What's the US's largest Protestant denomination? The Southern Baptist Convention. If you want to make a bigoted remark about Islam or atheism, where do you go to do it? The Southern Baptist Convention.
Comments about Islam have generated controversy at past Southern Baptist meetings. In 2002, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, the Rev. Jerry Vines, called Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, a "demon-possessed pedophile." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Along comes Watergate criminal, Chuck Colson. Colson went to the clink after pleading no contest to obstruction of justice. In prison he found religion. Where does he go to make a bigoted remark about Islam? The Southern Baptist Convention:
Colson, 75, spoke at a conference that precedes the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which begins here Tuesday.
At one point, Colson said "Islam is a vicious, evil ... " and then before finishing the sentence, said, "Islamo-fascism is evil incarnate."
"Islamists," Colson said, "are very different. We will die for what we believe. They will kill for what they believe."
"The problem isn't terrorism," Colson said. "The problem is an ideology that is mixed with fascism ... We are in a long war, a long struggle."
Outside of the facile use of the fascist label -- something both the Left and Right are prone to do -- there is a conspicuous absence here of the Christo-, Judeo- and other cognate forms that would qualify as fascist as easily as the Islamist variety. Colson, himself, is no warm and fuzzy advocate of Spirituality and God-is-Love religion, either. In good Christo-fascist form, he makes these a target, too:
Colson also dismissed a burgeoning movement known as "the emergent church" - popular among younger Baptists and other evangelicals - as "abandoning the search for truth" in favor of "conversations in coffee shops." He instead pointed to the success of booming Third World Churches, which Colson said adhere to "pure orthodox truth."
I love it: "pure orthodox truth" (as Revealed by Charles Colson). But Islam is only one of the two dire threats the world faces. The other is militant atheism, which Colson warned was growing in popularity in the West (NB: as my mother would say, "From your lips into God's ear, Mr. Colson"):
"This is a virulent strain of atheism which seeks to destroy our belief system," Colson said.
I don't know exactly what belief system Colson refers to, but if it's the one that believes the earth is 6000 years old and was created in seven days by The Big Guy, it has a lot more to worry about than atheists. Like science, for example. Or are science and atheism the same thing?
Speaking of 6000 years or whatever it is humans have been around, the Reverend Billy Graham (or whoever it is who writes his column) made this comment last week in response to a question about atheism:
Atheism -- the belief that God doesn't exist -- is almost as old as the human race, and the arguments atheists used hundreds of years ago are the same ones they use today, with only slight modifications. (Billy Graham's column, via Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
The time scale here is amusing (hundreds of years), but the point is certainly true. Atheists -- people who didn't pay attention to or think about gods, goddesses, sprites, spirits, etc. -- have been around through recorded history. The basic reasons probably haven't changed much, either. It was a sensible way to live and the alternatives weren't sensible. It's a belief older than any religion. Even the Abrahamic version of monotheism is relatively new in terms of human history (OK, Mr. Colson disagrees, but then he also disagrees that religion in general is good; it has to be his religion). Religions, unlike atheism, also exist in more flavors than you can count.
Unfortunately they all tend to leave a bitter aftertaste.
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The fundies continue to bolster club membership by hyping scary threats. "Get the kids in the house, Sarah! There are atheists and muslims and non-fundamentalist christians out there!"
First; should I offend anyone "here," I do not apologize. My intention is not to offend any particular individual. I am "talking" about a thing, not addressing a "person." If you so choose to take offence...then, such is your choice.
"This is a virulent strain of atheism which seeks to destroy our belief system," Colson said.
Yes.
And the sooner, the better. For all of Humanity.
I sincerely wish that I could personally tell Colson that I am the perfect "poster boy," for the heathen atheist that his mother warned him about. I am completely unable to conjure up an image of a Christian fundamentalist (or Islamic, Jewish, etc.), without seeing the little banjo-strumming, Down's syndrome child...or the twisted, demented hillbilly, who sodomize's Ned Beatty, in the film version of the novel, "Deliverance," written by James Dickey. Dickey, by the way, was a very, very fine poet; endowed with a deep, and profound sense of "self," that allowed him to successfully transcend one of the most difficult barriers ever encountered by any great poet: clearly unveiling the "universal," through the instrument of the "personal." One common thread ties together all of the world's greatest poets...they do not avert their eyes, no matter what their vision might reveal to them. And that is why poetry is such a vastly harrowing, and terribly dangerous enterprise. Witness:
Pursuit from Under
by James Dickey
Often, in these blue meadows,
I hear what passes for the bark of seals
And on August week ends the cold of a personal ice age
Comes up through my bare feet
Which are trying to walk like a boy's again
So that nothing on earth can have changed
On the ground where I was raised.
The dark grass here is like
The pads of mukluks going on and on
Because I once burned kerosene to read
Myself near the North Pole
In the journal of Arctic explorers
Found, years after death, preserved
In a tent, part of whose canvas they had eaten
Before the last entry.
All over my father's land
The seal holes sigh like an organ,
And one entry carries more terror
Than the blank page that signified death
In 1912, on the icecap.
It says that, under the ice,
The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass
To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force
From the iron depths of cold water,
His shadow dwindling
Almost to nothing at all, then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead
To splinter the roof, to isolate seal or man
On a drifting piece of the floe
Which he can overturn.
If you run, he will follow you
Under the frozen pane,
Turning as you do, zigzagging,
And at the most uncertain of your ground
Will shatter through, and lean,
And breathe frankly in your face
An enormous breath smelling of fish.
With the lungs staining your air
You know the unsaid recognition
Of which the explorers died:
They had been given an image
Of how the downed dead pursue us.
They knew, as they starved to death,
That not only in the snow
But in the family field
The small shadow moves,
And under the bare feet in the summer:
That somewhere the turf will heave,
And the outraged breath of the dead,
So long held, will form
Unbreathably around the living.
The cows low oddly here
As I pass, a small bidden shape
Going with me, trembling like foxfire
Under my heels and their hooves.
I shall write this by kerosene,
Pitch a tent in the pasture, and starve.
At the heart of every religion, no matter its form, or how benign it may appear, is something very, very dark; deeply disturbed; and profoundly feral. It does not love you. Make no mistake. It only wants you.
When we began to emerge...when we started on the long journey out of the eternal abyss, "something" followed us. It follows us still. It is likely that it will never be left, trailing un-tethered, entirely in our wake. Laying down "the Cross," setting it adrift, is the true task of "taking up the Cross." I am persuaded that the fate of all Mankind hangs in the balance; we are no longer children, here. This place speaks to us with a clearer, truer voice, with each passing day. And it does not know how to lie. That is not in its nature. To close your eyes, and place your hands over your ears will do no good. That this place -- in which we all find ourselves -- is utterly indifferent, can be disturbing. That does not mean that it is evil, or that it intends us harm. It only means that it is indifferent. In the course of this necessary indifference, we all suffer acts of evil; and harm invariably pursues all of us. These things are offset, to a considerable extent, by selfless acts of kindness, and love.
For me, to act as though what my reason, and my senses have revealed to me, in the course of the last sixty-two years, are somehow ordained by some unnamable entity, would be the worst sort of immoral act; it would be the voluntary rejection of my "humanity." I cannot, and will not, do that. Ever. No threats of punishment, or promises of rewards, will ever change that. I do not fear anyone's Hell; and I have no desire, whatsoever, for their Heaven. Here is my place; this is my home; I have known much of what it offers, and I will know more, before it is over. And I will not look away. Ever.
The Carvaka date back at least 2600 years.
The interesting thing to my mind is that it seems like religions began from a place familiar to us atheists and you scientists: the observation of the natural world. Early humans observed the cycles of seasons and the moon and the movement of stars, and suffered the vagaries of weather and climate.
And they recorded the movements of the sun and moon; a thousand years ago, Native people in the Four Corners region built monuments showing they knew the 18 1/2 year cycle of the moon rising and setting further north or south along the horizon at the solstice (equinox?).
Those people, like the Stonehenge builders, like the pyramid builders, like the Aztecs, were adept at observing the physical phenomena of the world, in ways that we moderns can scarcely imagine doing for ourselves. And they all created fantastic narratives to explain and contain the natural phenomena which dominated their lives.
I'm not defending the narratives, and perhaps religions have never been entirely or even mostly benign, but it seems to me that something must have gone horribly wrong along the way for some modern religious movements to so strenuously reject observations of the natural world. I suspect that something may well be orthodoxy.
True, caia. Very tough, to lay this one down. Very hard. But I will tell you this: what you have seen, I know."IT."
And I do not prevaricate. The "beast" would not allow me to. It knows me; I know it. "We" shall prevail. I promise you.
It is very, very difficult to write this; because the outcome is uncertain, while the engagement is inevitable: We shall encounter "the beast;" and we must contend with it...that is a given. How, exactly, we shall go about this, will eventually determine the outcome. The stakes are huge.
,
Dylan: "It is very, very difficult to write this; because the outcome is uncertain, while the engagement is inevitable: We shall encounter "the beast;" and we must contend with it...that is a given. How, exactly, we shall go about this, will eventually determine the outcome. The stakes are huge."
Dylan, what the devil are you talking about?
Dylan: I wasn't addressing your comment, but Revere's post.
My point was that the meticulous collection of data was an intrinsic part of early religious observance. Indeed, if you wanted to argue for some social benefit of early religions, it might be the attention given to the natural world, allowing for better odds in hunting, gathering, planting, and harvesting. Could people have made such observations and gained such knowledge without a supernatural aspect? Sure. But humans often do best at retaining and passing on knowledge when it is wrapped in narrative, song, and ritual, especially in oral societies.
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at, unless it's that fear and a desire for/to control lie near the root of many religions. I'd agree, even if I think the fear predates the religion humans were prey before we were even humans. But, if you'll forgive me for saying so, your pronouncements strike me as rather foreboding and dire themselves, with more than a whiff of prophetic drama.