Leslie Eppler's List: Christianity and politics

• As for those revolutionaries who do appear in the Bible, the Maccabees and the Zealots, they look more like Taliban than Zapatistas.
• As for those revolutionaries who do appear in the Bible, the Maccabees and the Zealots, they look more like Taliban than Zapatistas.
• As for those revolutionaries who do appear in the Bible, the Maccabees and the Zealots, they look more like Taliban than Zapatistas.
• As for those revolutionaries who do appear in the Bible, the Maccabees and the Zealots, they look more like Taliban than Zapatistas.

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• Christianity, after all, is not Judaism, and the Christian religion begins with the assumption that it is not about nation-building or Kingdom-creation anymore. The “Kingdom of God” that Jesus preached is precisely not the Kingdom of Judah; it took the disciples quite some time to get this point.
• Some Christians have used their understanding of the Deuteronomic covenant to read God’s judgment in current affairs
• Any reader of the book of Job should know better than to talk like Job’s false comforters. There are tragedies in human life that are not to be explained by Deuteronomy; that much is clear.
• But the second belief is that Jews and Christians share a common core of moral judgments. The simple fact is that they do and they don’t. Judaism is one religious tradition; Christianity is another. There is no singular “Judeo-Christian” morality any more than there is a “Judeo-Buddhist” morality.
• But these same Christians often think that the Ten Commandments are essentially the Christian short-list of rules that are still in force (actually, the Christian short-list may be found in Acts of the Apostles 15; it has three commandments, not ten).
• Ten Commandments are a Jewish symbol, not a Christian one.
• Eventually the legitimacy of Christian visual representation of the divine was established at the Seventh and last Ecumenical Council in 787. The defenders of Christian icons argued that the Law had been replaced by an “age of grace,” and thus that the Commandments were no longer binding on Christians. They also said that since Christ was God Incarnate, he was essentially an icon of the Father, suggesting that images were now not only acceptable, but of special value.

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• Our personal and collective histories are not linear.
• This belief in inevitable moral progress, whether it comes in secular or religious form, is magical thinking.
• It is a battle between two groups intoxicated with the utopian and magical belief that humankind can protect itself and master its destiny.
• We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degradation as well as to nurture and sustain life.
• Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress is also cumulative. And in many ways science has simply replaced the faith our pre-modern ancestors had in God.
• he New Atheists ignore the wisdom of Original Sin, as well as studies in cognitive behavior, that illustrate that human nature is often irrational and flawed.
• It comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.

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