Skip to main content

Come, Let us Reason Together

An L. Kate Deal illustration
Maybe because it is the holiday season, I noticed that someone was arguing for "the Christian attitude" toward animals.

Maybe because I taught in a church college for such a long time, I thought of all those arguments about whether or not there is "a Christian perspective" on what a college should be, or whether the president of the college, or the faculty, or the students, or the mathematics curriculum should be "Christian".

I cannot recall whether it was Reinhold Niebuhr or his brother, Richard, who said that whatever particular case one tried to make about something being "Christian", the strongest argument one could make was that there would be some Christians who agreed.  And, or course, that probably even more would disagree.

There isn't "a Christian point of view".  There are a hundred or a thousand Christian points of view.  I suspect that in Tulsa, or Amarillo, or Lynchburg there will be a lot of people who agree that Christians are pretty much like Baptists.  But there are a lot of Baptists, too:  Calvinistic Baptists, Primitive Baptists, General Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestination Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, and Garden Variety Baptists.  Every one of them will be quite willing to tell you what Baptists believe about what a Christian is.  They will not agree, of course.

Once upon a time, I was a Lutheran.  No, no, not that kind of Lutheran!  I was not the same kind of Lutheran Michele Bachmann is said to have been, nor even the same kind that Martin Luther was.  Martin Luther was German.  I was a derivative Scandinavian, and there are those who disagree with me about that, too.  But I can say without fear of contradiction, I think, that I was a Squarehead Lutheran.  However, I must confess that once upon another time, I visited relatives in Norway at Christmas time, and we danced a most somber dance around the Christmas tree, and spoke of relatives who were missionaries in Africa or Stavanger or Somewhere, and I did wonder whether my mother might have had a more adventurous life than she ever told.

Catholic Bishops are especially willing to tell us what Christians ought to believe about birth control, or why priests have three knots in their cinctures, and why sometimes they come untied, and Christians in Nigeria are sending missionaries to explain the truth about Christianity to the United States.  And you have been to South Carolina, haven't you, and danced around the Segregation Tree, or to Salt Lake City?

"What is the Christian attitude toward animals?"

Oh, stop!

 There are those who will agree with you, and with me, but. . . .

Come, instead, let us reason together.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there
Post a Comment
Read more