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Political pulpit
The Bible as weapon in the culture war

...First, the idea that citizens with a particular religious position can seek to impose their religious agenda on the whole body politic violates everything I believe about the separation of church and state.

I want the religious beliefs of all our citizens to be respected and their right to practice their religious values in their own way to be protected by law, and I do not want the particular religious beliefs of any part of this nation imposed on the rest of the people by law. The very reason this nation was founded must not be compromised by the zealotry of some of our citizens.

Second, as a believing and practicing Christian who exercises public leadership in a recognized Christian institution, I am appalled at how little of the biblical scholarship of the last 200 years has entered the minds of members of this new generation of would-be religious leaders, to say nothing of our citizens.

Is it rational, for example, to assert that a book that we now know was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 135, is in fact the eternal and unchanging "Word of God?"

Does a moral God send a series of plagues on the Egyptians or stop the sun in the sky to allow more daylight so that Joshua can continue to slaughter his enemies? Should a book be called the "Word of God" when it calls for homosexuals to be executed, defines women as property, approves of slavery and suggests that Jews ought to be persecuted?

The Bible inevitably reveals in its pages the common assumptions of the time in which it was written. It believes that the Earth is the center of the universe and that God lives above the sky, keeping the divine record books current on the chosen people's behavior and intervening on occasion to open the Red Sea, pour down manna from heaven and dictate the 10 Commandments.

It reflects a time in history when people knew nothing of germs, viruses or tumors and treated sickness as if it were divine punishment that could be offset by offering sacrifices to please the angry Deity....

...Today we are experiencing the Bible being used by religious and political leaders to enable them to define the morality of birth control, abortion, racial and sexual discrimination and even acts of aggression against our "enemies."

To oppose this mentality, they not so subtly assert, is to oppose God and thus to be anti-religious. These are nothing less than the steps people take on the road to transforming a democracy into a theocracy, which is to walk in the direction of the cruelest form of government that human beings have devised.

Theocracies always turn demonic because they justify everything in the name of God....