Church Under The Bridge

BandWagon

Why I can’t get a girlfriend - I stole the idea for this one from another blogger, but it amused me nonetheless.

Cross-posting FTW.

It’s incredibly sad that Proposition 8 passed in California. It’s incredibly sad that gay marriage is even an issue in our country. It’s incredibly sad that we as a nation have come so far and yet are still so far behind.

I’m not overly religious, but you know what they say – knowledge is power. So I’ve tried to gain at least a basic theological understanding. I’ve tried to see the conservative stance on this issue, but I just must be blind on the specific subject.

Here’s the deal. If you’re going to take the bible at face value and entirely literal, does it not read “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”?

It is not love to force the Bible down someone’s throat.
It is not love to turn your back on someone because they’re pregnant out of wedlock.
It is not love to deny someone’s sexuality if they are gay.

It is hate. Hate is anger. Anger is fear. What have you got to fear?

Keep an open mind.

Not that Democrats are awesome at dutifully “following God” (not that they necessarily should), but I tend to hold the “moral majority”, the “Religious Right” to a higher standard being that they claim to represent God. However, as an independent voter, I’m free to believe God wasn’t just pulling my chain when he said things like “the only religion I’m [God] interested in is to look after orphans and widows” (James 1:27) or “What you do to the least of these you do unto me”.

Quite honestly, were it not for the abortion issue (I’m personally against it but I respect people of differing opinions–especially since I don’t have a uterus) I would honestly find it very difficult to justify voting Republican at all.

In my examination of politics and the Christian faith, I feel comfortable concluding that the summation of excuses conservatives use against things like well-fare (sp?), war, gay rights, drug policies, immigration, etc seem to be rooted in hate and the justifications they provide are often “practical”. By this I mean that it is impractical to give money to 90% of homeless people when only 10% really put it to good use (I’m just using arbitrary numbers). Or that it’s more practical to “use force to make people behave peacefully” (note the irony) than it is to genuinely reach out and have patience (heaven forbid we turn the other cheek or anything crazy like that) with our enemies.

I find this to conflict with the Christian faith which states that God was born in a barn, spent a good chunk of his life being homeless, talking/living/eating with the crazies and the rejects of society, and hanging on a Roman cross like a criminal out of crazy, compassionate love for mankind. I would think it would be within the power of an Almighty God to come to earth as a powerful king with powerful armies and force the world to believe in Him, but that wasn’t what he did. In fact, Jesus rejected this method explicitly during the temptation in the desert.

Basically, all of this is to say that I feel the “godless liberals” do what Jesus would do a lot better than the Religious Right. But I think we all know bad things happen when Christianity becomes “popular” [cough]Crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, war, etc[cough].

Just some thoughts.

How to incorrectly incorporate religion into politics

Could you imagine if politicians (in America, at least) actually had an interest in solving our nation’s problems as opposed to being right? I think the same goes for those of us with strong political opinions. People buy into political ideas simply because they’re represented by their political party and not because they’ve done the research on both sides of the issue and then reached a conclusion. However, that’s not to say that such a person hasn’t done the research on important issues–just that they come up with a conclusion, and then do research so they can argue about it. So they can be right. Ultimately, so they can exercise superiority over other people.

It is my experience that these people argue a lot more ruthlessly and with more bias (because they’re only interested in feeling superior). However, mature people tend to argue with understanding and consideration of the opposition (both of their viewpoints and their feelings). Because they’re interested in helping their cause by getting more people to believe them. They’re not worried about being right or wrong–in fact, they are less likely to be wrong, because they did honest research. Interestingly, because these people are right more often (and because they’re usually honest) they’re found to be more credible by the general population.

Unfortunately, those people are few and far between–a sign that our bass-ackwards society is going down the crapper. This is reinforced in the increase in divisions in party-politics. This is because people are more interested in being perceived as correct by others than actually being correct. That’s why hardcore conservatives perceive liberals as being a bunch of baby-killing well-fare dependents. That’s why hardcore liberals perceive conservatives as being gun-toting money whores.

Did you know that Catholics predominately vote Democrat? And of course, if you’ve been awake for the last century, you’ll know that evangelistic Christians vote primarily Republican. Did you know that the evangelistic Christian doctrine is a LOT less contradictory than the Catholic doctrine (I’m Catholic so I can say that and be somewhat politically correct)? Yet evangelistic Christians are more harshly criticized (in pretty much every way, but I’m specifically talking about doctrinally) by liberal media than Catholics? In fact, (keep in mind that I try to tune out all kinds of biased media–both liberal and conservative) I don’t think I’ve ever heard liberal media attack Catholicism unless it was some angry blogger in his basement ranting about how ALL Christianity is terrorism (actually it’s not just bloggers, there are books on the topic as well). And I’m sure there are plenty of examples of conservative ignorance as well, but I’ll let Luke tell you all about those in a different post.

I’m honestly not trying to say that political parties are bad or piss off anyone that happens to be strongly affiliated with either party (especially since ignorance isn’t exclusive to politics–it’s also especially prominent in religions and atheism/agnosticism–I just think politics is a pretty good example). I believe that political parties are acceptable if their member-base honestly believes half the crap that they say they do. Unfortunately, most people’s political passion comes from a desire to piss off the opposing party and not an urge to find solutions.

Finally, to reinforce my position, this is one of my favorite examples (it’s actually a callout of an example) of how ignorance changes a search for a solution into petty fighting (this quote seems to “shame” atheists but I’m sure there are at least a few religious people who think similarly):

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism. Biologist P.Z. Myers, for example, tells Stein that religion ought to be seen as little more than a soothing pastime, a bit like knitting. Books such as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion often read like pure taunting, as when Hitchens pettily and pointedly types God as lowercase god. Tautology as typography is not the stuff of deep thought.

(The above was a quote from Time Magazine that I found on this article at UncommonDescent.com)

Bottom-line: agenda-pushing is almost always a kind of ignorance. The opposite of ignorance is maturity and enlightenment (unfortunately, enlightenment is often hijacked when people claim that their position is the enlightened position, and then we get nowhere). Anyways, it’s a sad day when I’m lecturing on maturity.

Discuss.

Okay, so it’s 9:30ish and I’m driving my 40-ish minute commute from the town of Cedar Falls (where I go to college) to my house in Jesup (where I will continue to live for the next month). As I drive, I find myself listening to talk radio. Because I’m wicked cool. The radio show is, if I recall correctly, Focus On The Family with outspoken Christian Dr. James Dobson (I’m struggling with adjectives to imply that he is a Christian–which is pertinent to this topic–yet show respect for his opinions).

Because this is a predominately Liberal site, I’d like to establish some credibility and say that I’m politically moderate, religiously Christian, and altogether very critical of the good Doctor. In my personal opinion, he goes to lengths to make it seem that liberals and homosexuals and everyone who doesn’t think similarly to him are all collectively conspiring against Christianity (and it is my belief that this actually fuels the fires between Christian and Atheist/Agnostic and between Liberal/Conservative). But I digress.

I tuned in on the middle of the show, so I missed out on who he was interviewing; however, it was regarding the upcoming film “Expelled” so I presume it was actor and filmmaker Ben Stein (“Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?”). Oh yeah, I think it’s important to know that he’s Jewish according to Wikipedia.

Anyways, the movie “Expelled” is based on the premise that modern scientists are beginning to ignore evidence that could potentially act against Darwinism. I think his specific beef with modern academia is that it rejects the possibility of an intelligent designer, which outspoken Evolutionist Richard Dawkins even professes is a possibility (and if something is a possibility, why should it not be considered?). In an interview with CitizenLink, Stein says, “Darwinism had led to academic suppression. Anyone who questioned the orthodoxy of Darwinism was losing his job, getting harassed, losing his grants, losing his office, her office.” In other words, the scientific community is exercising the same closed-mindedness and intolerance that (or so I believe) the religious community had exercised over society and even over the scientific community for a long time.

While I probably don’t believe the same things as Stein or Dobson, I do feel that when we stop being open-minded and examining the other perspective, we become ignorant. I think that’s a trait commonly ascribed to political conservatives, so for liberal academia to prevent itself from being viewed as hypocrites (God bless FireFox’s spellcheck feature. WTF? “Spellcheck” isn’t a word?) it will need to be more accepting of alternate viewpoints (meaning state the evidence for that viewpoint as well as the evidence for opposing viewpoints) or, if the viewpoints are disprovable, illustrate that by academic/scientific means. Basically just be ethical and stop the agenda-pushing.

Although I am a college student (and my tower of priorities has doing-my-homework trailing distantly behind playing guitar and Facebooking–which should, in fact, be an accepted verb IMO), I think this article has been pretty well-researched (more-so than some of my papers and presentations) and I am pretty proud of it. If you’re willing to overlook what I believe to be some biases, I think you’ll also find the actual interview (which I still haven’t listened to in its entirety) to be somewhat interesting.

Discuss.

The difference between Scientology and other organized religions is that Scientology is actively turning people bat shit crazy while other organized religions happen to have the occasional mentally-bat-shit asshole as a member.

And now, I present you with someone talking a great deal about nothing. Sha-BAM. Tom Cruise. Crazy as bat shit.

That the grand canyon could have formed in a matter of weeks?

If you do, this museum is for you. I think it’s bullshit, but hey. You’re entitled to your own beliefs. Check out the Ars Technica review of the Creation Museum.