Deadly Designs

Trey Smith

At its best, religion can inspire human beings to perform acts of great charity and compassion and create works of wondrous beauty. But these good works have been endlessly reported and praised, and they need no additional documentation from me. If anything, people who report on religion have a tendency to only report its good effects, while sweeping the bad ones under the rug or blithely dismissing them as perversions of "true" faith. I seek to provide some balance to these choruses of praise by reminding people that religion has also directly caused many acts of terrible bloodshed, cruelty and destruction.

Worse, many of these evil deeds come about not by twisting or distorting the teachings of scripture, but by obeying them. There is much material in every religious tradition that teaches violence, intolerance and hatred of the infidels. Modern theologians who recognize the savagery of these passages have either ignored them altogether or else have elaborate schemes of reinterpretation aimed at convincing themselves and others that these verses don't mean what they say. Unfortunately, there will always be believers who see through this charade and interpret the violent verses with the frightening simplicity which their context suggests. These people are a threat, and so long as we persist in believing in books that contain these sorts of dangerous messages, they will always be a threat.
~ from The Biggest Threats We Face From Conservative Religion by Adam Lee ~

In all honesty, I used to view religion differently. I was far less critical of liberal or mainline religious groups -- particularly Christians -- than I was of fundamentalist zealots. In time, however, I've become equally critical of both sides...for different reasons.

If you've spent any time on this blog, then I think you're well aware of my issues with fundamentalists. I spend a lot of time detailing my problems with their thinking. So, in this post, I'll tell you my main beef with their more liberal brethren. Lee mentions it in the second paragraph above.

It basically has to do with intellectual dishonesty. They spend inordinate amounts of time trying to sanitize their religious tomes when, as Lee points out, it's plain as day obvious that these documents promote such wretched concepts as slavery, rape, child abuse, prejudice, incest, hate and all sorts of excuses for killing people who don't see the world as you do.

By and large, in this country, this means liberal Christians. They promote the good ideals that Jesus purportedly shared and try to bury almost everything else in stinking piles of hubris.

For example, in the Book of Leviticus, there is a clear indication that the Jewish nomads believed that homosexuality is an abomination. In the New Testament, Paul holds a similar opinion. From a biblical standpoint, homosexuality is a no-go. Plain and simple, it's a major sin against God.

So what are liberal Christians to do? Some of them take this part of the Bible as authoritative and, like their fundamentalist counterparts, condemn homosexuality. Others, however, try to tell themselves and others that what the Bible says isn't what it really means! If you can twist these words around, then what can't be twisted?

We find the same kind of strategy employed when it comes to the issues of violence and war. Though the Old Testament, in particular, spends a great deal of space promoting war and various forms of violence, the liberals of the faith try to tell us that those ugly portions can be ignored. If we can ignore those sections, why shouldn't we ignore the rest?

As much as I find the fundamentalist perspective distasteful, it appears to me that they are, at least, somewhat faithful to their primary religious document. They accept it as God's blueprint for humankind. Liberals, on the other hand, pick and choose the parts that match up with their personal beliefs and discard the rest, all the while saying that they BELIEVE in the truth of the Bible.

If you believe that the Bible is the word of God, God-breathed or God-inspired, me thinks you must embrace it, warts and all. If you only can bring yourself to embrace parts of it, then it ceases to be a foundational religious document and becomes nothing more than a work of literature.