The Decline and Fall of Our Western Religions
I had the good fortune to be studying theology just at the turning point (1956-59) when the great theologians were projecting the best they could of what remained of the Christian tradition, some gains were to be made by John 23 in reforming the Catholic Church, Zionism still was a social philosophy that incorporated the interests of all, Islam had not yet been perverted by the current madness of the Islamist extremists. But one could see that Protestantism had begun its decline into the perilous fundamentalism that has now emerged as a hate religion -- spinning apocalyptic nightmares of a restored and then destroyed Israel and along with it the end of the world around us!
I can speak with some authority about the decline of religion because I studied it at it roots -- then being exposed as mythic expansion on the debris of ancient religions of all colors -- ranging from the nightmarish gods of the Babylonians with their contempt for humans to the Zoroastrian worship of the competing gods of light and darkness which spawned our parallel dual conceptions of a god of wrath eternally waging war with Satan and vice versa -- to the various prejudices enhanced by the Christ hater, St. Paul, who set running two millennia of pogroms, prejudices, and wars against all vulnerable members of human society -- women, Jews, gays, and non Christians of all persuasions.
I studied with Bob Handy at Union Theological Seminary the peculiar history of Anglo-American religion in America -- the Manifest Destiny conception of a New Israel that was exploited to justify genocide for native Americans, the use of a sloppy emotive ('born again') hate religion emerging from the Middle West and South to sanction slavery, hatred of strangers, and, thereafter, our enduring racism and contempt for successive waves of immigrants to our country -- Irish and Italian Catholics to the Latinos and African Americans now serving as our American caste system laborers.
My outrage is set against the reality that I also discovered in the life and Gospel of the original Christian, slaughtered by brutal Roman authority (NOT the Jews -- pace our anti-Semites) as a suspect revolutionary with his pleas on behalf of humanity and particularly the poor and meek ones repressed by Roman society. My grandfather, Charles Foster Kent, was one of those who published among numerous other scholarly works on the Bible, a Life of Jesus, attempting to get to the real man underlying the stories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Foster_Kent
My own primary teachers along the way (some his students who conveyed a sense to me of the man who had died before my birth) recognized the perversions taking place in American religion, e.g. Reinhold Niebuhr's protest against the Billy Graham simplistic pieties:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/126/23.0.html
to Ernest Nagel's explanation as to why he was an atheist:
http://skeptically.org/againstreligion/id19.html
Both of these men were among the most humane and caring about humanity that I have had the privilege of knowing. They were last in line, perhaps, of men of such stature.
Yes, I am angered by the betrayal of the best features of our world's religions, which can easily be discovered in their sacred writings -- their concerns for peace and social justice that are now at such risk with the little men with little minds and withered spirits running things in far too many centers of power.
May some divinity save us all before it is too late. We live in the era of WMD --lightly proposed as appropriate responses to oil crises -- and an environment that is being rapidly destroyed by human hubris (greed). So ended the 600 years Pax Romana of Roman Empire some 16 hundred years ago in the 5th century.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
I can speak with some authority about the decline of religion because I studied it at it roots -- then being exposed as mythic expansion on the debris of ancient religions of all colors -- ranging from the nightmarish gods of the Babylonians with their contempt for humans to the Zoroastrian worship of the competing gods of light and darkness which spawned our parallel dual conceptions of a god of wrath eternally waging war with Satan and vice versa -- to the various prejudices enhanced by the Christ hater, St. Paul, who set running two millennia of pogroms, prejudices, and wars against all vulnerable members of human society -- women, Jews, gays, and non Christians of all persuasions.
I studied with Bob Handy at Union Theological Seminary the peculiar history of Anglo-American religion in America -- the Manifest Destiny conception of a New Israel that was exploited to justify genocide for native Americans, the use of a sloppy emotive ('born again') hate religion emerging from the Middle West and South to sanction slavery, hatred of strangers, and, thereafter, our enduring racism and contempt for successive waves of immigrants to our country -- Irish and Italian Catholics to the Latinos and African Americans now serving as our American caste system laborers.
My outrage is set against the reality that I also discovered in the life and Gospel of the original Christian, slaughtered by brutal Roman authority (NOT the Jews -- pace our anti-Semites) as a suspect revolutionary with his pleas on behalf of humanity and particularly the poor and meek ones repressed by Roman society. My grandfather, Charles Foster Kent, was one of those who published among numerous other scholarly works on the Bible, a Life of Jesus, attempting to get to the real man underlying the stories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Foster_Kent
My own primary teachers along the way (some his students who conveyed a sense to me of the man who had died before my birth) recognized the perversions taking place in American religion, e.g. Reinhold Niebuhr's protest against the Billy Graham simplistic pieties:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/126/23.0.html
to Ernest Nagel's explanation as to why he was an atheist:
http://skeptically.org/againstreligion/id19.html
Both of these men were among the most humane and caring about humanity that I have had the privilege of knowing. They were last in line, perhaps, of men of such stature.
Yes, I am angered by the betrayal of the best features of our world's religions, which can easily be discovered in their sacred writings -- their concerns for peace and social justice that are now at such risk with the little men with little minds and withered spirits running things in far too many centers of power.
May some divinity save us all before it is too late. We live in the era of WMD --lightly proposed as appropriate responses to oil crises -- and an environment that is being rapidly destroyed by human hubris (greed). So ended the 600 years Pax Romana of Roman Empire some 16 hundred years ago in the 5th century.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 11:25 AM
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