The Religious Right isn’t really very religious. It can’t even be said they have a religion to be right about, so when liberal critics say “the Religious Right is wrong” they are more right, if you’ll pardon my use of that word, than they know. The Religious Right pretends to be followers of Jesus but as I showed yesterday, they really aren’t. Jesus said you cannot serve God and money:
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Luke 16:13).
And it is pretty obvious which the Religious Right has chosen to serve. They not only covet money for themselves, being proponents of the so-called prosperity gospel, but praise the rich Jesus condemned and happily accept their funding. Jesus, you might remember, preferred hanging out with the poor, prostitutes and tax collectors to rich people.
What makes matters worse is how these people demand that we live our lives in accordance with their dictates. They tell other Christians – real Christians by the way, as in people who make at least some effort to follow the words of Jesus – that you can’t be a Christian and support non-Christian positions, completely ignoring what Jesus laid out in their own Bible as the positions of importance for his followers.
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If only they could be blessed with some self-awareness when they say things like this. Or a mirror.
Jesus did tell his followers to look within themselves, after all. And he was not the first wise man to do so. Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living (Apology 38a) and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi had inscribed in its forecourt, the words of Apollo: “Know thyself.” Jesus told his followers that they were hypocrites not to pick the mote out of their own eye before attempting to do so with their brother’s (Matthew 7:5), and told the angry crowd, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).
Jesus wasn’t about forcing everyone to agree with him. He didn’t tell anyone they weren’t really a Jew because they didn’t follow him. Jesus wanted each and every person to look inside themselves and get their lives in order, and to treat others the way they would want to be treated (Luke 6:31). How wonderful it would be if these so-called Christians took Jesus’ words to heart and looked to themselves for a change.
My own religion doesn’t tell me what to do. It doesn’t tell me to tell other people what they should do. It does tell me what is important in life – for me. Modern day Heathenism, often called Ásatrü (belief in the Aesir) though there are also the Vanir, has its values embodied in what modern Heathens call the Nine Noble Virtues (NNV).
More or less true to ancient Heathenism (we can never know for sure because Christianity destroyed that culture), these values are expressed different by different Heathens but are all drawn from a comon source: the remaining collected writings of that vanished culture.
It is important to understand that there is no Heathen “canon” to debate the meaning of and that Heathenism is not a “revealed” religion like Christianity, though we do have our “Words of the High One” (Hávamál), which unlike the Bible does not come down to us as commands but as advice.
And because it is not revealed religion, there is therefore no orthodoxy and no heresy. The Nine Noble Virtues are not the Ten Commandments. They do not promise divine retribution for failure to adhere to them. There is within them nothing incompatible with the United States Constitution.
What the Nine Noble Virtues are, is a “list” of ethical guidelines as gleaned from the Poetic Edda, especially the Hávamál and the Sigrdrífumál (Sayings of the Victory Bringer). This is not a Bronze Age list. It dates only from the 1970s, in fact. Our Heathen Norse ancestors had no such list. What they had were the belief in the virtues expressed in literature that has come down to us, and many myths and legends used to teach proper behavior, now lost to us.
The original list of virtues was compiled by the Odinic Rite’s by John Yeowell (a.k.a. Stubba) and John Gibbs-Bailey (a.k.a. Hoskuld) and it as good a list as any (and better than some):
1. Courage
2. Truth
3. Honour
4. Fidelity
5. Discipline
6. Hospitality
7. Self Reliance
8. Industriousness
9. Perseverance
These are the things my Heathen ancestors valued. None of these things require me to shove them down anyone else’s throat. They guide me in the living of my own life. They are the things that make of a human being a good person. Thus, they address the mote in my own eye, not my neighbor’s or my brother’s.
My religion allows me a place and a space to express my worship of the divine. Many people understand the divine in many different ways, from believing in gods to worshiping nature, or the Earth, itself. How other people might honor the divine (or not) is their own business. It is not my worry.
What is my worry is when these people insist on pushing their interpretation down my throat, and completely ignoring their own Bible while doing so. Jesus, so obviously a champion of the poor, becomes a weaponized champion of the rich, a capitalist’s capitalist, and the poor, far from blessed, become demonized instead. This is not only their belief, which they are welcome to, but, when they get their way, the law as well, and thus religion is legislated into law.
I don’t think my religion is superior. It’s just my religion. And anyway, the Constitution says all religions are equal before the law, whatever anyone else might think, and that makes atheism equal to any religion. People need to just accept that we are all different, with different beliefs, different ideologies, and different worldviews, and that we can still get alone despite these differences, if only we would all look to ourselves and not worry so much about what our neighbor is doing.
Even these radical fundamentalists could still live their lives as whatever they want to pretend they are if they would accept that they could reject same-sex marriage and abortions, say, for themselves, while not worrying about what others are doing. They could eschew use of contraceptives, remain true to their beliefs, and leave everybody else alone to follow the dictates of their religions or non-religion (e.g. science).
That would lead to a sort of Utopia, and it really isn’t asking much that people value the freedom to follow their own religion while leaving everybody else to follow theirs. It is what the Founding Fathers hoped for, and it is what we ourselves should hope for – and demand. Because to accept anything less is to accept theocracy, and therefore the end of the American experiment in democracy.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
