My Own Mind is My Own Church

by Jack Nichols

For me, the most distressing photo from the tsunami disaster showed a 12-year-old orphaned Sri Lankan girl, her face engulfed in inconsolable anguish. Then I heard that Jerry Falwell at Liberty University (already smarting after critics accused him before mid-January of doing nothing about the tragedy) had finally promised to send 10 truckloads of rice to ravaged areas, costing his moralistic bandwagon $25 thousand, a paltry sum in my opinion.

Falwell also promised to send a hefty load of Christian pamphlets to be distributed by his boneheaded Baptist missionaries among Muslims. He’s begging his flock to cough up more cash for propaganda purposes, realizing, probably, as with his frightening and false anti-gay rants, that the horrors of the tsunami tragedy would allow him to cash-in with his usual opportunistic fervor.

Falwell’s load of Christian pamphlets will probably outweigh the rice he’s sending. While every truckload of Falwellian rice is, please excuse this inept word, a “godsend”, I also keep wondering if Falwell’s judgmental mindset (such as emerged when he blamed gays, the ACLU, feminists and other U.S. citizens for the tragedy of 9/11) will now find him blaming Asian “heathens” for his “loving” God’s untimely XXXmas present to them. If they’d only believed in Falwell’s loving Lord, you know.

In fact, on New Year’s Eve, a top Saudi Muslim cleric, Sheik Saleh Ibn Fawzan Al-Fawzan, blamed the tsunami on the gay-friendly Thai resort town of Phuket and other Southeast Asian tourist resorts, that, he said, "corrupt people from all over the world who come to commit fornication and sexual perversion…These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries, are Allah's punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims."

Thanks, Sheik, for explaining why Allah sucked up and drowned thousands of little children, including Muslim kids. He’s a real winner, your Allah.

The Sheik’s U.S. equivalents, those evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in cahoots with Falwell, are finally succeeding at creating a fascist U.S. dictatorship led by the idiotic, theocratic Bushies. In state legislatures everywhere these slimy dogmatists are tirelessly instigating attacks on our civil rights.

One item of oft-repeated disinformation that they spout (and that Falwell repeats incessantly) implies that America’s Founding Fathers were all their kind of Christians. mI’d like to see this foul disinformation vigorously countered at every turn. mWhile there were doubtlessly signers of the Declaration of Independence who belonged to one Christian sect or another, the Founding Father who wrote the Declaration itself advised Americans to read the Bible not as a holy book, but as one would peruse the work of an ancient Roman historian.

My three favorite U.S. Founding Fathers were certainly no Christians. They were: (1) Thomas Paine, whose revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense, inspired the American Revolution; (2) Thomas Jefferson, whose strategic approach to the Christian clergy was uncompromisingly hostile; and (3) Benjamin Franklin, who, when discussing the divinity of Jesus, said he’d never studied the topic and thought “it needless to bother (himself) with it now.”

All three of these 18th Century revolutionaries were Deists. That is, they rejected all supposedly “holy scriptures”-Jewish, Christian and Muslim-- and postulated that a rather remote and uncommunicative Deity had somehow wound up our world like a round-faced clock, leaving it to spin on its own axis. South Asia’s tsunami tragedy seems somewhat to support this perspective.

Few realize that in Washington D.C.’s Jefferson Memorial there’s a large-lettered partial quote from the 3rd President dominating the inner part of the dome. I say “partial quote” because D.C. tourists may miss that Jefferson was referring to the clergy when he said:

“I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Jefferson’s complete quote shows an intense concern that in my opinion, every gay man and lesbian can share. His fuller text in this instance said:

“The clause of the Constitution which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorable hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity through the United States; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own…they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough too in their opinion.”

Benjamin Franklin ably flunked all of the Christian litmus tests that the Reverends Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson et al are pretending today that he would have passed.
Franklin said:

“I imagine a man must have a good deal of Vanity who believes, and a good deal of Boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true; and all he rejects are false.”

While Franklin was willing to praise Jesus’ “system of morality” he confessed: “I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes.” Thomas Jefferson happily seconded this observation, writing: “Fragments only of what he (Jesus) did deliver have come to us mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.”

Thomas Paine’s last book, the Age of Reason, a blistering attack on Biblical nonsense, turned him into a near non-person in the USA. Although his written thoughts had inspired the American Revolution, his death became an occasion for fanatics to dig up his bones so that today no one knows where he’s buried.

The timid Episcopalian, George Washington, who’d once distributed Paine’s Common Sense to his troops, refused (after the publication of Age of Reason) to even console Paine with a letter when, in a French prison, the brilliant revolutionary’s life hung in the balance. After Paine’s release, however, and upon returning to the U.S., it was only the principled Thomas Jefferson who dared to walk with him arm-in-arm through the streets.

There are still no statues memorializing Thomas Paine in the nation’s capital. This, no doubt, is because after stating that he didn’t believe in the creeds of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim “churches” -- “nor of any church that (he) knew of,” he insisted as any red-blooded individualist should that: “My own mind is my own church.”
Paine wrote:

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish (Muslim), appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

South Asia’s tsunami, causing such incomprehensible suffering, has found many who are questioning the concept of a loving Creator. For me, the idea of a transcendent Skygod long ago went out the window, replaced by the more reasonable doctrine of immanence, namely that godly potential exists within each person, manifesting what Quakers call “The Inner Light”. This more humanistic or secular godliness (if I must call it godliness) can be found, for example, in any individual’s compassionate, helping response to the tsunami.

There have long been good reasons to question the theory of a loving Creator.

Living creatures (as sweet as they appear in certain respects) are given to devouring all other living creatures. The Heavenly Father -if His plan may be blamed-seems to have devised an infinitely cruel inter-species food chain, a kind of world-encompassing cannibalism. Small, frightened creatures flee but get painfully torn to shreds and eaten alive. God’s eye is on the sparrow? OK, but so are eyes of big snakes in the grass.

My patience with today’s religious bigots has utterly evaporated. As a strategy, I say, Thomas Jefferson’s assertive approach to the clergy might easily stand for activists as a reputable movement mantra:

“…they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

©365Gay.com 2005