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Today's Sermon against Dogma

How the Church made Jesus a mean guy.

Rafe Mair 4 Sep 2006TheTyee.ca

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His message was pretty simple.

As many of you know (he says hopefully) I do three weekly editorials for Omni TV, Channel 10. Their licence requires them to do some religious programming and while they never interfere with me in any way, they have told me that if I felt like unburdening myself of my latest views on matters religious, to fly at 'er. I occasionally do so, but as a critic -- which I gather from the reactions, is not quite what many viewers expect.

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I'm nominally an Anglican who sometimes lapses and that I'm now, it would seem, permanently lapsed. My problem is that while I can't deny that God has done the many things that all Christian churches claim He did and while I can't accept them without reservation I know that an all-powerful God can do anything. I neither believe nor disbelieve. I simply say that the catechism of my church and all the others is utterly irrelevant, full of clearly man-made doctrinal inferences from authors of dubious authority who may not even have existed.

A careful perusal of the Bible finds a few pronouncements against some forms of homosexuality, none of which were made by Jesus.

While an interpretation of an answer given by Jesus could be interpreted as a claim to his own divinity, this is not contained anywhere else and, as a matter of fact, two of the gospels claim that Jesus is descended through his father Joseph -- a fact much ignored.

Jesus, it's not rocket science

There is no mention by Jesus of a Trinity or a virgin birth. Jesus certainly never claimed that the wine and bread of the communion table actually became his blood and flesh upon ingestion. I could go on but leave with you my personal belief that the only important thing about the Bible to me are the words of Jesus and while the rest may be true, partly true or nonsense, that is irrelevant.

Jesus was clearly preaching to ordinary people. One of the groups he was fighting was the scribes and all who split doctrinal hairs and claimed a monopoly on knowledge. Jesus spoke in parables that ordinary people could understand and these stories illustrated a point of behaviour, not a tenet of faith. He said to ordinary people that they should love God and their neighbours and that upon these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. There was nothing mysterious about his teachings. There was no need for a priesthood to explain anything.

The true AIDS sin

What's all this about?

The Roman Catholic Church has caused hundreds of millions of deaths, especially in Africa. The Catholic injunction against artificial birth controls has resulted in monumental birth rates and resultant death and starvation. Nowhere does Jesus forbid birth control and most other churches, Christian and others, accept if they don't encourage birth control.

The condemnation by the Catholic Church of the use of condoms has made AIDS a pandemic. In fact the Catholic Church, several African governments and Western countries have, by their moralizing, condemned millions to life-threatening and life-ending disease.

The Catholic Church has blood on its hands -- big time.

The answer they give should make everyone else upchuck. They take the view that because various popes have declared birth control and homosexuality sins that they must condemn the resultant sinners to death. Even if Jesus had said, which he didn't, that all his followers must have baby after baby until the woman can no longer produce, is dead or dying, I would deny the church the right to deny, on penalty of excommunication, the right of all people to have sex protected against conception.

Dangerous dogma

Even if Jesus had proclaimed, which he did not, that homosexuality was such a venal and horrible sin that the church must insist that commissions of such sins carry the death sentence, I would condemn that church in the strongest terms.

What the Roman Catholic Church has done is use its dogma, smugly pontificated by popes, including John Paul II, to create a massive need for help whereupon it can step in and say, "Tut, tut, we told you to abstain from sex and not use condoms when breaking our laws but now that you're starving, sick, dying and spreading the malaise of AIDS to millions of people, homosexual and heterosexual alike, all of this your fault for not obeying the Holy Father's wishes...but we your ever-loving church will step in and see if we can help."

Biggest cult?

What sort of church would permit this to happen? Here is the generally accepted definition of a cult: any group which has a pyramid type authoritarian leadership structure with all teaching and guidance coming from the person/persons at the top. Surely that definition fits the Roman Catholic Church to a "T." By creating an infallible pope (in matters of doctrine), the Catholic Church has set up a pyramid-type authoritarian leadership structure as defined.

If all the pope did was punish adherents to his "cult," that would be bad enough, but clearly the impact has gone far beyond adherents to the Catholic faith. Is it perhaps -- God forbid -- that those outside the "cult" don't matter?

I will be seen as an anti-Catholic heretical bigot. I defend myself by confessing to heresy but not to any sort of bigotry. To cite an old saw usually used when anti-Semitism is charged, not only do I have a lot of Catholic friends, I also have a Catholic son and four Catholic grandchildren.

I yield willingly to the notion that all people are entitled to worship their own God or gods as they wish, or not worship at all. What I condemn is any religion that uses its power to create situations that, if their dogma is obeyed, will have as inevitable consequences poverty, misery, disease and death.

Rafe Mair writes a Monday column for The Tyee. His website is www.rafeonline.com.

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