Bad Pastors, Bad Ideas
Challenging the sermons that spew bigoted thoughts, fascist ideals, twisted logic, and downright deception that threaten our secular democracy.
Americans are realizing that most religions, particularly the brutal and violent Abrahamic ones, are incompatible with the basic values and ideas of American liberty. The right to self-govern and the right to self-determination are both foundational to the functioning of our secular democracy, and when faced with the oppressive and slavish dedication required to serve Yahweh, whose First Commandment contradicts the First Amendment, more of us are choosing to believe in American liberty instead of Middle Eastern fascism.
The Bible wasn’t written for Americans or by Americans. It’s filled with countless justifications for slavery, child marriage, child rape, infanticide, bigotry, genocide, and murder. It says nothing of equality, liberty, or democracy.
Does Jesus say a few nice things? Sure, but Hitler probably told the Third Reich’s child soldiers to mind their parents, too, and so what? It doesn’t matter when you work for someone who believes they are the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner, whether it’s Hitler or God.
We have the Sixth Amendment because no one should have that much power over someone else’s fate.
At nearly every point in our history where we have attempted to expand the scope of liberty to include more people, to fulfill the Founders’ promise of creating a “more perfect union,” God has always been standing in our way.
In the lead-up to the Civil War, Republican Cassius Marcellus Clay noted in his 1886 autobiography that “The present generation can know nothing of the terror which the slave-power inspired.” It was so fierce that “a professed minister of the Christian religion in South Carolina” said it was better for him “to murder his own mother, and lose his soul in hell” than denounce slavery.
Slaveowners handed out edited versions of The Bible to their slaves, reinforcing the passages about obeying masters while removing the ones discussing liberation and freedom.
Hell, even Thomas Jefferson disrespected The Bible, desecrating it and carving it up with a knife to create a naturalistic version of a Jesus who performs no miracles and dies at the end. There’s no resurrection, no angels, and none of the “corruptions of reason” Jefferson despised. His version is a far better starting point for centering any idea of American morality than The Holy Bible.
It was God who helped usher in the Comstock Act of 1873, a religious terrorist’s successful plan to restrict our free speech and conform it to Christianity’s whims that are being used today by Christian fundamentalists and their puppet politicians to ban books, prohibit access to contraception, and limit equality.
Throughout our history, religious Americans have fought to limit liberty and to expand it. The Ku Klux Klan drew on its deep ties to Protestantism to funnel Americans into their hateful ranks of white supremacy that would then be the fuel that kept the fire of segregation burning in our country until Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. took to the pulpit to show white Americans a dictionary and teach them about the meaning of the world equal.
One of this generation’s greatest civil rights victories, achieving LGBTQ+ equality, is already being threatened by religious extremists who want everyone to bend the knee to their God’s bigotry. Today in America, books are being banned, children are fleeing their homes, and pregnant women are in danger of dying, all to appease religion.
Americans should not have to live in fear – the fear of hell, the fear of societal repercussions, the fear of displeasing a foreign deity. Christianity is toxic, and The Bible is not a morally good book. It’s been tainted by its most ardent and toxic followers who hide behind religion and use it as an excuse to hate and discriminate against their fellow Americans, just as they always have, and who desires to be associated with that? Not me—nor a growing number of my fellow citizens, and it’s time to offer something better.
A new Facebook page will highlight the sermons that spew bigoted thoughts, fascist ideals, twisted logic, and downright deception that threaten our democracy while hopefully constructing a newer, more just philosophy filled with sincerely held beliefs that better align with a secular democracy.
If you still have Facebook, check it out and give it a follow. And if not, expect some of the posts to make their way into this newsletter.
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