Tag Archives: Religion

Politics and the Prince of Peace

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According to a Gallup poll from last year, 62% of very religious white Americans are Republicans, while 27% are Democrats. In Gallup’s words: “A white American’s degree of religiousness … is a strong predictor of that person’s political orientation”.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/150443/Religious-Whites-Identify-GOP.aspx

Yet it isn’t obvious why this is the case. It certainly isn’t obvious that Jesus’s teachings are more consistent with right-wing politics than left-wing politics (and certainly not by a margin of more than 2 to 1).

No doubt there are many reasons why this state of affairs has come to pass here in America. While doing some casual reading on the internet, however, I came upon an article called “Would Jesus Vote Republican?” on a site called RaptureReady.com. Perhaps this article isn’t representative, but the author strongly recommends voting for Republicans, even though they are the lesser of two evils:

“The Republican Party brings to the legislative table in America a much safer, more sound course of governing, in our view. The GOP, for the most part, opposes abortion, legitimizing homosexuality as equal to heterosexual relationships, and huge programs that create and perpetuate destructive, mammoth social programs…. That party is, by and large, in favor of a strong national defense, national sovereignty, and keeping God’s name at the heart of our national character”.

http://www.raptureready.com/republican.html

One thing we might all agree on concerning the paragraph above: it doesn’t have a lot to do with Jesus.

A Revelation

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Anyone who has been exposed to the Book of Revelation or had trouble sleeping after watching The Omen should read Revelations, a recent book by Princeton professor of religion Elaine Pagels.

According to Professor Pagels, the Book of Revelation was written around 90 C.E. by John of Patmos, an itinerant preacher and follower of Jesus. He wrote the book as a piece of anti-Roman propaganda, in response to the fact that Rome had colonized Judea and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. The Romans are the villains in the Book of Revelation. The number 666 is probably a numerological translation of the full Latin name of the emperor Nero.

The Book of Revelation became an official part of the Bible when the New Testament was codified in 325 C.E. Professor Pagels argues that it was included for political reasons. It was useful to the men who were organizing the Catholic Church to have a story that could be used against their political enemies, i.e., the Christians that church leaders like Irenaeus and Athanasius called “heretics”. The early leaders of the church were a quarrelsome, unprincipled bunch who did whatever was necessary to suppress opposing views. They claimed that some of their fellow Christians were the evil enemies of God described in a story written 200 years earlier about the Romans. But now the Romans weren’t the bad guy anymore. 

This is a depressing but necessary book. Generations of innocent people have been scared and even scarred by a horror story that purports to describe a coming apocalypse, albeit one with a happy ending for a few true believers (us, not them). To borrow from Nietzsche: “What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up”.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

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On monotheism:

“I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — good people, yes, but any religion based on a single… well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system that has worked pretty well for twenty-five hundred years. So you see I am ecumenical in my dislike for the Book. But like it or not, the Book is there; and because of it people die; and the world is in danger.”  (1988)

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose.”  (1992)

On himself:

“I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”  (1956)

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”  (1992)

Sex and Christianity

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I’ve often wondered when and how the men in charge of Christianity decided that sex, especially outside of marriage, is shameful.

In an article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Brown (a respected professor of history at Princeton) implies that Ambrose of Milan (aka St. Ambrose) and John Chrysostom of Antioch and Constantinople were largely responsible (or irresponsible, depending on your point of view). Both men were bishops in the 4th century. According to Brown:

In their hands, long-established codes of living in this world (propounded by philosophers since classical times) were transformed … (into) divinely sanctioned precepts with which to achieve entrance to the other world….

It was not enough that precepts of courage, continence and self-denial should help to steer men and women through the dangers and temptations of this life alone. These virtues, if practiced with heroic abandon, were held to lead directly to heaven.

The ascetic or philosophical life, in which the mind or soul was elevated above the body, had often been recommended as the best or most satisfying way of life by ancient philosophers. Eventually, this way of life became not just the most prudent one, but the most religiously acceptable one. Sex became officially dirty.

No doubt the story is complex. One of the books that tells the story and which is discussed in Professor Brown’s article is Ambrose and John Chrysostom: Clerics between Desert and Empire by J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz. Only $100.96 on Amazon (or $88 if you lean toward the electronic).