Enough With the Hating

Today, April 14th, Bill Maher has a good piece in Salon (sorry, I don't know yet how to post live links here, but you can find it if you go to the main page) titled Say It Loud: I'm Elite and Proud. I promised myself I wouldn't get into politics much here, but I never said that about religion -- nor would I, because religion is very important to me. And during this current US administration, religion and government have become unfortunately intertwined. I say unfortunate because this is America where constitutionally we have separation of church and state. I never have understood how politics and religion could become anathema to good manners in dinner conversation, or nowadays forbidden to some internet discussion groups. How can you live and not have opinions about these things?

The thrust of Maher's piece concerns a little-known fact: The Justice Department is being run by graduates of a place called Regent Law School, who are mostly female and in their 30s. And Regent Law School is a part of Pat Robertson's university.

But Maher, as much as I think his heart and brain and therefore also his tongue are in the right place, is not perfect himself, and I didn't like the way he said what he had to say. I think he's been infected with the same germ that finally brought Don Imus down. Further, Maher made one statement that's flat wrong, and I don't think he made it tongue-in-cheek. He said "that eye-for-an-eye stuff that Jesus was always in a flap about" -- that's not an exact quote, but close. Fact is, Jesus wasn't in the eye-for-an-eye camp. That was Old Testament stuff. The new stuff that Jesus formulated had to do with cheeks, not eyes. Turn the other cheek, that was Jesus.

The Christian Right has consistently distorted what Jesus said and did, even while they cling to the Bible as the Word of God. Jesus, if he were alive today doing the same kinds of things he did in his own time, would probably be in trouble with any government. He was kind of anti-authoritarian, to say the least. But mainly, he was for love not hate, he was for everybody gettting along with everybody else, he was the ultimate uniter of people, not a divider. He was into forgiving, not punishing. And as for pre-emptive strikes, remember what Jesus said about "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

Regardless of which side of the political or religious or cultural or socio-economic spectrum one is on, I think the time has come to put away the hate, and the language of hate. We have to learn how to be confrontational, when necessary, without being destructive. That's a tall order. I'm not even sure how to do it. But for starters, in my own daily life, I'm going to try.