So, I woke up this morning, and discovered a trackback in my email. Holy crap! I thought, Someone linked to me! Lil’ old me! Linked to! How cool! I must go and discover who linked to me! Maybe it’s one of the cool blogs I read all the time. Maybe this will be my gateway to becoming a rich and famous celebrity blogger! I’ll have cars and men and money, and be featured on that retarded bit CNN does on The Situation Room, where they show off blogs and talk about them!
     Yeah, yeah, I know. I hadn’t had my coffee yet, okay?
     I followed the trackback and discovered Adamelijah of WhereIStand.com. Not only did I get a link, I got quoted. Ooo. So, welcome, y’all, who might be wandering over from that site to see what the dirty liberal atheist at Coffee House Poetry has to say about things.
     
     First, let me just say that I’ve never been to or heard of Adamelijah or Where I Stand before now, and I haven’t really looked into the site or the guy any more than to read his post and glance over their front page. That is, I don’t know anything about him, or them. All I know is this one post that showed up in my trackbacks.
     So, let’s talk about this post. Adamelijah’s post is about the Rev. Greg Boyd, whom I mentioned in my last post, and starts out (well, close to starts it) by saying, “The Church exists to glorify God. It is there for the edification and encouragement of believers. The church should never become a place with the primary purpose of elevating political power.”
     Yes, exactly. Church, I grew up believing, is where you go to talk to God. It’s not where you went to hear about politics. I don’t know where you go to hear about that. Adamelijah goes on to speak about why he disagrees with the Reverend Boyd’s speeches (sermons, I suppose, when they come from a reverend). Adamelijah quotes a lot of scriptures, which, I’m afraid, don’t mean much to me. I’m pretty Bible-illiterate. I know a lot of atheists who make a big point of knowing the Bible — I’m not one of them. So, we’ll skip those bits, as I’m not qualified to argue about any of them.
     Adamelijah says:

The church certainly doesn’t belong to one political party or another, and that is something that I will never advocate. God transcends our parties and He is the One who I’ll concede readily is an Independent. Even in the Old Testament, when the Captain of the Lord’s host was asked by Joshua, “Are you on our side or on our enemy’s.” He answered, “Neither.” God is on his own side.

As far as that goes, Mr. Boyd is right on:

     I like to hear that sort of thing. I get very tired of people claiming to have God on their side (particularly sports teams) whenever they do something. I get really tired of hearing that we’ve got God on our side in the War on Terror^(TM), because the last time I checked, Muslim fanatics are religious too, and are also claiming to have God on their side.
     Adamelijah goes on to say:

Where Reverend Boyd errs is taking things too far. His conclusion that “the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.”

Indeed, with hundreds of references to sexual sins in the Bible, I’d suggest that Boyd’s problem is not so much with the “Christian Right” as it is with scripture. Boyd’s call is a total disengagement of the church from the nation’s political life. Rev. Boyd observes:

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Lets consider the sillyness of this point. When Jesus was on the Earth, there was really no restrictions on people’s ability to show faith. And unless Rev. Boyd (who, by the way, claims not to be a liberal) seperates Christ from Paul, consider what the Apostle said in 1. Corinthians 5:1-5

     I’m tired of “liberal” being a dirty word. I’m tired of being looked down on because I believe that all people should be treated equally, and given the same rights. I’m tired of hearing things like, “who, by the way, claims not to be a liberal”, like being a liberal is some awful thing. To me, it sounds similar to saying, “who, by the way, claims not to be a scabies-infested leper who’s into buggering children”. Come on. It’s a political ideal. It’s the idea that we’re all equal, and, to a certain point, all deserve the same rights. (By that, I mean, you don’t get the right to murder folks, fuck children, sacrifice people on altars, etc.) But, you know, two gay guys should be able to get married. (As should two gay women.) A poor, unwed single young mother should be able to get a safe, legal abortion if she needs one, rather than bring another unwanted kid into a world where the odds are already going to be stacked against it. We should all be able to live in a peaceful world where we’re not getting fucked up the ass by the megacorp du jour, and where we aren’t destroying the environment and despoiling the world and going to war over natural resources or religious differences every ten minutes. Man. What and awful idea to live up to, wanting to live in a world where everyone gets treated decently and countries are at peace and we all have what we need to get by. Damn us liberals! Damn us!

Boyd has concluded that Christians can let their culture die and go to pot. He believes that it is of utter irrelevance whether America lives or dies and whether we rip apart the moral fabric of our society and sit by as our heritage and our nation is despoiled and brought low.

Its a tempting view, because to be quite honest, there’s very little to reccomend politics. Politics is so often about the pursuit of raw unbridled power at the expense of decency, goodness, and fairness.

Yet, I wonder if every idle word will be called into account, what shall be said of the loss of a great nation to cultural decline? What shall be said of the lives destroyed through indoctrination that would be carried out without opposition should Christians go silent? What shall be said of those souls who, through cultural relativism and the idea that there are no absolutes, are innoculated against the Gospel, because they can never see that they have sinned?

     During the debates in the last election, John Kerry said, when asked about abortion, “I do not believe that I can legislate morality.” At the time, I thought that this was equal parts intelligent and fucking stupid (which summed up a lot of what Mr. Kerry had to say, really). Intelligent, because at the time, the context was that because he was Catholic, Catholic leaders were crawling up his ass about his stance on abortion. He was saying, basically, that he couldn’t in all fairness impose Catholic ideology on non-Catholic/religious folks by way of laws. Right on! But, in truth, we legislate morality all the time — murder’s illegal, so’s pedophilia, etc and so forth.
     But, there is a difference. Regardless of religion or lack thereof, most sane folks can agree that it is wrong to shoot someone dead on the street because they were, I don’t know, rich and you wanted their money, or screwing your wife, or wearing the wrong gang colors, or some such foolishness. Regardless of religion, we can all agree that forcing little children to perform sex acts is wrong. We can’t agree on abortion. I say abortion should be safe, legal, and rare (shades of Clinton), and that if we want less of them, we should educate our kids thoroughly about sex and the consequences, so that they know to be safe and responsible about it. You say sex education causes more sex, so only teach the kids abstinence, and make abortions illegal, because it’s murder. That’s what your religion tells you. We can’t agree. So, it seems only fair to keep abortion safe and legal, since folks will go have them anyways, illegally, and I’d hope we can both agree that we don’t want to see a rise in young women bleeding miserably to death in back alleys from illegal abortions gone wrong. Since your religion tells you not to have one, you won’t, and if I need one, and I have no religious qualms about it, I can go safely have one. That seems fair to me, and I don’t see how that affronts religious folks.
     I don’t see how minding your own business is “allowing your culture to die and go to pot”. I have no right to tell you that you can’t be a Christian (or whatever). You have no right to tell me that I have to live by your religion’s rules. Hence, we should make our laws with that in mind, and I think that’s what Rev. Boyd was getting at.
     Adamelijah goes on at some length about Rev. Boyd’s “spin” on political matters, and I’m not going to defend Rev. Boyd there, because I don’t know squat about the guy. I do know that apparently he’s making a butt-ton of money running a mega-church, and that always makes me suspicious. However, if he’s making a butt-ton of money by preaching tolerance, then I’d far rather see that then some lunatic like Jerry Falwell, who makes his money preaching hatred and nutjobery. Which is, I’d like to point out, what I meant by “This is what I want to hear from religious leaders.”

I’m sorry I don’t find this in scripture, does he have a reference, for all “good and decent people” want order and justice? What does Jesus say, “there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matt. 19:17) Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

So again, who is good? Who is decent? Scripture tells us, no one. Not the Christian, not the unbeliever. The Christian is saved by Grace, but that doesn’t end the sin nature.

To say, “all good people want good and order and justice” is to speak unscripturally, but as I’ve mentioned before, this wasn’t a first for Rev. Boyd. Despite the earlier scripture about the need for judgment and justice, Rev. Boyd called for disregarding judgment and things such as church discipline.

     There’s a saying, “Every dog is three square meals away from being a wolf.” This applies to people as well. We’re one disaster away from returning to our animal natures at any given moment. Witness the poor behavior of some folks in New Orleans during Katrina, or the LA Riots back in the day — give us a reason, and we turn into pissy chimps at the drop of a hat. I say that’s human nature because, frankly, we’re only a few thousand years out of the trees. You say it’s human nature because we’re sinful, yaddayadda. Helloooo! We’re both saying the same damn thing! We both agree that we have a responsibility to be better than that. We only disagree about how to go about it.

You go to emergent churches and you’ll not hear that today is the day of salvation, that now is the time of the Lord’s favor. You’ll hear people admonished not to sound too Christian or talk about a Ten Commandments Monument, because the people there who aren’t Christians might be offended.

It is an attempt to make Jesus palatable, to market Jesus, but there are so many things that stand in the way including the Evangelical Conservatives. Its all very inconvenient to their marketing strategy of Christ.

Yet, Jesus was not nice. He was holy; he was just; he was kind, but he wasn’t nice. You don’t crucify “nice guys,” you ignore them. God has called us to many things, but niceness is not in there. Niceness is saccharine filed sentiment that keeps us from doing things that are right and just, because it wouldn’t be nice. Whipping money changers out of the temple may have been just, but it certainly wasn’t nice. Telling the Pharisees they were whitewashed tombs was honest, but it wasn’t nice.

But, its the nice Jesus that liberals like Carol want, because this nice Jesus doesn’t threaten anything. He sits, winking at sin, never walking into the wilderness to cry, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

     Hey, I have news. I don’t care about “nice”. I’ll settle for fair and decent. We just disagree on what’s fair, and decent. I think fair is you leaving folks who don’t believe in your religion the hell alone, and stop trying to force us to march to your drum. Decency is not forcing people to live your way, when they don’t believe in it, and it actually does them harm (witness the unwed young mother forced to have child after child she can’t support, and being trapped by a cycle of poverty that she passes on to her kids, when simple education might have prevented it).
     And finally:

Coffee House Poetry:

This is what I want to hear from religious leaders.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;-2 Timothy 4:3

LGBT World News
10,000 Monkeys and a Camera
Bligbi
Pandagon
The Sentry News Digest
Drinking Liberally Kentucky
Ratboy’s Anvil
Black Lesbian Jew
Shakespeare’s Sister
Pam Spaulding

Indeed, a lot of friends from secular liberal sources. Featured in the New York Times, and praised from one end of the liberal blogosphere to another.

     Damn us liberal heathens, being happy to hear a preacher preaching tolerance for once. Damn us liberal wimmenfolk for not wanting to be forced into being barefoot and pregnant and ignorant in the kitchen, making pie, just because we happen to enjoy getting our rocks off occasionally, and have the audacity to think that since science has made it possible for us to not suffer that, we shouldn’t have to. Damn us liberal heathens for thinking that just because you’re gay you should have the same rights as the rest of us. Damn us for not wanting to murder thousands in a stupid war. Damn us for wanting to be decent, and fair, and nice, and wanting everyone to be able to live well and equally, according to their own views, as long as they aren’t harming anyone or imposing their views on the rest of us. What a bunch of fuckers we are for such thoughts.

Playing the Popularity Game:

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