Ruminating on Relgion: A Personal Note
What can be done now to defend ourselves and our country against the fast moving fascism fueled by the beliefs of the religious right and the wealth of the oilgarchs?
Having unconditionally recommended that you, dear reader watch and listen to Right Reverend Budde’s sermon, I feel I should say something about my ‘take’ on the subject of the Christian Religion. To begin with it should be noted that there are many flavors: some 200 denominations in the U.S. and 45,000 world wide. The most important thing to know about all religions, including Christianity is that you can find justification for just about anything you care to justify in their sacred texts, including genocide, male superiority, racism, slavery….you name it.
My personal experience with this fact occurred When I applied for Conciencious Objector status because I did not want to be a part of a war where, as then Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey put it, General Giap was to Vietnam what George Washington had been to the United States. Add to that that villages were being destroyed in order to save them and “we” were bombing anything that moved. And there was a massacre at Mi Lai.
There were two reasons my Draft Board, located in Falls Church Virginia turned down my CO status: (1) my objections to fighting the Vietnamese were not based on an objection to all war(s) and (2) not based on “religious training and belief.” I believed there were just wars, such as the war against Nazi Germany and, after I was told, in a whinny southern accent that “You college keeds think you knows it all”, I said that I hoped I would have had the courage to fight in WWII. Then, after another red faced scowling man said “Whah don’t you cut that hair boy/“ and asked if I was an atheist, I explained that I was agnostic and that it wasn’t God telling me the war was wrong. The war was wrong. My country was wrong. It did not help that I mentioned the Socratic question: Is an act wrong because the gods say it’s wrong or do the god’s say it’s wrong because it is wrong?, followed up by references to Spinoza and Tesla which had shaped by belief that God is Nature and were we only to believe that we would not be trashing it. I had began the interview sincere and polite. I left angry and afraid.
The part of the Selective Service Act that required that one’s objections to war be based on religious training and belief was later struck down by the Supreme Court on the grounds that it essentially violated the separation of church and state – that a Conscientious Objection need not be based on the moral directives of a supreme being, but could also be based on a “sincere and meaningful belief which occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those”..
These memories have surfaced these last few days because there is talk of deporting thousands, prosecuting women who have abortions, retaking the Panama Canal and possibly stealing Greenland and annexing Canada. Sure, some ot those ideas and others are mostly bravado, they nevertheless signal a belligerent, macho, racist ’official” American approach to the world. And supporting this approach are the Religious Fundamentalists.
One of the main reasons the Conservative Religious Right has become so powerful is that it has supported and cultivated a closeness to the ideologies and policies promoted by Right Wing Think Tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute. These well funded conservative institutions, aided by Supreme Court Rulings that money is speech and corporations are people, have evolved into powerful political propaganda centers.
What is most worrisome is that just as the right stole a march on the left by funding “Think Tanks”, they are now focusing on the thinking of American youth, attacking secular public schools and promoting the use of state and federal tax dollars to support religious schools. While it is true that the First Amendment to the Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, it is also true that the Constitution does not establish a right to public education, it has been interpreted until recently as insisting on a separation of church and state.
To be continued…