As I settled in for the evening I started going through my favorite bloggers and saw that Dharmakara, an English writer who joins a Pure Land practice with regular attendance at a Friends unprogrammed meeting had just put something up. I always look at what he has to say…
In a haunting reflection Dharmakara offered this startling, annoying and compelling quote. The writer he quotes, rolls his eyes at
“the inanity of the sermons and the arrogance of many congregants, who appear to believe they are “honorary” sinners. The liberal church, attacked by atheists as an ineffectual “moderate” religion and by fundamentalists as a “nominal” form of Christianity, is as its critics point out, a largely vapid and irrelevant force… it does not understand how the world works or the seduction of evil. The liberal church is largely middle class, bourgeois phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialisation… and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if “we” can only be nice and inclusive, everything will work out. The liberal church also usually buys into the myth that we can morally progress as a species… [and has a] naive belief in our goodness and decency – this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit…
“…Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father. Most of these men and women ran afoul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, involved fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, cultivating empathy and defying the powerful. It was a commitment to care for the other. Spirituality was defined not by “how it is with me,” but rather by the tougher spirituality of resistance, the spirituality born of struggle, of the fight with the world’s evils. This spirituality, vastly different from the narcissism of modern spirituality movements, was eloquently articulated by King and the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and put to death by the Nazis.”
The quote comes from Chris Hedges who takes on both religious Fundamentalists and the New Atheists with some vigor. While I have serious reservations about using the term “fundamentalists” for nonreligious people, Hedges appears to make a challenging case. At least from the taste I got at a salon dot com interview…
I find the upsetting and challenging part not in how he takes fundamentalists and New Atheists to task, but rather his challenge to liberal religion.
I don’t think he’s right, well not completely.
But he does point right at the shadow of liberal religion and yells “look here.”
I shall…
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