Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part twelve. The Problem of Politics

Back when I was writing in my spiritual journal in 2005, I felt a mission to the world, to rescue it from political oppression (as embodied in the right wing parties in every country including my own) from Easter 1984 until election day 2004, a period of just over twenty years.

I decided, in February 2005, to stop calling myself a Christian. I do not own the language. If I call myself a Christian, I wrote, people will think of me as a follower of George W. Bush. (Today it is even worse; to be a Christian is, in popular language, to be a Trumper.) The question is not, do I want to call myself a Christian; but, am I what the world thinks of when they hear the word Christian? Clearly, the answer was (and is) no.

Some of what I wrote below was during the worst of my medical problems, but also at a time when a Republican president aspired to be a world dictator and use war as his tool of domination. Remember George W. Bush? [Bush and Cheney] “have galloped out on their Texas steeds to conquer the world, and other Republican horsemen of the apocalypse, only slightly worse than Democratic mules…Most of the universe is gas-jets of hydrogen, and in one small space, there is a miracle of complexity—and it is evil.”

“For the law of the universe seems to be thermodynamics—whenever there is, in one place, a brief shining moment of inspiration, beauty, order, and love, the great mass of stupidity, hatred, and bloated gluttony will flop over on it and obliterate it. All that is good and God is an aberration quickly blasted by the sick universe…Whenever there is a glint of beauty and peace, the leaders of the world delight in trashing it.”

I was reading Rabbi Kushner’s book, Who Needs God? But can there be one, even in the diffuse form I have fantasized? Kushner also wondered how one can get angry at a God that one believes does not exist. But we are angry because there should be a good God who will rescue the world.