BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: What is a Secular Christianist?

GRENDEL’S AZTEC BAPTIST CATECHISM:

What is a Secular Christianist?


A Secular Christianist is not a Christian per se, but a particular kind of Christian; a political Christian rather than a spiritual Christian. Not all Secular Christianists are what my Grandma would have called good Christian folk, if you judge them by their public behavior. I don’t even want to think about their private lives. But the Gospel and my Granny have told me that I have no call to judge. They certainly stridently identify themselves as “true” Christians, and they prefer to be in the judgement seat, not before it.

Secular Christianists are people who cross the line drawn by the First Amendment, because they think have a direct line to God Almighty, and seek to impose God—their idea of God, their “bible-based” morals, their particular version—and their peculiar interpretation of—the Word of God, on our designedly secular government, and our religiously—spiritually—diverse society.

Secular Christianists would like to teach the children of our country that United States of America is a Christian Nation, established from the very beginning on Christian principles by the Founding Fathers. The small t truth about our founding fathers and our nation is a whole lot more complicated than that, but Christianists don’t like complications. Their political principle—if not their motto—is “Keep it simple, for stupid”—for the credulous, the gullible, and the self-deluded.

White, black. Good, evil. Right, wrong. With us, against us. Secular Christianists like to feel that they are surrounded by enemies, and they want us, their fellow citizens to feel that way, too. I think it can be fairly and balancedly said that Secular Christianism as movement, with an assist from Al Qaeda, has succeeded in achieving that goal.

Secular Christianists believe in unity through fear and demonization of the other. They believe in terrorizing wayward souls into the arms of Jesus. Christianists believe in soul searching, but not their souls; they want to search your soul, your hard drive, your bedroom. Many of them are what I call Soul Arsonists, who work on the principle of destroying souls in order to save them. Secular Christianists find solace as well as salvation in the thrill of hellfire and the comfort of myriad enemies hugging them close.

Do you want to live in fear? They do.

I'LL SHOW YOU MY REALITY

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW SERMONETTE:
I’LL SHOW MY REALITY IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS
OR REALITY SHOWS VS. THE GROUND OF BEING

Dr. Omed has been venting his spleen in other blogger’s comment boxes. Dick Jones (Patteran Pages) and Sam Mills (feral) have suffered my remarks very kindly, and Sam provides His Loveliness a second home when my PC or my software is fubared. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my numerous sins of commission and omission.

Here is Dick’s post for October 4th:

“All art is abstract. Only reality isn’t because it isn’t art”. Emil Nolde

DISCUSS.

This quote has netted 23 comments last time I checked. One of my comments was:

"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony."* "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the "Ownership" class.

Like I said. Vent. Spleen. I would slightly revise that last line to read:

…support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the “Ownership society.”

“Reality” is one of those troublesome words, almost as troublesome as the word “love” (We’ll be getting to that). People tend to assume they know what the really real reality is, just as they think or rather feel they know what love is. People have no idea. I don’t mean that they have no idea what reality or love is; I mean they have no idea. Reality is whatever they see in front of them; whatever they choose to see. A lot of people have a TV or computer screen in front of them. Their reality, your reality, my reality, are all a combination of our perceptions and our creative apperception. The latter is the senior partner. We all have our little kingdoms of beholding. In our individual dominions our writ is absolute, but for the weather of the world, and the fruitful operation of chance.

Our reality is an artifact of our perception and self deception, what it is depends on how or through what we’re looking at it. To steal a phrase from Tom Stoppard, reality is its own alibi. Sort of like God.

From the ether I hear a question; something whispering this way comes: “So, what’s your alibi, Dr. O?” In the midst of the comment string appended to a bit of flotspam I posted to Sam’s Safe Haven for Broken Blogs, I generated a concise coda or creed that expresses my current alibi:

Many paths; one Way. The word may be god, but the word that is the word, the one word, the true word, the eternal word, as Lao Tzu said, cannot be spoken. It cannot be believed or disbelieved, because it is beyond belief. It cannot be acted because it is outside of action or inaction. It cannot exist or not exist, because it surpasses existence and nonexistence. As Meister Eckhart said, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Yet it encompasses us, and everything that was, is, can, or will be.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be passers-by." I have given a lot of thought to that phrase, to me perhaps the most important saying attributed to Jesus (certainly the most mysterious), as I have watched the terrible merciless beauty of "God's" creation and destruction go by as it carries me down the years to the terminus ad quem, the way station that is my particular destination.

Remember, I’m cherry-picking from my own comments (which is inherently unfair: click the comment string link above to read it all) but what I said made Meg feel besieged and invoke love as her defense, and also caused Sam to take me to task:

Doctor O, such responses as you give are analogous to flak bombs that deflect enemy radar. You quote and cite and lead astray while never addressing the issue at hand. All you say here is surely so. Who can say nay? Yet the issue is a professed lack of compassion which, as expressed, differs little from outright hostility toward an entire population of a region experiencing a dire emergency. So Lao Tzu me that, why dontcha?

My answer:

Sam, make that outright hostility toward an entire species, experiencing a dire planet-wide emergency due to its own collective bad behavior. A lot of us will have to die before the planet can get well again. That is not a wish, that is a fact.

There are many "me"s, the human personality is not unitary. One of me, out of the many, is an angry misanthrope. Having compassion for one's fellow creatures and loving one another as much as is possible is a great good thing, but we are not saved by our love and compassion nor can we save anyone else. All the love and compassion of the Human race put together is not saving the planet as far as I can see. What many people think of as compassion is a misapprehension of this waking world and its inhabiting spirits.

St. Paul at the end of Corinthians I chapter 13 says "Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love (agape'). I have no faith, and don't think we have much hope. That leaves love. I think detachment is more necessary to true love than compassion. Detachment is necessary to true love because true love is foolish, betrayed, hopeless, lost. True love is, as Galway Kinnell put it, "tenderness towards existence." The beauty of this world is without mercy, and I chose to live and love in it not only because it is beautiful but because it is merciless. I was not merciful 27 years ago when I lowered the barrel of the revolver from my temple and decided not to blow my brains out. Love is the most useless thing in the world, and the most necessary. Here's my combination: Compassion plus detachment equals love(agape'). Beauty plus the ruthlessness we call passion equals love(erato). Love(agape') plus Love (erato) equals Grace.

Sort of like singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I've heard Willy Nelson sing it that way.

Well, Sam thought I was still pumping blogiston on the fire, and posted a picture of a panda pissing up a tree to put it out. Among other things, Meg said:

Dr. O, I have to confess, and this is exceedingly difficult for me, that I don't really know what you were saying up there. It sounds like you see love and living differently than I do on such a grand scale that I can't quite wrap my brain around it.

Sam and Meg, I cherish you both. I want you to know that I expressed myself as honestly as possible without any intent of wounding either of you. The reason I am rehashing all this is because I have lived almost five decades knowing that the vast majority of people in this world, if not left breathless with giggles at the things I say, do, and believe to be important, interesting, and true, are either bored, puzzled, nonplussed, dismissive, or regard it as an assault on everything that's good and holy. Or it just makes their heads hurt. It’s always when I’ve said something that seems to me to be perfectly clear and straightforward that no one gets it. I might as well be a squid squirting ink.

I started writing in the first place because words failed me. Words could not carry the meanings, the reality of what I wished to express. Every poem succeeds if it succeeds through the failure of words that comprise it. The word that can be spoken is not the word. This is an important truth to me.

In my twenties, long before I was diagnosed as Bipolar, during periods of mania I would often wander about in what amounted to a state of religious or spiritual ecstasy. I literally had waking visions. I saw streams of color emerging from and returning into people like a stream of smoke from a cigarette exhaled and re-inhaled. I saw “angels,” numinous entities that would descend and inhabit trees or dance on telephone wires. When the moon was full I thought I could see the man in the moon talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and would try to read his lips. I saw other things I won’t talk about right now. Call them visions or hallucinations; neither term is adequate to describe the reality of the experience. To speak of these things at all diminishes the reality of the experience. Words fail. My blog is the one place I can have it my way, a place where I can make my stand. As I am a party of one, I have become an army of one, rhetorically speaking. I wage war with words on words. I commit poetry, satire, and parody, not pillage, rapine or murder. I leave the latter violences to the literal minded thugs which almost all creeds or sects no matter how high-minded contribute at least some few to the world. My words “are but warriors for the working day”

Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'dWith rainy marching in the painful field;There's not a piece of feather in our host-Good argument, I hope, we will not fly—
Shakespeare, Henry V

*Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: "CREATION SCIENCE"

Probability, credibility, credulity abide,
but for the greatest of ease
on the high moral trapeze
credulity puts God on your side.

All the explanations of "Creation Science" seem to be based on the concept that God is a senile delinquent running some sort of shell game on creatures he devised in his image; or else is letting Satan run it, having delegated the details of the divine Ponzi scheme to those bright boys in the Dept. of Evil.

This idea goes back a long way. In the book of Job, Satan says to God, look at your faithful servant Job, he's got it pretty good, nice life, makes it easy to believe in you. Why don't we kill everyone he ever cared about, take away everything he ever had, and torture him until he cries uncle. I bet it won't take long before he curses you. And God said, what odds will you give me?

Why this is an appealing idea is a mystery to me, but it might explain why fundies keep voting for guys like Ronnie Raygun and Howdy Dubya. The Creationist attempt to suborn science to their cornfed inbred theology is what H.L. Mencken called "An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it in terms of the not worth knowing."

Well, I think they have alot of explaining to do. P.S. The branch of theology concerned with explaining why a good God allows evil to exist is called "Theodicy." Nuf said.

"If Evolution is outlawed, only Outlaws will evolve." Jello Biafra

As an Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist, I'm quite as fundamental on the question as the Godlicking creationists. If you truly understand and accept the hypotheses of physics and evolutionary biology there is just no way you can believe in a personal god who creates the kind of parochial universe retailed by these poisonously and willfully stupid nimrods. They've gotten really clever, aping the rhetoric of the skepticism they oppose, making a charade of the scientific method, and employing the trappings of science to decorate the altar of their patriarchal, tribal, Bronze Age War God.

The truth is not in them. They are liars and fools. Shame on them. Yes, I do judge their belief system, and find it wanting. Of course, I was tortured by Southern Baptists as a child. "The vast majority of the unwashed masses," the Noncogs as my friend Julian calls them, are what I call turbideists (turbid+deist). They run their belief "systems" on the go along get along principle, and can believe any number of impossible (and contradictory) things before breakfast, and are indeed mostly harmless, unless you make them think, the only real "thou shalt not" in their moral compass. They "believe in belief" as E.M. Forster said, as spiritual vitamins, an uplifting placebo, a sort of mental insulation against the cold facts of existence.

The fundies by and large are a different matter. They really do believe in something. They do have a belief system that is coherent and internally consistent to the believer no matter how stupid or insane it seems to an outside observer. This provides the fundie, of whatever stripe, with a coherent program and consistently causes them to do bad things, particularly to people who don't agree with them, in word, deed, or just by having the effrontry to exist. True believers commit atrocities. Without strong belief there is no reason to act. Weak believers, turbideists who attend the chinese restaurant church, one from column A, two from column B...etc., just shrug their shoulders, smile, and think about something else.

I've been told that arguing with fundamentalist Christians is like shooting fish in a barrel. I think there are some sharks in that barrel. I heard about the "miracle car" scam on the BBC World Service. At least one of the people arrested was a fundy prot in good standing, with her own "ministry." I don't think that most of the fundies are stupid because they were born with defective equipment; I think it's nuture, not nature. Fraud, whether conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious, is essential to fundementalist belief; these sects could not exist without it. These people are inculcated to accept fraud with complete credulity from childhood on. These true believers are strong in their faith, and therefore have no trouble swallowing lesser lies, so long as they come from their brothers and sisters in Christ.

I can remember very clearly getting up in front of the congregation of our Baptist church when I was six years old, testifying and praising Je-sus just for the sake of the attention it got me, understanding, without being able to put it into words, that I thought it was all a crock of shit. I was a precocious lad. And the Sundaygotomeetin crowd just lapped it up.

Much later in my career I had a torrid affair with a married fundy woman, who told me, often, and with complete sincerity, that I was going to Hell, sometimes while we were still screwing. She believed in predestination, and thought she was among the elect of god, so she wasn't. Going to Hell, that is. This woman was not congenitally stupid. She was, in fact, maybe the brightest person I have ever met;.she was so smart she was scary. By the way, if your scruples allow it, I recommend married fundies as lovers: since they really believe in sin, all that transgression and betrayal makes the sex really hot.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 5.7.03)