  netpilot has requested, and an illustrious guest has indicated, that we need to bring into some focus the various points raised re: the relativity of the Sermon On The Mount and other Christian teachings to foreign affairs and such. The structure of blogs isn't aslways friendly to long spans of verbiage like a discussion board, so I've made an effort to bring together the various comments that are germane to the issue. For this we shall waive the rule of ONE RESPONSE allowed the ORIGINAL AUTHOR, because by now that line is totally blurred. I do believe, in fairness, that I responded to all of net's points, but could be wrong. So here is the full monty (warning - LONG! This is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for the lower order of attention span!
- insert smiley)... netpilot: Somewhere along the line liberal has become a four-letter word. I believe it started with Rush, but the real blame lies with liberals themselves. When political hacks such as Rush or O’Reilly point the finger and apply the liberal tag, liberals do their best to cloak themselves in a moderate, if not conservative robe. It’s almost comical to watch our politicians distancing themselves from the left while providing justification after justification for any vote they made which might be interpreted as liberal. Why is that exactly? Liberal.
Last time I checked, a liberal politician is one who is progressive, open-minded, willing to change. It is also associated with politicians who place more importance on social programs than on the military. Taking this even further, it’s been a label put upon those who are willing to negotiate with adversaries and try peaceful means to solve problems instead of relying on force. So, to Rush, O’Reilly, and others of their ilk, I ask “what’s your point?” Since when have these characteristics become bad? On the contrary, these are characteristics of which one should be proud. They are traits attributed to those who have learned from the past and realized violence is used only as a last and extreme resort.
They are traits shared by those who place more value on humanity and peace than they do on monetary wealth and power. They are traits of people who understand that we are not blessed with an even playing field and that many people can use a leg up. And they are traits of people who have learned from life that compassion is more important than preservation of capital. So instead of running from this label I say to everyone else, you’re damn right I’m a liberal, and why the hell aren’t you? Boileryard and I go back a few years and he has had the unfortunate experience of hearing this rant of mine before. Even though I personally am not a Christian, this nation prides itself on being founded on Christian principles.
Many make the argument that this nation is in fact a Christian nation and that’s what our founding fathers intended. Regardless of my own personal religious affiliation (Buddhism) I throw my hat in with Christians in stating that the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5 through 7) is probably one of the finest pieces of pure theological teachings we have today. Here are some of the finer points. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Agree with your adversary quickly.
Turn the other cheek. Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away. Love your enemies. Judge not. Now call me crazy, but those sound like liberal teachings to me. Am I bringing religion into politics and breaking down the imaginary wall of separation?
Perhaps. But I’m trying to do the opposite of what I see being done in this country today. I’m basing my political beliefs on what I’ve learned to be morally correct principles instead of re-defining my religious beliefs to fit into my political box. So that said, at long last here comes my point. When you read this do you find yourself thinking that this sounds great but that these teachings are not very realistic in today’s political climate? Do you believe that these teachings only work if everyone participates?
If so, you are not alone. I’m suspicious myself. So here are my questions: if being a liberal and following the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha are not doable and practical today, then why keep up the premise of being a Christian nation? Are we not guilty of the same behavior of those who have hijacked the Muslim religion? Why go to the bother of changing our religious teachings to fit our political beliefs when they so obviously contradict each other? I know I run the risk of offending many, but after reading the teachings of the Buddha and reading the Sermon on the Mount, the only way I can justify supporting the Republican, Democrat, or Libertarian parties would be to judge these teachings as either impractical or secondary, and choose to follow political dogma instead.
Boileryard Clarke: You and I both come from a teacher who explained that religion is best understood in the realm of metaphor, and when we make it literal and solid we lose the poetry and thus the deeper meaning. Christian, Jewish and Muslim "nations" have all lost the metaphor and the lesson - and we see the result. But to your point - I guess I don't see the relation "liberal" has with your examples. A political liberal also believes in reform, and that government can address the ills of society. Therefore they are inclined to make a program to coerce and enforce the principles you ask we apply. Forced cheek turning.
Forced meekness. Forced love. And so on. What exactly is "Christian" about forcing anything? The essence of religion is that it comes from within. If we've learned anything we should know that the benefits come in the realm of personal revelation.
By the same token the Bible never expresses that a Christian should be a doormat. You - netpilot - have the living kind of religion. It has never been anything but admirable. On you it fits, and I happen to personally know that you have driven yourself to abide by what you believe. We should be thankful there are people like you who take the metaphor and the lesson seriously. You show a lot of people the way.
But you may be a very dangerous man in government, when all is said and done. Liberal politics from this framework can also be seen as being next to the installation of a theocracy. That's what Muslim Supremacists are trying to do. And should we instill Christian ideals as the so-called Religious Right sees them? God forbid (there, I said it). When I stood against the government in the 60s I stood against statism and government telling people what they should do.
Liberty and liberal seemed a whole lot closer then. But today's liberal isn't about liberty. They aren't against statism. They are the state. And this, you see, is my problem. I feel I kept the faith, as it were, and remained a "true liberal," while what morphed out of my fellows is a Nanny just itching to do what is best for me.
Read: Get into aspects of my life an outside entity has no business being in. And I would be a hypocrite to change now, as I feel "the Left" (as it is now constituted) truly is. At least from that frame of reference. Boileryard Clarke: net the problem is that you and I cut our teeth long ago on the History Channel religion board. You KNOW that at least makes us partially idiots, but mostly it makes us incapable of forming a cogent thought relative to religion. Well that goes for me anyhow...
But here's a post by someone who is slowly becoming a very good friend of mine (webwise of course) that I saw today...and I think it speaks to our discussion. Why... it almost looks like she was spying on us don't it? Her name is La Shawn Barber and she's a class act all the way. Here's the article titled Jesus Was a Liberal .... urlLink La Shawn Barber "Reverend" Jesse Jackson makes some ignorant and incorrect assertions in his latest column, but I want to focus on one: the crack about Jesus being a liberal. I cringe not at the idea that my Lord and Savior is a Democrat; I cringe because Jackson, a professing Christian, deliberately panders to those with little or no understanding of who Jesus is and what the Bible reveals about him. People unfamiliar with the Bible tend to select verses and principles out of context to support a particular position.
But Scripture must be compared with Scripture and interpreted in light of the whole Bible. There is no excuse for a so-called reverend, particularly one who attended seminary (didn’t finish), to make such errors. For political gain, however, he seems willing to deceive the unsuspecting about the nature of God. Jackson writes: Think about it: A conservative Christian is a contradiction in terms. Christ wasn’t a conservative. He fed the hungry simply because they were hungry.
He didn’t require that they go to work first. He healed the sick, simply because they were sick. He didn’t push them into an insurance company, or let the drug companies gouge them on prices. Jesus was a liberal; Herod was the conservative. Implicit is the common notion that conservatives don’t care about the poor. Liberals think they’ve cornered the market on compassion simply because they advocate bigger government programs to do the caring and feeding.
To sum up the difference between liberal compassion and true compassion, I’ll borrow an old saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” (If “Jesus was a liberal", as Jackson says, I wonder what he’d have to say about the other attributes of liberalism, such as sexual permissiveness, advocating homosexual “marriage", killing unborn babies or discriminating against people based on their race. ) While I believe non-political conservative values, such as promoting traditional families, self-restraint, self-reliance (physical, not spiritual), to name a few, are biblical attributes, I don’t dispute that some liberals mean well when they contend that feeding the hungry just because they’re hungry is what Jesus would do. It is true, but not the way they think. As Jackson knows, liberal, conservative, libertarian, constitutionalist, etc., are labels we fallen humans came up with to describe our political ideology. Labels are just a quick way to describe where we are on an imaginary political line.
In that regard, I’ll dispense with political labels and use spiritual ones: believers, unbelievers, saved and unsaved. According to the Bible, which I believe is inerrant, infallible and God-breathed, we are dead in our sins. That is, we are incapable of recognizing the need for salvation. From the first disobedience in the Garden of Eden, every person born is a sinner. We are rebels through and through. But a person is “saved” from God’s wrath once he’s acknowledged his sinful condition, confessed his sins, admitted his unworthiness and turns away from his sins.
He’s asked God for mercy and forgiveness and acknowledged the need of a Savior: Christ crucified on the cross. In all of these things the repentent person has faith, and in his infinite mercy, God forgives. Read more here. Jesus did many things in his 3-year ministry. With righteous indignation, he threw out traders and money-changers conducting business in God’s temple, fed the hungry and cared for and about the downtrodden. But that’s not all he did or ultimately why he came.
This is where the unbelieving miss a crucial point. Christ wasn’t a traveling doctor or soup kitchen volunteer walking about the countryside curing ailments and filling bellies with loaves of bread and fish. He was extending an offer to heal spiritual sickness and provide the bread of life — Himself — to satisfy spiritual hunger. The portrait of a “liberal” Jesus misses these points entirely. Christ indeed fed the poor. The poor in spirit.
Christ said, “I am the bread of life….Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Some people don’t believe that Jesus was anything other than a man. They say Jesus was a good teacher, a wise philosopher and an all-around great guy but ignore the fact that this “good teacher” claimed to be the Son of God. He claimed authority to judge sin, not merely to point it out.
Such authority is given to no mere man. In his boldness, Christ told the unbelieving Jews that if they indeed knew God, they’d also know him because he and God were one. He even claimed to be the “I AM” himself, the name of the God of the Old Testament. Jesus is also the Lamb slain to pay for the sins of those he came to save. He will return to deliver God’s wrath on an unrepentant world. Isn’t it interesting that people who claim Jesus was a liberal skip over this part?
I certainly didn’t expect Jesse Jackson to say all this in a 650-word column, but a little hint would have been nice. To heal our spiritual sickness and hunger is why Christ came into the world, and I pray that Jesse Jackson knows it. If he really believes that the God of the Bible approves of deception and deliberate misapplication of Scripture, I truly feel sorry for him. A man who once believed abortion was murder has let his political ambition take precedence over truth. This is compassion: I pray that God has mercy on him. netpilot: Again, here are the points from the Sermon on the Mount which I mentioned in my previous post.
"Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Agree with your adversary quickly. Turn the other cheek. Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away. Love your enemies.
Judge not. " Let's take this more toward the Iraqi conflict and foreign policy instead of soup kitchens. That was my intention anyhow. But even then, there is nothing spiritual about 'Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away. ' In this instance, the woman who wrote the article is guilty of the same mistake made by Jesse. She's picking and choosing the parts of his teachings that fit into her worldview.
But... the question I asked has not been addressed. Are these teachings still relevant and do they still apply to today's world? Are they still doable or are they naive? Trish: We must keep any particular faith/spiritual path/religion (fill in the blank here) from having overriding influence. To think those in government have no beliefs let alone that they have no influence is delusional at best. But there is a huge difference between practicing a personal faith through action and speech (as most are called to do within their particular path), and forcefeeding it to others through whatever means.
Boileryard Clarke: I can't answer for La Shawn - and she wouldn't need that anyhow. Also the subject was well done and heavily attended at her blog, but I can give my take on an answer. Also I would prefer we stay to soup kitchens, but netpilot has taken it to the realm of foreign policy. So here we go. It should be noted that La Shawn and I, while Christians, have our own interpretations of things. So I only answer net for myself when I say... We're also to give to Ceasar what is his and to God what is His.
And whether or not we are talking about soup kitchens or foreign policy, Jesse's worldview or La Shawn's worldview, or for that matter netpilot's worldview, my contention is that the virtues expressed by Jesus in that sermon - and in His entire teachings - are the sources of inspiration and understandings directed toward the paradigms that order each individual's relation to all else. But in that it may instruct policy MUST be another matter, for in a society that attempts to order and accomodate the various religions within the same borders as we do in America, we have to keep an eye out to the imposition of one set of teachings over another. And in any case if we found the truest expression of the Buddha there would be no borders, no power centers, no armies, and no more Buddhists either. But Islam's paradigm would swallow the sermon on the mount whole, as "fighting is proscribed for you" intones the notion that here we have a relgion and a version of God that admits to man's penchant for conflict. Islam attempts to temper that penchant by saying when a man cries for peace it is righteous to give peace, but if he fights - keep fighting him. Check your response here, my fellows - in my travels I studied the Qu-ran and was very close to conversion at one point.
I'm not giving the standard American street-corner vitriol here. There is no "turn the other cheek" to offense in Islam once the intent of your opponent is clearly seen as your ruin. There is only tempering response when the other guy cries "uncle. " In Christianity it may seem that gracefulness comes at the point of being attacked, while in Islam it comes when your enemy asks for you to have it. This is a huge chasm. And it does not take into account - at any time - the idea that there could possibly be people who are using the knowledge that you won't defend yourself in order to take what you have and what you are - because they didn't buy the lessons and/or you forgot that it is a metaphor.
The point of my silly comparison is as an answer to your question of the teaching's relevence to today's world. Are they? Yes they are - but to the degree they contain (or appear to contain) the seeds of one's own eventual destruction, then you have to ask - was that the intent of the lesson? netpilot: Boileryard - I realize I'm running the risk of having this devolve into a theological discussion, but I would have to disagree with your reference to metaphor. I see nothing metaphorical about what I referenced, pretty straight-forward stuff. But I sure wish we could all go back to my original post and address the points I brought up there.
urlLink La Shawn Barber: netpilot says: "She's picking and choosing the parts of his teachings that fit into her worldview. " I am "she", and I'm not sure what I'm picking and choosing, if you could be more explicit. I jumped in mid-discussion so I need to get caught up. In the meantime, you mentioned the Sermon on the Mount. If you have the time, check out a post I wrote about the war from a biblical worldview, urlLink "Onward, Christian Soldiers. " I look forward to the discussion.
Have your Bibles handy! --------------------------- That's where we ended as of this writing. As I said - posting rules are waived. urlLink MORE… 
