....... Cross-posted over at
Cristo Lumen.
Apocalyptic Pinheads... Man, I just love that term. Wish I had come up with it myself, but I didn't. This guy did... David James Duncan.
"I'm a guy in Lolo, Montana, with a wife and two daughters who likes to fish and wants people to love one another and the earth, who wants us to have a government that is worthy of us, who is sick of apocalyptic pinheads telling us we don't have to worry about the earth because the end of the world is coming," he said. "So I'm doing some yelling. I guess I'm trying to do it as constructively as possible."
Part of that constructive yelling by David has resulted in a new book called...
God Laughs and Plays:
Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
Although some are likely to take Duncan's book as a withering assault on fundamentalism and the Bush administration, at its core it is really an abiding embrace of mysticism - Christian and otherwise - of uncertainty, of mystery. Mysticism and mystery, of course, are the enemy of fundamentalists, who cloak themselves tightly in their own self-certainty, Duncan writes.
"The kind of fundamentalism that now more or less governs this country does not justly pronounce the word God, it defines and Americanizes God, worships its own definition and aims to impose that definition on everyone," Duncan writes [...]
Love, Duncan believes, is in short supply within Christian fundamentalism - any fundamentalism for that matter, whether it's Muslim, Hindu or Jewish. Self-love and its kin, self-worship, unfortunately, are not. It's not far from self-love to hating anything that remains, of course, and Duncan notes with sharp language the schism that the combination of politics and fundamentalism has created in American civic life.
"The fusion of religiosity and right-wing politics has created a mood of vehemence," Duncan writes in the preface to "God Laughs and Plays." "It has changed America's leadership, altered our collective identity in the eyes of the world, and destroyed our civility at home. Opponents of the right-wing/fundamentalist conflation are now demonized not just as `traitors to America' but as enemies of a new kind of Americanized God."
Although Bush has allied himself with fundamentalism, Duncan said, American Christians - whether they voted for Bush or not - are starting to grow weary of the "hijacking" of their religion by those who may have forgotten Christ's lessons about money, tolerance, the poor, the earth and violence.
"Americans at large are really thirsty for the wisdom that has been lost, or misplaced, or just turned away from," Duncan said. "They are tired of seeing their religion, which is rich with Jesus' examples of peace and love, be used as the tool of corporate oil tycoons and nation-rapers and men who don't care about anything but fast money" [...]
But what's been done to Christianity isn't subject to election. The change there will have to come another way. Duncan believes it will start - already is starting, in fact - in the hearts of Christians who want to reclaim their heritage from fundamentalists who have, in a misbegotten quest for biblical literalism, made Christianity a place to be entered by people with a crowbar and a lot of money.
Again, Duncan recalls Jesus' own words: "In response to the Armageddon fantasies of His days, the Son said, `The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. "For behold, the kingdom of God is within you."
"What that means is that these people are not going to beat Christianity into you no matter how they try," he said. "They're not going to scare Christ into you. Whatever you want to call it, it's already in you. You don't have to send your money to some pinhead on TV to find the divinity of the world. You just have to open your heart and look inside."
(my emphasis)
AMEN!
It high time we ended this plague of the... Apocalyptic Pinheads... for the good of this country, the world, and the christian faith.
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