Actually Greg, I think I’ll follow this rhizome for today:
“I think it would be kind of hard not to take Christianity serious since it lies at the roots of and is all over our present culture. Not to understand it (or take it seriously (would be a serious gap in any attempt to understand the human condition“,said I.
“Or at the very least the Western tradition. Yet it is shocking to me how many do actually dismiss it or account for it as simply expressing the core of ‘what is wrong’ with the West. But it ain’t that simple!
In fact that obscene desire for simplicity not only accounts for the present “politics as circus” we see in our Republican primary, but in the signal misunderstandings of Liberal politics,” said Greg.
“While I do admire people like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkin’s, I agree their dismissal of Christianity over-simplifies in ways that are no better than the oversimplifications of the right.”
It’s as if what the left is reacting to, in a knee-jerk kind of way, is the knee-jerk interpretations of the right. It fails to understand that what the right is doing with Christianity has less to do with Christianity and more with a rationalization of personal interest. In other words, both the left and the right are basically caught in a conflict based on misinterpretation.
For instance, the left will point to quotes in the bible that explicitly deride homosexuality as a sin as concerns gay marriage. But this, to me, suggests a kind of hypocrisy since it is the left that delegates the bible to literature –which I personally believe is the right way to see it. And it assumes that the only reason that rightwing Christians are so resistant to gay marriage is because of these passages. Hence: their wholesale rejection of Christianity.
But we all know this is nonsense. What the rightwing rejection of gay marriage comes down to is a personal aversion to homosexuality (the sense that it is just weird (and the quotes from the bible are little more than rationalization for what they would have felt without those quotes. And the left assuming that bible is just literature should have pointed them to this dynamic. For instance, should I, having read Crime and Punishment, kill someone just to see what the experience was like, be able to blame it on having read that book? And why wouldn’t we give the same consideration to Christianity?
Ideologies do nothing; people, on the other hand, do.
And we can see the same dynamic at work in a point made in Trey Parkers and Matt Stones series Little Bush in which Bush Sr. explains to Little Bush that it is our God given right to exploit and use up our natural resources until Jesus comes and takes us up in the Rapture. And the left, having determined the bible to be literature, should be able to see this as a one-sided and self serving interpretation of the bible (not some inherent quality of Christianity (as having neglected the part that said we are keepers of the earth. And we can see this understanding at work in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
The problem for the atheist left is that we run into a contradiction when we refer to the bible as literature then act like that piece of literature has any kind of absolute hold on the Christian –that is anymore than any other work of literature might have. Doing so, we fail to distinguish between what Christians do and the inherent nature of Christianity.
And in doing so, we fail to recognize what may be the very element we will need to deal with our present circumstance. We, right now, are (via global Capitalism and the climate change it is creating (facing the new Rome: the Beast if there ever could be one. And who would be better equipped to save us but some Christ-like figure? Someone who truly understood the revolutionary nature of Christ?
?: how does the secular left hate religion and claim privilege over the hateful aspects of religion, especially when our biggest worry should be the secular right: the libertarians…