We always seem to be harshly critical of Christianity, and that is because the ones who get up our collective atheist nose is the Religious Right. But there are all sorts of Christians out there who are fairminded, humane, not the dupes of political mobocrats and jingoists.
I found the website while reading When Corporations Rule the World, I wanted to look up the author, David C. Korton. It turns out they are staunchly behind him.
Korton, by the way, is a conservative. A sane conservative, who while being a capitalist and pro-business, is opposed to the huge international corporations who act as unelected governments and as major movers in international politics and economics.
These quietly faithful Christians are concerned about all the things we are: separation of church and state, the dumbing-down of America, the reckless foreign policy of GWB and the weapons industry, etc.
It's good to know they're there.
Posts: 6257 | Location: British Columbia, Canada | Registered: 06-11-02
'As it happens, we in the now-reviving Religious Left want to encourage Dems to embrace a somewhat different, but coherent, worldview, appropriate for the 21st century in which it is increasingly clear in economic, political and environmental arenas that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet. We understand that the only way the human race is going to survive the next hundred years is if we overcome nationalist chauvinism and embrace our common humanity. And the first step to do that is to reject the 5,000 year old, and frequently disproven, “strategy of domination” with its misguided assumption that Homeland Security is best achieved by military, political or economic domination over others (hard version: wars like that in Iraq; soft version: diplomacy backed by military threats and economic boycotts).
Instead, we need to embrace a new paradigm: Homeland Security can best be achieved by Generosity and winning the hearts and minds of the people of the earth to the view that the US really wants the wellbeing of everyone, not just of our own corporate and political elites.
Last week The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an interfaith alliance of both religious and non-religious but spiritually atuned secularists, bought a full page ad to apply this strategy to Iraq (read it at www.tikkun.org/iraqpeace). Recognizing that many Americans want to know what would happen after the US troops were withdrawn, the ad implored the peace movement Dems to explicitly call for an international force to replace American troops and to conduct an election in which the people of Iraq could determine their own future without being under the rule of an occupying power. It also called for a Global Marshall Plan, not only to rebuild Iraq once it was safe to do so, but to dedicate 1-2% of the GDP of the US each year for the next 20 to eliminating domestic and global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate healthcare and inadequate education and to repair the global environment.
The 'vision' of the religious left (which seems to include atheists) for Iraq might seem a little Pollyanna-ish, but the vision of the religious right certainly wasn't more realistic. The latter seemed to be based on bringing about Armageddon and the rapture, or converting all the Muslims (whatever happened to those Samaritan's Purse teams waiting to go into Iraq and hand out Bibles?).
"Vision" is apt. Each side has created a model of how the world works, and interacts with it as if his own model truly represented anything. But hey, that's how we humans operate.
Personally I'd rather live in a world in which the paradigm of the religious left were the basis of human interaction. Sort of, "Hey, let's try to live by the Golden Rule. And for those who won't play fair, let's hit them and give them a time-out, then let them back in and see if they've learned their lesson."
Rather than "Hey, let's find some other way to get our hands on tax dollars for our buds who are in the arms industry, so they'll get us elected again, and let's get our hands on that oil, because we'd rather put our money in the space research pork barrel than invent clean energy. So first we have to scare everybody. I know, we'll say that we have to fight the Axis of Evil! Doesn't mean anything, actually, but it sounds ominous." (Loud cheers.)
Posts: 6257 | Location: British Columbia, Canada | Registered: 06-11-02
