Proving God by Consensus: My Problem with the Religious Right

A few decades ago I was awakened at seven o’clock one Sunday morning by the persistent droning of my downstairs door buzzer. I was living then in a back apartment on the top floor of an East Village walk-up that was without an intercom or the capacity to buzz visitors inside. This circumstance made it necessary for me to descend five flights of stairs to personally open the frosted-glass front door and to see who it was.

In this instance it was two Jehovah’s Witnesses.

At the time I bore no animus toward people who presented themselves as fervently religious. Though I deemed them delusional, I respected both their right to their delusion and their need of it. The proselytizers I encountered were more likely to draw pity from me than to provoke my ire.

So if I had good reason to be put out by the inconvenience they’d caused me, an inconvenience compounded by the ungodly hour they’d picked to pay a call, my reaction to the elderly and finely attired black couple with soft Georgia accents who greeted me—he with a bible in one hand and a straw hat in the other; she wearing a hat bedecked with white and yellow flowers—wasn’t in the least bit hostile. In fact, while I made it clear that I had no use for the message they were delivering, I was as courteous as I could be. I didn’t want to tamper with their fantasy or hurt their feelings and when I closed the door on them it was very gently.

But that was a while back, before religion assumed the weight and influence that it has in our cultural and political affairs and before I understood just where the so-called “True Believers” are coming from.

We tend to allow that, unhinged as we may judge them to be, evangelicals, in their efforts to make converts or to bring “more religion” into the culture, are doing the work of a God they feel with genuine confidence to be real. Some of us might even imagine that they care about our salvation. But this isn’t what’s happening. Dealing with their fear of death, a fear exacerbated by 9/11 and the destruction of the myth of American invincibility, and wanting desperately for a God and the potential for eternal life implicit in the concept of God to exist, the real mission of these people isn’t to share a revelation but to validate beliefs they’re not sure of by securing the agreement of others. To prove the existence of God to themselves by achieving a universal consensus on the matter (the only way to achieve something like certainty about anything) is the true aspiration of the religious right.

And I mightily resent the manifold ways in which their ambition to, for starters, make a formal theocracy of America—a more than adequate means of certifying their beliefs—is already poisoning the lives of the rest of us.

I’m speaking, of course, of their interference with a woman’s freedom to end a pregnancy and of homosexuals ability to marry one another. I’m also talking about the brakes they managed to apply to government sponsored stem-cell research and the role they played in obliging us to endure a George W. Bush for a second term (let alone what his presidency has left in its wake) because he professed to share their faith in Jesus Christ. And I’m referring as well to what turned out to be a politically pivotal quantity of Tea Party candidates that they were instrumental in electing to Congress.

And, again, none of this has been, at bottom, to the purpose of spreading a vision (which could maybe have claimed some level of legitimacy), but rather to, in their own minds, ratify by numbers, law or custom, the presence of a deity.

Since there remains a sufficient population of heathens to challenge their beliefs and to keep their uncertainty alive, reaching their unspoken goal will only become more urgent for the evangelicals. They will get louder and more insistent. And their successes will be more pernicious. Is a President Rick Perry completely out of the question?

I should say that having a few issues of my own with the prospect of death, and quite capable myself of twisting and distorting reality in order to live in the world with a semblance of equilibrium, I can, even under the present conditions, experience some empathy for the Christian right’s agenda. (And I can also appreciate the necessity and durability of religion itself. I’m always taken aback when people whose minds I admire predict that human beings will one day “outgrow” the need for religion, as if it were merely a stage in our evolution. Like the biologists who are looking for a religion gene, they miss the point. For as long as death is a precondition of life, a need for some kind of invented deity, with a plan for mankind—and a collection of rules and practices which, if scrupulously followed, offer the promise of an afterlife—is going to prevail for a large percentage of humanity.)

But while I’m not insensitive to the evangelicals’ cause that doesn’t make its increasing encroachment on the lives of the secular any more acceptable to me. I repeat: Is a President Rick Perry out of the question? No. If there was once a time when we could indulge the folks of the Christian right at no substantial cost to ourselves, that’s not the case any longer. Their quest to conscript us into their immortality project has gotten too much out of hand and leaves no room for such generosity. At this point there’s little choice but to do battle with them; to fight their actions at every turn. The consequences for those of us who live for this life rather than the next one have become too dire to let them slide.

 

I think you may be onto something. This is an intriguing perspective.

 

There's a real cynicism in the kind of Christianity they follow. I think a lot of them get an ego boost in the idea that people who don't have the same exact world views as they do will be burning in hell forever. If they really had the compassion that Christ had, they wouldn't really take joy in that notion. I think if Jesus was as cynical as they are, he wouldn't have even bothered to save humanity and reform human corruption.

 

In my neck of the woods, the Christian cult(ture) is a means of employment and advancement on the community ladder. "Prosperity" is traded within the church and through church members and rarely outside. The larger the church, the more money it takes in therefore more power.
Beware when the church slips into the judicial system and the city government as it had here. While other communities grew over the years, my area stagnated. Jobs are few and crime is high. Education system floundered and the labor pool became ignorant and limited. It appears the wealth went to a select few while opportunity went to their children.

I will never give again to those ringing bells at department store doors or even talk to to well dressed people knocking on my door. In my opinion they destroyed many peoples lives while advancing their own.

Reminds me of an article I once read entitled, "Who's Dream Is It Anyway", in reference to the evangelicals in control of all that tax free wealth and the people that gave it to them willingly. I'm disgusted.

 

Dude that is fucked up. Fascist Theocracy is creeping in everywhere(shudder)

....another example I'm told is Colorado Springs

 

It's been that way in small Southern towns for generations. Now it's creeping into some of the larger ones.

I could give you the name of a Southern city that is not small where they open every Chamber of Commerce meeting with christian prayer, and members are randomly selected to do this in front of the group. The tiny minority of Jewish members, known by name to the chairman, are exempted from this expectation. Everyone else is assumed to be not only christian, but conservative. Those who are in leadership positions are expected to show receipts proving that they have made recent cash contributions to the Republican Party.

:leaving:

It has become the western point of the Bible Belt, which is really more of a narrow triangle than a belt. By the time it reaches the Atlantic Ocean, it has spread out to reach all the way from the middle of Virginia to the northern edge of Florida. Atlanta is the most significant exception to the pattern.

I don't count the Mormons, who keep to themselves and do their own thing. I've never known them to interact with other christian groups.

 

• God is god (wether you believe or not; christian or other)
• Religion is made by man; it has nothing to do with any hypothetical or real god.
• Religion and its thesis obscure in their writing and thus are open to interpretation and therefore distortion.
• This turns religion into something very similar to politics.
• Religion as seen, understood, practized by many is (and always has been) completely and utterly discriminating and intolerant.
• Wars have been fought - and continue to be fought over religious differences.
• People have been ostracized, tortured, maimed and killed in the name of religion.


Religion (at least in my humble opinion) is telling us not much more than this: How we should behave in our everyday life. If I can "be a good person" without being threatened with hell and rewarded with an afterlife what does that say about religion?

 

Hah! I hadn't been keeping up on this but I do remember the Air-force Academy in Colorado Springs coming under pressure for evangelizin' heavily on cadets and discriminatin' against other religions...
Turns out that pressure came basically from this cat Mikey Weinstein, an Academy Graduate ...

http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=36782
( Despite the source and the authors conclusion, this is actually a great article,)


From the LA times...http://articles.latimes.com/2011/nov/26/nation/la-na-air-force-pagans-20111127

Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans

Officials say an $80,000 Stonehenge-like worship center underscores a commitment to embrace all religions



November 26, 2011|By Jenny Deam, Los Angeles Times

ZW
(P.S as an Atheist, this kind of platitude leaves me a little unsatisfied... to put it mildly):coffee:

 

I once had a boss whose interpretation of religious freedom was that you can follow any religion you want, as long as you pick one and give it your best shot. It never crossed her mind that freedom of religion includes freedom from religion. She assumed that everyone would become a toxic person if they didn't believe that a supernatural being was telling us to behave.
:toetap05:

I have learned some useful things about life from various religions, but I believe that the teachings come from accumulated human wisdom, not divine inspiration or revelation. That didn't cut it with the boss. She might have gotten rid of me if I had not played the sexual preference card. I officially listed myself with HR as bisexual, and she was afraid of a lawsuit if she ran me off, since I was doing my job well.

But...getting back to the OP, I think it makes perfect sense that people need to do various things to assure themselves that their inherited beliefs are true, since there is no empirical evidence to support this. Nobody else is offering them life after death, so they have strong motivation to convince themselves of a highly unlikely belief system.

I find Zen particularly useful in my efforts to accept the world as it is, including the probable fact that this life is all that there is for me.