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Flirting with Theocracy

Jewish and Christian language is filled with theocratic language:  language that describes rulers acting on behalf of god.  I am less knowledgeable about Islam, but I suspect it is just as prevalent there.  Islam is, after all, the other child in the Judaic tradition.

To be clear, it is not so important whether one believes in god, or not:  language that refers to god is a claim to absolute truth and rights.  When people claim, for instance, that God blesses America (or anywhere else), they are supporting the idea that America (or whatever the place, or idea) is absolutely right.

The function of religious language is a claim to authority.  If I tell you that eating pork, or working on a Sabbath, or getting a divorce, or not being circumcised is blessed by god, or forbidden by god, I am appealing to the highest authority I can cite to defend the claim.

People often defend their ideas and actions and diets and countries and clothing by appealing to god.  When they do that, they are making it clear that they have it on the highest authority that they are right.  You can take your habits and mores and so-called holy books or political proclamations and do what you want with them, but when a person says god hates . . . oh, gay people, or abortions even to save the life of the mother, that person is telling you that they have it on the absolutely, highest authority that they are right.  Period!

The universe is very old; perhaps 13 or 14 billion years old.  Fourteen billion:  14,000,000,000.  A little more than 3,000 years ago, in Egypt (where Moses came from), a claim was made that there was one, really great god:  the sun, actually.  One god!  Monotheism.  Now you have a really good authority to appeal to; not just whomever your household god happened to be, or a river god, or coyote or bear, but the god at the top of the heap!  Maybe Aten, or Aton.  The sun.  Or Jahweh, or The Father, or grandfather, or Allah.  In this country, most of us come from the Judeo-Christian version of that, but with clear roots back to Egypt, and Babylonia, and Jerusalem, and maybe Oslo, Norway or Geneva, Switzerland, or Rome, Italy.

We invented our ultimate authority--the one, true, holy god--just a few human generations ago.  And now, when we want to let each other know, what we really, truly, absolutely believe, no doubt about it and no room for compromise, we say it is god's will.  That is how we defend out ideas when the stakes are really important.

I cringe when our Presidents end their speeches with, "And god bless America!".

Why do I cringe?  Because they usually mean that they believe America is something really special to god, that this is the modern holy land, and that their particular religion--the one of Moses and Jesus and St. Paul and the Pope and John Calvin and Billy Graham and maybe Donald Trump--is what we are and everybody ought to be.

I do not believe in a theocracy; that god speaks through the King, or the President, or the Pope, and that is what we really are.  I believe that we have a Constitution that defines what we really are, and strive to be.  I have no serious objection to people worshipping Coyote, or the Sun, or some guy in Jamaica with manure in his hair, so long as they don't get arrogant and silly and demand that all of us do that.  If people do not want to eat pork, or drink coffee, or allow Demon-Rum to cross their lips, or think that they should marry only other descendants from a village in Bulgaria, I do not really care, so long as they do not suggest that their goofy preferences should become the law of the land.  We have a constitution for that.  And, in fact, the Constitution says that we can be whatever kind of religion we want to be so long as we do not try to require it of everybody.

We aren't a Christian nation, even though many of us, historically, came that way.  We aren't any other kind of religious nation, either.  We are the United States of America, and we have a hard enough time getting over our colonial and slave-holding history to go through all of that, again.  We finally, not very long ago--just in time for my mother to vote--recognized that we are not a male nation, either.  And we aren't just caucasians, or Anglo-Saxons, or born-and-bred-in-Boston or Baltimore.  We are, almost all of us, immigrants and children of immigrants, to this day, trying to form a more perfect union.

The laws we have did not drop down from heaven like a stone.  They are the best we could find, or invent, and amend.  We aren't god's promised land.  But we are trying to do the best we can to become a really good place.  Together.  All of us.

Once in a while, maybe every four years or so, we get a little off track and do something stupid, or scared, or ignorant.  It might be best, at those times, not to claim that god is on our side, but to admit that ignorance is sometimes in good supply, and that we have some hard thinking to do.

It is no time to claim that we are god's chosen people;  no god, not even our old favorite.  Nor that we are something special.  It is hard enough just to be decent, caring people.  

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