christianity

Quakers & Capitalism — The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic & the Capitalist Spirit (via Through the Flaming Sword)

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Here’s the next installment in the book I’ve been writing on Quakers and Capitalism: The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of c … Read More

via Through the Flaming Sword

For some reason, this paragraph from the article fascinates me:

When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).

This description of the believers need for discipline describes the usual “Baptist” form of conversion and post-conversion interaction with the world. When we are converted, we are supposedly called to be “not of this world” yet we are simultaneously asked to have an impact upon it. Baptists haven’t given much thought to how this is done as a spiritual discipline. Sure, reading the bible is high on that scale of disciplinary measures, but there is no real advice about how to “supervise” our own states of grace.  This dichotomy leads to Protestant Christianity being seen as a culture so intermingled with the world that we have Christian pop culture as a result, which mimics culture, so that we have an excuse to interact with it. What I find about Quakerism that’s appealing is their discipline of silence. It’s a withdrawal with a view toward “a plan.” I don’t believe Baptists are taught to have a “plan” of interaction with the world. If they are it’s merely to bring as many Baptists into the fold as possible. So insistent is that plan that there isn’t much of a desire to follow up on all those conversions (discipleship).

Isn’t this just like capitalism? It may be a simplistic comparison, but think for a moment. There is a need for a product. People buy the product. Others want it. More product is made until finally the market is saturated. Product still gets made but there is no outlet for surplus and no plan to deal with the surplus. There is no thought of any kind taken of the ramifications of mass production, be it spiritual or material. There is no follow through or discipline, only production.

Hmmm. I had not heard of this article before and I’m glad I found it at QuakerQuaker.org. Good food for thought.

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When “Thinking Biblically” Means Violating Someone Else’s Civil Rights

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Listening to Christian radio is something I do periodically. I do it because it’s helpful to know what Christians are actually saying and not rely on hearsay. The same goes for listening to Rush Limbaugh and the guy that makes my ears bleed, Glenn Beck.  I listen also because I used to be part of that subculture and I like to hear all sides of a cultural issue, even if I do disagree with it. Janet Parshall is the host of a radio show on Moody Bible radio called “In the Market.” This show discusses cultural topics from a “biblical viewpoint.” Today’s show was about bullying and the LGBT public campaign called “It Gets Better.”

Parshall begins by outlining the tree criteria for defining a protected class. Three criteria to be met as a protected class:

Immutable characteristic

Suffering politically

Suffering economically

Parshall and her guest today protest this campaign because they do not believe the bible supports homosexuality as an “immutable characteristic” but as a “lifestyle” that is chosen. Therefore, homosexuals should not be a protected class as defined by the government. They also take issue with the statistics provided by the campaign that 9 out of 10 LGBT are harassed at school and that fully 1/3 commit suicide. Parshall’s guest and Parshall herself take further issue with the whole campaign and believe it to be another way to “legitimize” homosexuality in our culture. This is also a common tactic to bring down the whole argument the campaign is trying to get through because of the personal characteristics of those asking for it. Over and over they emphasize that it’s not right to bully at all, end of story. Except it isn’t the end of their story. It never is. It’s like saying it’s never ok to abuse your wife and then go on to emphasize that Ephesians 6 gives husbands “authority.”

I must say that this is typical of Christian radio. They all agree that bullying is wrong or that ________ is something we should fight against, however, they make it particularly clear that the action these human beings commit are “biblically sinful”  They believe they are “speaking truth in love” by pointing out that these people are sinful and even if they decry bullying as an action, their very denigration of homosexuality promotes the kind of thinking that steeps into their children and which grows into the idea that these people are “less than” “normal” human beings and are therefore not deserving of “special” treatment as they call it.

It is true that all bullying is wrong and should be dealt with, but since it isn’t AND since the bullying is also statistically more prevalent among the gay community, then it is absolutely incumbent upon them to not make things worse by marginalizing a group basing their justification for doing so on ancient, middle eastern principles that are questionable at best when used as universal principles for modern societies. Science has also backed the modern belief that homosexuality is far more complicated than waking up one day and deciding whom to be attracted to sexually. I did not “decide” who I was attracted to. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I experimented with kissing some girls in my class and even an older girl. The kissing was enjoyable, however, I just happened to find kissing boys more enjoyable. I didn’t decide to kiss more boys. It just turned out that way. If I’d gotten better offers from girls, I might have thought about it more!

The point is that “thinking biblically” will always trample on modern society’s civil rights, merely by being biblical. Being biblical means being frozen in time and having ancient ideas declared universal. Why this isn’t more obvious is inscrutable to some who don’t live by a set of scriptures, but having come out of it, I can only say that it is perfectly reasonable to think so if one is convinced that the bible is literally and irrevocably the word of God, dropped from his mouth to the hands of scribes writing it down; infallible, correct in all areas it touches, and binding for all time to those who believe it. It’s safe and effective for circumscribing one’s life with it. Until and unless you can prove this to be untrue, you will never penetrate that fundamentalist armor. Never. How did I do it? By having an open mind and by going to college that taught mythology, literature, and philosophy, and history. By seeing that time and cultures move and evolve and change and that the God of ancient scriptures also moves, evolves, and changes according to the men who wrote things down.  And yes, being open to the ever evolving Spirit that exists in everyone and tells me truly that it matters not what a person does if they are harming no other human being because the Light of the Divine in them demands respect, dignity, and basic human rights, whether you agree with their essential and irrevocable genetic makeup or not. End of argument.

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Church Times – If Jefferts Schori is at meeting, I won’t come, says Primate

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Church Times – If Jefferts Schori is at meeting, I won’t come, says Primate.

First of all, “Primate?” Really? This about describes the good old boy network at work here.  Apparently, Rev. Ernest, Archbishop of the Indian Ocean (how can you be a bishop of an ocean?)  can smell the taint of woman thousands of miles away and refuses to participate in a summit because of the U.S. Presiding Bishop, Jefferts Schori’s attendance. It’s crap like this that convinces me that church hierarchical structures should do us all a favor and come tumbling down before it’s too late to salvage such nonsense.

The party line goes like this: Jesus was a man, therefore his priests can’t be anything but men. How about this? Jesus appointed men as apostles therefore women cannot be apostles? Or how about this? Only 4 women are named in the bible as part of Jesus’ inner circle therefore only 4 women are allowed to be disciples? Or, here’s a good one, Jesus and the disciples were Jewish. Therefore only his priests can be ethnic Jews? Right? Peter had a mother-in-law therefore all priests should have mothers-in-law? Makes sense to me. (Extreme eye-rolling here).

Better yes, how about women boycott all religions that exclude us because Jesus had different genitals? I’ll go first.

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Better to Judge Than Examine Yourself

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I am amazed, yet not really surprised, at some “true” Christians’ cavalier attitude about judging another person’s faith. We who no longer walk these well trodden and judgmentally offensive paths can’t help but wonder how deluded one must be to think no one else’s path is genuine but their own. How easy it is to know what another person thinks about or what one’s motivation is.  Miguel Guanipa claims to know that Anne Rice’s religion was “fashioned from ignorance,” and has a ““what’s in it for me” mentality.” Sounds like so much sour grapes to me. I can’t help but think that such people are envious of those with the proverbial “balls” to leave behind what these judgmental people are scared to. Fear is a great motivator, especially in religion.

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Quote of the Day

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God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination….

Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death.

Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

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It’s Not Hard to Get My Goat This Morning

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A couple of things bother me today.

Yesterday, had a lovely lunch with my daughter, my best friend, and my sister. Alcohol and other things were involved and as usual it ends with my sister yelling at the top of her voice at me because she disagrees with me politically. My friend sits there bemused and the exchanges sends my daughter outside to smoke. Meanwhile everyone in the neighborhood can hear the exchange which is embarrassing. Should I have stopped it? Yes. Did I? No, because old habits die hard.  You see, my sister is a Christian fundie racist who listens to Glenn Beck and believes all the apocalyptic things the quasi-Christian/Republican right says on the radio/fox news/etc. I used to be just like her. I believed all the doom and gloom stories that I was fed, was a racist, and wanted everyone to just leave me alone so I could do with my money as I saw fit.

Then I met someone on the other side of the world with a loving, compassion about them who challenged me. I also deconverted from a Christianity like my sister’s that blames people for the circumstances they are in without ever thinking “there but for the grace of God…” I no longer mix my politics and my religion. My personal ethic is based on “been there, done that” to the extent that my sister’s never will. I believe politics has to hit home somehow before the reality of what you are espousing sinks in. She says she’s not a bigot, yet rails on about blacks who come to the ER to get their drug fixes. I challenge her on it, but she says she’s right because she sees it. I said that doesn’t mean the whole world is that way and we had a few white people in our small town blowing themselves up in meth labs. We went round and round. Still, when I left that particular brand of Christianity and began listening to something more hopeful, more helpful, and less rugged “screw everybody else” individualism, I became a better person.

This ideological transformation didn’t happen overnight and I still harbor some of the same awful beliefs from that time, but I fight it and anyone who challenges me on it from a racist, fundie standpoint. They can keep their bigoted religious viewpoint if they want, but trying to get them to see without those tinted eyeglasses on seems a lost cause to me.  What set this off? My suggestion to my sister that we’d all be better off if we had a system of health care that helped everyone not just the extortionist insurance industry. My sister is a nurse, and boy did that hit a nerve. Why? I don’t know. But she’s been “Beck-ified.”  I wish I could say that her ideas aren’t typical, but sadly they are typical in the type of churches we hale from.  These types of christians have not been converted to Jesus, but to a type of christo-facist nationalism that equates personal wealth and individualism with salvation, none of which Jesus personally preached.

She later apologized for yelling but “not for her viewpoints.” Of course not. That would mean changing one’s views, which requires a great deal of introspection and humility and an ability to admit when we are wrong. Pretty much in short supply in America these days.

And the other thing that bothered me today?  …. er…I forgot.

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“We the People”

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And right after writing about individualism in religion, I come across this assessment of the “Restoring Honor” rally at Religion Dispatch:

Individually, most Tea Partiers probably are nice people, trying to do what’s right, motivated by good intentions that extend from their faith in God and in their understanding of what this nation stands for. And individualism is exactly what the rhetoric of the rally was all about; from the website: “throughout history America has seen many great leaders and noteworthy citizens change her course. It is through their personal virtues and by their example that we are able to live as a free people. Our freedom is possible only if we remain virtuous.” Mirroring their Christology, salvation for themselves and for the country is an individual act.The convenience of individualism is that others cannot be held accountable for personal failures, nor can an individual be held responsible for the actions of another. The problem with individualism is that it fails to connect the dots between a movement or ideology and how one person might interpret that ideology, thereby taking a course of action perhaps incongruous with the party’s original intent.

Individualism is beneficial for leaders to peg success or failure of a movement on each person’s virtue rather than the power of the collective to effect change. Individualism is focused on personal attainment, personal happiness, and personal livelihood, and fails to see how each relies on a system that empowers, privileges, or dispossess either the individual or others in the process. As I discovered at the rally, to shift the conversation from “I” to “we” in speaking of a collective liberation was quickly flagged as anti-American and dismissed.

Since when did “we the people” become synonymous with Socialism? How can we convince people that “loving their neighbor” means more than just praying for them, that it means supporting a system that raises each of us up through access to education, health care, jobs, and a livable life? How can we encourage people to stop thinking of themselves as living in subdivisions and start living in neighborhoods? How can we shift from the Jesus of the comfortable to the “sell all your possessions” Jesus?

I don’t think we change the nature of the conversation by berating those with whom we disagree, further sowing the seeds of resentment and faction. We change the nature of the conversation by connecting our own work to the values or faith by which it is motivated. The Christianity I practice requires that I love my neighbor even when it isn’t easy, that I work for “the least of these” even when I want to quit, that I give my two coins even if they are the last two I have, and that Jesus died not only for my sins but also those of the tax collector, the Samaritan woman, and the Pharisee.

Alex McNeill is absolutely right about what makes the rugged individualists of America so opposed to anything they see as threatening by labeling it “socialist.” Forgetting that Jesus was a “socialist” in the purest sense, it’s easy for us to ignore the bigger picture and concentrate only on ourselves. I should take a lesson from my sister and mother, who are as viciously anti-socialist as anybody I know. It is convenient to be able to just pray for people rather than actual help them, and that’s the biggest critique I have of Christianity as a movement. I’m guilty of this individualism myself probably because I see the futility of engaging in debate with entrenched ideologues, my own family among them. But what do we do when those on opposing sides refuse to do anything but berate, deride, marginalize, and curse? When do you realize you can’t have a conversation with rabid ideologues and move along? That’s my question. No one seems to be able to answer it.

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