Christians left and right

Anne Lamott has a new column on Salon today, if you like that kind of thing. I must say -- she tries very hard to play a tough hand, preaching to the anti-choir, as it were. She is a much more successful essayist than she ever has been a novelist, and I sort of admire her for that -- accepting success in a realm slightly different than the one she shot for. If we're counting, I've made tons more money as a technical writer in the last 6 months than I ever have writing my own stuff -- perhaps more than I ever will, though I still hope to sell my first novel.

Speaking of Christians and liberals, cartoonist Ted Rall sort of debates a Christian who wrote him. His stance is much more typical of liberal-progressives' take on Christianity -- Jesus is admired in the abstract for what he taught, but the modern Christian right is so objectionable they spoil it for any thinking person.

Most people I know profess either that stance or condemn all religion out of hand. Each of them has reasons for doing so, and it would be presumptuous of me not to take those reasons seriously or to discount them because I, like Lamott, believe otherwise. I do think that by avoiding church, people deprive themselves of several non-spiritual things, much less spiritual ones: a great tradition of music, and the Bible as literature, to name two. I don't see how you can call yourself a truly literate person and not know, for example, the difference between Noah and Moses (I once saw a poem in which the writer had Noah parting the Red Sea; maybe she thought Noah was the water guy) or understand the origin of words and phrases like "the burning bush," epiphany, the "tumbling down" walls of Jericho, or the "four horsemen." Especially in this era where the Christian right is using apocalyptic fearmongering to influence American foreign policy and actively work to destabilize the Middle East in the hopes of speeding the apocalypse, every anti-rightist should understand what underlies this movement.

In this context, the recent, horrid attempt by NBC to profit from this hysteria through its recent Revelations miniseries is the worst kind of exploitation.

Christians and progressives,Christian Zionists,NBC's Revelations,Anne Lamott,Ted Rall