Us without them

I don't remember what prompted this conclusion. I've been thinking for a while now about evolution and survival of the fittest and how that relates to some people having the need to feel superiority over others. A white person in the South may be at the bottom of the economic and social ladder but they can think At least I'm better than those black people. (Yes, I do know what word the white person would have really said.) Fundies sneer at outsiders I'm saved and you're not! The rich change laws to suck up even more cash. Straight kids bully gay kids.

Apparently, I'm partly right. Newsweek has an excerpt from the book The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson. According to his research we have a very strong drive to form groups with the desire that our group dominates other groups. It isn't me v. him, but us v. them. We will even sacrifice for the group in ways that don't make evolutionary sense.

This drive to be in the dominant group can be satisfied by "symbolic victory on ritualized battlefields: that is, sports." Some fans are quite exuberant when their team wins. Whatever group we form (even when formed randomly for the sake of an experiment) there is almost an immediate bias for the group members and against non-members. There is hostility when the other groups appears to encroach on the in-group's territory.

So I'll update my conclusion above. People want to be in the winning group. Southern whites as a whole want to feel superior and feel hostile when their territory is taken over by blacks. Religious people feel threatened when their cultural superiority fades. Straights feel threatened when gays refuse to be closeted. Patriots appear everywhere when terrorism strikes. And strife between nations has been continuous. Yes, says Wilson, our drive to be in the dominant group may mean war won't end, though it might mean border skirmishes rather than world-wide conflagrations. The article ends this way:

Civilization appears to be the ultimate redeeming product of competition between groups. Because of it, we struggle on behalf of good and against evil, and reward generosity, compassion, and altruism while punishing or downplaying selfishness. Bit if group conflict created the best in us, it also created the deadliest. As humans, this is our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance.

According to my religion and ethics I have a goal of working against this tendency. Even when I form groups I don't want it to be for domination. I want the us without the them.

The print edition has a series of six photos taken of fans outside a variety of music concerts. The fans look alarmingly similar, especially the spiked hair fans of Casualties, essentially highlighting the article's point. Alas, the online edition has only three of these photos, though the spiky hair is there.

In the same issue of Newsweek Andrew Sullivan has the cover story about The Forgotten Jesus. Too many of us invoke Jesus to reinforce our position -- lay claim to being in the dominant group striving against some opponent. This is a misuse of what Jesus said and did.

Sullivan has two examples. The first is Thomas Jefferson who created what we know as the Jefferson Bible. Jefferson discarded all the claims of divinity because that got fused with power and created wars and pogroms. Instead, he focused on the words of Jesus: love your enemies, give up wealth. And definitely give up power because that is only effective under the threat of violence.

The second example is Francis of Assisi, who gave up wealth and power to serve others. While I admire that I found Francis suffered from the prevailing idea at the time that a person had to be self-loathing to be holy. Going that far strikes me as damaging to mental health.

This is the heart of Sullivan's comments:

The saints, after all, became known as saints not because of their success in fighting political battles, or winning a few news cycles, or funding an anti-abortion super PAC. They were saints purely and simply because of the way they lived.

Isn't the King James bible conservative enough?

One wonders if some of the loudest Fundies have actually read the bible. It's easy to believe the woman in the pew hasn't because she's been told one must read it correctly, with correct understanding, so perhaps it's best we just tell you what it says. It appears a Fundie or two has read the bible -- and is annoyed with what they find inside. That can be the only reason for The Conservative Bible, a project to purge the bible of liberal bias -- perhaps an inverse of the Jefferson Bible. Wait -- isn't the bible supposedly the inerrant word of God? Gotta get that irony alarm fixed. Here are 10 guidelines for how to make the bible more conservative:

1. Provide a strong framework to support translation without liberal bias.
2. Don't emasculate, don't use gender inclusion.
3. Don't dumb down -- some modern translations are at a 7th grade level (oh, yeah, the guy in the pew isn't going to read it).
4. Use conservative terms for words that have drifted in meaning (such as "peace").
5. Combat addition. They didn't "cast lots," they "gambled."
6. Emphasize the logic of Hell.
7. Express parables in their full free-market meaning.
8. Exclude liberal passages that were added later -- "Forgive them for they know not what they do."
9. Credit the open-mindedness of the disciples.
10. Use concise terms rather than liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio.

All that prompts an essay discussing the how difficult it is to get the bible from the original Hebrew and Greek (starting from which text to select) into modern English -- and then the perils in interpreting and understanding whatever you end up with.

Even through distortions and contradictions

My friend and debate partner lives up to the second half of his honorary title as he takes me to task for some sloppy thinking -- or maybe an attempt at making a logical jump that only fellow Christians would follow (my debate partner is Jewish). So he stands with wet noodles in hand ready to commence flogging.

"...the Christian Church is the only voice in our society that talks about God..."

Say what??!!! Sometimes you really puzzle me.

Just about everyone talks about God. Certainly, a vast spectrum of religious groups that can not be described as "the Christian Church" talk about God or a Higher Being or Great Spirit, etc.etc.etc. Even atheists talk about God as the, uh, entity? force? philosophy? thing? that they don't believe in.

And who or what is "the Christian Church" that has a "voice"? "The" implies a single, unique entity. It's my impression as an outsider that there is precious little, perhaps nothing, that all the various Christian groups agree about. Who or what is the legitimate voice of "the Christian Church"?

Yes, well deserved criticisms of my writing. Setting jokes aside, let's see if I can explain what I was trying to say.

I have a particular and personal concept of the Christian God, based on my understanding of the bible and personal religious experiences. I try to make this understanding central to the way I act, especially in the way I treat other people. It is the main reason why I go serve supper to a bunch of gay young adults of a different race each week. I look for this understanding to be reflected in the Christian Church that I'm a part of.

Some aspects of that concept of God include a directive to treat everyone with respect and compassion, a directive to be inclusive of all people, a directive to attempt to meet the basic needs of others, an offering from relief from grief and guilt, an offering of spiritual companionship, and offering of wholeness of body, mind, and spirit. Obviously, I have my own way of describing Christian concepts.

Starting with that, I usually don't pay much attention to the voices from completely different spiritual traditions (Buddhist, Islam, Hindu) and only mutter a little bit against those that claim there is no God.

But with the Christian Church -- in all its thousands of clamoring voices -- I've said a great deal. Many voices in the Christian Church also describe my personal concept of God and do it in a way the louder culture can hear. However, this blog is full of cases in which I rage against very loud Christian voices who contradict the message I believe the Christian Church should be presenting. But even through their distortions and contradictions these loud voices are at least talking about the Christian God. I wanted to say that while I say (or repeat) things that put the Christian Church in a bad light (and usually deservedly so) that doesn't diminish my belief in the Christian God these churches only partially describe. So perhaps the misunderstood sentence should have read in part "… the Christian Church is the only voice in our society that talks about the same God I believe in…"

My friend continues:

However, thank you for these very interesting Jefferson quotes. They certainly make your point. If I could travel in time, I would certainly visit with and listen closely to Jefferson, who also famously said:

"Every twenty years a revolution!"

Oh, how we need that vast national housecleaning of minds today!

I remember the "revolution" in 1968. Have we had one since?

An engine for enslaving

If Thomas Jefferson really intended America to be a Christian Nation (as the Fundies insist) would he have said:

The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves ... these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

That and some other quotes from the Founding Fathers have been collected for your reading pleasure.

I long ago separated what the bible and my faith says about Christianity and what the Christian church says what the faith is supposed to be. The two are frequently different. Even so, the Christian Church is the only voice in our society that talks about God, though it does so imperfectly. Jefferson is referring to that imperfection.

Applying scissors to the sacred text

Jack Rogers wrote the book Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church. It's on my list of books to buy, though at the moment I have a closet full of books I haven't read yet. This posting is an interview between Jack Rogers and Toby Rogers, the author's son and the book's editor.

While that is worthwhile, what caught my attention is one of the comments. That writer (an atheist) says that while it is good to make the Christian religion more gay-friendly (or at least less homophobic) there are still some problems. The big one is that the religion's source-text still has passages that are easily interpreted to condemn gays (we know this because of the extent they are used on us now). There will always be those who will interpret those words in the wrong way, the same way there will always be people who claim the bible says men are superior to women (though there aren't many non-Jews who demand we restore Kosher dietary laws). Once you edit the bible to remove those that condemn gays (and mention slavery, male superiority, etc.) and then add words that explicitly stress human rights, equality, and personal dignity, only then will this particular writer consider paying any attention to it.

Alas, I'd be very nervous about who claims authority for the rewrite -- unless it's perhaps me. ;-) But I would face condemnation from many who were equally convinced I had done it wrong. I don't need to be the author of another Jefferson Bible.

Hijacking the Jefferson Bible

My sister-in-law responded to my quotes from Jefferson, saying:

I see that you quote Thomas Jefferson, I hear that he edited the Bible, taking out parts that he didn't think were "truth"....If you ever see a copy let me know. That might be interesting reading. I'm sure that there were whole books not included. My grandfather did that, it was amusing, took out whole sections....

I had heard about Jefferson taking scissors to Bible, but it was only recently that I heard of the "Jefferson Bible," the published result. So I went looking for such a book and found it on Amazon.com. It appears he threw out all of the Old Testament, and from the New only kept the Gospels. From those he started with the birth of Jesus (not the annunciation), and ended with the death (not resurrection). In between, he removed all hints that Jesus was holy. The customer review section in the second half of the webpage contains a popular review that explains what Jefferson did. This describes Jefferson not as removing the parts of the Bible he didn't like but extracting a summary of the parts he did like.

Below that review is another that says to be very careful which edition you order (and not the paperback version) because it contains a foreword by William Murchison with endorsement by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition that claims the Jefferson Bible says exactly opposite of what is actually in the pages! For example, Murchison claims the book is an example of Jefferson's faith, how devoted a Christian he was (he was Deist, not Christian), that Jefferson created the book to demonstrate country was founded on Christian ideals, and that Jefferson disapproved of the separation of Church and State. Quite the hijack!