Rather than move the world forward in a positive manner, many aspects of religion no matter how “peaceful” your one true religion is, many aspects of religion are a redundancy decades or centurties after secular institutions began to function in the place of ancient religious insitutions such as courts, hospitals, universities and civil government. Indeed, I think that religion here in the west is just hanging around after it has been become obsolete on the secular civil level. As such what good is it except to clutter those secular institutions with superstition and useless remembrances of the past.
The past is the past. The Modern World is now. A Post-Modern world is tomorrow. There seems to be a lot dead weight regarding religion trying to drag us away from modernity.
That dragging people into a mindless past with Sharia Laws, Islamic or Christian, is anarchy – trying to destroy the secular real, functioning, world around us.
In the news I see sad things in that seven people were mowed down in gun fire at a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass celebration in Egypt. Fully 10% of Egypt’s 80 old million souls are Coptic Christian which these days comes close to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in their beliefs.
There are also fire bombings at Christian churches in Malaysia, an Islamic Country, where a court ruling said that it was legal for Christians, a minority, to use the word Allah as the word for their G-d in Christendom. Semantics. Bloodshed. Misunderstanding.
I am looking briefly at the concept of post modern Christianity with various mainstream and evangelical fundamentalist branches of the Christ tree trying to rethink and retool not to a modern world – but a post modern world – whatever that means. The here and now is modern enough for me.
I will say that dialogue if it exists at the high CEO level of church entities doesn’t talk to the little people on the ground on how to rethink and retool- sounds like I am talking automobiles in Detroit – more so than churches – Religion is like General Motors – only the empty factories give evidence of a once great human enterprise. Empty churches – empties factories – Obsolete thinking! Gross mismanagement of purpose.
The RC church, the so-called power house of Christian entities that should be setting the pace on post modernism, if there is such a thing, is still wallowing in the 32 years of Vatican mismanagement. Still languishing in the disaster reign of Pius IX in the nineteenth century who started the war on modernism (like a similar war on terror – it will never end).
In fact, Vatican II and all its negative fallout to this day forty odd years later is partially a result of trying to undo 32 years of RC/Christian gross mismanagement of humanity and its spirituality. The Vatican likes electricity and flush toilets (very modern things) but everything else that is not medieval is Verboten.
Indeed, Benedict’s attack on Islam, a new holy war, his infamously incompetent and tactless reference to Islam in the 14th century in his Regensburg Lecture in September 2006 is something mainstream Christianity will have to deal with in terms of collateral damages for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Perhaps bloodshed in the news today in Egypt and Malaysia has its direct roots in that very same speech.
While one part of Christianity wants to address interfaith issues and improve the perception of Jesus’ message to the ages, bumbling hack Vatican bureaucrats are still debating the bloody Crusades!
There is a point in time long ago where the secular world took over most institutions in the West. Rather than give the devil his due, I would say that most of Christianity lives in the delusion of the past before street lights, electricity, running water, penicillin, birth control and all those other truly evil things of a modern world.
Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism Etc. must look at reality first in the present and assess where they have been or where they are going. Otherwise, the coming rapture happens to them all - as they get whisked away into obscurity and history. Good riddance.
The Coptic Christian killings above is indicative of the dysfunctionalism of Islam in Egypt. Before Obama’s visit to Cairo earlier this year, the hack cronies of the Government decided that the pigs being raised by Christians in Cairo would cause a national swine flu epidemic even though there was little or no scientific data to support such a slap in the face of the Coptic minority population which eats pork.
The pigs were confiscated and destroyed. Compensation from the Government did not materialize. What would you expect – Justice?
The Moral of the story of Egyptian Muslims harassing Coptic Christians in Cairo - The pigs used to eat the garbage in the streets. The pigs are gone. Now all of Cairo smells of rotting garbage. If you want to be post-modern and or even modern world, start a secular garbage collection bureaucracy before you impose your stinking religious prejudices on the entire world. Think first – cause and effect.
The west and the Christians can learn from the lack of tolerance to others in the smug present world moving into a future world. That world will likely see the decline and disappearance of all religion because the guy in the back end of the Donkey costume does not know how to signal or cooperate with the other guy in front end of the suit. Or vice versa.
We are all interdependent in this world -“joined at the hip”- if it takes a hundred years to start up an interfaith dialogue, guess what, the secular will survive while your religious world crumbles and disappears.
Religions will come and go in the post-modern secular world. Whether there will be any religions left in that post-modern world? Well - one third of the passengers of the Titanic did after all make it all the way to New York.
In the meantime, garbage will continue to be picked up in a timely secular fashion.
Reality is real. Religion frightens me.