{"id":23010,"date":"2014-07-02T13:06:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T17:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=23010"},"modified":"2014-07-02T13:06:40","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T17:06:40","slug":"smart-people-saying-smart-things-7-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/07\/02\/smart-people-saying-smart-things-7-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Smart people saying smart things (7.2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Ethics<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes a most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being. While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sr. Joan Chittister, \u201cAre Women Devalued by Religions?\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Women make up two-thirds of the hungry of this world. Women are two-thirds of the illiterate of this world. And women are two-thirds of the poorest of the poor, because they lack access to the resources and recognition men take for granted. That\u2019s not an accident. That is a policy \u2014 one supported by religious institutions that call such discrimination \u201cwomen\u2019s place\u201d and \u201cGod\u2019s will.\u201d<\/p>\n

What religion has said about women has long been used to justify what society has done to limit their development. Not only does what our churches, mosques, synagogues, and faith communities teach and do about women become the morality of the land. What they do not say or do on behalf of women condones what becomes the\u00a0immorality<\/em>\u00a0of the land.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Randall Maurice Jelks, \u201cHey religion, your misogyny is showing\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a direct link between\u00a0Kate Kelly, a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter day-Saints, who was excommunicated on charges of apostasy, and\u00a0Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman sentenced to death for her supposed apostasy.<\/p>\n

And the link is deeper than the charge of abandoning one\u2019s faith.<\/p>\n

Patriarchy comes in all forms, but religious patriarchy seems particularly pernicious because it assumes that male rule is constituent of God or the gods.<\/p>\n

In other words, God or the gods behave like men \u2014 wrathful, scornful, jealous, and imperious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jonathan Rauch, \u201cThe Great Secession\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The desire to be left alone takes on a pretty aggressive cast when it involves slamming the door of a commercial enterprise on people you don\u2019t approve of. \"\"<\/a>The idea that serving as a vendor for, say, a gay commitment ceremony is tantamount to \u201cendorsing\u201d homosexuality, as the new religious-liberty advocates now assert, is a far-reaching proposition, one with few apparent outer boundaries in a densely interwoven mercantile society. It suggests a hair-trigger defensiveness about religious identity that would have seemed odd just a few years ago. As far as I know, during the divorce revolution it never occurred to, say, Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, \u201cYour so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.\u201d That would have seemed not so much principled as bizarre.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0There is, of course, a very different Christian tradition: a missionary tradition of engagement and education, of resolutely and even cheerfully going out into an often uncomprehending world, rather than staying home with the shutters closed. In this alternative tradition, a Christian photographer might see a same-sex wedding as an opportunity to engage and interact: a chance, perhaps, to explain why the service will be provided, but with a moral caveat or a prayer. Not every gay customer would welcome such a conversation, but it sure beats having the door slammed in your face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; \u2014 what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope for change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children \u2014 those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own \u2014 being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And\u00a0these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray His will be done on earth!\u00a0It makes one\u2019s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty. \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the kind of humans loved by God; Joan Chittister and Randall Maurice Jenks on the kind of humans not loved by the church; Jonathan Rauch on “The Great Secession;” and Charles Darwin on one of the ways he disagreed with Jonathan Edwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[92,17,53,44,52,37],"class_list":["post-23010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-church","tag-equality","tag-gay-rights","tag-gender","tag-homosexuality","tag-smart"],"yoast_head":"\nSmart people saying smart things (7.2)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the kind of humans loved by God; Joan Chittister and Randall Maurice Jenks on the kind of humans not loved by the church; Jonathan Rauch on "The Great Secession;" and Charles Darwin on one of the ways he disagreed with Jonathan Edwards.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/07\/02\/smart-people-saying-smart-things-7-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Smart people saying smart things (7.2)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the kind of humans loved by God; 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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}