Now Playing: Bill Maher Segment with Dan Savage
Topic: God and Politics
Most Americans who sustain any sort of personal spirituality are not as intense in their opposition to Chrisitan politics and beliefs as Bill Maher. However, the objections and criticism people like Maher make are not the rare exceptions to the rule, but are in fact the common sense conclusions that most people arrive at - especially if the religion of their childhood did not include total immersion in the imaginary reality of fundamentalist literal thinking.
D.L. Hughley isn't off the mark when he remarks that many American Christians behave as if they believed that Jesus was born in Kansas.
At one point, Dan Savage is talking about the selective reading and selective usage of Biblical verses to justify attitudes. He describes the Bible as a book of ancient tribal prejudices.
The single most powerful prejudice - and it is the entire basis of the Christian internal mental construct - is that God and God's kingdom is literally a kingdom run by a tribal chieftain.
If not a tribal chieftain, then a monarch patterned after the historical monarchs who by virture of conquest rendered tribal chieftains subservient and therefore inferior to monarchy.
Contemporary Christianity sustains - in that part of our imagination that effectively imprints reality on the mind - an image of God as a Pharoah or an
That's a version of God the majority of Christianity - consciously or unconsciously - buys into. It's a kingdom ruled by divine edict, strictly written and rigidly enforced law. It's a kingdom modern preachers and Christian lobbyists have found to be quite the fountain of profit.
Getting away from that notion was what Jesus was doing. But nowadays Jesus seems to have been conscripted by biblical literalists and end-times preachers into this ancient false reality upon which modern judgemental prejudice is founded.
It is a false reality.
It's the reality of child-like or adolescent minds in contemporary adult Christian bodies pretending that unproven and never-established absolute innerancies are what God is all about;
... that absolutes are the only legitimate function of reglion.
We need more Christians to stay home on Sundays until their spiritual adolescence matures and their wallets are no longer the bookmarks in the scriptures they ponder.
We need fewer Christian churches that have no different function on Sundays than that of stadiums, arenas and auditoriums where entertainment and refreshments are both for sale in generous mind-altering abundance.
We need far fewer preachers telling the gullible that wealth and prosperity is the natural and ultimate validation of personal piety.
We need religious lobbyists to encourage goodness and ethics which are legitimate and natural impulses
... and to stop urging some sort of institutional morality that takes no prisoners.
We need far fewer preachers telling God what to do and the people how to behave.
