RE: Kingdom of This World

Steve Brenneis opines:

To take Mr. Neumayr's excellent point a little further:

Much of the left also seems to want to create some homogeneous religion in which everything is true and nothing is hard. Thus we suddenly sprout a dozen new-age variants on the world's major and minor faiths in which everything and nothing is doctrine.

There are people who want to resurrect the more interesting points of several ancient pagan belief systems such as Druidism and others. Unfortunately for them, Druidism has an ugly side involving self-mutilation and human sacrifices, so these urban liberals manufacture something easier to live with and rationalize away the nasty bits with more or less incoherent arguments.

Similarly, people who find traditional Christianity too difficult to bear have resurrected any number of early Christian era gnostic cults and sects. In some cases they have morphed several of these into some unrecognizable hodge-podge, in other cases they have fine tuned their synthesis with the more marketable aspects of Eastern mysticism. Unfortunately for them also, most of these second and third century gnostic sects tended to be even more strongly ascetic than the early Christians and would have found most of what modern liberal religion-mixers have created to be abomination.

Finally, and more insipidly from the point of view of pure faith, there are groups of people who simply ignore the more difficult teachings of their chosen faith and when confronted with their apostasy resort to calling their accusers hyperbolic names like "extremist" and "fundamentalist." These folks come in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian flavors. In the Jewish and Christian forms, activities like abortion and homosexuality, absolute abominations by any reasonable reading of Judeo-Christian scripture, are rationalized away using out-of-context and quasi-scriptural arguments. Failing those, liberals resort to "opinion" and "my interpretation" arguments.

In the Muslim form, ugliness like jihad, sharia, and the infidel poll tax are swept under the carpet to produce a sanitized version of Islam that is really nothing more than Arabic Christianity with a different "prophet" at the helm. In fact, in the process of sanitizing Islam to the point it becomes some civilized belief system acceptable to most Westerners, nothing much is left but ritual.

The unfortunate end result of all this is a gulf between religion and faith. Many liberals want to have a religion that fits them comfortably like a new sports car or a wide-screen TV, but without the inconvenience of faith, understanding, or more importantly, behavior modification. As always with liberals, this comes down to a lack of understanding of the difference between what we do and what we are, or as the pundits put it: a triumph of style over substance.