Pie in the Sky by and by...

I dropped off to sleep last night thinking about the twit in Congress who wants to use “Holy Scripture” as his basis for government... and as I lay there on the edge of sleep, I also happened to be thinking about one of the pleasures of yesterday... eating a slice of my neighbor Irene’s amazing pie.  I know, I know... It’s a strategy, some would say a silly strategy, that involves interrupting a stream of disturbing thoughts with a recollection of something pleasant... and last night just before I disappeared into a satisfying, deep sleep, that strategy led to my thinking about the great difference between my way of living in the world and Ted Cruz’s primitive, fundamentalist way of explaining the ultimate reward system for human beings.  The difference is that I like pie now... and I wish I could share wonderful pie with the whole world. The idea of building a religion, a plan for living, for being,  around “pie in the sky by and by” doesn’t make sense... and smacks of selfishness and ignorance and resignation. It stops way short of finding ways to make the world a better place for everybody to live safely.  

-----------

So when it was morning again... on the first day of October, with my government shut down by Senator Cruz and his colleagues, I was back to thinking about how to some extent mixing religion and politics played some part in getting the nation into this ridiculous situation. In a news report a few days ago a local radio station played the Senate Chaplain’s prayer for the session that was about to begin. The prayer was basically a plea for the Almighty to step in and solve the problems facing the nation.  That was just before Senator Cruz’s marathon faux filibuster.  I don’t know how many Senators and Representatives claim affiliation with fundamentalist evangelical Christian churches or any other religious organizations, and it doesn’t matter to me so long as members of Congress and the institution itself respect the first Amendment to the Constitution which is meant to ensure separation of church and state. I don’t expect any of them to to be required to declare their religious affiliation or to say so if they are not religious. I don’t know anything about Ted Cruz’s religious practice, but he publicly identifies his evangelistic fundamentalist Christian religion by name, presumably to take advantage of the fact that Texas is a state where his church is part of a major religious denomination. According to the denomination headquarters’ published statistics, “over half of all people of that denomination in the world live in five Southern states: Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama.”  

Fundamentalist evangelical Christian denominations routinely describe “salvation” as getting a passport to heaven, and it’s fine with me if Senator Cruz and other legislators are personally comforted by believing that they have got for themselves irrevocable passports to Heaven and to eternal bliss.  Emphasis on a guarantee of eternal blissful afterlife as an advertising hook to get people to join a temporal institution strikes me as illogical and at least borders on being immoral, especially when the religion threatens that if you don’t get the special passport you’ll have to go somewhere after this life is finished and that place is “a living hell” where unimaginable suffering is eternal, a literal burning forever and ever.  It reminds me of what hostage takers do.  They say, “Give us what we want or suffer terrible consequences.”

When a religious organization says, “We’ve figured out who can get into heaven and who can’t... what the rules are for being admitted to heaven,”  it seems to me at least reasonable to ask on whose authority and whether or not those who are identified as being unqualified for heaven are discriminated against in the temporal world where I live.  

Most people have heard at least one of the jokes about the jihadists who martyr themselves anticipating the payoff of 7 virgins waiting to receive them with a very special home coming in heaven, but when they get to the judgement place after they are dead the hot time they have been anticipating is a hell of a surprise. Some Christians apparently fail to see the same illogic in their own descriptions of a heaven where streets are paved with gold which they expect to find after they float past Pearly gates on their way to reunite with "loved ones who have passed on" before them. For fundamentalist Christians hell is no laughing matter.  I wonder if Christians with a firm belief in a heaven “up there” could be tolerant of a joke coming out of a non-Christian religious community about seven virgins all on El Cajon Boulevard (as unlikely as that would ever be) in San Diego on one street corner at the same time waiting for some kind of rapture in a reunion with a martyred Christian missionary. 

Now to the point of this writing:  I would like to believe in the possibility that a nation could be developed in this temporal world (call it a kingdom if you like the sound of it) where all people are received with equal good cheer regardless of race or ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation and all of them guaranteed social justice.   I'd like to believe there could be a time when no child ever goes to bed frightened or hungry, where nobody who wants a home is denied one, where nobody who is sick is unable to afford and get medical treatment.  I really like the idea of the kingdom of God which Jesus described, and I'm quite sure he was talking about the way this temporal world might be arranged and furnished with the needs of absolutely everybody in mind, not a pie in the sky for a select few.  

Wouldn't it be wonderful if members of Congress could get together for a real, old-fashioned tea party after which they might adjourn to their caucuses and spend their time finding ways to make our nation resemble the "kingdom" Jesus described... in spite of the reality of suffering, of deprivation, of hunger, of homelessness, of madness of war.