“God Appears and God is Light/To those poor souls who dwell in Night/But does a Human form display/To those who dwell in realms of day.”
These humanist sentiments were expressed by a man who regularly conversed with angels and who believed that the key to human happiness lay in separating religion from state (and avoiding sexual frustration), the English poet and artist William Blake. He also wrote “God only Acts and Is in existing beings or Men” and he was a big fan of the American Revolution. His writings helped open the minds of people like Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison over a century later. Not bad for a Christian.
Go forward a century and people like Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein supported a new American movement, Religious Humanism. Charles Francis Potter, an evangelical Baptist turned Unitarian minister wrote the Humanist Manifesto I. Below are a few quotes from the document:
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto1.html Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant.
Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social passion.
In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.
We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.
Belief in God was optional. Belief in the rights of man was not.
Go forward another few decades, and the most respected American clergyman of the 20th century, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. lead the South through desegregation and voter rights and then the nation through the early years of the anti-war movement, before the American right wing, realizing what a potent threat a Christian minister humanitarian was to their war-hatred racket had him murdered.
http://www.mlkonline.net/dream.html When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Everyone knows that J Edgar Hoover despised MLK Jr. and that he spent years and untold FBI man-hours trying to cook up evidence to discredit him and his movement. Here is something that not everyone may know. One of the FBI’s plans was to replace King with a hand picked phony civil rights leader.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/Vendetta_MLK_LS.html Aside from the suicide note, there is no more graphic illustration of the mind-set and nature of this political police operation than the realization that while the campaign went on, the FBI had a parallel plan to find a "suitable replacement" for King.
The plan was simple. William Sullivan, the head of the Intelligence Division, had given it some thought and, in a January 1964 memorandum to Hoover, proposed that the FBI conduct a search to find a "suitable" successor to King. Hoover agreed. Sullivan, when asked about the memorandum by the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded in a way that speaks for itself: "I'm very proud of this memorandum, one of the best memoranda I ever wrote. I think here I was showing some concern for the country."
As I have argued elsewhere, this is exactly what I believe the right wing did after they successfully murdered Dr. King. They bribed some slick tele-evangelists to start the religious right, in order to fool Americans into believing that God was on their side, the Republican side. Why? Because King had proved that if you appeal to Americans’ faith, you could literally move social mountains in this country. And the corporate fat cats and would be fascist leaders were not about to let it happen again.
Why does it matter if the Republican Party is able to make the public identify Jesus with the GOP? It matters, because almost 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_StatesThis is not a fringe group. This is not a fly by night cult. Religion is a fact of life in the United States, probably because we have freedom of religion, at least for the moment, and so people are allowed to choose a faith which helps answer their spiritual questions and ease their life crises and needs. The Democratic Party can not afford to blow off religion as some kind of antiquated superstition that people will grow out of if they just get health care benefits and good disability insurance. Issues like death and why sad things happen to nice people for no reason are going to continue to plague us, and we will continue to seek solace, each in the way that suits us best. If Democrats treat religion as a joke, or worse, as a dangerous anachronism, then people of faith with be offended. And our party and the various socially liberating movements which we represent are missing out on a chance to mobilize people in a way that may be impossible through a purely secular movement. Need convincing? Look south of the border.
Central and South America have seen some of the worst atrocities in the world. Poverty, racism, sexism, war, exploitation of people by their own elected leaders and by colonials---all conducted under the auspices of a Church that had its capital across the ocean. However, even as they were forcibly converted, the exploited peoples of the New World found something within Christianity that spoke to their needs. They subverted the Virgin Mary, creating a revolutionary figure, a goddess who combined the characteristics of Aztec and Christian religions and who promised to protect them. (Anyone who thinks Our Lady of Guadalupe is nothing but a joke on some toast should read the book
The Goddess of the Americas ed.Ana Castillo which combines a number of accounts of Guadalupe--Tonantzin as liberating political, feminist and religious icon) In the martyred Jesus, they found a champion of their own status as martyrs of the modern world. When the time came when they were powerful enough to rebel, these two symbols would give them strength. Mexicans kicked out the Spanish under the banner of Guadalupe the protectress. More recently, left wing social movements have gained ground thanks to priests on this side of the ocean who said “Hold on. Christ would not tolerate this.” And Liberation Theology was born. Though the Catholic Church has fought hard against what it calls a heresy, even defrocking some of its major proponents and banning their works, the movement thrives, because this is a religion of the people.
In his preface to “Jesus the Liberator” Jon Sobrino writes that it was morally necessary to reclaim Christianity in Central America from the tyrants.
We have to speak, on the one hand, out of the pain produced by seeing Christ made the object of hijacks and distortions, so that we must go out and do battle and give ourselves up for him, in an attempt to make it harder for people to say of him the terrible words used of God in the scriptures “because of you his name is blasphemed among the nations.”
The same could be said for our country, where professional right wing pundits talk about gay bashing and murdering Muslims and endless war in the same breath with God. There are millions of Christian voters out there cringing every time they hear things like that. They are waiting for some religious social leader to step up and proclaim that this is not the message of Jesus---it is inconceivable that 80% of Americans would embrace a religion that advocated such hatred. They look at their television screens, at the senseless deaths of women and children in Iraq , at the millions of uninsured children about whom the supposedly religious right wing does not care, at the children of immigrants for whom Republicans will not provide a path for citizenship even though the children have no other country besides this one and they feel a deep sense of moral anguish, not in spite of their religion but in keeping with it. For Jesus has taught them to love others as themselves. As Sobrino writes “we can opt out of many things; we can not opt out of the deaths of the poor.” The more Christians feel Jesus in their day to day lives, the more they feel the suffering of others. That is not to say that secular humanists can not feel the same empathy for the suffering of others. There are many ways to live a humane life. But in the U.S., the majority choose the path of religion, because they are allowed to do so. We have freedom of religion, unlike a lot of other countries (think Saudi Arabia, where all you are offered is one hate filled version of Islam.)
The right wing is clever. It saw what someone like Martin Luther King Jr. could do when he mobilized the faith of America's Christians. It has made sure that no Kings have come again. It has done this by making it very hard for those who feel the plight of the poor and the victimized to speak out. If they do, they risk having their tax exempt status questioned or worse. On the other hand, the Bush administration is giving out millions of dollars to religious organizations who will agree to tailor their message so that it conforms to what the right wing wants the 80% of Americans to hear. So, we are told that all Jesus cares about is abstinence and the unborn fetus (but after it’s born, it is on its own) and marriage between man and a woman (even if the man is gay and the union is loveless) and no stem cell research. Jesus spends a lot of time in Heaven crying over stem cell research. That is why he has no time for the poor and war.
Imagine if people in the U.S. had a choice between No Stem Cell Christians and some one like Leonardo Boff (from
St. Francis: A Model for Human Liberation)
To live humanly means to feel the warmth of someone who says to us, in spite of our physical and moral misery: “It is good that you exist, Brother. You are welcome. The sun is also yours, the air is everybody’s, and love can unite our hearts.”
Hearing something like this, they might listen further as he says
“It is not fate; it is not a demand of nature, it is not the will of God that there be rich and poor…Poverty dehumanizes rich and poor alike…it destroys emotional life…it leads to envy, hatred, violence against those responsible for their misery, and often, against God, raising their fist against heaven. It dehumanizes the rich because it leads them to consider the poor as inferior, outcasts of society, the dead weights of history.”
Oh, and by the way, the monks are marching again in Burma.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7070551.stm One monk who was on the march told the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based radio station run by dissident journalists: "We are continuing our protest from last month as we have not yet achieved any of the demands we asked for.
"Our demands are for lower commodity prices, national reconciliation and immediate release of
Aung San Suu Kyi and all the political prisoners."
Aung Nyo Min, the Thai-based director of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma, said of the rally: "This is very significant... we are very encouraged to see the monks are taking up action and taking up peaceful demonstrations in Burma."It takes a lot of courage to get up after the beating those monks have taken and start marching again. Courage like that requires faith that the goal---meeting the basic human needs of others---is more important than one's own safety. In a place like the United States, where people have so much material wealth to lose, it is even harder to get people to take a stand. In the abolition movement, in the civil rights movement, in the anti-war movement of the 60s, faith was a powerful motivator. Despite the machinations of J Edgar Hoover and the right wing, it can be again.
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