But the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.
.. Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.
.. In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals.
.. In 1942, Mr. Vereide’s influence spread to Washington. He persuaded the House and Senate to start weekly prayer meetings “in order that we might be a God-directed and God-controlled nation.”
.. The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.”
Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex
The archbishop has justified of his decision on the grounds that homosexual acts are “contrary to natural law.” Unlike many religions, Catholicism insists that its moral teachings are based not just on faith but also on human reason. For example, the church claims that its moral condemnation of homosexual acts can be established by rigorous philosophical argument, independent of anything in the Bible.
.. But it also holds Thomas Aquinas’s view that there can never be a genuine conflict between these two sources. Therefore, any apparent conflict results from our failure to understand what either God or reason is saying.
Most important, there is no assumption, in any given case, that we must resolve the conflict by revising the apparent conclusion of reason. For example, the church (eventually) decided that the scientific claims of Galileo and Darwin were correct and required revisions in teachings based on biblical passages suggesting otherwise. It is, therefore, an open question whether to accept the reasonable conclusion that homosexual acts need not be immoral and reject the view that this is what the Bible says.
.. There is considerable discussion among biblical scholars on this issue, with many suggesting that the passages that seem to condemn homosexual acts in general actually refer only to certain cases such as homosexual rape or male prostitution. But even if the biblical view is that any homosexual act is immoral, the Bible’s support for this view is no stronger than its support for the morality of slavery. Christian scholars argue that the acceptance of slavery (even in the New Testament, by Paul) merely reflects the limited perspective of the Bible’s human authors (similar to their belief in geocentrism or six-day creation) and does not reflect God’s revelation.
Repent for Lent: Renewing Our Minds with Memetic Theory – Original Sin
The human capacity to imitate exceeds that of any other species, and this is demonstrated by babies hours old mimicking the facial expressions or gestures of their parents. As we evolved into increasingly relational creatures, the way we learned from each other inevitably encompassed imitation not only of behaviors, but of desires and emotions.
This mimesis is not bad in itself; it builds bonds and relationships. But when we learn our desires by observing what others have or want, we can come into conflict if our desires cannot be shared (or if we do not know how to share). Our prehuman ancestors experienced the positive and negative emotions entwined with mimetic desire before language helped to make meaning of their confusion.
.. Imitation in the form of retaliation can destroy a group or community. But at some point various ancestors, converging upon someone among them… came together again and gained relief from the stress of conflict and violence. They killed or expelled this person.
.. Hominization, Girard theorizes, came with this discovery of this control mechanism – this scapegoating mechanism – that prevented the complete destruction of all against all. This violent origin of human civilization, the manifestation of negative mimesis pushed to its limit, is known in Girardian terms as “the founding murder” and may be analogous to the Christian concept of “the fall.”
.. If we recognize God as the perfect relationship of mutually giving and receiving love, without rivalry or violence, then to be made in God’s image is to be made for relationship. And that’s exactly what being a mimetic creature is!
.. if, as Girard says, human consciousness was formed by an act of violence, but the truly human one is the nonviolent Jesus, then we are not yet fully human. We are still in the process of being transformed. And part of that transformation comes from seeing that the way we have built unity since the dawn of civilization has left countless innocent victims in its wake. Our humanity deepens as our mechanism for social cohesion shifts from sacrifice to mercy. This can only happen when we recognize our victims for who they are rather than glorify our violence against them (as has been happening ever since the founding murder released a cathartic euphoria). And this recognition was made possible by God exposing himself not as the commander of our violence, but as its victim.
.. While a literal reading of scripture is incompatible with evolution, an understanding of mimetic theory shows that scripture itself is an evolution — a recording of humanity’s evolving understanding of God from violent to nonviolent. In Genesis, it appears that God expels humans from paradise; by the time we reach the Gospel of John we see that what we perceived as God’s wrath was really our own negative judgments rendering us unable to recognize God in the midst of us. As John 1:10 says, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” (I began to explore the consequences of our false judgments in light of Genesis 3 here. )
Money is the Root of All Evil (abridged)
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.