Theocracy Rejected: Former Christian Right Leaders ‘Fess up

People who are sensitive to interpersonal disgust – for example, they dislike sitting on a bus seat left warm by a stranger – are more likely to hold right-wing attitudes and to be racist.

Fortunately, if you’re like me and you’re disgusted by monkey eating, dead person touching and bestiality watching, you’re safe.

Other types of disgust sensitivity, such as aversion to eating monkey meat (core disgust) to touching dead bodies (death-related disgust) and to people watching pornography involving animals (sex-related disgust) were correlated with interpersonal disgust, but did not themselves predict racist or prejudice attitudes once levels of interpersonal disgust were taken into account.

CNN is running a special report on what they’re calling God’s Warriors. Christiane Amanpour reports on the rise of religious extremism in the world. From their preview video, it looks to be both enlightening and exposing.

The report spans over three days and it looks like they’re saving the best one, Christian Warriors in the US, for the last day. I gathered from the video that the report shows the harm done when the Christian religion (in particular, the conservative right wing flavor of Christianity) is mixed with politics. The entire series looks very interesting. Time to go set my Tivo.

Certain areas of the brain have been identified as being active when people pray, meditate or have some other kind of spiritual experience. This influx of research is being promoted by both sides of the spectrum. Both religious groups and atheists say these studies defend their point of view. Religious groups claim it was part of the divine design, while atheists state that we were hard wired to be religious as a result of evolutionary survivalism.

A recent CNN article, Are humans hard-wired for faith?, discussed how religion has been beneficial to human beings:

To be sure, religion has the unparalleled power to bring people into groups. Religion has helped humans survive, adapt and evolve in groups over the ages. It’s also helped us learn to cope with death, identify danger and finding mating partners.

Today, scientific images can track our thoughts on God, but it would take a long leap of faith to identify why we think of God in the first place.

It will be interesting to watch this research proceed. What will the future of neurotheology hold? Will we find something extraordinarily supernatural, or will we find out that even our soul/being is simply a mesh of circuitry that can be saved, stored and placed into a new flesh sleeve^† ?

^† Read Altered Carbon

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of Stumbling on Happiness, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Compassionate Commercialism. He lamented the quickly changing marketing environment, and discussed how current advertising trends are preying on our human nature and are subsequently hurting our society.

We are used to commercial tricks that play on our fears. The official-looking letter marked “Verification Audit” is actually a magazine subscription renewal form; the credit card company’s ominous call to “discuss your account” is actually an attempt to sell new services.

Should we now get used to commercial tricks that play on our humanity? How would we feel about a device planted in trash bins that screams “I’m stuck!” until the lid is opened, at which point it continues, “Stuck in a dead end job, that is — and if you are too, then let us show you how to make millions in real estate with no money down”? Is it O.K. to send a thousand doleful puppies into the streets with tags that say: “Thanks for checking. And speaking of checking, our bank charges no monthly fees”?

My belief in being a spiritual being and that there’s something beyond what I can perceive with my basic senses still exists. Aside from organized religion, there’s much that I do agree with when it comes to Jesus’ teachings — how we should treat, love and serve one another. Those are things both my wife and I still believe in and want to have instilled into our children’s character.

This is a hard place to be as an individual and a family. There aren’t very many church communities that will easily accept individuals that don’t conform well to their doctrine (dogma). Some places exist, like the Unitarian Universalists Association, but we’re still a little unsure as to whether or not that would be a good fit for us.

My wife recently discovered The Center for Progressive Christianity and pointed me to their 8 Points. These point resonated deeply with me and I wish there was a church community where I lived that shared these tenets.

1. Have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.
2. Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for the way to God’s realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us.
3. Understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus’s name to be a representation of an ancient vision of God’s feast for all peoples
4. Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable.
5. Know that the way we behave toward one another and toward other people is the fullest expression of what we believe.
6. Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty – more value in questioning than in absolutes.
7. Form ourselves into communities dedicated to equipping one another for the work we feel called to do: striving for peace and justice among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God’s …
8. Recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege.

Another interesting read regarding this issue is What is a Liberal Christian?