Religion kills folks dead

I'm nearing the end of my patience with American Christianity. It is the enemy of progress. It is a bleached sepulchre containing only dead bones. It is the milstone hanging around my neck.

My soul is dead today. And there is good reason for progressives to feel so. Our country follows the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, false prophets of the religious and political right. Even the mainline churches are stuck in the sediment of past traditions, proclaiming a theology of the past, no longer relevant or appealing to enlightened minds.

What enlightened person could possibly think that God could mate with a human virgin? (What was it like for Mary? Did she orgasm? Did her hymen break? Was there blood on the sheets? What was it like for the Holy Spirit? Did the Spirit achieve orgasim? Did He have a smoke afterward?) The virgin birth worked for early Christians living before they knew anything about sperm, eggs and zygotes. It certainly doesn't work for us today. It yields the kind of ridiculous musings I've just joked about. It is unappealing, even dangerous baggage from the past. Should we go on to mention original sin, substitutionary atonement, the deity of Jesus, the bodily resurrection? Certainly Christians have better things to do than shovel this compost.

It would be so refreshing to be surrounded by curious minds, open to new experiences and new expressions of the soul.

There is an incredible amount of prejudice in Evansville, IN. Mention Hispanics and inpenetrable walls go up. They are 'illegal aliens', and they 'don't speak the right language' are the common rejoinders.

I tire of American exceptionalism. It is not just uncivil; it is immoral. I'm tired of borders and politics, and the dehumanization of all 'outsiders' by American imperialists. It's sad that Christians are fooled by this nonsense. In my judgment, American Christians are more American than they are Christian. They worship Caesar, not Christ. Or perhaps it's better to say that they worship Caesar (the United States) as the Christ. The Kingdom of God is borderless, and it transcends all rights and prerogatives of any nation.

I continue to tire of American Christianity. It is completely vacuous.

Pink Floyd

The child is grown; the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.

The old notion that church (and religion in general) is something you 'grow out of' when you 'grow up' seems truer to me now than it ever has before. Maybe it's time to 'put away childish things'.

I find theism increasingly irrelevant and void of justification, particularly in light of the growing complexities of our world. To say that 'God' is the answer seems trite.

My basic premise is this: the church is dying. It's structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit.

--Chuck Meyer, Dying Church, Living God

How true.

Sadly, the congregation I presently serve has spent a year on visioning and it counts for nothing. Intractable parishioners are already clogging the works. They will be successful in halting the kind of change necessary to save the dying corpse we know as the church.

Maybe that is really my mission, and should be the mission of all progressive pastors. Before there can be rebirth, there has to be death. As Meyer points out in his book (cited above):

Renewal movements are irrelevant when they merely remold the same old material. They resurrect the undead--a contradiction in terms except in zombie horror movies. Just as you cannot put new wine in old wineskins because the old wineskins will burst, a new church cannot be built on an old foundation. We have to let it die, even assist it to die, before it can be resurrected. It must be dead the institutional equivalent of three days in the tomb. Really dead. Stinking dead. bone rotting, rafters to basement, dust-to-dust dead.

Amen, and amen! Meyer knows the church well!

My basic premise is this: the church is dying. Its structure and theology make no sense today and haven't for decades. Far from being innocuous, their outdated uselessness goes beyond a nostalgic irrelevance to purposeful insidiousness, not just taking up space, but monolithically standing in the way of the spirit

Why Pastors Feel Worthless

"A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the expense of the rascals who work to live." --Voltaire

Favorite Lyrics

I believe I've past the age of consciousness and righteous rage;
I found that just surviving is a noble fight;
I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view;
but life went on no matter who was wrong or right.

--Billy Joel


Gods of the season, lead me to my next incident.

--Collective Soul


I'm all out of faith...the perfect sky is torn

--Natalie Imbruglia