The Marginal Christian's Handbook.

Gallup Poll: Over 80% of Americans Identify as Christian

A Gallup poll about religious beliefs in America doesn't reveal any earth-shaking information.  Still, I thought it was worth a comment. 

About 82% of Americans in 2007 told Gallup interviewers that they identified with a Christian religion. That includes 51% who said they were Protestant, 5% who were "other Christian," 23% Roman Catholic, and 3% who named another Christian faith, including 2% Mormon.

Because 11% said they had no religious identity at all, and another 2% didn't answer, these results suggest that well more than 9 out of 10 Americans who identify with a religion are Christian in one way or the other.  (Gallup)

But only about 62% of those polled identified themselves as belonging to a particular religion go to church.

To summarize, more than 8 in 10 Americans identify with a religion and 8 out of 10 say that religion is at least fairly important in their daily lives; more than 8 out of 10 say they attend church at least "seldom"; and again more than 8 out of 10 identify with a Christian religion  (Gallup).

Interestingly, only 14% of those polled said religion is "increasing" its influence. (Gallup). Of course, how one answers such a question would depend on one's assumption about its current or prevailing influence.   

Torture: An Issue for People of Faith

[Cross-posted at Versus & Buck Naked Politics]  At Slacktivist, Fred Clark wrote a searing response to Mona Charen's distressing recent column on torture.  Thanks, Slacktivist, for doing this---so other blogs don't have to.

And since it's Christmas, I also found via Slacktivist this site:  The National Religious Campaign Against Torture. For some reason, the group limits membership to organizations (i.e., to churches), but you can sign a statement and get other information on opposing as immoral the government's use of torture.  Speak Truth to Power, people!  Read NRCAT's statement below and then please go there and sign it.  After all, it's Christmas.

The Passing Show: the Uses of Prayer, the British Spongebob, Sideshow, and the Church of Christ without Christ

by Damozel | I've had a long day of praying and waiting, waiting and praying.  Being a certain sort of Christian, I assume that God knows what he is doing all the time and always knows what everyone wants in his or her heart;  I also believe that life is demonstrably not about trying to be happy all the time or to live forever, but something else, a different sort of opportunity.   I therefore believe that prayer is pointless on some issues:  things I don't like and feel I can't bear will happen.   But of course, a priest I know once pointed out, the answer to a prayer is not invariably, "Yes."

Prayer is for filling in the time when there's nothing else to do but that, I guess; and also because you might as well ask.  To quote a character in a Flannery O'Connor novel I read in my twenties, how can you get what you don't ask for?  You might as well ask.  Anyway, that sense of connection and communication can keep you from going insane when there is literally nothing else to be done.  At least you can ask for the kinds of things that can make a difference in the meaning of a situation:  courage, support from above or within, that sort of thing.   And you can register what sort of outcome you want.  Who knows, maybe it does make a difference sometimes?  And so far my prayers have been "answered."  Answered with a "yes," I mean.  Unless, of course, it's what was going to happen all along anyway.    

Can I Hear You say Hallelujah? Evangelicals Step Up.

The word "evangelical" gets thrown around a lot these days concerning various Christian groups.  Some of the groups mentioned are honest-to-Jesus Bible-thumping hellfire-spouting missionary types, but some of them are just exceptionally conservative Christianists who go to church every Sunday, sit up straight, sing in the choir, and refrain from dancing or drinking.  There's a difference, I think.  Coming from the Carolina Bible Belt---and being related to a number of Southern Baptists and Republicans----I'd say there is a difference between those and, say, the Pentacostalists. 

But I don't suppose it matters.  I'm not going to tabulate and classify them; I'm just going to pray that more of them get the prodigious mess in their heads (where the words of Jesus get all mixed up with what their Daddies told them about taxes, capitalism, and the flag) sorted out so they don't keep yanking the country further down the path to dysfunction and dishonor. 

There's some reason to believe that some of them are hearing the pleas (or that God is hearing the prayers) of some of their more centrist or even leftward-tilting brethren.   

According to The Raw Story, one large group, the National Association of Evangelicals,  (45,000 members) have "broken ranks with the Bush Administration on torture."

The National Association of Evangelicals, representing roughly 45,000 churches across the U.S. endorsed on Tuesday a declaration against torture put together by Evangelicals for Human Rights – an organization of 17 evangelical scholars – in a striking break from the Bush Administration's policy.

"Tragically, documented cases of torture and inhumane and cruel behaviour have occurred at various sites in the war on terror, and current law opens procedural loopholes for more to continue," the evangelicals' statement declares.

Sara Miles at Salon.com: When Christ-consciousness gets a hook in you, it hurts like hell.

I am always happy to find confirmation anywhere that other thinking women with brains, a leftward-tilting sensibility, and a devotion to progressive goals have struggled as I did and do with the chagrin of being Christian in an age when the label conveys to the people I respect  "intolerant, narrow-minded, embryo-hugging-at-the-expense-of-sentient-humanity, climate-change-denying, taxes-nonpaying, liberal-baiting, logic-denying middlebrow moron."   Bill Maher, for example, was all over the whole God issue as usual Friday night, in the very first Real Time of the season.  Every time he gets on the subject I feel less and less affection for Bill Maher (even though he is still my hero) and more and more irritation that I can't be there to rebut his many, many wrong assumptions (and no one else ever has to my satisfaction). 

I am slightly soothed to note that most of his guests admit---shyly, as a rule, and with a certain shame---to a belief in something besides hot tubs with twins and so on.  But not by much I'm not.  I'm an intelligent person and I can tell a hawk from handsaw regardless which way the wind blows, but the sometimes it's hard to hold shame at bay, even though Jesus---understandably---explained, as he had every right to do, that if his followers were ashamed of him, he would be ashamed of them.   

For one thing, as I would expect Jesus to understand,  I'm married to a Brit---i.e., an atheist who not only doesn't believe in God, but views any discussion of, or casual reference to, one's religious beliefs as a solecism of the worst sort----and I am surrounded by lovely, non-God-bothering liberals who are prone to announcing their nonbelief in a tone of really insufferable smugness, as if their lack of faith somehow set the final seal on their credentials as progressive thinkers with a sky wide tolerance for all faiths. 

So I was happy to see this article by Sara Miles in Salon, since both her experiences trying to be a Christian in secret and the reasons why she let it happen to her are painfully familiar to me.

First, just to get it out of the way, the traction-like pull of the original fisher of men (and women) once you let him get his hook in you: 

[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com] 

But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man....

[quote ends; link in original]

Sloth and Other Deadly Sins.

JUMP BACK TO INTRODUCTION TO THIS NOTE (IN THE FLATLAND ALMANACK).    

SEVEN:  COUNT 'EM!  As previously noted, I come from a religious background that didn't focus overmuch on sin.  I first learned about the seven deadly sins in a novel I was reading.  I was only young at the time---11 or 12, say---so I was surprised to find that there was a list of sins that were considered "deadly."  I wasn't sure why that was supposed to be so.  Deadly how exactly?  I didn't know. 

Nowadays, of course, I could simply google "the seven deadly sins" and all my questions (more, or sometimes less, authoritatively) would be instantly answered.   Here's a whole website devoted to the seven deadly sins, for example.   The pull quote at the top of the page remarks rather jovially, "The Seven Deadly Sins are those transgressions which are fatal to spiritual progress.  You probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating.  Welcome to your source for information for history on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues."

DEADLY VIRTUES.  About the same time I first read about the seven deadly sins, I also learned about the seven deadly virtues, which is what they were called in the song.  My parents (and I at age 11 or so) were fans of any musical by Lerner and Loewe, and Camelot was a family favorite.  In that original Broadway version (Julie Andrews as Guinevere, Richard Burton as Arthur, Robert Goulet as Lancelot), adorable Roddy McDowell starred as Prince Mordred, Arthur's illegitimate son by his own half-sister (though this isn't mentioned in the play), and a bastard in more ways than one.   I fell in love with him based strictly on one tiny photograph inside the album cover.   (Even as a child, I knew that Lancelot was an insufferable prig, despite my mother's swoonings over Robert Goulet.)

In Camelot, Mordred's malice seems to come from out of nowhere;  they don't delve into his miserable childhood and Oedipus complex or the rest of it; for that, you have to read The Once and Future King (the book on which the play was based).    His one number is called "The Seven Deadly Virtues," and it goes like this (and this is from memory because I so adored that song as a child that it's permanently seared into my brain):

The seven deadly virtues, those ghastly little traps:
Oh no, my liege, they were not meant for me.
The seven deadly virtues were made for other chaps
Who love a life of failure and ennui.

Take Courage:  now there's a sport!
An invitation to the state of rigor mort!

And Purity:  a noble yen!
And very restful every now and then.

I find Humility means to be hurt.
It's not the earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt!

Honesty is fatal and should be taboo;
Diligence:  a fate  I would hate!
If Charity means giving, I give it to you;
and Fidelity is only for your mate...

Which is pretty much how I learned the names of the seven cardinal virtues.    I was intrigued by Mordred's version of adolescent rebellion---"Let others take the high road; I will take the low/I cannot wait to rush in where angels fear to go!"---but I didn't really understand at age 11 how to emulate him.   I wasn't even sure what some of the words (diligence, for example) meant.  Those were (comparatively) innocent times, the Seventies. Too innocent, for example, to permit a character in a musical to sing with malicious merriment about the Seven Deadly Sins.

God, Death, and Judgment: A heretic's view.

I was talking recently to a young friend who is going through a crisis of faith.  He can't continue to believe in God, he said, because he simply can't accept the notion of a supposedly just God whose actions are so arbitrary.  If it matters to God whether we believe or disbelieve, he said, why doesn't God show special favor to those who believe the right things?  Why don't their prayers matter more?

And how can a just God justify to humanity events such as the tsumani that killed so many in Indonesia a year and a half ago?   And why, if praying makes a difference to anything, isn't it more reliable?  When my young friend prayed that his mother's cancer would go away the first time, it had gone into remission; but when it returned, all his praying did her no good at all.   "It's pointless," he said. 

Furthermore, what about all the people---on both sides---being killed in Iraq?  How can a just and merciful God allow the good (whichever those are) to be killed along with the bad?

Listening to him made me very glad to be a heretic.   Conventional Christians have to engage in heroic twists and leaps of logic to explain to themselves and others why good people suffer along with the bad.  Because I came at Christianity (christianity) from a different angle, I never have this problem.

1.  God doesn't care whether you're happy.  First of all, I don't assume as most Christians I know seem to do that God wants his creatures to be "happy," whatever that means.   If I believed that this was the purpose of creation, I really would have to chop some logic. 

The idea that personal suffering is a sign of God's inattention certainly isn't supported by the Bible.   If you assume that when bad things happen to people it's a sign of God's anger, Jerry Falwell, you clearly haven't paid enough attention to what your Bible tells you about what happens to those whom he favors with his personal attention, starting with Christ and working backwards and forwards through history.   

I remember a dismal hymn we used to sing at the Episcopal Church that expressed the paradox that Christ was so fond of reiterating:  "The peace of God...is no peace, but strife cast in the sod/Yet brothers pray for but one thing/The glorious peace of God!"  I didn't get it as a teenager and I certainly wasn't interested in a God who promised "not peace but a sword."   

I had to come to Christianity the long way around, via  other religions.  Given its difficulty, I find it much easier to see life as the process by which the soul educates and disciplines itself than as a one-time-only temporary chance to convince God that you are sufficiently repentant/pure/faithful to deserve a place at some extended picnic with the other good and deserving.    If we assume that there is a God who takes some sort of interest in our welfare---and based on experience, I do----the only possible inference we can draw from what we observe about the reality of human life is that suffering, bereavement, and death are (from God's perspective) circumstances that somehow inure to our benefit, however much we may wish to forego them.

A Marginal Christian Looks at Corporal Punishment, Sexual Assault, Transvestitism, Divorce, & Crushed Testicles in the Old Testament.

  [published on July 13, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles", my previous blog]

A Marginal Christian Looks at  Corporal Punishment,  Sexual Assault, Transvestitism, Divorce, and Crushed Testicles in the Old Testament

Someone pointed out to me that my discussion of the Bible isn't exactly authoritative.  "You aren't a Biblical scholar," he pointed out.  "You really aren't qualified to say what it means."

No, that's right.  But I am engaging in a little exercise called "Imagine the world if we took the Bible literally just based on what it seems to be saying and didn't read selectively or with regard to its context"  That's pretty much what certain right wing Christians do.  I'm doing what they do:  going through and cherry-picking the particular parts of interest to me.

I will always think it surprising that the Church Fathers saw fit to keep the parts of the Old Testament that didn't directly relate to Jesus.  I know---or I think I know; let's say I've been told----that the early church split very early on between the Church led by Jesus's brother James and between the Church led by Paul (who never met Jesus, or at least not while Jesus was alive).  The Church of James still followed the law of Moses; Paul decided because, according to him, he had the direct authority of  Jesus to do so. 

Jesus frequently cited the law of Moses in his disputes with the pharisees and scribes and such, but it's always seemed clear to me----I am telling you my perception, not what know or even "know"-----that in his disputes, he was constantly reinterpreting that law.  Indeed, it seems obvious that he was; otherwise, why would they have been trying to nail him on charges of blasphemy.  I don't think in sober truth that there is much of it left if you read his remarks closely; he quotes scripture constantly, but he is spinning it toward completely different conclusions, or so it seems.  His statement that he came to fulfill the law I take as meaning something entirely different than the fundamentalists I know take it to mean.  I understand it to mean---this is just me, unaided by Biblical scholarship----"Now that I am here, you don't need it anymore" or (possibly) "Now that I am here, I will tell you its purpose; if you achieve the purpose, you need not follow it to the letter."

I say all this because----again-----I am continually astonished at the ease with which certain Christians I know (including certain churches I shall not specifically name) jump back and forth between old and new testaments without really seeming ever to read them together.

First take that plank out of your OWN eye.

A Marginal Christian looks at Leviticus on Sexual Sin Generally*;  Matthew on adultery specifically; and what we can learn from Christ's encounters with two adulteresses.

* CAVEAT: I have only a rough idea of how the text is construed by modern-day Jews.  This posting is an answer to Christians who use Leviticus as the ground for excluding homosexuals from the community or for denying them civil rights.

One of the most annoying aspects of "The Church of God Without Christ" is ignorance.  Yes, ignorance.  Most Christians---including or rather especially the leaders of the various sects----don't know and don't WANT to know the history of the church or really anything about its evolution.

Though they can quote scripture, and have a propensity to do so, they can only quote the bits that resonate for them (i.e., that confirm something they already want to believe).  I've got family members who can bring the (apparently) apt quote, but if you start questioning them about the source, they have NO IDEA of the context or of how the quoted piece fits within the whole. 

The chapters in the Bible that address the ancient laws provide a fascinating picture of life among the Israelites.  You have to assume that if at least some of the people weren't engaged in the forbidden conduct, it wouldn't be necessary for God to forbid it. 

Now there are Jews who keep to the ancient laws as well as they can; these people have the virtue of consistency and can be said to take the Old Testament literally. 

But modern-day Protestant Christians like to go through and cherry-pick the ones that suit them and that they believe 'apply' to the current day.  Then they will tell you that they take the Bible literally because it is the authentic word of God and that they take it literally.  Oh really?  Let's talk about what it would mean to apply Leviticus literally.   

1.  Sexual sin in Leviticus.

Time for some close reading.  I'm going with the New English Bible because those who know better than me say it's more true to the original text.  I'm going to take the word of the scholar who assured me that the New English Bible is more accurate, even though I recently saw a bumper stick that said---and this is so delightful---in golden letters upon a black background, "The King James Bible is the True Word of God."   Heh.

According to the introduction to the New English Bible, the translation of the New Testament "was undertaken with the object of providing English readers...with a faithful rendering of the best available Greek text into the current speech of our own time, and a rendering which would harvest the recent gains of new scholarship." New English Bible (1971 ed.) Introduction to New Testament at v. 

FYI, the New English Bible doesn't use the conventional verse numbers ("which in the New Testament date only from 1551 and have no basis in the manuscripts.")  I've done the best I can to identify them correctly for those wedded to the KJB, but I can't warrant my citations.

Before I start, I am going to adopt the assumption of Christians everywhere that Christ's death was a sacrifice that somehow cancelled out the obligation of his followers to make ritual sacrifice as spelled out in Leviticus.  I am going to focus on some of the other requirements of Leviticus.

Let's start with the much-touted and much-disputed passage from Leviticus banning homosexuality (between man and man) as an "abomination."    Here is the translation set forth in the New English Bible.  It is unequivocal.  I cannot deny it.  It comes from the chapter called 'the law of holiness' and it says: