Religion - Frog in the Pot

For as long as it has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows–and it has been a while¹–I would offer that there has never before been such a strange set as those joined in this year’s Trump campaign for U.S. president. Riding sidecars on Trump’s chariot toward ultimate power are one of history’s most inspiring and loving religious leaders and perhaps the most evil person to darken American politics.

The Bible tells a loosely similar story, but with a twist or two, in describing the Fall of Lucifer. Lucifer was once one of God’s most powerful angels, until his lust for worship caused him to rebel against the Creator, resulting in his fall from grace and eternal life to become the destroyer of worlds. It has been said that Lucifer took at least a third of the angels with him in his rebellion and fall, and that he did so by deceiving them with lies.²

What the Bible does not foretell is that Lucifer ever again joined forces with God or Jesus. His exile was to be in perpetuity. So: How in the world did we reach today’s pairing of this political Odd Couple? Continue reading “Running for President with Jesus and Hitler”

The American writer Charles Dudley Warner offered this statement to the world in his 1870 book, My Summer in a Garden.[↩]
See “What Was the Fall of Satan in the Bible,” in The Collector.[↩]

Until recent years I had never thought much about spirituality, let alone my own, whatever that might be. Instead, I have spent more time thinking about organized religion, and about my flight from it that evolved over my early decades. As I have described that journey in the earlier essays in this series, from my teen years onward I increasingly experienced the Catholicism that I had been taught to be a source of personal unhappiness rather than liberation from it. This experience certainly did not seem in line with the Resurrection story.

But what would fill the space in my life created by my abandonment of the faith of my youth? That I never thought to even consider this question is itself worth considering. My exit from religious practice and my growing agnosticism could have left me alone in the existential sense. What to believe in if not my Church and its creed? What to think if the Church shamed members for sexual orientations and identities, condemned them for marrying outside of the faith, and forced females into second class status? If the religious guidance that had been drilled into me since age five was no longer meaningful to me, what was to direct and even comfort me on life’s infirm road ahead? Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part IV: Wonder”