Maafa21 is a propaganda film funded and promoted heavily by Christian fundamentalists. It distorts the truth about abortion for its purposes, as any propaganda film does, and it argues that the real objective of the abortion rights advocates is population control and a targeted attack on minorities.  It is a blatantly dishonest film to strengthen the resolve of the anti-abortionists. We remind the reader that the anti-abortion crusade is a religious campaign primarily supported by Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Christians.

The anti-abortion advocates are attempting to impose their religious views on others who parse the issues differently and come to different conclusions about ethical priorities and social issues. There is no right for one religious group to impose its religious beliefs on others that disagree with them, and as I have said before, the attempt to enforce religious conformity and prohibitions in line with religious belief is precisely our problem with the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists that believe the truth lies solely in their cause and must be written into law and enforced by religious believers. We believe in religious freedom in our country, and we must protect that religious freedom from well-intentioned true believers that cannot or will not understand the complexity of issues surrounding abortion and the conflicting values that it presents us with.

As an aside, but worth mentioning here as an example of the anti-abortion crowd not getting the complexity of moral issues, many of the same people who support the anti-abortion movement (and like to call themselves “pro life” as if we are not all pro life), are the same folks who support the death penalty and who support war as foreign policy. Those who oppose abortion because it “kills the innocent” (an issue for another time) apparently are oblivious to the fact that the innocent are sometimes executed for crimes they did not commit (lots of instances proven by DNA in just the last year) and that the innocent and civilians are often casualties of war and justified as collateral damage. The point is simple and obvious—these are complex moral issues and cannot be decided by arbitrary prohibitions based in simplistic religious views.

The abortion debate can be held without reference to Christian belief [which I think humanists would prefer] but it rarely is because most of the anti-abortion crowd base their argument in religion. So I will comment from the Christian Humanist perspective and remind readers that not all religions or even all Christian churches and denominations are part of the anti-abortion movement.  The religion-based anti-abortion crowd is pretty much limited to the Roman Catholic Church and various evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant groups allied with them.

Many Christian denominations and churches take a nuanced position that recognizes arguments on both sides and leave it to individual Christians to act in accord with their conscience, while other Christian denominations support the right of women to control their own bodies. The majority of Protestant  denominations do not accept the argument of the anti-abortion religionists that a fetus is a human being. Some Christians (including your non-theistic writer!) hold that a human life comes into being at birth when the “breath of life” enters the child and it begins breathing. Others disagree. But the biblical model relied on by many Christians comes from the birth stories in Genesis where life began when the breath of life (ruach, breath or spirit) was breathed into the body to become a living human being. 

Anti-abortion supporters believe differently and have a right to disagree and to advocate for their position.  They have a duty to conform their conduct to their beliefs, but they do not have a right to try to force their beliefs on the rest of us or to deprive us of our right to act in accordance with our beliefs. In a pluralistic society it has to be that way.  Both  the pro-choice and the anti-abortion positions are religious interpretations supported by Christian believers, but they are religious beliefs and the laws of the land should not interfere with the rights of either side. 

Those who wish to abstain from abortion are free to refrain, and those who believe differently should also be able to act on their beliefs without interference from the law.  We live in a democracy.  We do not believe, as do the Taliban whose views we are fighting, that religious views of one group should be written into law.

Holding a rational discussion with a fundamentalist is futile because their argument is circular and they fail to see that.  Christian fundamentalists start with a premise that is not universally agreed (such as the Bible consists of the literal words of god), then they pick particular verses from that Bible and come to the conclusion that only their particular understanding of Christianity is correct based on their premise.

The writer of a critical email makes that faulty jump.  She says: “Christ claimed to be God in the flesh, living among us. So, He is either crazy; a liar seeking power; or telling the truth.”  The first sentence is questioned by most New Testament biblical scholars in the religion departments of major colleges and universities throughout the world for lots of reasons that we cannot go into here and are not relevant to the point.  If you accept her first statement, which I do not, you might come to her conclusion.  What she and others of her ilk are not willing to concede is that there are Christians who do not share her fundamentalism.  Fundamentalism only arose in the mid-1800s and was not accepted by most mainline traditional Christian faiths then or now.  It arose as a protest to what fundamentalist reactionaries called Modernism.  So the point is a very simple and incontrovertible one.  Despite what she says the majority of Christians throughout the world are not protestant fundamentalists, and to some degree or another have views different than she does.  She is willing to draw a circle around those who believe like her and deny that anyone not sharing her beliefs is a Christian, but that flies into the face of reality and common sense.

I will concede that many traditional Christians may have trouble with a Christianity that does not include a concept of god and that is a legitimate discussion for debate.  The broader issue, which I will not concede, is that not all Christians are fundamentalists and not all believe as she does.  Recently Christian Humanism was the subject of discussion in several different theological seminaries across the U.S., and last year I served as advisor for a doctoral student at a major university who was writing a thesis on the subject.  It is a legitimate and recognized position that is gaining adherents among serious students of theology.

I maintain a website where my views on Christian Humanism are presented in an orderly manner [which some readers on this blog may wish to visit, so here’s the URL: http://www.christianhumanist.net ].  This blog is much more random in nature and is a traditional weblog that I post to whenever I have something to say.  I write for a local newspaper and I write comments on its blog, so I get a lot of reaction, some hostile.  A fundamentalist Christian attacked me a week or so ago, claiming that there was no such thing as a Christian Humanist and that if I did not repent of my sinful views, I would be condemned to eternal hell.  I’ve discovered you have to keep your sense of humor with these folks, and to the critic I responded as follows:

“You’re not up with your reading about contemporary Christian views — and incidentally you are not the arbiter of who is a Christian. A Christian is a follower of Jesus, one who takes his teachings seriously and attempts to follow them in his life. I am a Humanist because I believe in humanity, I believe in rational principles, I believe that mankind should live by ethical principles, and I have chosen the principles of Jesus to live by.  I am agnostic on the subject of deities. You can read about my views more extensively at www.christianhumanist.net or you can Google the topic to learn something about Christian Humanism, or you can go to Wikipedia, where it is discussed with references.

“I know that you and other fundamentalist Christians have a very narrow definition of “Christian,” which essentially limits it to those who believe as you do, but I reject that view. When Jesus’ disciples tried that “they don’t believe as we do” line, referring to a group that was not part of the disciples, Jesus corrected them to say those who follow his teachings as his true followers. I happen to be a Christian without an operating view of god. Not your cup of tea, I guess, but there are lots of varieties of Christians.”

Is it possible to be a Christian without a belief in God?  I believe the answer is yes; in our time being a Christian without a concept of God is both possible and necessary for those who find the life and teachings of Jesus compelling but have difficulty with the concept of God in traditional Christian theology.  The various articles on this weblog argue in favor of a non-theistic form of Christianity that is reasonably called Christian Humanism. 

Given the fundamental premise of traditional Christian theology that we cannot bridge the gap to god with philosophy or science, that we cannot know god except through Jesus, that at least part of the meaning of the Trinity in Christian theology is that Jesus is god in the flesh living among us, and given our difficulty with that premise and our suspicion about the possibility of any meaningful talk about god, it may seem a stretch to talk about non-theistic Christianity but it is that improbability to which I have come in my search for a meaningful and rational basis for a personal faith. 

I locate my particular religious perspective within the general framework of Christianity but I do so without any related concept of God in the traditional theistic sense of what that term means to most people who identify themselves as Christians.  It is a position that I reached reluctantly, partly because I find language about god troublesome at best, but primarily because I am convinced that there was something unique about Jesus and his teaching that challenged the conventional wisdom and religious assumptions of his day with a timeless critique that even today continues to speak to something higher and better in us and challenges us to become better than we are.