General News

Does God Have a Future?

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[youtube: video=”h5qeIcJrajs”]
If you like the most recent issue of Tikkun Magazine “God and the 21st Century” you might enjoy watching this recent debate called “Does God have a Future?” While heavyweights Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston make the case for God and religion Sam Harris and Michael Shermer try and deconstruct Chopra’s “woo-woo” language to quote Shermer. While you probably know that Chopra and Houston are not defending the God of Pat Robertson or any particular religion, for Harris and Shermer any talk of God and religion is problematic. They take aim at Chopra when he conflates terms like non-locality and infinity with spirituality. On the other hand sparks fly when Chopra-fueled by a long standing feud with Shermer accuses him of being an extreme scientific reductionist.

General News

Hitchens Updates the Ten Commandments

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Christopher Hitchens critiques the Ten Commandments and updates them for the 21st century. What do you think? What would your Ten Commandments look like? [youtube: video=”v/l_lM61aDyPg&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6″]

General News

Hitchens on Buddhist Atheism

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Christopher Hitchens has an interesting praiseworthy comment for Stephen Batchelor’s new book “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist:”
“The human thirst for the transcendent, the numinous – even the ecstatic – is too universal and too important to be entrusted to the cultish and the archaic and the superstitious. In this honest and serious book of self-examination and critical scrutiny, Stephen Batchelor adds the universe of Buddhism to the many fields in which received truth and blind faith are now giving way to ethical and scientific humanism, in which lies our only real hope.” Mark Vernon reviews Batchelors new book and reflects on Hitchens statement. In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared in 2007.

General News

Modern Day Slavery Museum Debuts

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I lived in Naples, FL for over eight years and never realized that there were human slaves toiling in the agricultural fields less than 45 minutes away. This is the case for much of the population of Naples, one of the wealthiest towns in America and the only city in the world that has two Ritz Carltons in it — the beach and golf resorts. Furthermore, it is the case for much of America. While the trendy green movement has led us to scrutinize trans fats and demand hybrid cars we haven’t paid enough attention to where our food comes from. When I was 21 years old I visited Immokalee for the first time and began volunteering with a local organization that provided much needed goods and services to the community.

General News

Christian Hegemony: The Power of Language

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“You’re either with us or against us.” – from Matthew 12:30
“Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”- Antonia De Nebrija
I recommend checking out the latest booklet from Paul Kivel called “The Language of Dominant Christianity” (available as a downloadable PDF for only $3.50 or as a book for $4.95.) It is a short (85 page) A-Z dictionary of common vocabulary words in the English language that reveal how Christianity has influenced our thinking. In addition to defining a comprehensive list of words (64 pages) Kivel provides a section on “word groups” and points out how certain terms are found within our criminal/legal system, notions of morality, racial understandings, educational ideals and political ideology. And in the first part Kivel provides the context of why it is important to analyze and examine the Christian roots of our language. This booklet is one part of Kivel’s latest project to name Christian dominance as one of the many systems of oppression.

Humanism

Why Atheists Choose Religion

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The idea “to be religious is to be a theist” as Christopher Hitchens stated in his debate with Lorenzo Albacete is a quite ethnocentric claim. It is true that in the West we have often associated a theistic God with religion, but this neglects Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and numerous religious traditions which have adopted a deistic, pantheistic, panentheistic or other understanding of God. And as I pointed out in my critique of Hitchens last week, Unitarian Universalism contains 19% of people who identify as atheist/agnostic. In the over 140 comments I received from my post “Christopher Hitchens: The Orthodox Protestant Atheist” both on the Tikkun site and in the version crossposted on Alternet.org there was both surprise and disbelief that atheists could be religious leaders. I described how I am in seminary at Starr King School for the Minstry studying alongside atheists and agnostics who are in training to become religious leaders and ministers.

Humanism

Christopher Hitchens: The Orthodox Protestant Atheist

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Despite having engaged in numerous debates with Christians, Muslims and Jews across the liberal/conservative spectrum Christopher Hitchens still holds to an amazingly ignorant understanding of the liberal religious heritage. His understanding of who is and who isn’t a Christian is perhaps the most disappointing and surprising piece of evidence for his myopic interpretation of religion. While rejecting conservative Christians’ theological claims about God, the Bible and Jesus, he accepts their understanding of who is and is not able to be considered a Christian. In a recent interview with Marilyn Sewell, a Unitarian Universalist minister and self-professed liberal Christian, Christopher Hitchens paraphrased C.S. Lewis to explain the boundaries of who constitutes a Christian. It’s not surprising then that a recent blog post by Dr. Ray Pritchard of “Keep Believing Ministries” for a conservative Christian site called Crosswalk was entitled, “Christopher Hitchens Gets it Exactly Right.”

General News

The Disturbing but Common Christian Morality Of Pat Robertson

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Pat Robertson’s latest claim that God punished Haiti for making a pact with the devil was rightly condemned by religious and political leaders across the spectrum. However, there is an irony here in that many of those leaders or religious laypeople who saw the cruelty in Robertson’s remark actually share his same underlying theology which is as equally disturbing. The disagreement lies in the timing and particular expression of the theology, but the essence of Robertson’s cruel statement is shared by many of those religious people who condemned it. The problem for many was not Robertson’s God–one that is insensitive, cruel and sadistic but rather it was the specific reason he posited for God allowing or commanding what “he” did. But let’s be clear–many people believe that God did have a reason for allowing the quake–albeit different than Robertson’s.

Rethinking Religion

Ten Spiritual Quotes for 2010

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Below are some of my favorite quotes on a variety of different spiritual themes. I find it useful to reflect upon them as I think about the upcoming year. May you find wisdom and inspiration. Presence
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.

Christianity

Resources for the Radical Dr. King

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The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. – Dr. King

If Americans permit thought-control, business control, and freedom control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism. – Dr. King
Video interview with Dr. King (apologies for the 30 second ad at the start, it’s worth waiting it out):

We don’t talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enough.