Madame,
I join you (and the Black Eyed Peas) in asking,
“where is the love?”
And Anne Rice echoed your sentiments when she
announced that she was still a follower of Jesus, but no longer wanted to be
known as a Christian, due to so many giving the title a bad, bad name she
wanted no affiliation with.
Jesus and his disciples would well recognize
the same twisters, the same selfish deceivers, the same obeisance to elite
servitude (and the same attitude that everyone else is on their own), and the
same cultural adherence to unexamined (and often corrupt and deliberately self
serving) “laws”—religious or otherwise—in our modern day. And how deeply, bitterly, ironic that the two
greatest commandments of the Bible as summed up by Jesus in Matthew 22 are so readily
ignored, especially the second.
The lack of reading on the part of people, and
their resulting susceptibility for being “taught” twisted ideology by self-serving
demagogues who tell them what “The Good Book” says—what the people themselves
should have read—leads to the abysmal situation where religion is twisted to
cause evil effects, precisely the kind that Bill Maher and others rail so
effectively about.
But even all the criticisms of biblical
chapters and their possibly questionable robustness do not detract from the emphasis
on the poor, the sick, the hungry, the weary.
Even a cursory reading of the New Testament Jesus would give pause to
true believers. Pause, because most of
the words are about love, tolerance, brotherhood, forgiveness. Further pause when they discover the few
words of condemnation that Jesus uses, and the few instances of great anger,
are reserved for precisely the same types of proselytizers of the ‘prosperity
gospel” and their plutocratic allies.
Even unbelievers can see how good a world it
would be if people would mimic Jesus, or Katie Davis, or anyone who lives out
those two commandments, including and especially the second. When we don’t live out the second, we don’t
really live but merely exist, for we feel the emptiness of it all deep inside
us from the disconnection from our
neighbors. And maybe, just maybe, sense
that true change for lasting good means we must live out fully that second
commandment. A good reminder in this “most
wonderful time of the year.”
Because in a globalized world, we’re all
neighbors. And really, always have been.
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