My Dear Mr Moses:
I read your article in Counterpunch (Jan 17) with with bemusement and frustration. Rev King was a rare abberation in the history of Christianity. In the main, Christians love peace like wolves love vegetarianism. I don’t have the answers — I barely have the questions. But I do know that the humans as an organism and an organisation will change and embrace peace only after they reject organised superstitious tyranny. Christianty is based on the notion that someone must lose for me to win, a value system that can never bring peace. Thanks, Jack
Aloha Mr Moses,
You are absolutely correct when you state that “a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.” Far too much time is spent deriding Christians, as if we were all of the Robertson/Falwell “Christianist” ilk. We’re not.
While I agree that Christian Zionists and other Fascists for Jesus deserve a real thumping, there are groups, like CMEP, and pastors like Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who are making (at least) a dent in the insanity, and doing so in a manner that jives with what they believe. Our support of these people could counter the nasty, hateful neocon version of Christianity spewed by the likes of Coulter, Delay, Dobson and of course Robertson and Blow Them All Away in the Name of the Lord Falwell.
Thanks for reminding the readers of CounterPunch that King was a Christian — and a radical. Reminds me of someone else.
K Lowell
Hawaii
Subject: Virgin Birth
Dear Greg: Maybe it’s because of the tendency to believe in, rather than to know, “truths,” that people are so easily misled. A guy heard a burning bush talking? And took its words to heart? And then people took the man seriously? Come now… And there are definitely WMD; and the “turris” hate our freedoms. And the moon is green cheese and that irresistable tingle in your naughty bits is bad bad bad–let’s have a “two minutes’ hate” (“1984”) instead of a real release. We are definitely doomed if people keep waiting for the Big Parent in the sky to protect them. Any real faith in one’s ability to handle life must, and does, come from within anyway: “God” helps those who help themselves; or as Islam says: tie the camel to the hitchin’ post (don’t just “trust” it to Allah) AND pray to Allah that all we be well. The great Christian believer (and questioner), Hermann Hesse, said in his book, “Demian”, that “…we create gods, and they bless us.” We make up friends to hold our hand in the terrifying icy impersonal universe of “black velvet futility” as Kurt Vonnegut put it in “Sirens of Titan”. You cannot count on people who believe in magic. They have no backbones–or else they keep marching off the cliff (or pushing others off) with religious fury. They are so easy to manipulate when so deluded. Peace, Al
Thanks Greg for that article. I’m a menno in NYC and passed this around to some of my friends here. I hate to see the religious right lay claim to the moral high ground, and it’s good you remind us of history. I see both sides, being from the conservative evangelical camp before I evolved into this very left wing stuff. The polarization of this political thought lately is just obscene. We have no dialogue. It will have to swing back and it’s good to remind the left to look for support within the ranks of the “enemy.” Anyway, just thanks for writing and thinking. Susan in NYC.
There are occasionally religious leftists who have both courage and intellectual integrity like MLK. However they do not believe in power to the people, they believe in power and glory to Almighty God, the same god that has oppressed people all over the world throughout history. The religous have deluded and cretinized the population to accept their power systems and their positions in it. Religion has traditionally been an anti-people ideology which conceives people as sinful, willful and above all disobedient to the Devine and earthly authority people are supposed to obey.
That 80% of the US people give lipservice to the delusions of religion is simply part of the overall political and ideological false consciousness of the population, since a non-corporate political party is not permitted in the political arena in the US power system.
Morley, L.A.
One of the above writers in reply to my asking permission to post comments says: “Sure, use it anyway you want. I’m surprised you want to. I tend to comment on CounterPunch and Z- net articles to clarify my thinking. I don’t know what I think unless I read what I write. You are only the second person out of many who is actually interested in the topic s/he is writing about. I don’t think Americans are interested in ideas. Certainly academics aren’t, they’re too busy doing research.”
So I’ll reply with an idea. In evaluating widespread belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, do we allow for a religious mode of belief? On this question, I think fundamentalists (of the right) and atheists (of the left) speak with a solid front: no such thing as a religious mode of belief. But I think King, following Alain Locke (whether explicitly or not I don’t know) certainly worked with a religious mode of belief that neither atheists nor fundamentalists would be able to share. In this way, either one can speak of faith as a mode of experience or most likely one is not a religious leftist of any sort, whether Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist. There is an art to this mode of belief, but again, you’d have to have a certain view of art to grasp its essential nature. We’re not talking home deco here, although William James does allow the home deco religionists their place as the “happy minded” sort in his Varieties.
MoPress 