A MATTER OF DEGREES
“The main reason I’d been glad to leave America was Protestant fundamentalism. But Europe, I eventually saw, was falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism whose leaders made their American Protestant counterparts look like amateurs. Falwell was an unsavory creep, but he didn’t issue fatwas. James Dobson’s parenting advice was appalling, but he wasn’t telling people to murder their daughters. American liberals had been fighting the Religious Right for decades; Western Europeans had yet to even acknowledge that they had a Religious Right.”
Bruce Bawer. While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. 2006.
COMMENT
For those who have detected dreams of a coming Levitical society in the words and actions of Christian Dominionists, Brewer’s account of Islamist inroads in a pathologically tolerant Europe sounds a call to stand firm in defense of a secular society. Close readings of both the Torah and the Koran will reveal that the application of literalist thinking must logically lead to violence. The relatively benign face of the American Religious Right gives cover to the Dominionists’ more malign intent. If a sullen gathering of right-thinking men stones my neighbor for an expression of religious doubt, it matters little which sacred text provides legal sanction for the punishment.
CS
Showing posts with label Dominionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dominionism. Show all posts
Monday, April 2, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
Jung and Impressionable
BIBLICAL AUTHORITY
“Protestantism has . . . intensified the authority of the Bible as a substitute for the lost authority of the church. But as history has shown, one can interpret certain biblical texts in many ways. . . . . [U]nder the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the church or have become profoundly indifferent to it. . . . But many of them are religious people, only incapable of agreeing with the actually existing forms of the creed. . . . The Catholic who has turned his back on the church usually develops a secret or manifest inclination toward atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, while Protestant relativism permits variations.”
Carl Jung. Psychology and Religion. 1938.
A REFLECTION
Of course the sects Jung had in mind were what Americans now characterize as Mainline Protestant, a breed whose numbers continue to decline. Eighty years on in America the authoritarian face is less that of the Pope than that of the non-denominational “Bible Church” minister who leads large, semi-autonomous congregations made up of the theological illiterati. That the manipulative and unbiblical apocalyptic visions expressed in sermons and popular fiction, e.g., the Left Behind series, could be taken seriously might be held to demonstrate the depths of biblical and historical ignorance to which a large majority have sunk. The religious perversion that is the Dominionist movement exploits this ignorance and, furthermore, countenances none of the relativism to which Jung refers. What might he say about today’s atheist/Muslim Europe and secularist/Christianist America?
CS
“Protestantism has . . . intensified the authority of the Bible as a substitute for the lost authority of the church. But as history has shown, one can interpret certain biblical texts in many ways. . . . . [U]nder the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the church or have become profoundly indifferent to it. . . . But many of them are religious people, only incapable of agreeing with the actually existing forms of the creed. . . . The Catholic who has turned his back on the church usually develops a secret or manifest inclination toward atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian movement. The absolutism of the Catholic church seems to demand an equally absolute negation, while Protestant relativism permits variations.”
Carl Jung. Psychology and Religion. 1938.
A REFLECTION
Of course the sects Jung had in mind were what Americans now characterize as Mainline Protestant, a breed whose numbers continue to decline. Eighty years on in America the authoritarian face is less that of the Pope than that of the non-denominational “Bible Church” minister who leads large, semi-autonomous congregations made up of the theological illiterati. That the manipulative and unbiblical apocalyptic visions expressed in sermons and popular fiction, e.g., the Left Behind series, could be taken seriously might be held to demonstrate the depths of biblical and historical ignorance to which a large majority have sunk. The religious perversion that is the Dominionist movement exploits this ignorance and, furthermore, countenances none of the relativism to which Jung refers. What might he say about today’s atheist/Muslim Europe and secularist/Christianist America?
CS
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