[Mb-civic] "He's Gone!" and "Why I am a Christian (sort of)"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040406A.shtml

 He's Gone
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 04 April 2006

    Rat in a drain ditch,
    Caught on a limb,
    You know better
    But I know him.
    Like I told you,
    What I said,
    Steal your face
    Right off your head.

    Now he's gone, gone,
    Lord he's gone, he's gone.
    Like a steam locomotive,
    Rollin' down the track
    He's gone, gone,
    Nothing's gonna bring him back.
    He's gone.

    - The Grateful Dead, "He's Gone"

    Stone the crows. Tom DeLay is checking out.

    "I'm going to announce tomorrow that I'm not running for reelection 
and that I'm going to leave Congress," said DeLay on Monday. "I'm 
very much at peace with it."

    Never thought I'd live to see the day.

    In 1988, DeLay gave a press conference in Texas to defend the 
military record of Dan Quayle, who had been tapped to accompany 
George H. W. Bush on the Republican presidential ticket. Quayle was 
under fire for having allegedly used family influence to secure him a 
safe spot in the Indiana National Guard, thus keeping him out of 
Vietnam. DeLay argued that Quayle's failure to serve in Vietnam was 
not his fault; he wanted to go, but minorities had taken all the available 
slots.

    Seriously, he said that.

    This is the man who once said, in a debate about the minimum 
wage, "Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on 
$4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not 
exist."

    This is the man who once said, in a speech to bankers delivered 
eight days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, "Nothing is more important 
in the face of a war than cutting taxes."

    This is the man who once said, to a government employee who was 
trying to stop him from smoking on government property, "I am the 
federal government."

    This man is gone now. After being indicted in Texas for campaign 
finance violations arising from his redistricting scheme, after surviving 
a tight primary challenge while staring down the barrel of a well-
financed Democratic challenger, after watching his press secretary 
Michael Scanlon and his deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy cop pleas in 
the Jack Abramoff scandal investigation, after watching Rudy 
specifically accuse his chief of staff Ed Buckham of being neck-deep in 
the scandal in his plea confession, after sitting up nights wondering if 
the Abramoff scandal was going to land him in prison, DeLay decided 
enough was enough.

    Time Magazine, which carried one of the first reports of his decision 
to step down, has DeLay adamantly denying any wrongdoing. "Asked if 
he had done anything illegal or immoral in public office," read the 
report by Mike Allen, "DeLay replied curtly, 'No.' Asked if he'd done 
anything immoral, he said with a laugh, 'We're all sinners.'"

    It was the Democratic party that did this to him, of course. Wait, 
sorry. It was the "Democrat" party.

    "I guarantee you," continued DeLay in the report, "if other offices 
were under the scrutiny I've been under in the last 10 years, with the 
Democrat Party announcing that they're going to destroy me, destroy 
my reputation, and that's how they're going to get rid of me, I 
guarantee you you're going to find, out of hundreds of people, 
somebody that's probably done something wrong."

    That's right, Tom. It was the Democrat party, that awesome 
juggernaut of competence, which has shown time and again lo these 
past few years its Zeus-like ability to hurl devastating political lightning 
bolts from its lofty position, that took you down. They can stand up next 
to a mountain, so I hear, and chop it down with the edge of their hand.

    Or maybe, Tom, just maybe, all this happened because you are the 
living embodiment of absolutely everything wrong in American politics. 
Forget your ideology, and your hateful divisiveness, and your 
shameless canoodling with the Taliban wing of fundamentalist 
Christianity. One cannot swing a cat by the tail in Washington DC 
these days without smacking someone who thinks the way you do. 
This doesn't make you unique, sadly.

    No, your criminal misuse of the campaign funding laws, your outright 
disdain for the rules if they keep you from assuming absolute control, 
your almost Zen-like ability to operate beyond the confines of 
conscience and dignity, is why your presence has been a cancer on 
the body politic since the day you put down your bug extermination 
gear and tried a power tie on for size, and is why you're finished now. 
How deeply were you in the pocket of your contributors? You took an 
R.J. Reynolds corporate jet to get to your arraignment. There has to be 
some kind of award somewhere for behavior so brazenly craven.

    It is hard to avoid a sense that something like justice, true justice, 
real justice, has been well served by the manner in which Tom DeLay 
has been laid low. Politics is a little cleaner today. Not a lot, maybe not 
even enough for folks to notice, but it is indeed just a little bit cleaner, 
now that he's gone.

    William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally 
bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush 
Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

  -------

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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-03/27jensen.cfm


ZNet Commentary
Why I am a Christian (sort of) April 06, 2006
By Robert Jensen

I don't believe in God.

I don't believe Jesus Christ was the son of a God that I don't believe in,
nor do I believe Jesus rose from the dead to ascend to a heaven that I
don't believe exists.

Given these positions, this year I did the only thing that seemed
sensible: I formally joined a Christian church.

Standing before the congregation of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in
Austin, TX, I affirmed that I (1) endorsed the core principles in Christ's
teaching; (2) intended to work to deepen my understanding and practice of
the universal love at the heart of those principles; and (3) pledged to be
a responsible member of the church and the larger community.

So, I'm a Christian, sort of. A secular Christian. A Christian atheist,
perhaps. But, in a deep sense, I would argue, a real Christian.

A real Christian who doesn't believe in God? This claim requires some
explanation about the reasons I joined, and also opens up a discussion of
what the term "Christian" could, or should, mean.

First, whatever my beliefs about the nature of the non-material world or
my views on spirituality, I live in a country that is extremely religious,
especially compared to other technologically advanced industrial nations.
Surveys show that about 80 percent of Americans identify as Christian and
5 percent as some other faith. And beyond self-identification, a 2002 poll
showed that 67 percent of all people in the poll agreed that the United
States is a "Christian nation"; 48 percent said they believed that the
United States has "special protection from God"; 58 percent said that
America's strength is based on religious faith; and 47 percent asserted
that a belief in God is necessary to be moral.

While 84 percent in that 2002 poll agreed that one can be a "good
American" without religious faith, clearly there's an advantage to being
able to speak within a religious framework in the contemporary United
States.

So, my decision to join a church was more a political than a theological
act. As a political organizer interested in a variety of social-justice
issues, I look for places to engage people in discussion. In a
depoliticized society such as the United States -- where ordinary people
in everyday spaces do not routinely talk about politics and underlying
values -- churches are one of the few places where such engagement is
possible. Even though many ministers and churchgoers shy away from making
church a place for discussion of specific political issues, people there
expect to engage fundamental questions about what it means to be human and
the obligations we owe each other -- questions that are always at the core
of politics.

The pastor and most of the congregation at St. Andrew's understand my
reasons for joining, realizing that I didn't convert in a theological
sense but joined a moral and political community. There's nothing special
about me in this regard -- many St. Andrew's members I've talked to are
seeking community and a place for spiritual, moral and political
engagement. The church is expansive in defining faith; the degree to which
members of the congregation believe in God and Christ in traditional terms
varies widely. Many do, some don't, and a whole lot of folks seem to be
searching. St. Andrew's offers a safe space and an exciting atmosphere for
that search. in collaboration with others.

Such expansiveness raises questions about the definition of Christian.
Many no doubt would reject the idea that such a church is truly Christian
and would argue that a belief in the existence of God and the divinity of
Christ are minimal requirements for claiming to be a person of Christian
faith.

Such a claim implies that an interpretation of the Bible can be cordoned
off as truth-beyond-challenge. But what if the Bible is more realistically
read symbolically and not literally? What if that's the case even to the
point of seeing Christ's claim to being the son of God as simply a way of
conveying fundamental moral principles? What if the resurrection is
metaphor? What if "God" is just the name we give to the mystery that is
beyond our ability to comprehend through reason?

In such a conception of faith, an atheist can be a Christian. A Hindu can
be a Christian. Anyone can be a Christian, and a Christian can find a
connection to other perspectives and be part of other faiths. With such a
conception of faith, a real ecumenical spirit and practice is possible.
Identification with a religious tradition can become a way to lower
barriers between people, not raise them ever higher.

We can ground this process in the ethical principles common to almost all
religious and secular philosophical systems, one of which is the assertion
that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. For example:

--None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he
wishes for himself (Islam).

--Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Christianity).

--Act only on that maxim that you can will a universal law (Kant).

One of the most playful and powerful ways this has been conveyed is in the
story of the gentile who challenged two Jewish rabbis to teach him the
Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot. One rabbi dismissed the
question, but Hillel, one of the great Jewish theologians of the first
century BCE, told the man: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to
your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and
study it."

There is an important struggle going on for the soul of Christianity,
which should be of concern to everyone, Christian or not. The debate is
not just at the level of arguments over whether, for example, certain Old
Testament passages should be interpreted to condemn homosexuality. The
deeper struggle is over whether Christianity is to be understood as a
closed set of answers that leads to the intensification of these
boundaries, or as an invitation to explore questions that help people
transcend boundaries. Such a struggle is going on not only within
Christianity, but in all the major world religions.

Where can this lead? Some might argue that promoting such expansive
conceptions of faith would eventually make the term Christian meaningless.
If one can be a Christian without accepting the resurrection, then calling
oneself Christian would have no meaning beyond an expression of support
for some basic moral principles that are near-universal. That is partly
true; if this strategy were successful, at some point people would stop
fussing about who is and isn't a Christian -- and that would be a good
thing. The same process could go on in other religions as well.
Christianity could do its part to help usher in a period of human history
in which people stopped obsessing about how to mark the boundaries of a
faith group and instead committed to living those values more fully.

In other words, the task of Christians -- and, I would argue, all
religions -- is to make themselves more relevant in the short term by
being a site of such political and moral engagement, with the goal of
ensuring their ultimate irrelevance. The task of religion, paradoxically,
is to bring into being a world based on the universal values that underlie
most major theological and philosophical systems -- compassion, empathy,
solidarity, dignity. Such a world would be truly based on love and real
solidarity, a world in which we would take seriously the claim that all
people have exactly the same value.

In his 1927 lecture "Why I Am Not a Christian," the philosopher Bertrand
Russell said: "A good world ... needs a fearless outlook and a free
intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time
toward a past that is dead."

I couldn't agree more, and I joined a Christian church to be part of that
hope for the future, to struggle to make religion a force that can help
usher into existence a world in which we can imagine living in peace with
each other and in sustainable relation to the non-human world.

Such a task requires a fearlessness and intelligence beyond what we have
mustered to date, but it also requires a faith in our ability to achieve
it.

That is why I am a Christian.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center (
http://thirdcoastactivist.org), and the author of The Heart of Whiteness:
Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire:
The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at
rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu .




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