we also have with government - power, money, sex, ego, bigotry, etc. If those of us who have a higher vision for government were to leave it because it's dirty, then only the scoundrels would be left.

Great point.

You are on point about caring for the poor. Part of that, from a spiritual faith, involves moral self-examination by the rich and poor alike. Such was the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in which Christ discussed the only hell-sent character in his parables being the one with much who ignored the suffering and need of the destitute. Tough road for all of us in consumer culture, yet essential before healing of passions like selfishness can take place. There comes a time when some very discomfiting feelings about ourselves must be faced. And, this is true for other things all people tend to do to make the world a colder place.

Meanwhile, it doesn't help to have some interest groups out there blatantly blaming by association, making accusations without evidence, straw-manning the faith, and erring about what and how the Bible is, what is actually says, and why.

Yeah, there was something positively spooky about the way the ratings were racking up. Not normal for this blog, so I started looking and sho'nuf jhc was getting 5s and a few 4s, and anti-jhcs were all getting consistent 1s, ALL from "bobespirit2112". An alter ego of jhc's?
==========

Anyway, of course there are several billion people out there who are not Christians. Religions are constructs of their society which may or may not export themselves through invasion or domination. Christianity itself has been tacked on top of other religions (Haiti, Mexico, Peru, etc., etc.) wherever it has been imposed. Easter is a pagan fertility festival. So any specific religion is in contradiction to any other to a greater of lesser degree. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all root from the same books, and yet there are violent schisms even within each. Any argument of the value of one over another is the same as, shall we say, the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or the number of souls to be saved to heaven.

Yet they do.

How you can be an evangelical Christian without wishing to impose your view on others would seem to me to be a contradiction. The idea that almost half the country think the Bible's explanation is as or more likely than the theory of evolution beggars belief, and a plain failure not only of the schools but of the religious leadership to explain the Bible in any way concurrent with the 21st century.

I don't think I've ever had anything to fear from any of the animist tribes of Brazil or Indonesia, but religionists continue to arrogantly export our religions to them. And many here have plenty to fear from the political power of the Christian Right.

I guess I just missed all those religious leaders standing up and disavowing creationism or literal reading of the Bible.

So, although I am sure I could sit down and have an interesting and stimulating conversation with Mr. McLaren (as this blog shows), unfortunately the force is with the dark side at this time, and religion is their light-sabre.

Deleted, post needed more thought that I was prepared ot give it.

Let me make some brief observations. I believe spirituality is very real, but the Abrahamic religions do not connect with my beliefs. Does that mean that I don't think about Aquinas on Double Effect, or the Rambam on charity, or Muhammad at St. Catherine's? No.

Think about the activists you mention. Think about the "I have a dream" speech, and how it tied to personal experience and spoke of hope for the future on earth. Now, think of Pat Robertson spouting how God was going to get a school board for not banning the teaching of evolution, or how Chavez should be killed, or a nuclear weapon should hit the Department of State. Think of those that don't answer questions, don't speak from their experience, but recite chapter and verse of a book that may not be significant to their audience.

I don't know the particular faith of one of the holiest people I know, but he has chosen a job as a hospital orderly, wheeling people into the operating room. A wise hospital lets him be comforting, frequently holding a hand silently. How does that contrast to someone on a street corner, ostentatiously waving a bible, and telling me how I would be damned if I didn't accept his way?

If there is a deity that has taken the time to create an eternity of torment, then I'm on the side of his Adversary. I can think of few things more boring than most descriptions of paradises, free of challenge, creation, and, for that matter, my four-legged family.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

To me the death of Humanism, which allowed all of good will to overlap with out judgment, marked the death of all being able to join in public discourse with out being judged.

It also marked the death of discussions of "Public Interest" or the "Common Good".

Clinging to one's individual religion in public discourse about values leads to judgments and soon stops finding common values among groups of people with various religion or no religious backgrounds.

Humanism allowed discussions to evolve and individuals to lower boundaries to find common elements of values in others common with one's self in unexpected ways.

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

JustOneGuy, don't know who you directed that at as I don't see any diatribe near here.

In a world where, even today, the greatest reasons for believing in the religion you choose are the parents you are born to and the country you are born in, and where, 100 years ago, countries were mostly more monotheistic than they are today, the vaste majority of social activists in the US have been Christian and in the Indian subcontinent, Hindi or Muslim.

I don't see any irony in this, particularly in the US, given the precepts of Christianity. What is ironic is the proportion of professed Christians who don't seem to have accepted Jesus' words to their heart at all.

Even today, the US maintains a higher church going rate than any West European nation and you can look at the polls taken about what religionists think about agnostics or atheists. Despite our constitutional separation of church and state and despite being the vaste majority, it would seem that the religious population would not accept a declared atheist as president. Where does this fear come from? What basis?

So given their very small proportion of general society, you might be surprised by the number of declared atheists and agnostics who are also acknowledged humanists and deep thinkers.

Try this one
and this one
and this, here.

Morality is a human value, not unique to religion, and, more particularly, not any one religion, whatever it may be.

And I'm still trying to see where you saw a diatribe late in this thread where I see honest questions raised and points made.

Sorry for any confusion, my comments were directed at BevD, who quite a ways up the thread spoke of religion as a plague and said that people of faith are not only ignorant but should be campaigned against just as abolitionists once took on slavery or civil rights heroes once took on injustice.

While I can agree that one does not have to be religious to be moral, I believe it helps. It helps me.

Looking at the big picture, I am sure you and I agree more politically than we disagree. Hence McLaren's call to common ground. I guess what bothers me most is when a candidate with progressive ideas is treated as somehow less progressive because he or she is a person of faith. That happened recently here with Tom Perriello, and I just don't understand it.

Vibrant I can see. Intellectual? I'm having trouble with that one among the Evangelical Megachurch going population.

This thread is so very disheartening. At best, the discourse rises to polite bigotry. And like seemingly every 'discussion' these days, the breathtaking infinity of human potential has been debased into a ballot of choices.

"Religious" or "irreligious."
"you and your friends" or "the rest of us."
"the patient findings of thinking minds" or "plagues humans visit upon themselves."

People cannot be wholly defined by an "ism." In fact, to define oneself in this manner is the hallmark of mental illness. In the phrase "religious extremism," "religious" modifies "extremism," not the other way around. The former is the expression of the latter; a symptom not the disease. And all sneezes are not evidence of the flu.

Is this not an extreme statement:

"[In] the past few years, I've become almost as intolerant of [people of faith] as I am to slavery, or war."

To declare that tens, if not hundreds of millions of people are not worthy of tolerance, requires precisely the kind of dehumanization that suffers slavery and war.

The vast majority of people of faith are no more characterized by their vocal extremist minorities, than are U.S. citizens by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.

Those would ask:

"What is it, considering the heinous acts -- all justified by 'christianity' -- makes you able to stay with it?"

...haven't asked themselves why they remain citizens of a country that no longer values habeus corpus and uses legal loopholes to justify torture.

Lest I seem to be harping on those who think all Christians are alike, I have a question for Mr. McLaren:

When did you lose your faith?

"Religious leader" is an oxymoron. As you noted, the "systemic problem with Christianity" is that which plagues any organization that contains a hierarchy. Power corrupts -- that simple truth is the single principle on which this country was founded.

"Religious leaders" are those who would place themselves spiritually above others. And though your particular message should be praised for its goals of inclusion, it is nevertheless based on the assumption that "the way of Jesus" is definitive.

Thus, are you not certain beyond any doubt that God exists? Is that not the conclusion you've drawn from sensing "'something more' to existence" than what is reducible to "time plus chance plus nothing?"

But certainty is the absence of faith. How much faith does it take to believe in that which you are convinced exists? The top of any religious hierarchy help "shepherd" those beneath. Or, stated another way, those who "know" seek to counsel those who "question."

Faith without risk is easy. Is that not the lesson of Job?

When "Jesus [stood] with a woman caught in adultery" who was about to be stoned, he spoke for those with no earthly reason to believe in a higher power. And yet he didn't call down fire from the sky. He drew in the dirt: and he asked a simple, shaming question of those secure in their beliefs. Then, when only the woman remained, Jesus chose not to reveal himself to her as the son of God. Pointing out the obvious -- "where are they? Has no one condemned you?" -- he sent her on her way, with the recommendation that she "sin no more." Jesus didn't prove to her the existence of God. Instead, with a simple act of kindness, he helped to restore her faith in humanity.

We all share that humanity, and its limitless potential. And whether our existence is an accident of nature, the design of a higher power, or somewhere in-between, we are the beneficiaries of a powerful gift: an imperative to understand our connection to the greater universe, and the intellect to inch towards an answer.

Our "common ground" is that journey. Our goal should be to share it and learn from each other along the way. And the test of our faith is whether we can relinquish the arrogant assumption that any one of us can possibly know with certainty the answer.

Oleeb - sorry I miscommunicated by my use of the term "new kind of faith." I didn't mean "absolutely new." I simply meant "new in relation to the stereotype of the angry religious right dogmatist" or something like that. On a positive note - even people some would have considered in that stereotypical category are distancing themselves from it. See for example my blog about a recent online conversation ... it's at
http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/11/left-behinds-jenkins-and-other.html.

Your final questions resonate pretty closely with the thrust of my original post. I think those are truly important questions to raise.

Yes, many of them were deeply religious people, but if you had read closely, I said "LIKE" them, we must fight against this superstition. I might point out that other "deeply religious" people were (and are) fighting tooth and nail against them. You find it ironic that the activists were deeply religious, I find it deeply ironic, too, although probably not for the same reason. I find it deeply ironic that progress must first be blessed and authorized by the religious patriarchy before it becomes acceptable to human beings.

No, nothing happened to me in the name of religion, I am not a victim of religion, but then, I am not a victim of war or slavery, or torture, but I view them as the same archaic practice of superstition as religion and like those other abhorrences, we must speak our consciences when we see it.

Of course I'm "soured" on religion. Any empathetic thinking person should be, when he looks around the world and sees the evil and the hampering of progress caused by this belief in superstition.

Frankly, the time has come when we stop indulging and encouraging this kind of superstition, we should stop worrying if they're "offended" - for three hundred years in this country people were afraid to "offend" the slave holders, afterall, they were good christians and nice people and justified their slave ownership by tenets of the bible, but finally people had the courage to offend them and deeply offend them they did.

Organized religion isn't the problem, it is religion itself that is the problem and it is offensive to humanity.

Um, by "historical context,"

...thinking for themselves, they are vibrant intellectual communities -- communities that, for example, challenge themselves to comprehend one of the most difficult books in the world in terms of its ancient historical context...

Are you talking about Adam and Eve and the 7-day thingy?  Or Noah's ark?  Or is it the desperate effort to find something in the bible that implies a knowledge of fetuses or embryos and their personhoods? 

Or are you saying that these "vibrant intellectual communities" are trying to wrap their brains around scientific knowledge such as evolution, or stem cells, for example, that the god who supposedly inspired the writing of the bible knew nothing about, and couldn't even imagine?

 Heaven and hell?  Both are described in terms humans could understand without even using their imaginations -- floating in sky in presence of god -- or burning in fire with nasty old coot.

If I am off base, would you please explain the historical context that these communities are trying to intellectually suss out.  Thank you.

Jan

Bev, what in your view makes a particular belief "religious"? Is it inherent in the nature of religious beliefs that they are superstitious, or is it conceivable for a person to have a rationally warranted religious belief?

And is it inherent in the nature of religions and religious beliefs that they be patriarchal, or could there be non-patriarchal religions?

I almost always admire and agree with Dan K's comments, but I'm not nearly so embarrassed by liberal discourse or worry that its decline is the cause of political woes. That's too close to the RINO wish for "new ideas," which I get tired of finding hasn't been deflated enough yet.

Today's Times has an article on Al Franken's senate run. Attribute it to Franken's CV or media bias, whichever side you come down on, but he comes off as embarrassing sometimes. On the other hand, when I read a quote like this, I'm reminded how the ideals I used to take for granted don't require an extended philosophical distillation of Western civilization: Speaking about young voters, he says “They were 11 when Bush became president. Some don’t remember that a president can be articulate. They don’t remember that the federal government worked. And the saddest thing was that they don’t remember that our country was well respected around the world.” 

It doesn't take meditations on love, death, and faith either to articulate the notion of government of, by, and for the people, rather than the evils of big government and the marvels of capital accumulation. By comparison, another GOP rant on faith, the right to life, fear, terror, and taxes doesn't seem all that vital or relevant unless you're in the bubble.

I write when I can about art history, which requires placing it in context of all sorts of things, including Christianity. I'm aware of the diverse inspirations it has given. I just don't see what's to be gained by diluting the first amendment, which has protected minority faiths like, apparently, our eloquent guest's as well as nonbelievers. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

I don't find anything reasonable or rational about a belief in the supernatural.

I don't know if it is inherent in the nature of religion to be patriarchal, it certainly seems to be because humans cannot be separated from nurture/nature and civilization is patriarchal. That is not, though, the "problem" with religion, it is only one factor that makes religion destructive.

I understand the "god gene", the need for humans to look for something better, I believe that is real and good. In my opinion though, religion oppresses the human spirit and limits humans. It stops imagination and curiosity and while it once served a purpose in our evolution and development of our species, it now has become a hindrance to our progress.

What I object to is Rev. McClaren's urgent desire to "dialogue" with progressives, to join our causes, because inevitably, religious people claim a particular lease on the moral highground and sort human problems according to their system of priority. I don't think "joining forces" with "moderate religionists" is in the best interest of the progressive movement at this time of our human development. I no longer want to indulge them in their superstitions because they cannot respect or understand boundaries and it leads to the imposition of their beliefs on others.

I fully realize that this is a losing battle, but I reserve the right to object to it.

Re: While I can agree that one does not have to be religious to be moral, I believe it helps. It helps me.

What is it about religion that helps you to be moral?  Is it a doctrin that gives you examples of good and bad behavior?  Is it the fear of punishment after death that keeps you on the straight and narrow?

It strikes me that an intellectually honest person who decides that stealing is wrong because it gives him/her something he doesn't deserve and hasn't earned, and deprives the victim of something is certainly moral behavior. 

I agree that many people are incapable of going through the rigorous effort it takes to evaluate the complex dichotomies of motive and selfishness versus the desire to be true to themselves and the community and world they live in.  It isn't easy, and it also never stops; but it can be rewarding in its own way.  It also is a moral way to live.

The problem comes when those people who prefer to have the rules (and rewards & punishments) laid out for them, choose to follow a leader who tells them, for example, not to vote for a President because he is in favor of abortion rights.  That, as far as I can see it, is not morality.  

Someone who outwardly obeys all laws, but runs a stop-sign when the police are not around is not exactly a good citizen.  Someone who is selfish and hateful, and for example, sends young people to kill and be killed for bogus reasons, but who "knows Jesus and talks to god," doesn't worry about his reward or punishment; it is guaranteed by those who taught him the way to think justify his behavior.

Jan

OK, so I'm just trying to get a fix on your understanding of religion. Your view, I take it, is that a religious belief is inherently a belief in something supernatural, and all beliefs in something supernatural are at bottom superstitious.

There is a phenomenon in modern life I sometimes call "reverse fundamentalism". This is when non-believers insist on attributing the most backward, ignorant, fundamentalist and literalist readings to religious claims, so that those claims can then be easily dispatched by rational argument.

The problem is that actual flesh and blood human beings frequently don't cooperate with this urge for literalism. Most of them are not dogmatic theologians attach precise, literal dogmatic readings to the religious doctrines they appear to endorse. For most people literal and figurative language is all mixed together, and they can't even tell you themselves where one ends and the other begins. So it is not always clear just what beliefs they are actually expressing when they say they believe in God or sin or redemption or divine love or heaven or predestination or prophecy or an immortal soul.

As far as boundaries go, I don't see religious people as having any particular monopoly on the use of coercive means to "impose their beliefs on others". Some of the clearest historical examples of this kind of coercion, it is true, involve religions. But that's mainly because until very recent history most people were religious. In recent, more secular, times we have seen secular ideologies that are just as aggressive as any organized religion about converting others and compelling them to live according to their desired social plan.

I don't really see how politics of any kind can avoid the imposition of beliefs on others, in the sense of trying through various means, including legislation and other forms of government power, to get others to live in some particular way that reflects one's beliefs about the best way to live. It's just the way of the world. If one is interested in legislating any social changes at all, then one is inevitably trying to use the organized power of government to get people to do something they are not currently doing, or get them to stop doing something they are currently doing. And surely, these attempts to modify behavior on a broad scale are motivated by one's beliefs. Many of these beliefs are no more rationally warranted than religious beliefs in the supernatural. They are generated by habitual feelings and intuitions about what is "right" that one then attempts to "impose" on others.

Frankly, I wish progressives would get just a little bit more aggressive about "imposing their beliefs on others". Modern progressive thought has been too much preoccupied with dubiously coherent views drawn from latter-day liberal philosophy about the overriding importance of tolerance and merely formal political structures that are committed "no privileged conception of the good". So a substantial part of the progressive movement has degenerated into a personal-sphere libertarianism, where individual liberty is not just one component of the good life, but seemingly the sole political value, and politics is just perpetual rebellion against every form of social obligation and governmental coercion. This has dissipated the energy, creativity, social imagination and intellectual vitality of the left. You can't change the world in any significant way if you are not willing to push people a bit.

These latter day liberal philosophies have helped produce a whole generation who are all passionate about spreading "democracy", but can't be bothered to organize to produce structural social and economic reforms on a global scale. The latter would require endorsing a "particular conception of the good." We have places in the world in which people live in the most destitute, foul and chronically unemployed conditions, in colossal mega-cities that are little more than human dumping grounds, while the commercial and financial agents of powerful states scour these countries to accumulate whatever remaining capital is left to be appropriated, and compete with each other militarily for the booty. But all the democracy promoters can bother with is the absence of "civil society" and formal political structures. That is certainly one problem to worry about, but it's only part of the problem.

You also have the weird alienated anarchism of people like Chomsky and his devotees, which is preoccupied with extremely perceptive analysis of the faults of the modern world, but can't ever seem to organize any serious plan for doing anything about it since they believe every form of hierarchy and coercion is evil. I guess they think the anarchist Kingdom of Heaven will just come by magic, without the need for coercing any human beings along the way.

Though the people with whom I find the most intellectual affinity are a certain sort of secular and skeptical type, I also find there are some religious people with whom I find more common ground than with some other secular people. And I'll take allies wherever I can find them.

While I understand your point that you really meant different, I also think it vitally important that people know it is not new. The tradition of loving service and sacrifice with no expectation or demand of adherence to the faith by those one serves is a venerable and quite honorable tradition.

Those who make up the religious right leadership---hucksters and charlatan's all in my book---have no claim whatsoever to this tradition. Their "faith" is nothing but a sales excercise dedicated to servicing the desires of their CEO's (the Falwells, Haggards, Robertsons, and so on) who have become the most well known super salesmen of a set of dogmatic principles and beliefs that are no more Christian than are those who worship the Great Pumpkin. They pass their business empires along to their children who get to reap millions in tax free revenues ad infinitum. What they do, how, and why they do it is perverse and repulsive. These super salesmen are great at selling their two-bit simplistic and authoritarian visions of a stern old grandpa living in the sky judging one's every thought and action with an eye toward damning you eternally if you break his rules, but if you do you can still be "saved" (for future contributions)if you just once again find Jesus and love him that much more.

These ultimate Amway sales achievers typically lack any responsible or credible education or training in traditional theology, etc... All they need to know to grow the business is simple, straightfoward fundamentalism relabeled and repackaged as "evangelical". Once you understand the fundamentals, all you have to do is be able to understand the simple sales techniques of salvation through contributions to the leader's cause/causes, wrap it in Jesus and the holy spirit and you're in business! It's a zero money up front franchise business opportunity no unprincipled huckster can pass up as we can all plainly see. There's no end to the number of gullible, scared people willing to sign up for and pay for this nonsense and there's no interference in the racket by any governmental authority. Thus, they continue to exploit and distort whatever wisdom is in the Bible with a Wal Mart like business model in the name of enriching themselves in the name of God. This is precisely the sort of corrupt empire building that fanned the flames of the reformation against the corruption of the Church of Rome hundreds of years ago. They represent the very worst religion (Christianity in particular) has to offer the world. The near complete silence of those who know how corrupt and grotesque this type of "church" is, is unconscionable in my vew and is an affront to every good thing done by those who adhere to the best the tradition has to offer.

I know you are not one of the hucksters, but it is time for those who understand what is up with that crowd to stand up before it is too late.

One of the points Dawkins makes is that this argument presupposes that before Moses came down from the mountain, the Israelites didn't obey the Ten Commandments.

This is, of course, ludicrous. The basis for the enshrinement of morality in religious doctrine is that morality preceded religious doctrine--that basic rules of human behavior in communities are universal and fundamental.

People who found sects adopt these rules to gain authority, not to impose them anew.

There is also something that is fundamentally disturbing to me. A few people have noted, and I seem to remember thinking it reading the initial post, that one of the most appealing and central elements of Christian belief (in this country) is the profound sense of shared community in a congregation. There people find like-minded souls with whom they share life's joys and sadnesses, celebrating and supporting each other. This is, of course, undeniable.

But, again, I would claim that the religious institutions are as much parasitic on as enabling this community spirit. I've seen such communities arise on line many times, without any overweening religious basis. This parasitism reaches such an extreme level that people I find absolutely abhorrent, like Pat Robertson, gets money from my household every month, when I pay my cable bill.

And now that I've started, I have to say that you don't get to just take the good, community oriented, morality building things when you adopt even the most deity free version of Christianity (and another of Dawkins points is that it is hard to believe that people who claim to be Christian can simultaneously reject all its central tenets, from Virgin birth to the Trinity [which, of course, are themselves, incompatible].) You also have to take the bad with the good, and there is an awful lot of bad. Being ashamed is insufficient. Expressing deep concern is all very nice, but the death toll, literally, continues to mount.

There are days when I can doubt my own existence, not to mention God's! I fully agree with you when you say "our common ground is that journey." I just hope we can avoid both the arrogance of claiming to have risen above faith to absolute certainty and the arrogance of reducing other people's experience to something ridiculous and laughable.

This is, I am sorry to say, a profoundly dishonest argument. And a common one.

The extraordinary range of people's belief in the supernatural makes it impossible for everyone to treat everyone else's faith as respectable and neither ridiculous or laughable. In fact, it is extremely common for religious believers with very deep faiths to ridicule other faiths. It is ridiculous, a faithful Muslim would say, to think that any man could be the God of Abraham, or, even more ridiculously, that the God of Abraham was also a blastocyst.

It is ridiculous, many faithful Christians have said, to think that someone who blows himself up in a restaurant filled with mothers and children is going to be greeted in heaven by 70 virgins (or maidens, or young women).

And they all say that animists are ridiculous with no understanding of the deeper meaning of a single God.

These enormous variety of incompatible human faiths makes it deeply unfair to complain about the person who says "Yeah. None of this stuff makes any sense. I reject it all." while not noting that all believers reject the majority of other beliefs, and that there is no grounding for any of them, beyond an agreement on what is to be believed.

And the plasticity of this belief makes it even harder to defend. Someone above points out, as a virtue, that the slavery thing is out now, and so is the witchhunting thing. So there's hope. But, then, on what basis do you keep anything? Do join Bishop Spong and say, essentially, well all this supernatural stuff is just allegory, and all we're really talking about is human community and understanding?

You could save a heckuva lot of time if you just said that. And stopped getting together on Sundays, or Saturdays, or Fridays, or whatever the REAL special day is to reaffirm that you must be right, because you all say so.

And there, I've done it again. That was definitely ridicule, evoking Kipling. But I don't see how you can examine what people actually do, what they say underlies what they're doing, and not throw up your hands and start talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Finally, I don't see why it's less arrogant to say that the Creator of the Universe picked out this sect of these primates at this tiny sliver of time to devote itself to than it is to say that this is a ridiculous claim. And no matter how much you try to strip the Scriptures from your belief, in discussions like this, you never do renounce them. They are the foundation of your faith--and they don't make a whole lot of sense, whether your angel is named Moroni or Gabriel or Nhiliac.

I've had an arc of experience with what passes for religion much like yours. I used to be tolerant of those who (loudly) professed it, but no more.

There is nothing wrong with people having a variety of beliefs, and nothing wrong with them sharing those beliefs with others. But ideologues of any stripe who attempt to force others to adopt their beliefs or face penalties meted out by government are another thing. Religions are, by their very nature, intolerant of others.

For many years I failed to recognize the role of protestant all-white churches here in the Texas and the South in perpetuating the curse of Racism. There control of local and state governments, and their influence on the national government, were something that just didn't click with me.

Pat Robertson's run for President began to set off my current intolerance for religion in politics. Martin Luther King merely wanted to influence government, and in fact to correct some of the damage religion had inflicted on our nation through government and laws. But King was never a government official with police power and the ability to prosecute others in the courts. Robertson wanted (and still wants) that power. So do some many other fundamentalist and evangelistic leaders. They are the "Dominionists." They don't respect anyone who fails to adopt their narrow, bigoted, and ignorant version of religion, and they are dangerous to the rest of us and to the Nation. Creationism/Intellignet Design is just an example, one which the current Governor of Texas is trying to get enshrined in Texas' science textbooks.

A member of the Texas Education Agency sent an e-mail recommending that others listen to a speech given by a prominent anti-Intelligent Design author, and was fired for that e-mail a few weeks ago. The decision for new approved textbooks is going to be made next year, and Governor Rick Perry, Bush's replacement, wants it to include both scientific theories (?), Evolution and Intelligent Design. Hooray for Biblical Inerrancy! The Yahoos are running our government!

Most, if not all, fundamentalist forms of religion are a frightened reaction to rapid social change that the individuals don't feel they can cope with. So they create an imaginary protector and hand the problem off to him (it's always a him.) OK. Coping mechanism. But when they start trying to force their ignorance and fear off onto me, my children and grandchildren, then I will protect them.

Anyone who takes the side of those Yahoos is my enemy until they leave me and mine alone. Whcih means stop knocking on my door and handing me Bible tracts and get them the Hell our of government! They can't take my tax money, pollute children's textbooks, and establish government penalties for failure to follow their leadership.

Remember Andrea Yates who drowned her five children in a bathtub a few years ago? She and her children are as much victims of the Christian religion as practiced in Texas as they were of her depression.

So for some strange reason, I am no longer tolerant of the aggressive Xtians (those who have removed "Christ" from Christianity.)

You don't have to wonder why. Just watch the news. Or answer the knock on the door.