“The problem is you’re sober.” – The Lives of Cowboys, Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keiller
WASHINGTON – I love the boys, but I’m tired of hearing them preach. Holy week and Easter is always a very log slog for rebel women of faith, unless you’re like me and reach beyond organized religion. But even then the thunderous gasbag cacophony is hard to tune out.
“I don’t consider Andrew Sullivan to be a religious authority, okay?” – Rick Warren, ABC “This Week”
Why do we care what Rick Warren thinks? Not to pick on him, because it applies to all of organized religion’s men pontificating Sunday across the globe. I’d say the same about women, but there are no equals to consider.
WARREN: And when you ignore these things, then we’re going to get deeper and deeper into debt, and then we can’t blame God for that… The biggest problem for all of our economic problems is our inability to delay gratification. I want it and I want it now, and I’m going to buy it even if I can’t afford it. And not only have people done that, the government’s done it…
I hold the people who got themselves in debt. I hold the government that got themselves in debt. I hold multiple administrations. It’s not the fault of any one person. There’s plenty enough blame to be passed around.
Religious institutions and leaders have become like diets, with the same success rates to match.
Religious, agnostic or atheist, it only matters in your own life and how it helps you connect to what’s larger than religion, beyond Christ, Buddha, or Muhammed. Because there is something larger than us all and it exists with or without your organized faith of choice and even the lack of that faith.
But you may choose to still call it God.
On Easter, I get a kick out of the atheists, who tend to work hardest on holy days. They always amuse me, especially those who are planet-caring, like Bill Maher. He and his athiest allies miss the irony of their surety about there being nothing more, while positing our energies and actions impact the planet, which is nothing less than an affirmation of a galaxy of interconnection and reaction.
This happens on the force of something, but what?
Life is dependent on waves of energy colliding, the biggest bang theory honed to smaller, mini bangs that impact our lives and is irrefutable.
It is not ordained by one gender over another, one religion or another, though human civilization has decided men are allowed the ear of a god, but women are not, without a male conduit.
Jesus crafted as the human form of God, with religious disciples of this story forced to ignore the theory of energy exploding, as man in the form of a god makes him secure in his superiority in a universe of supplication to cosmic combustion.
The very notion of the universe foils the religious, with feminine and male equal to access energy, which knows no bigotry or misogyny and needs no faith, because of its constancy.
“Meet the Press” actually broke with the all-male Tim Russert religious legacy this Sunday, distinguishing itself by having evangelist Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, on for Easter. It’s a media miracle, the association to her faith giant father her entry.
Rick Warren dispensed his version of faith on “This Week,” something Jake Tapper and I got into it over on Twitter this weekend. I saw a “This Week” promo basically asking “are Mormons Christian?” I called them on it. Tapper obviously saw my tweet with the #thisweek hashtag and tweeted me: why should you care about a theological discussion with a major American religious leader? Nice framing, that. Tapper, who’s as good as media offers, missing or ignoring the religious gender bias women are fed every holy day. My reply: Why talk to same male “major Amer. religious leader(s)” excluding women’s voices? Why ask if Mormons Christian? Bigoted question. It went on from there, but Tapper had no answer for why no female religious leader was invited on. Nobody ever does.
Easter Sunday continues to be about listening to men.
Tapper and “This Week” felt it was more important to discuss Andrew Sullivan’s writings and the Newsweek cover.
The Mormon and Catholic churches do not allow women to hold the priesthood, however differently they define it; while Southern Baptists genuflect to sexist traditions, as fundamentalist faiths, including Muslim, favor misogyny.
Never before have we needed a modern religious reformation more, a conversation about women breaking out of the laity and into the priesthood.
Andrew Sullivan is dispensing his two cents about Jesus Christ, getting attention from the media and conservatives for it, because it’s seen as controversial. This from a man who fails continually upward and has never been held accountable for defaming Sarah Palin through his concoction of lies about one of her children not really being her own. Not exactly Christian, honest or ethical on any count, but it matters not. He’s a man of faith, so bring him forth, showing media tolerance because he’s gay, never mind what he spews forth.
Religiosity in America is thriving, while choking us, because what it actually means to be a person of faith in our country is anyone’s guess. We’re so far gone from the golden rule that we’ve lost all sense of grace.
Upon Trayvon Martin’s murder, racism got noticed. The National Review’s Rich Lowry, after receiving a large ration of grief, canned John Derbyshire.
His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.
This comes after Patrick J. Buchanan got fired from MSNBC for his book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, which caused a ruckus over the racial theory espoused in its pages. The “Morning Joe” hosts lamented the loss of their friend, as did some of their audience, which tells you all you need to know about the state of race in America.
All of this coming from so-called “Christians.”
Organized religion may be a gateway, but rapture as a goal is a ghastly way to promote enlightenment, though the surety of it is a blockbuster. If you get stuck in church and never go beyond, you’re basically in as rotten a place as atheists who rarely challenge themselves to answer the quandary of connection, which happens beyond religion and is more holy.
To get to the power where connecting to whatever energy that exists as the force that once got it all started, which offers the channel to move it with your mind, you’ve got to find the magnetic stream in whatever atom ignites into an idea in your unlimited imagination and ascertain the path that leads to tapping into the exploding universe to which we are all part, connected and second.
You are the energy that makes the world turn.
Focusing on whether “Mormons are Christian” is idiocy, as atheists will tell you. However, their own myopia revealed is the firmness to which they cling to nothingness, which is belied by the universe, science, and medicine.
Connectivity is the power to seek, the journey never ending. Finding the energy where you get outside your mind, beyond the Bible, galaxies away from rapture, there is simply The Source to tap, to mold on the way to manifestation.
The intent to access it can move your life. That can change your present. It manifests uniquely your future.
It’s beyond belief. Energy is.
It requires no organized religion, though it can be a gateway when a mind is laid open. It requires no holy book, though the enlightened can be welcomed guides. It certainly depends on no man or Pope.
We need no conduit. Energy is ours to mold in our own mind at will. Organized religion and its male promoters won’t teach you how.
Taylor Marsh is the author of The Hillary Effect, which is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, where it was 1 of only 4 books in their NOOK Featured Authors Selection launch. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has written for The Hill, U.S. News & World Report, among others, and has been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.