Religions Gone Mad

Where are the teachers?

One of the features of aging is some perspective. You remember how different things were years ago. How different people were. I remember some religious leaders practicing what they preached. Or at least they preached the good stuff. Love of others, no matter who they were. Welcoming all to the Table. Sheltering the immigrant. Feeding the poor. Stuff like that. They were acting like real leaders setting an example of compassion for “others”. They were teaching a way of living. If they were “Christians” they might actually act like it. What happened?

Perhaps it was the money. Look at Joel Osteen. Or Pat Roberts. Faith based on prosperity, wealth? Religion embracing right wing hate? It has worked. They are rich. They are performers. People shower them with money. Success! For them.

It’s easy to dismiss most religious leaders. As an agnostic, I am tempted to lump them all into a category with hating nutcases like Paula White and Franklin Graham. But that might be a mistake.

I found an exception. I like him a lot. Here is a taste. Plucked right from his website - which I encourage you to read, bookmark and share.

”If you claim to be a “God and Country “Bible-believing Evangelical,” great. But if you have contempt for immigrants or bristle at white privilege or oppose safeguards in a pandemic, your Christianity is ineffectual at best and at worst, it’s toxic. You might want to rethink something.

If you believe because you prayed a magic prayer to accept Jesus at summer camp when you were 13,  that you can inflict any kind of adult damage to the people and the world around you and you’ll still be golden, while gentle, loving, benevolent atheists and Muslims go to hell—you’re doing religion wrong.

If you’re passionately anti-religious because you think belief in a higher power is abject fairy tale nonsense, that’s fine too. But if you’re intolerant to difference and intellectually arrogant in the face of people who’ve reached different conclusions than you have, you are simply replicating hypocrites without the creeds.

Yeah, I know many of you reading this will write this all off as universalistic heresy, and I understand why. When you’ve been raised to believe that righteous and rightness are the same thing, you’ll do all you can to defend the story in your heads that tells you you’re one of the good guys.

But if whatever your religious affiliation or spiritual convictions or confession of faith doesn’t result in a life of greater empathy, then what’s the point?

If you are less loving because of your religion no matter what that religion is, you got it wrong.”
John Pavlovitz: Stuff That Needs to be Said