RELIGION AS POLITICS, RELIGION AS CULTURE

From AlterNet:

Religious Groups Bash Contraception, and Other
Reasons I'm No Longer Quiet About My Non-Belief

But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

More here.

I think, and this is a guess based on personal experience, so I may very well be wrong, that most Americans who describe themselves as religious aren't like the people this guy is talking about in the excerpt above. They may give lip service to this or that Christian idea, and try to live up to it to some extent, but aren't really all that concerned with everybody else living up to that standard. That is, most Americans may self-identify as Christian, but they're not terribly devout about it, and not rabid about proselytizing.

Problem is, this majority of mellow American Christians have a sort of tribal identification with the minority of asshole American Christians, and are unwilling to tell them to shut the fuck up when their mouths spew the diarrhea known as fundamentalism. Further, when non-believers take it upon themselves to tell fundamentalists to STFU, the mellow Christians stand a decent chance of thinking themselves the target, and getting offended. It's always dicey jumping into the waters of religious debate masquerading as political debate.

As I've written before, this situation is actually pretty fascinating. Religion is culture, deeply embedded in people's sense of who they are, and should be respected, if only for that. On the other hand, religion is also a set of values, principles, and narrative mythologies about how people ought to live their lives. This brings religion into the sphere of public discourse and politics, which is necessarily rhetorically boisterous and confrontational. Is it disrespectful to criticize Christianity? Hell, no. In the abstract, at least. I mean, there are ways to disagree with religious thought and still respect that religion as important culture.

Of course, it's not easy to do that when religion's defenders' opening statement is that you're so fucked up that you ought to be tortured for eternity by the mythical, supernatural, and evil being known as Satan. That is, some of those religious principles are straight-up offensive to non-believers, showing disrespect to their culture. Compounding matters is the sense that these fundamentalist assholes have about how respecting their religion also means never criticizing it, which is, of course, total bullshit--if you're going to play rough, my father always used to say, you've got to expect to get hurt.

I'm really sympathetic to the guy who wrote the above excerpted essay. These fundamentalists are, indeed, crazy fucktards, and are dead set on pushing their dangerous and lunatic ideas into the mainstream, forcing people who disagree with them into living by their rules. But religion itself, isn't the problem. I mean sure, there are some good arguments out there that religion is, in fact, the problem. But I just don't feel persecuted by Methodists and Lutherans. It's the Southern Baptists, so-called "Bible churches," and other varieties of fundamentalism that frighten me. They're the ones trying to fuck up society.

There's just got to be a way to differentiate between these two kinds of Christianity when you go after the bad guys.

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