A Religious Liberal Blog

This site hopefully can provide some vehicle by which I can comment, complain, and once in a while praise the state of religion in this country and around the world from a liberal protestant perspective.

Thursday, June 23, 2005


Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host, has written a column against seeing nature as sacred. The "Judeo-Christian" view is God is outside of nature "wholly separate from the world of His creation and wholly other than what the human mind can conceive or the human imagination depict.", a supernatural creator. The move to worship nature is done by those "who rely on feelings more than reason to form their spiritual beliefs."

But what sort of reasoning can we credit to Dennis Prager? If God is wholly separate from this world, from nature, than God is never to be found within the realm of human experience and is thus unexperiencable. We couldn't even begin to engage in speculative reasoning either since it is so wholly other that such a move would be futile. Upon what basis could we have knowledge of God? Silence would be the appropriate route if one believed as Prager does.

Prager has successfully taken God outside of the world. Even the deists had some route to know God through the laws of nature. The reason that other cultures may have had worship of nature, of ancestors, etc. is because they experienced a real sense of dependence on such things. This at least gives us a place to begin our reasoning: what are those features of our world in which we experience dependence and sustenance?

Prager also has a piece on why God must be referred to with male pronouns. Prager writes "neither men nor women want to be given rules or ruled by a woman"."God must be completely desexualized" and women embody sexuality, men do not. It's "more palatable for women to bow down to a male God than for men to bow down to a female god." Sexuality is bad, women are to be subservient, is that what religious language ought to strive for?

Prager exemplifies the distortions that masculine only language does to religious thought. And since God cannot be reasoned nor experienced upon what ground can he call for any kind of language about God? In other news; Bush has again called for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in a video address to the Southern Baptist convention. And some conservative Presbyterians and Anglicans have drafted a plan for the creation of a denomination within a denomination. A precursor to a split?

1 Comments:

At 7:52 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

The truly ironic thing about the Presbyterian "New Wineskins" movement is the power they give congregations to ordain elders and deacons. This is precisely the power that has traditionally been held by congregations, but the conservatives have usurped it with their power-grabbing Book of Order amendments. That is, because of their amendments to the Book of Order regarding the ordination of LGBT folk, the power of congregations to ordain who they want has been usurped.

Silly conservatives. Oh well, splitting up the denomination is the Presbyterian way...why else would we be referred to as the Mixed-P's? :)

 

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