Christianity: Evangelical or Imperialistic?

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A recent post on the Facebook page of Being Liberal (a political organization), they focused on the war between Religion (mainly Christianity) and Science.  The poster (reproduced here in a composite graphic) depicts the perennial war between both Church and State, and Science and Religion.  No one knows better than I that church policy does not tolerate confinement of religion to private religious observance.  As a kid, I too railed against so-called Christians who buried their heads in the sand, and did not put their votes where their professed beliefs stood.

But that's another battle: true belief versus hypocrisy.  If Christians throughout the US actually voted their conscience, the fight for universal health care would be a thing of the distant past.  The only reasonable objection to a far more robust welfare state is that it just might not be moral to commit an entire nation to stand by the morality of a minority.  "We can't raise taxes to implement the charity that only a minority of us, namely a small fragment of professed Christians, would consider their responsibility."  Okay.  Then we must not force the entire nation to subscribe to any policy that only a small minority can stand behind, such as Creationism, or Right-to-Life-ism, or Prayer-in-School-ism, or Let's-Bomb-The-Crap-Out-Of-Muslims-ism.  Or All Oil Is Our Oil-ism.

There are other battles we can identify.  Many Christians want a limited form of Equality: equality only for wealthy landowners (we got rid of that idea in principle, but it lingers), equality only for whites (that's still dying a lingering death), equality only for men (still fighting a strong rearguard action), equality only for Christians, or Equality only for Traditional Marriage.  See, a lot of people who believe in all sorts of equality would not be happy with the Equality of Religions.  The Founding Fathers, they firmly believe, only intended that the government should be even-handed in dealing with all Christian denominations, and maybe Judaism.  The Constitution expressly outlaws the practice of witchcraft, they would say.  How many teachers would smile if a kid were to get up at prayer time and say, Dear Satan, bless our school today, and lead us safely in Your Ways?

A little extreme?  Well, yes.  But we have to be consistent.

Is there nothing, Christians must be asking, that we can legally do in our daily lives, to practice our faith outside our churches and our homes? 

Oh, where to begin?  If committed Christians would only take their jobs as parents seriously, and not hand off their parenting responsibilities to the schools, there would be no need for prayer or religious education in state-funded schools.  If only people would talk about sex at home, instead of just screwing each other silly, kids would not need sex education in schools.  (Still, trained teachers can probably do it better than parents, but I think the jury is still out on this one.)  If only Christians would take the ideas of Charity and Compassion seriously, there would be far less of a burden on the State to provide a safety net, and there would be far less wealth that each Christian would leave in his estate.  Christians would deny all the principles they pretend to espouse in order to give their unworthy children the opportunity to squander the wealth they have hoarded so assiduously.  Some of the most notorious conservative hatchet-men out there  have inherited their wealth, and their vicious genes.  What a country, that lets them do this, and encourages them.  And they will do anything to keep this country perfect for tight-fisted businessmen, such as the Koch brothers.  And Christians are the front line of their defense.

Finally, it is time that Christians took the genius and the limitations of the Bible seriously.  No one with an ounce of intelligence can support the principle that every word in the Bible is divinely inspired.  But no one can deny that there are varying levels of inspired thinking in that book.  It does not suit the twisted purposes of Christian religious leaders to admit to any weaknesses in their scriptures; they must think that there must be absolutely no chink in its divine armor.  This commits the faithful to the task of defending some of the statements in the Bible that can only be justified on the grounds that they were directed to very small audiences, usually in times of crises, to achieve a limited objective, and were not intended to be general principles for all time.  In short, the Bible should not be read by idiots.  Perhaps Martin Luther had it wrong.

On the other hand, since the Bible is in the public domain (or should be), the christian community should take the task of demystifying it very seriously, and not resort to insisting that every word is literally true.

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A completely unrelated mud sculpture