- The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many.... They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.
...Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt... That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists.
Sounds like a great plan to me. I'm an Atheist, but there are some Christians out there who I really respect and admire, and I always hated how I couldn't clearly separate them out somehow when angrily ranting about these hateful Christianists. Well, now I can...
Christianists:
- Believe the earth is 6,000 years old because they added up the ages of people in the Bible
- Believe Jesus buried the dinosaur bones when he invented DNA
- Hate homos... wait no... "hate the sin, love the sinner"
- Judge others and condemn them to hell for breaking various laws in their religion
- Think women should be baby making machines
- Think they need to make laws to force everyone to follow the "rules" of their religion
Christians:
- Follow Jesus' teachings
- Trust science to come up with some plausible explanations for our existence
- Love everyone regardless of religion, gender, sexuality, race, etc...
- Want to learn more about people who are different them
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