Religious in the National Debate

• "Every white man for himself; women, children and minorities be damned!"
• "It's all the fault of the government spending all the money on those illegal aliens."
• "We couldn't educate the poor or allow them to have health care, they don't deserve it because of their laziness and besides it might take some of mine."
• "The gays caused my divorce."

Bishop Rickel's Blog has a new posting on "Prosperity, A sermon based on Mark 10:17-31". The passage from Mark is the story of Jesus with the Rich Young Man. I commented there, but felt that my comment fit in my blog here too.

The supposed religious are sure a closed-minded selfish bunch, in spite of the readings such as the one that Bishop Rickel's good sermon is based on. They keep yelling that it is a zero-sum game. Anything that "they" get means that I get less. "We have to stop those Muslims, homosexuals and aliens from getting anything from us."

But what if cooperation actually leads to everyone being better off. In economics it's called "gains from trade". Everyone is better off if we all work together with our specialties and trade.

Now let's look at the big picture. We can all be better off if everyone can do their best. If anyone is under-educated or is excluded from health care, they are not only worse off because of their misfortune, but we are all worse off because they can not participate in the cooperative efforts benefiting everyone

We are currently watching our supposed leaders fight out the healthcare reform. It seems that there is a lot of zero-sum-game arguing going on. It also looks like the religious are mostly on the wrong side of the argument. I think back to the history of Europe and the wars of religion and don't see much hope for our nation. I'm not sure how God helps. He seems to be used to limit rational discussion.

Gary

"Eternal Bliss in Heaven After Death" is an out and out lie!

• "reward after death"
• "immortality of the soul"
• "life of the world to come"
• "seeing again departed friends"
• "the Bible as literal Truth"

Historically, but probably mostly recently, there has been much discussion of the significance of the Bible and about what it says about everything. The Wikipedia provides a quick summary of details of religion that were practically unavailable when I was an adolescent and started questioning my parents religion. One had to organize the information in thousands of books to even start tracking what any subject on religion was or you had to accept one author's viewpoint as you chose his work to read. It was impractical to figure out what was believable from the massive amount written about religion. When I attempted to research the topic for this post I realized the massive summarization and footnoting of information about religion that the Wikipedia represents. I'm not going to bother giving the research reference for this article as any reader that actually gets the point can now easily find it themselves, if they want to. (I'm going to be over generalizing anyway.)

"Eternal Bliss in Heaven After Death" is not mentioned in the Bible. Dis-embodied souls eternally living in joy isn't biblical! (That's not to say that the pious haven't tried to weasel it in there.)

Now the point about the lie. Many priests and ministers, or whatever the leaders in your religion are called, go to seminary and are given an introduction to what the scholarship in your denomination knows about your own religion. The rest are just plain ignorant charlatans. They are taught biblical content and about modern biblical criticism and know what the Bible actually says about life after death and stuff. Now my mother is getting old and is living a very rough life. She can't wait to die and start enjoying the bliss. This is the view of the person in the pew. So why don't the ministers tell them about what the Bible actually says. No, your religious leaders perpetuate the lie.

It's disgusting. That's an example of religious fraud for power and control.

Gary