Religion Isn’t All Bad

“For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other; indeed, they have all one breath; so that a man has no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.” קהלת (Ecclesiastes), 3:19

It is worthwhile remembering that religious scriptures are not history in any academically modern sense but they offer great stories, or accounts of history.

Nothing stops us from liberating scriptures from their dogmatic certainties and approaching their stories, laws and commentaries with genuine objectivity; neither sacred nor profane. We may approach any and all of it as literature.

We hear alot about “religious liberty” whenever there are conservatives running for some office or another and scaring up votes. More often than not, of course, what these shameless opportunists and pseudo-intellectual moralists are promising is validation for the idea of a One True Faith and the privilege of imposing it upon the entire nation by legislating it into public policy.

With a sad and unfortunate vacancy on the Supreme Court having opened up recently, two sitting conservative justices have expressed their desire to “fix” the Court’s ruling that broadened marriage rights to include same-sex couples. The ruling emerged from the legal battle brought by a Christian County Clerk insisting that…