This is a continuation of my last post...

Unfortunately, there is too much disagreement about how to interpret Scripture, and too much adamant certainty on the part of many interpreters that theirs is the only sect that truly understands the meaning of the text. Each sect zealously hews to its own doctrine, and none have any way (aside from circular arguments based on Scripture) of verifying their side's interpretation. Inevitably, some group gains the upper hand economically, and they use their power and influence to set up a government that sponsors one sect above all others. Those in power neglect the needs of a poorer but usually more numerous competing sect. Corruption runs rampant, power struggles play out along sectarian lines. This is not only exactly what is happening right now in the Middle East, it has happened repeatedly throughout history. The history of religion is a history of sectarian warfare.

Sectarian aggression is always brutal, often genocidal. And it is not limited to any one religious faction. We only have to watch the nightly news to know about the ongoing horror being wrought by Islamic Fundamentalists in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lybia, as well as in France, Great Brittain, and the USA.

A cursory review of history shows that all of the great Western religions are guilty. In the First Crusade, when Christians sacked Jerusalem, they massacred nearly every man, woman, and child in the city. In case any Christian is under the illusion that the Crusades were just an anomaly specific only to a dark past, consider the "ethnic cleansing" carried out by Christian Serbs against Moslem Bosnians in the 1990s.

Only a secular government has any chance of bridging the divide between religious factions. The American founding fathers understood this. That's why the very first Amendment to our Constitution prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. The wisdom of the founders notwithstanding, there is a movement afoot to make the US a (white) Christian nation.

Roughly half the American populace professes belief in literal interpretation of the Bible, and many of those believers are bent on imposing their beliefs on the other half of the population.

Albert King, one of the great old school blues musicians, used to sing, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." And it's usually true. Most people who profess a belief in God and the hereafter are very reluctant to test that hypothesis. There resides within their psyches a spark of reason. And this is a good thing. But truly unshakeable faith is, by definition, unreasonable.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the truly reasonable individual, who is often, unfortunately (and mistakenly) labelled an infidel.

Most people are somewhere in the middle. They try to thread the needle with some form of Pascal's wager: that one can never know for sure if there is a God, but the safe bet is to believe. That way, if you are right, you're in with the hip crowd, in Paradise. And if you're wrong, it won't matter.

Blaise Pascal was a 17th century scientist and philosopher. He was a pioneer of physics, one of the first to argue that there can exist a true vacuum, an absence of all matter. That sort of gives an indication of the rudimentary state of science back then. Now we know that vacuums not only exist, but that most of the vastness of the universe is empty space: a vacuum. (That model is now in question due to the "discovery" of dark matter; there must be a whole lot of stuff in the so-called vacuum that we cannot see.) We also know now that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that it started with a big bang, that it is expanding, that the expansion is accelerating, and that there is no sign (or need for one in explaining it) of a Creator. We now know the nature and origin of every chemical element. Elements are formed through fusion reactions within stars; the smaller ones, from Iron down to Helium, in small stars like our Sun; the heavier elements are generated when super novae implode.

If Pascal had known then what we know today, would he have devised his wager similarly, or at all?

Let's not kid ourselves that religious belief is just a private matter, that whatever people believe is fine as long as they don't hurt anybody. Certainly people's beliefs have real consequences in the world. True believers cannot resist the temptation to impose their will on others. There were many issues at stake in this election, but none so important to Christians as the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Earlier this year the Southern Baptist Convention held a national conference in Nashville. Robert Jeffress, the pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas had this to say to the one thousand church leaders in attendance: "Any conservative Christian who stays at home in November and allows Hillary Clinton to become the next President has FOREVER forfeited his right to speak about the sanctity of life..."

The SBC reported a membership of almost 15 million last year. And they represent only a fraction of the fundamentalist Christians in America.

For many of the faithful the facts of the Donald's dangerous ignorance, his bigotry, racism, sexual predation, lack of any sense of civic duty (prideful and boasting about not paying taxes), cutthroat business practices (multiple bankruptcies where he left his contractors and investors high and dry), fraud and deceptive advertising (Trump University) did not disqualify him from receiving their votes. It's not like they were unaware of the candidate's egregious faults. Many Christians held their noses and voted for the Donald anyway, because he said over and over in his campaign that he would appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, with the intent of making abortion illegal in America. Fundamentalist Christians are dying to impose their religious beliefs on women who would rather have the option to decide how they take care of their own bodies. I don't think those women are asking too much. Mind you, Jesus never said a word about abortion. Church officials have interpreted the Bible to suit their own ideas in assuming that an embryo is a person, imbued with the holy spirit of its Creator.

Year after year, billions of people live and die on this planet yet no one has uncovered a shred of evidence that souls exist. Yet the number of people who accept the hypothesis is staggering. And these same believers turn a blind eye to the evidence-based science on climate change. Ignoring this clear and present danger is easy for Fundmentalists because they are already in the habit of denying the established science of evolution. So they reject evidence-based science in favor of what amounts to no more than a deeply held but totally unsubstantiated opinion. They ignore shocking misconduct and lack of character in order to impose their belief that an embryo is a person. There is much medical evidence to refute that notion, but it does not seem to matter. And all this with the knowledge that when abortion is illegal it just goes underground, and women die. To instigate such a chain of causation goes beyond the pale.

It's not just the abortion issue that gets fundamentalist Christians to vote for a short-fingered vulgarian like Trump. It's also contraception, right to die, women in the workplace, women voting, gay rights, and more. The fundamentalists can overlook Trump's egregious attitudes towards women because they think women should stay at home, barefoot and pregnant. In their backward, atavistic view, any woman who enters the workplace and then gets sexually harassed had it coming.

The Panderer-in-Chief has no core value other than self-enrichment and win at all costs, but he knows how to push people's buttons. He promised to nominate a judge for the Supreme Court who would vote to overturn Roe v Wade, and that was pretty much all the faithful needed to hear. Way to go Ohio.

Jesus was a man of his time. Were he alive today I am sure his message would be the same as it was two thousand years ago: to treat others as we would prefer to be treated ourselves. We all have feet of clay, and are well advised to cut each other a little slack.

And being a man of his time, I seriously doubt that Jesus would ignore the message of science.

Congratulations on reaching the conclusion of this brief introduction. I hope you have found it thought provoking and that you will continue the conversation. Peace be upon you. Shalom! Salaam! Shanti!