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I welcome the attention that serious atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are offering the world at this moment through their books. They are bringing what I regard as a deserved criticism and a necessary correction to what Christianity has become in our generation.
Patriarchy has been a fact in the religious life of the world for at least 10,000 years. If God is conceptualized, as God has been, after the analogy of a male king or tribal leader, then only males are thought of as being in the image of God. Women are thus consciously and unconsciously defined as sub-human.
This is not really the proper question. Since sex is at the heart of life and its meaning, it is inconceivable that religion--primarily an interpreter of life--would not have strong convictions and opinions on this primary human activity. The proper question is whether religion has dealt with sexuality in a competent or incompetent manner.
No one in the world of academic theology that I know treats the supposed discovery of the tomb of Jesus as if it had any credibility. It is based on the idea that the resurrection of Jesus was in fact a physical resuscitation.
If they cannot there is something wrong with their understanding of their own faith system. God is not a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim!
It is difficult for anyone to say with certainty what Jesus was. The portrait painted of him in the gospels was written forty to seventy years after his earthly life had come to an end. By that time Jesus had been wrapped inside both the Jewish Scriptures and the liturgy of the synagogue which meant they interpreted him in terms of Jewish images and Jewish expectations.
The clear impression conveyed by the gospel writers, however, is that Jesus, following in the prophetic tradition in which his life was rooted, took his stand alongside the poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed. He is portrayed as touching the leper, protecting the woman taken in adultery, talking to a woman by the well publicly, welcoming children, extolling the virtues of the Samaritans and as saying “Go into all the world,” thus sending his disciples beyond their tribal limits into a place inhabited by those who spoke differently, worshipped differently and were defined as unclean Gentiles. Jesus was remembered by the gospel writers as a barrier breaker.
Of course religion is a human creation, man-made and woman-made. Who else is there to have constructed it?
The reason we human beings create religion is that we experience a depth to life, an otherness, a transcendence that we call God and we then begin to seek that which we believe this God can give us. That is where religion is born.
I doubt if it will change it much. All it demonstrates is that religion is important to a significant part of the American population and no serious candidate for the presidency will ignore that block of voters. Hot button issues like abortion and homosexuality have been used primarily by the Republicans to bind working class Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants to their banner.
God, however, is not in the service of any party and the excessive religious claims of Republicans, particularly on such issues as Terri Schiavo, the war, and limiting the availability of approved birth control medications and attempts to amend the Constitution to discriminate against homosexual people has already convinced most Americans that they do not want either party pretending that their policies and God’s policies are identical.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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