If Our Founding Fathers Were All Christians, Why Did They Say This?

Nobody can deny the fact that Christianity has played a huge role in our history. From the first Thanksgiving to the ideas of Jesus Christ that are embroidered in our culture today, Christianity and the Bible is responsible a big part of our heritage.

However, many conservatives will take this fact way out of context. They'll think that you have to be a Christian to be patriotic, which is simply not true. Following the more secular teachings of Jesus Christ (being charitable, loving one another, treating strangers with kindness) is what the men who founded this country were for.

I don't want to waste my time listing all these obscurant far-right arguments, so instead I'll list the facts straight from our forefathers.  READ MORE

You Cannot Be A Republican And A Christian

No one in American life today proclaims their allegiance to Christ more conspicuously than those who have rejected most of what Christ actually taught: Republicans. The modern Republican Party’s hell-bent embodiment of nearly everything Christ warned against has become so serious that we have to call it out. You cannot be a Republican and a Christian.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, maybe even as recently as the early 1990s, when to support the Republican Party was not altogether evil. And further back, of course, things were even more different. As Garrison Keillor once reminisced, Republicans used to be:

moderate, business-minded civic boosters and unapologetic patriots who were the linchpins and bulwarks of small towns across the Midwest, the enthusiastic backers of projects for the civic good, usually in partnership with the town liberals (the librarian, the bar owner, a lawyer or two, the Methodist minister, the banker’s wife). These Republicans were uniters and diehard optimists and persons of compassionate conscience, inveterate doers of good deeds.

Even today, there are probably some Republicans who still fit that description. The problem is that they are for all practical purposes invisible in American public life, and if their party found out about them, they would be hounded out of it. If they dared to compete in the lunatic talent show of Republican primary politics, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

The reason that you cannot be a Republican and a Christian is that today’s Republican Party doesn’t appear to stand for anything but what Christ strenuously rejected, like organized violence, self-righteous division, and greed. To say the least, this is hard to square with Christ’s teachings and example. I am not a Christian, and I’m certainly no Biblical scholar, but you don’t have to be. It’s not hard to tell the difference between who is and isn’t really a Christian, and Republicans, you’re not.
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This Changes Everything - Obama's Martian Gayness

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Rumors of President Obama's secret gay Martian past emanate from a top-secret government space teleportation program. (07:37)

Is Religion a Rorschach Test?

Photo Credit: Brian A Jackson/ Shutterstock.com

Religious texts can be interpreted in an almost infinite variety of ways. What do different religious beliefs tell us about the believers?

July 16, 2012

Talk to a hundred different believers about what God is like, and you'll get a hundred different answers.

Take, as the most familiar example to most Westerners, Christianity. Ask one Christian about what God is like, and she'll tell you of a strict, punitive authority figure: a creator and enforcer of rules, with clear ideas of right and wrong, a firm expectation that everybody should follow them -- and harsh, intractable punishment for those who don't toe the line.

Ask another Christian, and you get a different picture entirely: a loving parent, occasionally firm but mostly gentle and supportive, giving you lots of latitude to find your own path, who only wants you to be happy and to be your own best self.

Other Christians -- notably deists and theistic evolutionists -- see God as a sort of hands-off manager: initially founding the business of the Universe, intervening now and then to make sure things run smoothly, but mostly just sitting back and letting his creation run itself. And still others see God as an impersonal abstraction, an intellectual ideal, the encapsulation in metaphysical form of ideals such as love and morality.

Why do these images of God vary so much?  READ MORE

Six Reasons We Can't Change The Future Without Progressive Religion

Often, religion offers much that progressives need to build movements for change.

July 8, 2012

One of the great historical strengths of the progressive movement has been its resolute commitment to the separation of church and state. As progressives, we don't want our government influenced by anybody's religious laws. Instead of superstition and mob id, we prefer to have real science, based in real data and real evidence, guiding public policy. Instead of holy wars, othering, and social repression -- the inevitable by-products of theocracy -- we think that drawing from the widest possible range of philosophical traditions makes America smarter, stronger, and more durable over time.

That said: while we all want a government free of religion, there are good reasons that we may not want our own progressive movement to be shorn of every last spiritual impulse. In fact, the history of the progressive movement has shown us, over and over, that there are things that the spiritual community brings to political movements that are essential for success, and can't easily be replaced with anything else.

Religion has been central to the formation of human communities -- and to how we approach the future -- for as long as homo sapiens has been around. Apart from God-belief (which varies widely between religions), all successful religions thrive and endure because they offer their adherents a variety of effective community-building, social activism, and change management tools that, taken together, make religion quite possibly the most powerful social change technology humans have ever developed.

What does religion offer that progressives need to make our movement work?  READ MORE

Do People Get Less Religious When Societies Grow More Egalitarian?

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard

When countries embrace progressive social policy, that tends to create a decline in religious belief. Why?

June 25, 2012

Slowly but surely, religion’s historical monopoly on the human mind is breaking apart. On its surface, the reason seems straightforward: the rise of secular democracy and especially of scientific understanding should encourage more people to give up on religion.

In fact, recent research from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago shows that the picture worldwide is much more complex than that. While atheism is on the rise in many places in the world, others are seeing a rise in religiosity, creating a situation where the levels of belief and non-belief vary wildly depending on culture. A lot of it has to do with history and culture, but one intriguing thread can be pulled from the picture, which is that there seems to be a strong correlation between high rates of atheism and countries that prioritize economic equality and make higher investments in a strong social safety net, such as France and the Netherlands.

Could liberal policies help create non-believers? Previous research indicates that when countries embrace progressive social policy, that tends to create a decline in religious belief. The theory, often called the “secularization thesis” is that the combination of good education of its citizens and the fact that citizens can rely on the government instead of the church for poverty relief means that more people will turn away from religion. But could the reasons go deeper than that? Few people base their choice of whether to believe in God or not on something as simple as whether they can go to the church or the state in times of need. Perhaps it’s more that economic insecurity itself increases the desire to believe in God. And if atheists want to minimize the power religion plays in society, should they start by demanding a more secure and egalitarian society?  READ MORE

At GOP Debate, CNN Sucks Up to Candidates, Letting Racism and Misogyny Slide

In Arizona, the answers given by the presidential contenders mattered less the questions never asked.

In the seemingly endless series of debates between the Republican presidential candidates that has so far marked the 2012 campaign, debate #20, at the Mesa County Arts Center in Arizona, where the state G.O.P. will hold its presidential primary next week, was something of a dud. There were no moon colonies or $2.4 trillion "blank" checks or "oops" moments. No applause for executions or booing of gay soldiers. Well, okay, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich did accuse President Barack Obama of voting, while in the Illinois state legislature, to "legalize infanticide" (because of Obama's vote against a bill designed to chip away at abortion rights), but that's about as crazy as it got.

It should have been a whole lot crazier, revealing once again the derangement of the 21st-century Republican Party, but moderator CNN moderator John King apparently thought it his job not to challenge the candidates too terribly hard, lest he be derided as a member of the media elite. So "elite" was one thing King proved he certainly was not -- at least not in the realm of debate moderators.

Now pulling ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the national polls, former U.S. senator Rick Santorum saw his position in the debate line-up change, occupying the center stage with Romney. 

Santorum has not failed to make news in the last several weeks, as his opposition to the use of birth control has come to light, not to mention the resurfacing, thanks to Right Wing Watch, of a 2008 speech he delivered at Ave Maria University in which he claimed that Satan, "the father of lies," had set his sights on the United States, and that explained why universities were teaching bad things and why mainline Protestant churches were no longer really Christian.    READ MORE

Gingrich to Obama: ‘Respect our religion,’ not ‘every other religion’

By David Edwards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012 10:45 EST

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says he’s had it with President Barack Obama “respecting every other religion on the planet,” and thinks it’s time for him to “respect our religion” instead.
At a campaign event in Florida on Monday, Gingrich seized on letters read at Catholic Churches across the U.S. that condemned the Obama administration for making birth control more available to women.

“Callista and I were at mass last night, and I believe at every Catholic Church, they are reading a letter about the Obama administration’s attack on Christianity,” Gingrich explained. “This is a fundamental assault on the freedom of religion. … If you help me win the nomination and then you help me win the election, on the very first day I’m inaugurated, I will sign an executive order repealing every Obama attack on religion across the entire government.”   READ MORE

What Kind of Christianity Is This?

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's bellicose rants against Iran
and the 'Marxist cancer' he sees in the Americas have
made him a fan-favorite among Evangelicals,
05/19/11. (photo: AP)

By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News

28 January 12

rom time to time, I read about condemnations of religion coming from non-religious groups, especially concerning the all-too-common violence perpetrated in the name of religious gods. Indeed there is plenty to condemn.

Altogether too many religions sects of both major and minor religions, despite verbally professing a desire for peace and justice in the world, are actually pro-war, pro-homicide and pro-violence in practice (or they may be silent on the subject, which is, according to moral theology, the same as being pro-violence).

Obvious examples include those portions of the three major war-justifying religions of the world: fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity.

I use the term fundamentalist in the sense that the religious person, who ascribes to a fundamentalist point of view, believes, among other dogmatic belief, that their scriptures are inerrant and thus they can find passages in their holy books that justify homicidal violence against their perceived or fingered enemies, while simultaneously ignoring the numerous contradictory passages that forbid violence and homicide and instead prescribe love, hospitality, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation. 

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Once Again, Believers Have it Wrong: Atheists Don't Just Want Sex, Drugs, and Lack of Morality

As much as religion's defenders would like us to believe otherwise, there is no non-human moral authority.

January 23, 2012

The death of Christopher Hitchens last month sparked an outpouring of tributes. Most of them praised his best qualities: his ferocious courage, his seemingly effortless erudition, and his crusading defense of free speech and rationalism. 

Of course, he had his faults as well -- most notably his support for the Iraq war -- and I was happy to see that relatively few of the eulogies, even those written by his personal friends, overlooked or excused this. Given how averse Hitchens himself was to whitewashing the lives of the deceased, I have no doubt that this is how he would have wanted it.

There was one item, however, that caught my attention -- this column in the New York Times, which had the following line: 

Of course, he took on God, a dangerous occupation in the United States, declaring him not great and religion the product of a time when nobody "had the smallest idea what was going on." Like Einstein, he viewed ethics as "an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it," a position that sparked conflict with his journalist brother, Peter, who has argued that, "For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself." READ MORE

Bush's Faith-Based Gravy Train

By Howard Bess January 25, 2009 Editor’s Note: When the American Right began its dramatic rise in the early 1980s, one of its early slogans was “Defund the Left” — by gutting government-funded social programs managed by liberal organizations. Two decades later, George W. Bush’s administration went further, into “Funding the Right.” In this guest essay, Rev. Howard Bess looks at how Bush institutionalized these political subsidies under the umbrella of his faith-based initiatives: During the presidential tenure of George W. Bush, a very significant, largely unnoticed organizational innovation took place. I am not writing about the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security is very visual. Anyone who travels is aware of Homeland Security. The agency has become a reluctantly accepted fact of American life. Rather I am writing about the Bush administration’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative. With little scrutiny the U.S. government has fundamentally changed its approach to meeting the needs of Americans who are poor or in need of some sort of public help. READ MORE

Obama's Religion Problem: White House Funnels Money to Discriminatory Religious Groups

Photo Credit: Official White House Photo/Pete Souza

Taxpayer dollars are continuing to be dispensed to religious groups via a secretive and controversial government office.

May 13, 2011

This article originally appeared in Conscience magazine, published by Catholics for Choice.

After President Barack Obama gave a congratulatory shout-out to Joshua DuBois, director of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFBNP), at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Georgetown University religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau wondered in the pages of the Washington Post "what exactly that office is doing -- a never-ending source of confusion, and even awe, among reporters, policy analysts and professors in Washington, DC."

Berlinerblau compared the OFBNP to the Kremlin -- apparently because of its ironclad hold on information about its activities, which are frequently reduced to cheery blog posts on the White House website extolling the virtues of faith-based provision of social services to people in need, but rarely addressing the thornier controversies that plague its mission.

Beneath its do-gooder exterior, the White House has taken few steps that have allayed the concerns of both advocates of church-state separation concerned about the OFBNP's constitutionality and advocates of transparency and accountability. Meanwhile, as taxpayer dollars continue to be dispensed to faith-based organizations, it is still unclear how an executive order Obama signed in November 2010, which set out new requirements intended to reduce some constitutional concerns, will actually be implemented.

Obama first launched the OFBNP in February 2009, shortly after taking office. At the time, he mostly kept policies from the Bush administration in place, including maintaining the arrangement of having a faith-based office in the White House, as well as offices in twelve federal agencies. Religious contractors and grantees would continue to receive federal funding under the "level playing field," a Bush-era term meaning that faith-based organizations would not be at a disadvantage relative to secular organizations in applying for federal funds. In one major change, Obama created an advisory council, to be made up of religious and community service leaders, to develop recommendations on how to improve the functioning of the office and increase partnerships between the government and faith-based groups in addressing societal problems.
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The Santa Delusion: Why 'Religion Is Useful' Is a Terrible Argument For Religion

The argument from utility -- the defense of religion, not because it's true, but because it's psychologically or socially useful -- is freakishly common.
July 29, 2011 |

"But religion is useful. It makes people happy. It comforts people in hard times. It makes people better-behaved. And losing religious faith can be traumatic. So what difference does it make if it isn't true? Shouldn't we be perpetuating it anyway -- or at least leaving it alone? Why do you want to persuade people out of it?"

Atheists hear this a lot. The argument from utility -- the defense of religion, not because it's true, but because it's psychologically or socially useful -- is freakishly common. If you spend any time reading debates in atheist blogs or forums, you're bound to see it come up.
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