Re: Is God Skipping the Democratic Primary? (The New York Times, 2019, October 23)
Yes. Christians should be held to the moral standards that their religion teaches, and that means not the petty rules of ancient Israel, but the example of Christ's inclusiveness emphasizing the deeper moral reasons for any rule. This means, for example, that Christians must support loving relationships, not legalistic opposition to same-sex marriage.
Similarly, Buddhists must be held to the Buddha's wise teaching that authority, whether ancient, political, textual, traditional, or the Buddha's own words, can never trump critical thinking that might prove any previous insight to be wrong.
And the same for every other religion. Don't let religion serve as a shelter for prejudice, for unreason, for the rejection of social and moral progress. Do not let the prejudiced, the unreasoning, those rejecting social and moral progress hide under the intolerant worship of dead texts that too often belie their founders' most profound insights into the spiritual and moral.
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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to the The New York Times article.
It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opinion/democrats-2020-religion.html#commentsContainer&permid=103249063:103249063
J. Sutton replied:
ReplyDelete"@Felix Qui I wonder if you'd count the Ten Commandments as an example of "the petty rules of Ancient Israel." I think trump has probably violated all of them."
To which Felix Qui replied:
@J.Sutton
Yes, even the Ten Commandments need modern, living interpretation to make them fit for more morally developed societies, including every democracy. At the very beginning of the Ten Commandments, the text in Exodus 20 says: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before[a] me.
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below." (Ex.20: 2-4).
This is the dictator's demand (command) for absolute obedience. It commands intolerance for all other ways of thinking. This command driven start to the Biblical basis of Judaism and Christianity reflects perfectly the cultural milieu in which the text was written by the men of time, including all of their limited understandings.
Nor do I think that modern, democratic societies should be banning the production of images of the wonders of the world, whether to worship them or not.
There can be spiritual insight even in these verses that begin the Ten Commandments, but those insights need interpreting in the light of the following 2,600 years and more of moral development. Merely quoting the text to argue that images should be criminalized or that other religions not be tolerated, as Jews, Christians and Muslims have regularly done for many centuries, is morally wrong and denies the deeper spiritual meaning that the text might have. It needs living interpreters to bring it to life.
And so on at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opinion/democrats-2020-religion.html#commentsContainer&permid=103249063:103249063
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