LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I really like Spong. He tells it like it is. This Daily Kos post talks about Spong's latest comments about the misuse of the Bible by the religious supremacists.

Political pulpit: The Bible as weapon in the culture war

By John Shelby Spong

May 15, 2005

In recent years the Bible has emerged as a major force in the political arena.

For example, devotees of the Scriptures have quoted this sacred source to justify religious support for the war in Iraq. In fundamentalist Christian communities this war is seen as bringing peace to the Middle East and securing Israel's establishment, which they believe are the conditions for the coming of "the rapture" and thus the end of the world.

It is worth noting that part of the code language used by these millenarians is that in the rapture "no child is left behind!"

The Bible regularly is quoted by conservative Christians to argue that what they call "the homosexual lifestyle" is contrary to Scripture. Politically this takes the form of seeking to amend the Constitution to discriminate against our citizens who are gay or lesbian.

In this basic charter nearly every previous attempt at amendment has been to expand freedom. Now these Bible quoters want to reverse that trend, failing to see that if today's majority can amend the Constitution to discriminate, then no one is safe from tomorrow's majority.

In recent weeks the Bible has been at the center of the debate focusing on end of life decisions.

No less a person than Rep. Tom DeLay, the majority leader in the House of Representatives, has attacked people seeking to follow their loved ones' advanced directives to withdraw artificial life-support systems.

Our nation's judiciary has been called "anti-religious."

When leaders seek to intimidate the presumably independent courts, the first step toward a totalitarian government has been taken.

The Supreme Court has been called "anti-religious" by blocs of Christian voters, Catholic and Protestant, because it has not been willing to overturn Roe vs. Wade. In that campaign the high court has been labeled as anti-life, anti-God and ultraliberal.

Are these critics not aware that seven of the nine Justices on this Supreme Court were the appointees of conservative Republican administrations? Are we to believe that to be religious or Christian is to stand politically to the right of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush?

I find two things abhorrent in these clearly related incidences.

First, the idea that citizens with a particular religious position can seek to impose their religious agenda on the whole body politic violates everything I believe about the separation of church and state.

I want the religious beliefs of all our citizens to be respected and their right to practice their religious values in their own way to be protected by law, and I do not want the particular religious beliefs of any part of this nation imposed on the rest of the people by law. The very reason this nation was founded must not be compromised by the zealotry of some of our citizens.

Second, as a believing and practicing Christian who exercises public leadership in a recognized Christian institution, I am appalled at how little of the biblical scholarship of the last 200 years has entered the minds of members of this new generation of would-be religious leaders, to say nothing of our citizens.

Is it rational, for example, to assert that a book that we now know was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 135, is in fact the eternal and unchanging "Word of God?"

Does a moral God send a series of plagues on the Egyptians or stop the sun in the sky to allow more daylight so that Joshua can continue to slaughter his enemies? Should a book be called the "Word of God" when it calls for homosexuals to be executed, defines women as property, approves of slavery and suggests that Jews ought to be persecuted?

The Bible inevitably reveals in its pages the common assumptions of the time in which it was written. It believes that the Earth is the center of the universe and that God lives above the sky, keeping the divine record books current on the chosen people's behavior and intervening on occasion to open the Red Sea, pour down manna from heaven and dictate the 10 Commandments.

It reflects a time in history when people knew nothing of germs, viruses or tumors and treated sickness as if it were divine punishment that could be offset by offering sacrifices to please the angry Deity.

Demons of the unknown

Whatever did not fit into their categories of knowledge they regarded as supernatural miracles. Epilepsy, they believed, was caused by demon possession and deaf muteness by the devil tying the tongue of the victim.

Many of the liturgical practices of the church today continue to encourage this premodern mentality. In liturgy, the Bible is carried in procession elevated above the people to elicit acts of devotion. When its words are read in worship they are introduced or concluded with some reference to the claim that they are the "Word of God."

People quote its verses in debate to prove that their perspective is in fact God's will. Hands are laid on this book when we vow to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Today we are experiencing the Bible being used by religious and political leaders to enable them to define the morality of birth control, abortion, racial and sexual discrimination and even acts of aggression against our "enemies."

To oppose this mentality, they not so subtly assert, is to oppose God and thus to be anti-religious. These are nothing less than the steps people take on the road to transforming a democracy into a theocracy, which is to walk in the direction of the cruelest form of government that human beings have devised.

Theocracies always turn demonic because they justify everything in the name of God. [Emphasis mine- ed]

Non-religious people and people whose religious tradition is different from the prevailing point of view should be alarmed at these trends, especially when their voices, raised in protest, are dismissed as anti-Christian.

That is why I urge those who like myself are Christians, steeped in this religious tradition that we love, to speak publicly in powerful opposition to this current use of religious power.

Varied religious voices need to remind the leaders of this nation that no single person speaks for and no single perspective captures the ultimate truth of God.

All any of us can ever do is to "see through a glass darkly." There is no single pathway into the realm of God, and no eternal code of unchanging truth has ever been captured in any revered book of antiquity.

The Bible did not drop from heaven fully written.

A tribal text

It is rather a record of a particular people's attempt to walk through history making sense out of their experience of the divine. The Bible begins in a prejudiced mentality in which one ancient tribe assumes that its God is bound by the limits of its tribal views.

This story grows, however, until it reaches a consciousness that acknowledges all people as God's people. It transcends the portrait of a prejudiced deity when people hear God say "love your enemies, bless those who curse you."

It escapes the texts that denigrate those who are different and calls its readers to learn that in the God experience there is no division of ethnicity, gender or economic servitude that can finally be sustained.

God is no tribal chief

It explodes the primitive image of God as a supernatural tribal chief leading the people in acts of vengeance and ultimately reaches a place where God is viewed as analogous to the life-giving wind, identified with the transforming power of love and seen as calling all people into the fullness of their being.

That is when our faith story ceases to be subservient to its tribal origins and reaches toward a universality in which our God is seen as beyond every barrier and boundary.

The Bible: a weapon to enforce conformity to a narrow religious mentality?

No! The Bible I read quotes the Jesus I serve as saying that he came so that all might have life and have it abundantly.

----------

John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., is the author of the recently published "The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love" from HarperCollins and other books and essays on belief. www.johnshelbyspong.com

I want to highlight something he said in the body of this essay, something that reflects the purpose of this, and many other boards that are starting to turn up online:

Theocracies always turn demonic because they justify everything in the name of God.

Non-religious people and people whose religious tradition is different from the prevailing point of view should be alarmed at these trends, especially when their voices, raised in protest, are dismissed as anti-Christian.

That is why I urge those who like myself are Christians, steeped in this religious tradition that we love, to speak publicly in powerful opposition to this current use of religious power.

Varied religious voices need to remind the leaders of this nation that no single person speaks for and no single perspective captures the ultimate truth of God.

If we do not remind them about this, and if we do not act to halt their steamrolling over our rights, they will take over. They are a minority. We must remember that. But they have systematically climbed into power, using deliberately deceptive means to get good Christians to ride along and fund them, and to disguise their real goals- until now. Their triumphalism has revealed their hand. Are we going to let them walk in and destroy what we've had for 229 years? It's up to us, and others like us, to say, "Wait a minute! Your vision is not mine!" Do we have the courage to stand up to them and their fear and hate? They might listen to fellow Christians before they listen to a Jew or a Pagan. Let's get the word out.