Religion is a feel-good enterprise these days, at least with Christianity. It more and more adopts the New Age mantra of "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" (yes, that is the title of a musical) regarding others. But when one reflects on oneself, the third part of that phrase is frequently ignored; it's not always that people fail to see what needs to be changed, but that they fail to do it at all. Can it be because God loves them, no matter what? When something is accepted as it is, it is not going to be changed, so I wonder if some people, feeling the Divine Love, slough off any feeling of the need for change. I will leave that particular strain up to you to decide, after sharing this thought: perhaps instead of loving us, should we be concerned if God likes us?
My concern is the age-old problem of using religion to justify anything and everything. Self-justification is making oneself feel good about what one thinks or does, so it is relevant to my opening statement. Though, as Aesop pointed out in his fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," a "tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny," the tyrant's position can seem more secure if he uses a widely accepted source for defense. Enter the Bible and other religious texts. I love the Bible, the greatest anthology in the world, as the magnificent collection of literature it is. A problem arises when people take it for its word (instead of its Word). These Literalists are multiplying madly currently, and these little tyrants have been finding all sorts of pretexts. Anyone with a decent knowledge of how literature works should know better than to read poetry (good poetry, anyway; as Oscar Wilde said, "all bad poetry is sincere"), exactly as it is written. The Bible, which also contains writing of a wonderful mixture or fiction and non-fiction (it is not my concern here how correct the Holy Book is on history and science, only how it is interpreted), loses much of its luster and gains much terror in the hands of the Literalists. Much of Protestantism in America is overrun with these people; Catholicism, not to be left out, is catching up. You see them when they claim that the world was created in 144 modern hours; when they interpret any and every natural disaster as a sign from God; when they justify taxation with Jesus' admonition to "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's"; and so on. A favorite recourse seems to be Leviticus, though that is as much a good read as the Communist Manifesto, and is, in terms of good literature, the weakest book in the Bible; needless to say, much of its strictures are antiquated. Though it will be more important with the Hypocrites, Literalists also pick-and-choose the chapters and verses they use, perhaps to avoid the logical dissonance that would result from their preconceived notions meeting with a text that didn't support them. Now, their positions might be more justified if the words they take as exact fact were the words first written. But they attempt to literalize translations from languages quite different from our own. There is always something lost in translation, particularly with poetry, whose word choice is very exact. I think that is enough that needs to be said on that matter. In any case, my problem with Literalists is that I read the Bible largely as metaphor, with its central figure, God, being the greatest of all metaphors, since He is Everything; and you can't read a metaphor literally.
A frequent crossover with these people are the Hypocrites, who are of a much larger breed. The capital 'H' is significant, because these people don't just say one thing and do another; rather, they are one thing, and yet really are another. Many Christian-claiming people really are nothing of the sort (someone said that if Christ came back today, he wouldn't be a Christian; Nietzsche said that there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross). You cannot serve both God and Mammon, yet many try. Republicans are on the gallop lately, savoring the chance to be President, and most claim to be Christians. Yet, do their views side with the Prince of Peace? You cannot both take up the Cross of Christ and take up offensive war. "Just War Theory," even in its looser interpretations, still does not allow for the blood-lust most of the Republican candidates display (to be fair, this is also rampant among Democrats). And isn't there a disconnect between being Pro-Life with fetuses but not with those already born? This is probably the biggest instance, but there are others. For example, Christian redistributionists justify their actions using the Bible's declarations to help the poor; what they overlook is the more important fact of the New Testament's implications for free will, that charity is something to be encouraged, not enforced, and that it becomes void when not done willingly. When Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to get into heaven, he was not damning the wealthy because of their wealth; if that were so, then why does God make so many prosperous (as a friend pointed out)? Rather, it is the lack of will to relinquish material positions to follow Christ prevalent among most people that is the problem (or, to make it less religious, the need for renunciation in order to change). There is a deep rankness among people who truly believe they are Christians and yet overtly discard Christ's most important lessons, and it must be by Doublethink.
The New Agists, subsuming Literalists and Hypocrites, are helping to bring back a Theocratic Age by instituting theocracy itself; in other words, deeply politicizing religion, and making their God the President. Christ, who denied Satan's gift of the nations because they are of this world and Christ is of the Kingdom of God, is becoming very worldly. How else do you explain the American flag being flown above the Christian flag at a church, or that there is even a Christian flag at all? How else do you explain Christ being used to exonerate agents of offensive war, from soldiers to politicians? How else do you explain using a figure who freely died for others to endorse forced redistribution? How else do you explain several Republicans claiming they are on a mission from God, that they were called, as though they were the Blues Brothers? God was very clear himself about what he thought of earthly kings (1 Samuel 8:7-18). No, for me Christ is renunciation, who gave to the world what was the world's, his human aspects, so that he could be like his Father God. His love is not a justification for not changing that which can and should be changed (the New Agists, who think "you are beautiful, no matter what they say" or that you are perfect, even though perfection is a finality impossible for humans, who must change to love as Kiekegaard said); his parables and the prophecies are not meant to be understood at word, but are meant for rumination to discover who you are (the point of all literature), and therefore what needs to be changed; and his wisdom cannot be both claimed and ignored, and the hypocrisy is worst when used for political expediency. Religion has always been (unfortunately) tied to the State, but there seems to be something arising that is more than marriage, and I think it is that as the two meld more and more, the newest religion we'll see is Politicism, where people will worship at temples like the White House. This process is already well underway, as America elected a President running on the rather non-governmental concerns of Hope and Confidence ("Yes We Can"), and who is (or was) spoken of with a reverence unbecoming of a politician.
Therefore, the next segment will discuss the emerging religion of Politicism, and it's grave dangers for man.
