(via)

But I’m probably writing too much about comedy.

This video isn’t entirely necessary to watch in full, but irritated me as I watched it last night. Bible thumper comes on and says that homosexuality is against the word of God. Elliot Spitzer is very careful, saying things like “I respect your beliefs” but never addressing the obvious: the Bible says that adulterers should be stoned, as should women who have sex before marriage. If the Bible is the word of God, then you are disobeying God by not following these precepts. The problem with fundamentalists is that they are not fundamentalist enough. Crazy as that sounds – if evangelicals were truly forced to live in the world that the Bible dictates, they’d realize what a dystopia it would be. Does God want a dystopia? But Elliot Spitzer never mentions the ludicrous tenets of the Bible – and if stoning a non-virgin is kind of crazy, maybe homosexuality is evil is kind of crazy as well.

Furthermore, very sick of “I respect your beliefs.” Once religion is used to legislate – following religion as if it’s law – it’s no longer a “belief” but a political ideology. Commentators should not have to be so careful, as if religion is a “personal matter.” It’s hardly personal if they’re trying to bring these ideas into government. Religion is used as a shield – “I do not discuss my faith” – even if that faith guides policy. So someone like Michelle Bachmann can get a pass, and won’t be asked what she truly believes. Does she, for example, want the war of Armageddon? This is a valid question – ludicrous to normal people, but she’s a zealot.

Maybe there will be an article – “Does Michelle Bachmann want the war of Armageddon?” with an outline of Left Behind beliefs, but without asking her about it wherever she goes. If she is truly a Left Behind Christian, this a serious concern – in fact, it’s the most serious concern – and “I don’t discuss matters of my faith” is a disaster in the making. The religious test clause is a good one, a person should not have to be religious to serve – but if someone is deeply religious, the press needs to ask exactly what this means. Questions about the founding fathers are nice, but are only a surface reflection of a fundamentalist core.

The study, which examined the hippocampus region of the brain, found that Protestants who did not have a “born again” experience had significantly more gray matter than either those who reported a life-changing religious experience, Catholics, or unaffiliated older adults.

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Templeton Foundation, included at least two MRI measurements of the hippocampus region of 268 adults between 1994 and 2005.

It found an association between participants’ professed religious affiliation and the physical structure of their brain. Specifically, those identified as Protestant who did not have a religious conversion or born-again experience — more common among their evangelical brethren — had a bigger hippocampus.

I too have the intuitive feeling that there’s something else binding the world together, and I even run my life based on this intuition – I wouldn’t be so interested in writing these novels about God and evolution if I wasn’t partially convinced that I’m onto something. But there’s a difference between that and dropping everything in service of an intuition. Once you declare yourself a Buddhist or Taoist or Christian, you look for ways to confirm that existing intuition, rather than be open to the idea that you could be wrong (less so with Eastern religions, but fundamentalists are everywhere). It’s no different than believing science has answered the questions of the universe conclusively, when we have little idea of what exists beyond this planet, let alone what exists in the ether. So I can’t exactly get excited about the colorfulness of the world’s religions, because it causes people to conform to a set rule of laws, and stop looking for new ones. As the dopey woman says at the end, with a big sigh of relief, “It’s easier to submit.”

Rabbi Dror Fixler, an electro-optics expert from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, told The Local that the distinction between thought and action could mean that driving on the traditional Jewish day of rest was mutar, or permitted.

In October, scientists at Berlin’s Free University announced they had tested a “proof of concept” car that could be driven by thought. An electroencephalography headset with sixteen sensors measures the brain’s signals and sends them to a computer that operates the car….

“When you are making only thoughts, it is no action at all. There is a difference – if you are thinking, it is not the same thing, so you can’t say it’s forbidden,” he said. “That was what I asked the audience to think about.

This is bottomlessly silly.  I used to live across the hall from a family of orthodox Jews.  They’d ask me to come over on Fridays and turn on or off their lights for them – because for them this would be considered work.  As if the process of moving your wrist up and down on a lightswitch is more work than finding me and getting me to do it.  Isn’t the “switch” in the brain sending electrical impulses between synapses as material as electricity? Religion shouldn’t be like taxes where you try to find loopholes so God won’t hate you.  There’s the power of ritual and then there’s religion as obsessive compulsive disorder.

Tony Blair’s main idea is that religions do good charitable work – but so do legions of non-faith-based organizations.  You don’t need religion to care for the poor.  It’s not as though if Jesus didn’t exist to serve as an example, we’d spend all our time abusing each other.  We do that anyway – and given the amount of abuse that’s done in the name of religion, there’s a better argument that religion causes as many problems as it solves – in a way that non-religious charitable organizations do not.

The main thread here I think is the problem of fundamentalism. First two novels I wrote were about Hollywood – which I see as another religion, with the same kind of blind worship. I also mentioned porn up there. Though sexual taboos are a problem, being overly devoted and thinking sex is the only thing that matters isn’t the alternative. Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are next in line. I just posted a piece on Reality Sandwich which expressed the possibility of skepticism about 9-11 truth, and people were PISSED. Frankly, I don’t think this kind of true believerism makes any more sense for the fringe than it does for Sarah Palin devotees. So, short answer, the thing I think needs to go away is: blind devotion.

Blind devotion comes in two forms. Blind belief that religion tells you everything you need to know about life=fundamentalism. Or, blindly following one religion or another without fully understanding everything that goes into religious faith=most everyone else. It may be better if everyone was a fundamentalist – that is, if everyone who followed a religion had to follow religious law to the letter. It would probably lead to a lot fewer people following religion. The problem with religion isn’t the fanatics, it’s the millions more who believe in a faith without understanding what all goes into those religious texts they follow.

I’ve mentioned before that the problem with the political climate is not that there are too many radicals, it’s that there are too few. If more people actually studied what was going on in government beyond the pieces that are reported on the news, we would likely have a much different country. The Tea Party might not even exist if Tea Partiers took the time to see how this “government takeover” of health care is actually a Republican plan, for example. That would mean people coming to the table without their own pre-conceptions – to an almost supernatural degreee – but that’s what needs to happen.

In the same vein as religious fundamentalism, suppose Republicans actually had to live in their small government paradise in which there were no regulations on anything, there was no Medicare, no Social Security, and everything was privatized. There’d be far fewer people voting Republican. A milquetoast version of either politics or religion is not the answer – the answer is people who fully understand every detail of what it is they support. This would more than likely not lead to more radical fundamentalism, it would lead to people choosing radicalism that offered actual sustainability – because most people at core do not have a death wish to destroy things.

Religion really should be as air-tight as science. If you’re throwing away one thing from a religion – like saying “people who work on the Sabbath should be put to death” is crazy – then the entire framework of the religion collapses. Religion is beyond philosophy because it offers actual laws on how to live. Picking and choosing what laws to follow doesn’t make any more sense for religious laws than it does the laws of science. I understand that religion can offer a general guidepost on how to live, but if the Bible is the word of God and the Bible says kill people who work on the Sabbath, disobeying this is disobeying the thing you’re there to worship.

Trouble is religious texts are open to interpretation, so they become as much like philosophy as legislation. But still, religions are full of laws and if you’re unwilling to follow this or that law then you should find another religion. One where all the laws make sense. This may not exist – and to follow Jesus’ example, the most pious thing you can do is not be obsessed with religious ritual and instead carve your own path. One day, religion might actually meld with science – like we could prove that heaven is a real place and you need to do this and this to get there. Not saying that will be, but for example. Until that’s provable, it doesn’t make sense to follow a religious tradition that has no proof for its claims, and the laws it does claim are questionable – especially given the fact that they’re based on the word of a God that has to be taken on faith.

Put another way, no one should be a fundamentalist.

Jesus’ act of self-sacrifice would ultimately have been meaningless – yes, meaningless – if he had not inflicted a mortal wound on the enemy while giving up his own life.

The significance of the cross is not just that Jesus laid down his life for us, but that he defeated the enemy of our souls in the process. It was on the cross that he crushed the head of the serpent. It was on the cross that “he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15).

The cross represented a cosmic showdown between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and our commanding general claimed the ultimate prize by defeating our unseen enemy and liberating an entire planet from his bondage.

We rightly honor those who give up their lives to save their comrades. It’s about time we started also honoring those who kill bad guys.

Via Andrew Sullivan this is an interesting sermon about how Christ’s teachings are at core non-violent and got corrupted by money and power – i.e. the very things Jesus saw as corrupting followers of the Old Testament in his day. I’m not sure what he means by the church becoming “paganized” – “pagan” can be a catch-all term for “bad,” but it would seem more accurate that the Christian church became de-paganized during the time of Constantine.

Also from Greg Boyd in Myth of a Christian Nation regarding “An eye for an eye”:

The whole point of Jesus’ teaching is to tell disciples that their attitude toward “enemies” should be radically different. “If you do good to those who do good to you,” Jesus added, “what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same” (Luke 6:33). Everybody instinctively hates those who hate them and believes they are justified killing people who might kill them or their loved ones. Jesus is saying “be radically different.”  This is why Jesus (and Paul) didn’t qualify the “enemies” or “evildoers” he taught us to love and not violently oppose.  Jesus didn’t say, “Love your enemies until they threaten you, until it seems justified to resort to violence, or until it seems impractical to do so.”  Enemies are enemies precisely because they threaten us on some level, and it always seems justified and practically expedient to resist them, if not harm them when necessary.  Jesus simply said, “Love your enemies” and “Don’t resist evildoers.”  Note that some of the people he was speaking to would before long confront “enemies” who would feed them and their families to lions for amusement.

Points out how corrupt it was for Bush to refer to terrorists as evildoers – and also not entirely an accident.  Nor was “crusade.”  That said, total non-violent resistance to a terrorist armed with 1000 nuclear bombs, for example, doesn’t entirely make sense either.  Unless…the afterlife exists, we’ll all move on regardless, so Godly non-violence always makes sense.  But when you match this up with Jesus saying things like, “Don’t marry a divorced lady,” he’s as full of weird laws as anyone.

One thing is clear – anyone who holds up Jesus as the front for any kind of righteous army resides in the Dark Ages. And it makes a very compelling case that the far right’s vision of religion parallels the Roman view of religion before it fell. Note to America: the far right just won the most recent election.

Lest there be any confusion where Jesus stands – as this mainly references the Old Testament – this comes from a page called Reasons Skeptics should consider Christianity:

Jesus believed that the Old Testament was divinely inspired, the veritable Word of God. He said, “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). He referred to Scripture as “the commandment of God” (Matthew 15:3) and as the “Word of God” (Matthew 15:6). He also indicated that it was indestructible: “Until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the law, until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5:18). Notice that he mentions even the words and letters!

When dealing with the people of His day, whether it was with the disciples or religious rulers, Jesus constantly referred to the Old Testament: “Have you not read that which was spoken to you by God?” (Matthew 22:31); “Yea; and have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babes thou hast prepared praise for thyself’?” (Matthew 21:16, citing Psalm 8:2); and “Have you not read what David did?” (Matthew 12:3). Examples could be multiplied to demonstrate that Jesus was conversant with the Old Testament and its content. He quoted from it often and He trusted it totally.

There’s a lot more to it than that: a primer on Jesus’ view of the Old Testament. Basically, he thought Moses’ law was replacing true faith. And I’ve got to agree with him on that. While I was married, we lived across from an Orthodox Jewish couple (in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood) who would often ask me to come over to turn their lights off on a Friday night, as if it would absolve them the responsibility of “working” on the Sabbath if they got someone else to do it. This type of adherence to Biblical law turns a person into an obsessive compulsive, not a devout follower of worthy ideals. So I get it when Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

“Fulfill” could be interpreted any number of ways. Either be “more accurately devout” or “improve on what’s written” – even if what’s written is the infallible word of God.  The teachings of Jesus are also law-based, if not at times stricter:

“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

In short, he seems to be offering interpretation of Moses’ law and how it has not been effectively implemented, not necessarily that Old Testament law is wrong. But with all things Bible, it can be interpreted in many ways to fit your worldview. Whatever the case – the Bible is a whole document, consisting of both books, and that it contains so many ideas that are against human worth means that people should take a much closer look at this book that runs the world.