[virginiaprograsser]

April 23, 2006

A Time for Heresy

By Bill Moyers

This is the prepared text of Bill Moyer's remarks delivered on March 14 upon the establishment by Marilyn and James Dunn, of the Wake Forest Divinity School, of a scholarship in religious freedom in the name of Judith and Bill Moyers.

When Dean Bill Leonard asked James Dunn to join him here at Wake Forest's new Divinity School, my soul shouted "Yes!" These two men personify the honesty and courage we need to meet the challenge of faith in the fundamentalist dispensation of the 21st century as radical interpretations of both Islam and Christianity seek, in the words of C.Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, "to take over the government and use cause structures to advance the ideology, hierarchy, and laws" of their movement.

James Dunn and Bill Leonard are Baptists. What kind of Baptist matters. At last count there were more than two dozen varieties of Baptists in America. Bill Clinton is a Baptist. So is Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson is a Baptist. So is Jesse Helms. Al Gore is a Baptist. So is Jerry Falwell. No wonder Baptists have been compared to jalapeno peppers: one or two make for a tasty dish, but a whole bunch together will bring tears to your eyes.

Many Baptists are fundamentalists; they believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible and the divine right of preachers to tell you what it means. They also believe in the separation of church and state only if they cannot control both. The only way to cooperate with fundamentalists, it has been said, is to obey them. James Dunn and Bill Leonard are not that kind of Baptist. They trace their spiritual heritage to forbearers who were considered heretics for standing up to ecclesiastical and state power on matters of conscience. One of them was Thomas Helwys, who, when Roman Catholics were being persecuted by the British crown, dared to defend the Catholics. Helwys went to jail, and died there, for telling the king of England, King James - yes, of the King James Bible - that "Our Lord the King has no more power over their [Catholic] conscience than ours, and that is none at all."

Baptists helped to turn that conviction into America's great contribution to political science and practical politics - the independence of church and state. Baptists in colonial America flocked to Washington's army to fight in the Revolutionary War because they wanted to be free from sanctioned religion. When the war was won they refused to support a new Constitution unless it contained a Bill of Rights that guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religion. No religion was to become the official religion; you couldn't be taxed to pay for my exercise of faith. This was heresy because, while many of the first settlers in America had fled Europe to escape religious persecution at the hands of the majority, once here they made their faith the established religion that denied freedom to others. Early Baptists considered this to be tyranny. Said John Leland: "All people ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that each can best reconcile to their own consciences."

It was all about a free conscience in a free state, and James Dunn has spent his life as a champion of both. No one in my time has been a greater defender of "soul freedom" - the competence of each man and woman to interpret their own experience of God in the light of faith and reason. When James stood up against fundamentalists who would have the state recognize their literal reading of the Bible as the foundation for public policy, they smeared him. They demonized him. They tried to fire him from his denominational position. But they couldn't silence him. He stood against them when they set out to turn the Southern Baptist Convention into a monolith of dogma run from the top down by a cabal of credalists demanding doctrinal conformity. He riled them when they sought to turn the pews of their churches into precincts of partisan politics. He infuriated them when he opposed their plotting with the White House to draft a Constitutional amendment that would trivialize prayer by reducing it to a perfunctory ritual approved by the state. Said James Dunn: "The Supreme Court can't ban prayer in school. Real prayer is always free." When the fundamentalists and their obliging politicians claimed that God had been expelled from the classroom, Dunn answered: "The god whom I worship and serve has a perfect attendance record and has never been tardy."

This excellent Article continues at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bill_moy_060423_a_time_for_heresy.htm

[MAGI]

Thank you for this excellent informative article, Virginiaprograsser

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bill_moy_060423_a_time_for_heresy.htm

If only All "We the People" would read it!

More of the Moyer's speech:

"Yes, indeed: God does work in mysterious ways.

In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay also discovered the power of money to power his career. By raising more than two million dollars from lobbyists and business groups and distributing the money to dozens of Republican candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshmen legislators and got himself elected majority whip, the number three man in Newt Gingrich's "Gang of Seven," who ran the House.

Here's how they ran it: On the day before the Republicans formally took control of Congress on January 3, 1995, DeLay met in his office with a coterie of lobbyists from some of the biggest companies in America. He virtually invited them to write their own wish list. What they wanted first was "Project Relief" - a wide-ranging moratorium on regulations that had originally been put into place for the health and safety of the public. Soon scores of companies were gorging on his generosity, adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after another to the bill. On the eve of the debate 20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that "this was a key vote, one that would be considered in future campaign contributions." On the day of the vote lobbyists on Capitol Hill were still writing amendments on their laptops and forwarding them to House leaders.

Watching Tom DeLay become the virtual dictator of the House, with the approval of party leaders and the blessing of the Christian right, I was reminded of the card shark in Texas who said to his prey, "Now play the cards fair, Reuben; I know what I dealt you." They were stacking the deck against the people.

Consider what they did to the bill for Medicare prescription drug coverage. As the measure was coming to a vote, a majority of the full House was sympathetic to allowing cheaper imports from Canada and to giving the government the power to negotiate wholesale drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries. But DeLay and his cronies were working in behalf of the big pharmaceutical companies and would have none of it. So they made sure there would be no amendments on the floor and they held off the final roll call a full three hours - well after midnight - in order to strong-arm members who wanted to vote against the bill.

There are no victimless crimes in politics. The price of corruption is passed on to you. What came of all these shenanigans was a bill that gave industry what it wanted and gave taxpayers the shaft. But when the deeply flawed bill passed in the wee hours of the morning, the champagne corks popped in the offices crowded with lobbyists for the big drug and insurance companies. They were about to be richer on the backs of America's senior citizens.

When Tom DeLay worked the system to reward the rich and powerful, he had come a long way from Sugar Land, Texas. The people who had voted for him had the right to expect him to represent them, not the big lobbyists in Washington. This expectation is the very soul of democracy. We can't all govern - not even tiny, homogenous Switzerland practices pure democracy. So we Americans came to believe our best chance of responsible government lies in obtaining the considered judgments of those we elect to represent us. Having cast our ballots in the sanctity of the voting booth with its assurance of political equality, we go about our daily lives expecting the people we put in office to weigh the competing interests and decide to the best of their ability what is right. What do they do instead?"

Please read the full article. There is so much more.........

Gip, what do YOU think about this article?

[wimzkl]

Lord Acton: “The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”

Clinton: “There are large numbers of people who simply don't have the values and vision necessary to be part of an inter-dependent world. They think their differences - whether religious, political, tribal or ethnic - are more important than our common humanity. They believe the truth they have justifies their imposition of that truth on other people, even if it takes them to the death of innocents.”

Harry S. Truman: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Thomas Paine: “EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.”

Robert Fulgram: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.”

Our founding fathers were closer to religious prejudice than are we, and they recognized the danger inherent in prejudiced knowledge. There is a statue of a woman in Boston Common who was hung by other Christians for espousing Quaker beliefs. Our Bill of Rights was conceived and enacted to protect the rights of minorities in order to avoid or minimize the damage resulting from prejudiced knowledge; and so, we have mostly learned to live peacefully with each other here in America.

There is significance in the fact that it is the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”) that establishes a “wall of separation between church and state” (Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists.) Obviously, our Founding Fathers, with their knowledge and close memories of religious persecution, felt it was of paramount importance.

Those of you that want the Christian community to unite against the 14% minority and those of you that demand a return of our schools to your particular brand of prejudiced knowledge, listen to Jesus before casting any stones. It is not how we want the 97% majority in Iraq to treat the 3% that are Christian. We should do unto our 14% minority as we would have the Iraq 97% do unto the 3% that are Christian.

To claim love for all mankind as a characteristic of God in one breath, and then to claim exclusivity of qualification for the afterlife in another, is hypocritical. Love for all yields a level playing field for all. The accident of life that births religious beliefs will be ignored by God who loves all mankind.