(This piece was first posted on my Huffington Post column as “What the Republicans Are (Still) Counting On To Win”) When I was a Republican/religious right activist many years ago Reagan made us proud by being upbeat about America, politics and our place in the world. The Republican Party (rightly or wrongly) was all about a great optimistic future. Reagan and people like my friend Jack Kemp counted on the strength of their arguments to carry the day. Not any more.... Read more
Listening to the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time, hosted by the always wonderful Melvyn Bragg about Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) one story hit home—hard! One of the show’s contributors told the story of Perotine Massey, a Guernsey woman burned for heresy by the Roman Catholics. She gave birth while in the flames. The baby was tossed back into the fire after it burst from her burning stomach and landed — alive — at the feet of a... Read more
With friends like this God needs no enemies. People “defending” God have completely screwed up America and our politics. And their version of “God” fucked up the first half of my life too. Yes, this IS a movie review as well as a theologically-induced PTSD-unhinged RANT. I could have been painting a picture. I could have been playing with my grandchildren. Instead I was talking about God because I’m in a movie about hell. So I was in Nashville at... Read more
I have seen the power of forgiveness work to heal my former religious “certainties.” (I wrote about this journey in what my publishers call “The God Trilogy” — Crazy For God, Patience With God and Sex, Mom and God.) Those certainties gave my primate nastiness a patriarchal theological boost of self-justification. So before I could change I first had to come to see myself as a persecutor. I had to forget the “biblical example” I’d been set by my evangelist... Read more
My wife Genie has been my “Jesus tutor.” She’s very much like the Virgin Mary, not counting the virgin part. Like Mary, Genie got pregnant when she was a teen—by me not by the Holy Spirit. And it was unplanned like Mary’s pregnancy and also “out of wedlock.” Genie is a primate (Mary was too) but like Mary, Genie does not bite and scratch (very often). And Genie taught me how to forgive others and myself by forgiving me for... Read more
It’s tempting to rationalize my bad behavior as “caused” by wrong ideas. But blaming wrong beliefs for our true biological natures is as crazy as thinking that right ideas will save us. So when atheists blame religion for war, they are being as silly as Christians who blame atheism for the Gulag. And thinking you can make some “god” forgive you by believing “the” correct doctrine about him is absurd. Any god that petty isn’t worth serving–not to mention hard... Read more
In the world of wishful delusion, prayer “changes” us. In reality we’re stuck on this blue flyspeck in space on the edge of a cyclical multi-universe no one understands. In the context of the fraction of the cosmos we can observe sometimes it seems like we are less significant than the parasites inhabiting our intestinal tracts. That notwithstanding I love my wife, children and grandchildren so intensely that I feel compelled to lay my love for them–and the fear of... Read more
Why I Still Talk to Jesus -- In Spite of Everything
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