Showing posts with label liberal Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liberal Christianity. Show all posts

The end of an experiment




If I knew a Christian who lived alone in a cave for forty years, I wouldn’t imagine him to have discovered verifiable proof of God, but I would consider it possible that his years of solitary reflection had given him insights from which I might profit. It was with a similar hope that I started attending a Bible study at an Episcopal church a few months ago. I didn’t believe the liberal claim that, although the Bible lacks literal truth, it contains unique metaphorical wisdom, but I was open to the possibility that the mature, intelligent, and educated people that make up the bulk of Episcopalianism had transcended the Bible and, working as something akin to a network of rebels within the Christian community, had gained insights that I would find useful. I also hoped that they would likewise be open to learning from me. I let them know that I was an atheist, but I neither talked about my beliefs, nor did I ask probing questions or issue challenges about theirs because I wanted to present myself in as non-threatening a manner as possible.


Three months later, I am as ignorant as when I started, and have all but given up hope that their religion has provided them with the first unique insight. The thing that I find most interesting—and exasperating—about liberal Christianity is that a liberal Christian might define Jesus as God, man, God-man, or even as entirely fictional, but he or she absolutely must hold something about Jesus, or what Jesus represents, in high esteem. Just as the Boy Scouts and Freemasons require reverence for a completely unidentified God, and AA requires reverence for a completely unidentified Higher Power, so do liberal churches require reverence for a completely unidentified Jesus. In every case, it’s not reverence for an agreed upon entity or belief that is demanded but reverence for a particular word(s), as if that alone had the power to set one apart from less enlightened mortals.

Idolatry (n) the giving of undue honor and regard to created forms.

Although I rarely heard any of my classmates say much about what they did believe, I did hear most of them imply that they didn’t believe most of what is in the creeds. I was also excited from time to time to hear a classmate express puzzlement or consternation about a Bible verse or a church teaching, but such things were never addressed by the group. For example, during the last class I attended, someone said she was finding it difficult to combine the concept of God as an entity with the concept of God as love. After a brief and (I thought) awkward silence, someone changed the subject. After observing a few such instances, I concluded that there was tacit agreement to keep the discussion at a shallow level.


In their apparent determination to ignore doubt or anything that might result in doubt, liberals and literalists are alike, but they differ in that literalists consider their faith to be inseparable from specific facts about God, whereas liberals appear to regard vagueness as what they like to call a higher form of spirituality. In practice, this means that literalistic religion is centered on content, and liberal religion on process. As to how process can exist apart from content, I—like the woman in the class—have no idea, and I doubt that liberals do either. They define God as love, virtue, evolution, a feeling of oneness, awakening awareness, the ground of being, etc. although such terms are figures of speech rather than definitions. To illustrate, if I say that dogs are quadrupeds, I have said something identifiable and verifiable about dogs, but if I say that God is the ground of being, I have simply used a metaphor to express my belief—or at least my hope—that God is providing me with the kind of support that solid earth gives a building or the kind of nurturance that garden soil gives a marigold.

In a 12/17/12 Newsweek article entitled “The Myths of Jesus,” Bart D. Ehrman trashed the historical accuracy of the gospels, after which he took Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith across the chasm of logic by ending his article with a non sequitur:

“…for those with a broader vision…the story of the Christ-child and his appearance in the world can be founded not on what really did happen, but on what really does happen in the lives of those who believe that stories such as these can convey a greater truth.”

I wondered what he meant by “stories such as these” (there being other God-men who were born of virgins), and I also wondered what he meant by “a greater truth.” As one who lacks his “broader vision,” I had hoped in vain that, having gone to pains to attack the accuracy of the gospels, he might at least give some clue as to what he found good in them, but like other liberal writers, he proved to be a tease. Islam has its Sharia; Buddhism its eightfold path; charismatic Christianity its plan of salvation; and liberal Christianity its greater truth, but the last group differs from the rest in that they hold their greater truth closer to their chests than a poker player’s cards. What they offer instead are bromidic truths about love and justice, truths that rarely coincide with the behavior of the vengeful, intolerant, impatient, and ego-driven deity of the Bible, a deity who supports slavery, sexism, racism, blood sacrifice, homophobia, nationalism, genocide, rape, and everlasting torture. How do liberals handle such challenges to the deity of their holy book? They either interpret troublesome passages metaphorically or deny that God inspired them. They also deny that Jesus said much of what was attributed to him. They then take whatever is left and interpret it as it pleases each of them, the only requirement being that everyone think of Jesus as somehow special.

On the back of the handout for the communion service I attended were the words “...coming together...to struggle with our faith.” This and other things I read and observed led me to think of liberal Christians, not as the originators of bold new ideas, but as the last gasp of an emasculated Protestantism that has been struggling for relevance since the time of Darwin. Its few remaining adherents are now huddled behind the walls of their churches, doing their best to bolster one another up so that they might retain some semblance of a support structure that the rest of Christianity has long since abandoned. I envision them as children (sophisticated children to be sure) whose growing knowledge of how the world works has caused them to lose faith in Santa Claus. Being grieved by the prospect of Christmas without Santa, they doggedly pretend he’s real, only without the part about the sleigh, elves, reindeer, chimneys, presents, red suit, rosy cheeks, white beard, North Pole workshop, and jolly “Ho! Ho! Ho!” They replace such “obvious myths” with an unsubstantiated “higher awareness” of what the myths point to: miraculous powers, the existence of an omniscient being, the material rewards of being good, etc., yet they are left, as it were, with a superstructure without a substructure. Liberal Christianity doesn’t offer new beliefs, but a sorting through of old beliefs with the result that most have been discarded. 

I wrote a few posts back of an Episcopal priest who showed respect for my atheism by calling it “a valid spiritual path,” and I wondered in that post if I would ever be able to show respect for her path. What I’ve found is that while I very much respect her—and a few other Christians—as people of goodwill, to respect their religious path, I would have to think it was based upon truth, or at least that they were wiser or more insightful because of it, but I see no reason to believe that either is true. 

Three ways of thinking about God


First Version (I speak from experience)

Heaven is somewhere up above. God and Jesus have thrones, and Jesus’ throne is to the right of God’s throne. Heavenly beings stand before these thrones 24 hours a day for all eternity singing praises to God and Jesus. God and Jesus demand that we praise them, but it only counts if we want to do it. Here’s a list of what you need to do to get into heaven: praise God and Jesus everyday; do good works; get baptized by immersion (today if possible); go to a Church of Christ every Sunday; ask God to forgive you your sins throughout the day so you won’t die with any of them unforgiven. If you want to go to hell, here’s how you can do that. Die while masturbating; play musical instruments in church; become a liberal; get sprinkled rather than immersed; use the wrong number of glasses during communion; let women talk in church (including announcements and Sunday school); get divorced and remarry.

Hell is somewhere below, maybe at the middle of the earth. It’s like a big lake, only instead of being blue with water, it’s red with fire, and people writhe in this fire forever and ever, and during every second of that time, the fire is hurting them a trillion times worse than anything on earth ever hurt anyone. If you’re in heaven, you will be a trillion times happier than anyone on earth ever was, and you can even look down and see the people in hell, and they can look up and see you. Almost everyone you ever knew will be in hell, but heaven will be so wonderful that even the sight of your loved ones writhing in agony won’t diminish your joy.

Second Version (I use my own words to report what I have read and heard)

God is of another dimension, and can’t be captured within the language of this dimension, but Jesus demonstrated what our own lives could be like if we lived in constant communion with God. God can be sensed in the silence between words well spoken, or glimpsed through stories, many of which were first told around Bronze Age campfires. God sometimes shines on us through figures of speech that can only hint at his reality. When we feel love, we feel Gods presence. When we speak truth with wisdom, we give expression to the faintest whisper of God’s voice. When we experience wonder, we inhale the barest fragrance of God’s intelligence. 

God is pure joy. God is pure love. God is everything good rolled into a three-letter word. God is the ground of our being. God is that for which even atheists hunger but have no name. Within God we exist, yet God need not be conceived as all-wise, or all-powerful, or even as a conscious entity. God can simply be defined as the totality of the good that exists within every one of us, or even as the evolutionary potential of our species. We look for God in flowers; we hear God in music; we see God’s eyes looking back at us through the eyes of other people. We all came from God, and we will all return to God. Hell only exists on earth. Heaven is an awakening to universal oneness.

Third version (Again, I speak from experience)

Religion is all made up. Most people know down deep that this is true, which is why they only revere people who heard God’s voice in ancient times, while admitting that modern-day people who hear God are insane. Without God, there would be no holy wars; no genital mutilations; no prosperity gospel; no anti-science bias in education; no tax-exempt churches; no denial of global warming; no blaming sin for hurricanes and school shootings; and no soccer stadiums filled with 10,000 men who have come to watch another man decapitate a woman.

Liberal believers aren’t as bad as other believers because their God only exists as a mile-high stack of harmless metaphors. Unfortunately, their rejection of evidence and reason in matters of faith” still puts them on the side of ignorance and superstition. When the religious right persecutes atheists for trying to keep America from becoming a theocracy, religious liberals support the persecutors by remaining silent. Fortunately, 20% of Americans no longer have any religious affiliation, and their number is growing rapidly. Most of these people still believe in what they call something, but at least they’re not trying to make their beliefs into laws

John Spong (pictured) is a liberal Christian whose writings I have read. His photo is by Scott Griessel. 

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition




Martin Luther King Jr’s claim to have “seen the Promised Land” was an ironic reference for a black pacifist given that the original Promised Land was inhabited by presumably lesser peoples that the Israelites set about enslaving or exterminating—by God’s command no less. Nearly three millennia later, we newly arrived Americans used the Biblical account to justify our own partial extermination of Native Americans and our enslavement of Africans. We called our belief that we, as white American Protestants, had replaced the Jews as God’s chosen, Manifest Destiny, and it allowed us to see others as either obstacles to our progress or tools for our use.


I once took a Sunday School class in which we studied these accounts in which God ordered the Jews to attack cities and kill every person and every animal (except for the young female virgins whom they sometimes got to keep for the victory party). It was a liberal church, and the liberal response to anything vicious, contradictory, or simply stupid about the Bible is: Oh, THAT part isn’t God’s word because it makes God look bad, but THIS part, the warm and fuzzy part about how Jesus loves us, and we’re all going to heaven (all we Christians that is), THAT’S most definitely God’s word. Not so for one old man, who sat there looking for all the world like Santa Claus in a three-piece suit, for he said, “I can only conclude that all those people and animals that God ordered to be killed must have somehow deserved it.”

The stores are already selling Christmas decorations in preparation for the one season of the year during which America talks about “Peace on Earth,” and I will admit that it’s good to have a respite from what the baby Jesus grew up to represent (“I came not to bring peace but a sword”). Jesus’ position on violence certainly reflects America’s approach to problem solving, and we take great pride in the fact that we’re the most Christian nation on earth, which I’m sure we are inasmuch as we are willing to forego necessities in order to buy Hellfire Missiles (“…he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”). Our love for Jesus is so great that we even paid him homage when we named our favorite weapon, which we quite naturally use to kill those who don’t love him the way we do. Of course, some of them deserve it, I’m sure, but I can’t help but think that we deserve it too. After all, the biggest difference between us is that they kill for one god and we kill for another. Maybe whoever is left alive might finally have Peace on Earth.