I absolutely have a problem with "groupthink" about the Blazers. I don't (or try not to) blindly "defend the Blazers from all charges," and I detest the idea that other fans are the enemies and everyone should present a unified front against the claims of other fans. I also dislike groupthink within political parties. I'm not saying that without religion there would be no groupthink, I'm saying that organized religion is an entity that encourages it, which is my problem with it. As I said, I think personal quests for spirituality are perfectly good, which can certainly mean doing as Christ taught (or as Buddha taught, or as no one specifically taught but your own observations/feelings). I think it gets off track when it becomes organized.
Without groupthink, political parties would fall apart. The very reason a political party is formed is to represent the shared beliefs of a group of people. Same goes for religions. They represent the shared beliefs of a group of people, but they also allow for differences of opinion. I have friends in my church who disagree with me on a number of topics, and yet we all feel comfortable worshipping together. You can call it "groupthink" if you like, but you must apply the same charge to any other group that shares common beliefs, whether it be a Blazer fan site like this, or a group of environmentalists or anti-war demonstrators. Some organized religions may get "off track," but a lot of individuals get "off track" when they're operating on their own instincts and prejudices.
I agree. But then, I'm not a big fan of political parties. I do, however, understand that they're not going anywhere. Just like organized religion. I just am not a fan of the concept of either. That's not precisely what I mean. Of course anyone can do "wrong," whether affiliated with a religious organization or not. My point was that adding organization to religion moves it further from actual quest for spiritual understanding, in my opinion, and more toward obedience to the group and the people in charge of the group. That's what I mean by "off-track."
...just a pre-emptive comedy strike, a lightening of the mood if you will, as I knew it was about to get thick in here
Honestly, we ARE a Judeo-Christian nation. AND we are a secular nation. And we always have been. That's why these kind of debates are so pointless, with both sides pulling out citations from the Founding Fathers to justify one unequivocal view or the other. But the truth is that the Founding Fathers ran the gamut on religion... the gulf between Randy Forbes and Bill Maher is pretty much exactly the same as the gulf between, say, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson back in the day. Look carefully at the First Amendment. It very carefully defends religion, even as it rejects theocracy. We are a secular Judeo-Christian nation, just as we always have been. SR
How do you mean that "we are Judeo-Christian?" That a majority of the people are Judeo-Christian? If so, I agree. My take from the video linked in the original post was that Randy Forbes means that the nation bases its identity, in part or in full, on Judeo-Christianity and always has. I don't agree with that.
I do think that *part* of our national identity is based in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (And I say that as an agnostic who is extremely hostile to what I see as Christianist attempts to take over the government in the interest of theocracy.) I also think another, *equal part* of our national identity is a long and deep commitment to religious tolerance and, indeed, outright secularism in the public sphere. Thus I find totally one-sided depictions of our nation's religious history like the one offered by Randy Forbes to be totally misleading and essentially propagandistic... but I would say the same of my left-wing friends who would argue that the United States is completely *not* a Judeo-Christian nation. SR
"Groupthink" isn't from the human ego. We used to work in tribes so it's natural for us to want to belong to groups of humans which share something in common. That's why people join gangs, clubs, or hang out with the same people. I am not "religious", and I don't think I have a need for it. Why are you religious? What is your personal gain from it? I just can't even fathom the practice of worshiping something that is simply passed on through words. I meditate frequently, but I don't worship a "higher being" to reach my tranquility...
Very interesting discussion. And its amazing that it is really civilized for the most part. As for me, i'm not sure about the Judeo-Christian nation. While I think most people say they are "Christian" now, I don't think that really makes us a Christian nation, does it? When someone is a "Christian" nation, I think it means it was founded on the principles of Judeo-Christianity. IDK if that is the case, but those principles definitely had some effect. Personally, I'm 100% against religion, but I am "saved" (it feels odd to say this because I don't want to be like "OHHH I'm saved and you aren't you are going to hell... because that isn't how I see it at all). I have a relationship with God, and I do believe that Jesus is the son of God, and the only way to God. But religion turns me off like nothing else, I can't stand it. The hypocrasy, the judgement, the ego, its not right. I mean, seriously, if Jesus were to walk in to 95% of the "Christian" churchs out there, I think He would be very disappointed. I feel very lucky to be in a church that doesn't have those kind of beliefs and the "us against the world" mentality, but rather the "Oh, you think i'm an idiot? Thats ok, man, I love ya anyway" mentality.
I'm right there with ya, man. Plus One on your comments. While Jesus said, "Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together", I also think He would be very dissappointed if He walked into a majority of today's churches. Shoot, for that matter, some of His disciples (Paul, in particular) were very dissappointed (even disgusted) with some of the so-called congregations they came across back in the day. To me, it boils down to my "personal" relationship with Jesus......NOT about what some church has going for it. That said, do i want/need to be part of a group of believers? Absolutely. Someone once said that Christians are kind of like briquettes. Once one is separated from the others, it begins to go out. I think that's a relative truism. The Bible speaks of "iron sharpening iron", which basically means that Christians still need other (like and/or more mature) Christians to help them to grow in the faith. A state of withering faith is a bleak state, indeed. Bottom-line for me, though. It all begins with actively growing in the Word of God and prayer. Man will let me down (and I will let him down). He does every day. However, my standard isn't man, it's Jesus. He will never let me down......ever. The basis of His teachings is love. I fall way short of that goal every day. Fortunately, I have His Grace which reminds me that, no matter how many times I stumble, he's there to pick me back up every single time...so long as come to Him in honesty and humility. Again, it's all about my relationship with Him. It's such a pure and beautiful thing...I can't begin to describe....especially considering the hell-hole He pulled me out of). I don't have to get all caught-up in the "religion" thing. Religiosity - in and of itself - sucks. In fact, Jesus himself once called a large group (church) of Pharisees a "brood of vipers" for practicing such. They were all high and mighty on themselves (their pious "religion"), yet were lost. Simple as that. Seriously, Jesus told them that the outside of their cups were clean (literally, their hypocrisy), yet, the inside of their cups (their hearts) were dirty. Again, in my mind, so many people get all focused on religion (how they look) itself, yet fail to recognize the author. Just my 2-cents.
Great post, ABM. So much truth in what you have said. I'm a believer in Christ who falls short so much that it sometimes discourages me. But I try to keep my eyes on Him, because I know that He is "the way, the truth, and the life." When I focus on Him, I feel what William James described as "an inward paradise of tranquility." It's a calm reassurance that whatever happens in my life, God is in control.
The people who came here originally were religious and were either fleeing religious persecution or seeking religious freedom. You can't just say someone flipped some switch and all that went away. The nation was founded, basically, on reversing the things the British did that were source of grievances to the common man. There may be more to the 1st amendment being about "anything but a nation that has an official church like the Anglican"... My beef is that religion is being squashed by people using govt. and laws, and that secularism is being pushed on people. It shouldn't be either way. Government should encourage all religions to flourish and it shouldn't be so pervasive that anything anyone wants to do is a violation of church and state. I say this as an agnostic who doesn't like the idea of the govt. being misused for religious purposes or for secular ones.
I wish we could sit down and talk sometime. What you are saying is very popular today, and has gained a lot of traction amongst religious people, but it's a foolish and dangerous way to think. Jesus said many times that sin has to be cast out of our hearts, and that we must turn to Him to be saved. No one is automatically part of God simply by being alive. There are choices to be made in life, and those choices have consequences. Jesus told the Jews that, "He that heareth my Word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation." There are many, many texts like this in the New Testament, and I encourage you to read them for yourself.
Some of them came for those reasons. Other came for more secular purposes -- the original English settlement in North America was, of course, not Puritan Plymouth but rather Jamestown, Virginia, the profit-seeking venture of a joint-stock company. And even those who did come seeking religious freedom tended to think about that concept in very different terms than we do today... Our histories tend to de-emphasize things like the fact that Puritan minister and Massachusetts leader Cotton Mather, for example, wanted to capture any Quakers who showed up in the colony and sell them into slavery in the West Indian sugarcane fields. That kind of "religious freedom" was narrowly and, indeed, violently sectarian. Which is one reason why many of the most fervent supporters of the separation of church and state by the time the US gained independence were deeply religious people who understood that Massachusetts-style intermingling of religious and state authority was *bad for religion.* Today we almost always tend to think of "separation of church and state" as something designed to protect government from religion... but I think its more powerful effect over 200+ years of American history has actually been to protect religion from the worldly corruption of politics. I actually would argue that the reason why the modern United States is a such a remarkably religious country (compared to all other advanced Western democracies), the reason why even I, as an agnostic, think there is some validity to describing us as a "Judeo-Christian Nation" is precisely because we have been careful to defend the principle of secularism in the public sphere. I think the would-be theocrats of the so-called Religious Right (a recent phenomenon of the last 3 decades, really) better be careful they don't gain the world but lose their soul; we might end up like France, a country where everybody is nominally Catholic, a member of the state-sponsored church, but almost no one actually attends to mass and religion plays a minor role in shaping modern society. Politics = corruption. Breaking down the wall between church and state is bad *for the church.* SR
"Protect the government from religion"? I don't know anyone who thinks of it that way. Most people want just the opposite: they want churches protected from government tampering and control. They wanted the freedom to worship in any church, at any time, without government interference. We defend secularism and we defend religion, equally. That's what freedom is all about. I think (and I hope!) that the religious right is misunderstood. What they seem to object to most is the removal of all religious discussion from the public sphere. They're not fighting to make us more religious, they just want to preserve the religious foundation that seems to be crumbling all around us. I don't know any conservative who thinks that the government should demand religious observance of its citizens, though it may come to that eventually. If it does, I will fight it tooth and nail.
It is clear to me the founding fathers wanted to protect religion from government in the sense that they wanted to prevent a theocracy or "church of the state" type situation wherein one religion would use the government as a tool to wipe out other religions. Surely if say a Muslim group gained enough power in Government and began to suppress other religions and funnel government money and funding to mosques and Islamic faith based organizations you would be troubled by that?
My reading and indeed my text of the New Testament is very different from yours. I put forth to you that you are reading a politicized version of the bible created by the roman empire to create a state religion out of a spiritual path offered by Jesus. I think the value of the bible lies in the numerous instances in which Jesus and some old testament authors point towards our capacity to find god within without the need of a church. It's difficult to say exactly what Jesus said because there is such a distance in time between what he wrote and the oft translated and changed texts since his death. That's why I look for the oldest translations and towards things like the ancient greek translations and things such as the Dead Sea scrolls. I think it's wonderful that the teachings of Jesus resonate with you. I think however it's easy to mistake the material for the spiritual especially when the Romans have altered things to meet their political goals. I'm assuming you are not Catholic (I was raised Catholic btw) in which case you must follow to some degree the thinking of Martin Luther who stated that the bible had been altered to cede power to Rome. I find it amazing that the Bible so clearly shows that Rome is the 7 headed beast of revelations (Rome built on 7 hills) it was a Roman political apparatus that was responsible for Jesus' death and yet so few people bother to question the council of Nicea where what was included in the bible was voted upon. It was a political process that created the beginnings of Christianity as a state religion in Rome. This is in fact exactly what Stepping Razor was pointing to in the danger of the merger of state and religion...the corrupting power of politics on religion.
Hmm, can you source this? From what I can tell, France has a strict separation of church and state. I can't find any reference to a state-sponsored church in France currently.
