Poorly Constructed Article

I found this little tirade against monotheistic conceptions of divinity a while back.  It's not particularly well-thought out, though it is vitriolic enough to satisfy a certain blood-lust from those convinced of the erroneousness of any brand of religion, but particularly those brands that posit a personal deity that interacts personally with humanity. 

The author's basic assertion is correct - that a religion that justifies inequality on the basis of a personal God dictating the ins and outs of human economics and interactions is disgusting and dangerous.  That's true.  Unfortunately, he extends his tirade against any religion that acknowledges an "omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent gods or supreme beings", which includes Biblical Christianity.  The problem is that he hasn't apparently read the Bible.

The Bible is - among other things - a long, sustained cry against the marginalization of those around us, our neighbors, whom Jesus identified - rather inconveniently for legalists - as being everyone around us.  The constant indictment against God's people was their abandonment of serving their God, manifest in both their polytheism as well as their mistreatment or ignoring of those around them least able to care for or defend themselves.  The poor and the marginalized are prominent in Biblical calls for justice, care and love for our neighbor. 

This doesn't mean that many Christians don't understand this.

Secular humanists wish to scrap religion as an archaic and dangerous thing.  But frankly, religion - and particularly Christianity - is the only thing that protects the marginalized in our culture.  It's Christianity that stays the hand of capitalism and insists that the poor and marginalized must be cared for, that they must be educated and not left behind.  It's Christianity with it's insistence on the sacredness of all life that stays the hand of the natural selectionist and insists that even those who seem to be deficient in body or mind compared to the majority must be cared for, must be treated with dignity, must be protected.  If the author of this article balks at what he sees as the ease with which many modern Christians write off and ignore the world that suffers in part so that they can enjoy their mochas and designer clothing, he would no doubt find it hard to justify defending the downtrodden without Christianity.  He would no doubt find it hard to say why the developing world ought to be propped up and protected, rather than simply exploited for the benefit of the dominant genetics of Western Europeans.   

This author is right - if we have fooled ourselves into thinking that the order of this world is strictly ordained by God, with the rich to enjoy their wealth and the poor to suffer in silence, we are grossly mistaken, and need to go back to Scripture to hear God's very clear Word about how we are to treat those less fortunate.  But the author is very wrong in his assumption that the existence of a personal, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent God is rendered impossible simply because of our own evilness. 

 

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