Theology: “Religious beliefs and theory when systematically
developed.” By????
There is an
anomaly I've noticed more and more recently that simultaneously amuses and
bothers me. When I see the haters, the Trumpists and Franklin Grahams, the Uber
Patriots, the anti-choice, anti-health care, anti-LGBT rights, in fact pretty
much anti-everything persons who abound these days, I find one other salient
fact. If you were to ask these persons about their spiritual beliefs, if any,
the vast majority would loudly proclaim their muscular, Evangelical
Christianity. In those cases where that
is not so, they (Donald Trump, who actually believes he is God) are still sucking
up to that demographic in the never-ending quest for votes.
This confuses
me because even the most rock-ribbed Southern Baptists, snake handlers and who
knows what else handlers claim that their religion is founded on free will.
This should mean, as I understand it, that they believe that every believer should
be free to make their own life choices and (I guess) face the judgment music
when they die. If this is true, then
why, oh why, oh please tell me why, they are so damned determined that even if
they have this "free will" (and they don't, watch a Joel Osteen , Franklin
Graham
or TD Jakes at work and it's obvious they are herding and milking sheep)
that free will extends only to them and those with whom they agree. In truth,
the Free Will concept itself wasn't some revelatory bolt from the blue, but was
simply a theological "nanny, nanny, boo boo" at first by Baptists and
Methodists to Presbyterians/Puritans/Calvinists (same bullshit, different name)
who espoused Predestination. This seems to revolve around some sort of demented
interpretation which goes along these lines: “I have the free will to believe
exactly as I wish, and I also have the free will to insist that you believe
that way too. This becomes especially
amusing to me when these Bible thumping literalists hijack holidays and
enshrine them in some sort of “dogma dome” where we all can be treated to their
precise historical and religious significance, as well as the moralistic fables
surrounding their origins. This is resonant at this time of year because
history is lost in the translation.
Trust, however, that most Evangelicals
are unaware of much theology other than what their local shaman tells them. There's
a dirty little secret their leaders don't want their sycophants to know. There
is essentially no theology in the Bible. In fact, reflective of
this belief, while it is little known, Boston banned all Christmas celebration
for part if the 17th century. I know, I know, “But Mike, the
Pilgrims……!” Really? Not so much.
After the
Puritans in England overthrew King Charles I in 1647, among their first items
of business after chopping off the (Church of England, but secretly Catholic by
then) monarch’s head was to ban
Christmas. Parliament decreed that December 25 should instead be a day of
“fasting and humiliation” for Englishmen to account for their sins.
The (primarily Puritan) Massachusetts Bay
colony residents responded in kind. The Puritans of New England passed a series
of laws making any observance of Christmas illegal, thus banning Christmas
celebrations for part of the 17th century. A Massachusetts law of 1659 punished
offenders with a hefty five shilling fine.
In their strict
and fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, the Puritan elders noted that
there was no scriptural basis for commemorating Christmas. The
Puritans tried to run a society in which the civil laws would not violate
anything that the Bible said, and nowhere in the Bible is there a mention of
celebrating the Nativity. The Puritans further noted that scriptures did not
mention a season, let alone a single day, that marked the birth of Jesus.
Apparently the grinch who stole Christmas was really John Calvin!
Yet another
example of supposed religious piety related to Massachusetts is the
Thanksgiving concept. While it has morphed into a generally broad day of reflection
and thankfulness (except for losing football teams), there is significant
historical uncertainty regarding the origins of the holiday. Perhaps the most
accurate description of the “first” thanksgiving, is an account by one pilgrim
in a letter which holds that the colonists had not originally invited the
Indians, but that in the general 1621 harvest glee of “Hey, we’re still alive,”
guns were fired and local (at that time at least “not unfriendly”)
Wampanoag Indians came to see what all
the noise was about. Once there, they stayed for the feats and an uneasy, but
peaceful, day of food and coexistence ensued. That is the model we choose to
tell our children, minus the uneasy truce part.
Tragically the
legislated history of Thanksgiving in New England is much darker. That celebration in 1621 did not mark a
friendly turning point and did not become an annual event. Indians who were
convinced to live in “praying towns” were few but were allies of the colony,
which had grown, settling in the area of what is now Boston while gradually
inching farther west. By the 1630s,
there were more than 20,000 settlers in Mass., the vast majority Puritan and, especially
as new lands to the west and in non-Christian Indian lands became bones of
contention, relations between the Wampanoag and the settlers deteriorated,
leading to the Pequot War. In 1637, in retaliation for the murder of a man
settlers believed the Wampanoags had killed, they burned a nearby Indian village,
killing as many as 500 men, women, and children. Lost in the fog of war is the
fact that this village wasn’t even Wampanoag, but Pequot.
Following this massacre,
William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth, wrote that for “the next 100
years, every Thanksgiving Day ordained by a Governor was in honor of the bloody
victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” In other words, as Wounded Knee would become
in 1890, so the slaughter of non-Christian Indians by “praying town Indians,”
other tribes who resented the Pequots’ successes, and Christian Colonists’ was
celebrated and commemorated as a righteous and even divinely aided victory.
In the
aftermath, a few surviving Pequots were enslaved and shipped to Bermuda or the
West Indies or were forced to become household slaves in English households in
Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. Even fewer escaped across Long Island Sound
to Long Island. The Colonies essentially declared the Pequots extinct by
prohibiting them from using the name any longer. Their real sin? They had
controlled the wampum trade with the Dutch. This was resented by British
colonists as well as the Mohawk and Narragansett tribes. So, praise God for a
success in a commercial war!
It seems that
the free will "clause" is invalid for others, Christian and
non-Christian alike, who are fair game for all the petty judgmental
pronouncements of a Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Dinesh Desouza,
Rick Santorum and the rest. Interestingly enough in a sidebar, Pence, DeSouza
and Jindal are converts from older, but equally intolerant, religions. Apparently, the process of conversion
requires the ingestion of a gullibility and intolerance pill.
Leaders in
opposing LGBT rights, Women's right to choose (and actually women's rights in
general), humane treatment of immigrants, and the litany of things which
apparently are not subject to free will seem overwhelmingly to share this
strident, whiny, hypersensitive and censorious Christianity, while piously
celebrating two holidays whose history is, let’s just say, less than actual. If Jesus as he is portrayed in the synoptic
Gospels were to see what the Apostle Paul and his successors have done to the
message, he'd open a can of celestial whoop ass!
Excellent article. I certainly enjoyed reading it.
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