Sherry Chandler » Sunday morning browsing
Sunday morning browsing
Some musings called “Of Death & Taxes” worth a look by Darksyde at the Daily Kos:
…most of the religious people I know, even those who would eagerly identify themselves as members of the Religious Right, don’t seem as fanatical or as political as their leaders. Here in my neck of the woods, the local Hospice is manned almost exclusively by conservative evangelical Christians. They perform some of the most brutal, charitable work I can imagine. They take care of terminally ill people right up until death, emptying bed pans, giving them sponge baths, holding their hand, and allowing them to die with at least some dignity in the presence of people who care. These patients are almost invariably destitute and alone–the rich seldom lack for mourners. The volunteers do it for anyone who needs them, any race, even those we hear about being scapegoated by the religious right, such as gay/AIDS patients…
…
On the other side of the coin, I was in a guy’s office a few weeks ago that looked like a fucking shrine to George Bush. He had Dubya pictures on the wall, he had Laura and the twins smiling behind frames on his desk. This fellow is a partner in a tax firm and he’s all about the money. He cleared something like 400K last year–so he claims anyway–and tens of thousands of dollars of it was because of changes in the tax code under Georgie-boy. He also identifies himself as a Christian, goes to the ritziest church in town, drives a giant luxury SUV decked out with church memorabilia. In his own words he ‘hate queers.’ He also hosts Bible study in his lavish home every week; to a group of local businessmen carefully chosen for networking reasons.
My understanding is that the Hospice fellow and taxman vote the same way in ‘04.
DarkSyde was reacting to this passage from Liberal Jesus, a worth-reading post by Barbara O’Brien at Unclaimed Territory:
Westerners often cling to an infantile religion focused on a Big Daddy God and the face of Jesus mysteriously appearing on pancakes and cheese sandwiches. And since that’s what much of religion in America looks like, it’s easy to assume that’s what religion is. That, and the fact that the world seems infested with warring religious whackjobs, makes religion easy to hate. I understand that.
But the problem isn’t with religion. The problem is that, somehow, we’ve allowed religion to be defined by the stupid and the warped, resulting in stupid and warped religion at war with all things rational and humane. But religion doesn’t have to be that way.
For myself, I like the next couple of paragraphs from O’Brien’s post:
Followers of other religions can be baffled by notion of scriptural literalism. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was once asked what he would do if science disproved something written in a sutra. He said that he would revise the sutra. Westerners sometimes don’t know how to take this, but even the Buddha told his followers they shouldn’t accept anything he taught them on faith. Believing the sutras is not the point of the sutras, any more than believing in science is the point of science.
Many of the world’s religions do not regard their sacred texts as collections of facts that must be accepted unblinkingly by the faithful. Rather, texts, doctrines, and practices are means, not ends. They are interfaces with realities that confound the limitations of human intellect. These realities also confound the limitations of human language, so they cannot accurately be explained in words. From this perspective any religious understanding that can be explained in words or reduced to dogma is flawed. As it says in the first line of the Tao Teh Ching, “The Tao that can be explained is not the Tao.”
O’Brien, in her turn, was riffing on this quotation from Karen Armstrong, as it appeared in Salon (you have to sit through a commercial to see it):
..faith is not a matter of believing things. That’s again a modern Western notion. It’s only been current since the 18th century. Believing things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position, current really only in the Western Christian world. You don’t have it much in Judaism, for example. …I think we’ve become rather stupid in our scientific age about religion. If you’d presented some of these literalistic readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found it rather obtuse. They’d have found it incomprehensible that people really believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.
All these articles are worth reading in their entirety.
As for me, I have some beautiful Sunday morning sunlight to look at and will be leaving this artificially lighted screen.
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a comment