So, if I were God
So, if I were God, and people who claim to love and revere me are instead loving and revering, say, freedom, and in the process, doing really bad things, what would I do?
First, you don't have to be doing bad things to get God all riled about if you are worshipping something else that is not technically God. Like, for example, freedom. It's idolatry and it's bad, even if it's benign.
I had a student once who did a little exercise I came up with that asked him to list the ten things in life that he loved the most on the bottom of a pyramid. As he moved up the pyramid, he had to get rid of one at each level, so that when he got to the top, what was supposed to be left would be the One Thing (as Curly would say) that is the most important.
I don't remember all ten things, but I do remember the last three, because he got stuck and couldn't eliminate any more. He loved them all equally.
The three things were God, music, and girls.
That's not good.
If you did that with most good American Christians, and if they were honest, there would be five things left. America. Freedom. Individualism. Democracy. Capitalism.
If you really pushed them to eliminate a few, there would be three left.
America. Freedom. Capitalism.
Push really hard, and there might be two left.
America. Capitalism. With one more hard push, I'm afraid that the only thing left would be...
...Capitalism.
That's not good.
Let's be clear and fair. We'll talk about capitalism later. That was clear. Fair.
So. Freedom. Do we love it more than we love Jesus? Yes we do. How, you immediately demand as though you don't do this, do you know? How can you tell?
It's pretty simple. You do things for freedom that are, well, bad. You know. Sin. Like, Jesus wouldn't like them.
What?!?!? you demand, getting all huffy.
Well. If we wanted freedom for everyone, then that would be Jesus-good.
If we only want freedom for ourselves, and took it from others to get it and keep it, that's Jesus-bad.
We took freedom from the people who lived on this continent first so that we could have it for ourselves. The Indians. The Native Americans. We eliminated about 95% of them, took the rest and marched them off to other places, violating the treaties we had signed with them 400 times to take the land we had agreed to let them have after we took the land they were on in the first place. Make sure you understand that. We signed 400 treaties with the Native Americans, and we busted all of them.
We took freedom from the blacks, bought them from slave traders who had stolen them from their families, communities and native lands to feed our hunger for slaves, we turned free men, women and children into slaves, we bought and sold them as slaves, we got rich from their labor. When Lincoln set them free, we found a way through sharecropping to virtually enslave them again, and then through Jim Crow, and then through laws that we thought were clever and subtle.
We like to pretend that we fight wars for freedom, but we have never fought a war for the freedom of all Americans, not one (OK, half os us fought the Civil War to free the slaves, but not to free the Indians, and the other half fought to keep the slaves, so those two halves cancel each other out. It's just math.) We fought wars for land, power, influence, trade, money. Even WW2 was not fought for the freedom of any Americans, and certainly not black Americans. And many of our wars were fought against the freedom of peoples in other lands in support of dictatorships and tyrannies, so that we might protect, no, not our freedoms, but our trade routes and trading partners. Dang, that capitalism keeps sneaking in. Oh, and a bunch of wars to fight Communism, which we did by sacrificing the freedom of those peoples for our own peace of mind. And a few wars to fight terrorism, which were stupid, pointless, endless, ill-conceived and poorly fought, and, in the end, unsuccessful and wildly expensive.
Bluntly, we are all about freedom for white male landowners, but not really for anyone else. That's in our founding paperwork. Large print. Not subtle.
First, you don't have to be doing bad things to get God all riled about if you are worshipping something else that is not technically God. Like, for example, freedom. It's idolatry and it's bad, even if it's benign.
I had a student once who did a little exercise I came up with that asked him to list the ten things in life that he loved the most on the bottom of a pyramid. As he moved up the pyramid, he had to get rid of one at each level, so that when he got to the top, what was supposed to be left would be the One Thing (as Curly would say) that is the most important.
I don't remember all ten things, but I do remember the last three, because he got stuck and couldn't eliminate any more. He loved them all equally.
The three things were God, music, and girls.
That's not good.
If you did that with most good American Christians, and if they were honest, there would be five things left. America. Freedom. Individualism. Democracy. Capitalism.
If you really pushed them to eliminate a few, there would be three left.
America. Freedom. Capitalism.
Push really hard, and there might be two left.
America. Capitalism. With one more hard push, I'm afraid that the only thing left would be...
...Capitalism.
That's not good.
Let's be clear and fair. We'll talk about capitalism later. That was clear. Fair.
So. Freedom. Do we love it more than we love Jesus? Yes we do. How, you immediately demand as though you don't do this, do you know? How can you tell?
It's pretty simple. You do things for freedom that are, well, bad. You know. Sin. Like, Jesus wouldn't like them.
What?!?!? you demand, getting all huffy.
Well. If we wanted freedom for everyone, then that would be Jesus-good.
If we only want freedom for ourselves, and took it from others to get it and keep it, that's Jesus-bad.
We took freedom from the people who lived on this continent first so that we could have it for ourselves. The Indians. The Native Americans. We eliminated about 95% of them, took the rest and marched them off to other places, violating the treaties we had signed with them 400 times to take the land we had agreed to let them have after we took the land they were on in the first place. Make sure you understand that. We signed 400 treaties with the Native Americans, and we busted all of them.
We took freedom from the blacks, bought them from slave traders who had stolen them from their families, communities and native lands to feed our hunger for slaves, we turned free men, women and children into slaves, we bought and sold them as slaves, we got rich from their labor. When Lincoln set them free, we found a way through sharecropping to virtually enslave them again, and then through Jim Crow, and then through laws that we thought were clever and subtle.
We like to pretend that we fight wars for freedom, but we have never fought a war for the freedom of all Americans, not one (OK, half os us fought the Civil War to free the slaves, but not to free the Indians, and the other half fought to keep the slaves, so those two halves cancel each other out. It's just math.) We fought wars for land, power, influence, trade, money. Even WW2 was not fought for the freedom of any Americans, and certainly not black Americans. And many of our wars were fought against the freedom of peoples in other lands in support of dictatorships and tyrannies, so that we might protect, no, not our freedoms, but our trade routes and trading partners. Dang, that capitalism keeps sneaking in. Oh, and a bunch of wars to fight Communism, which we did by sacrificing the freedom of those peoples for our own peace of mind. And a few wars to fight terrorism, which were stupid, pointless, endless, ill-conceived and poorly fought, and, in the end, unsuccessful and wildly expensive.
Bluntly, we are all about freedom for white male landowners, but not really for anyone else. That's in our founding paperwork. Large print. Not subtle.
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