Americans are Really Secular
I'm not a Catholic, nor a follower of any of the Abrahamic faiths
(Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Baha'i faith), but I have noticed that
Christians in the West have embraced the past five hundred years ofsecular
social progress, nearly all of which contradicts biblical tradition:
...democracy and representative government in place of monarchy and belief
in the divine right of kings; the separation of church and state; the
abolition of (human) slavery; the emancipation of women; birth control; the
sexual revolution; LGBT rights...
As an animal activist, I think it's odd they would suddenly become an
obstacle to social and moral progress when it comes to animal rights, but
that's what's going on!
When I cited the Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut in a letter
to the editor of my local newspaper, the Tri-Valley Herald, in November
1992, I was clearly arguing for privacy, and NOT against contraception,
which I'd already used before anyway.
I'm not the least fazed that Catholics are using birth control. About a
decade ago, at a Berkeley Pro-Life meeting, I gave a secular analogy to
demonstrate that contraception is victimless.
Jim and Liza Frey (Catholic and Russian Orthodox respectively) reacted
favorably, calling it a wonderful analogy. (This suggests they've used it
themselves!) They did not label me a "heretic," "the devil," nor damn me to
hell, etc. for contradicting church teaching. And Jim went to Catholic
school as a youth.
As 19th century agnostic Robert Ingersoll observed, Americans have come to
believe more in the Periodic Table of Elements than in anything in the
Bible. A century ago, for example, ALL Christian churches opposed birth
control.
We're mainstream secular Americans first, with our religious identity
second!
In October 2007, I was matched online on eharmony.com with a single mother
from out of state. We spent a romantic weekend together.
She didn't disclose her religious identity to me until after we made love,
which is the way it should be. Why should religious identity interfere with
true love?
(When I see an attractive woman, the first thought that crosses my mind is
not, "Is she Trinitarian or non-Trinitarian?", nor "Does she 'work' for her
salvation?", nor even "Is she Republican or Democrat?")
And after our lovemaking, when she disclosed her religious identity to me
and said she's Catholic, I wasn't fazed. I didn't react with, "Huh? You were
the one saying 'we'll need condoms' for our lovemaking. And we're not
married, either!"
I related all this a couple of years ago to a beautiful latina Catholic
woman I was dating, during our lovemaking, indicating I wasn't fazed and
indicating that we Americans really live in a secular society.
A few years ago, the pro-choicers on AlterNet (a liberal headlines email
newsletter) were gloating that Catholics are using contraception and having
abortions at the same rate as everyone else in mainstream secular American
society.
In 1985, Diane (Jewish, and a friend of my college roommate John Antypas),
mentioned the story from the Old Testament of Onan spilling his seed, and
said conservative Christians see that story as proof that masturbation is
sinful.
My friend and roommate Chris, half-Jewish and half-Protestant, a liberal
Christian, responded, no, Onan's sin was disobeying God's order to
impregnate a woman... not spilling his seed.
But conservative Christians don't see it like that!
Even some liberal Christians don't!
The late Reverend Janet Regina Hyland (1933 - 2007) wrote in the January
1998 issue of Humane Religion (her Christian vegetarian periodical at the
time) about "The Compassion of a 'Pagan'," referring to Ovid, whose
Metamorphoses was clearly inspired by Pythagorean doctrine (reincarnation).
Regina quoted Ovid decrying the slaughter of cattle and sheep:
"But why have you deserved to die, you sheep, you harmless breed... Why have
the oxen deserved this?... From whence such hunger in man after unnatural
and unlawful foods? Do you dare, O mortal race, to continue to feed on
flesh?...
"To what wicked habits does he accustom his palate... who cuts the throat of
a calf, turning a deaf ear to its piteous moans?
"Or, who has the heart to pierce the throat of a kid which utters cries like
those of a child, or who can feed on the bird whom he has fed with his own
hand?"
Regina even commented in a footnote: "...in his earlier years, Ovid wrote
the ultimate, erotic 'love' poems, beloved by countless generations of
college undergraduates with raging hormones."
In a 2006 or 2007 phone conversation, shortly before she passed away, Regina
Hyland (then in her early 70s) told me she was celibate. I asked her, "What
about masturbation?
If you're masturbating, you're not truly celibate. To be a guru or a
spiritual master in Krishna Consciousness, one must control the tongue
(which refers not only to gossip, but to prajalpa, mundane or secular
conversation, as well as diet), the belly (diet again, not just
vegetarianism based on nonviolence and only eating prasadam or food offered
to the Lord, but gluttony as well), and the genitals.
(Jewish writer Mark Matthew Braunstein, in his 1981 book, Radical
Vegetarianism, similarly writes: "Like monks masturbating, milk-drinking
vegetarians are imitating the very thing they wish to avoid [animal
cruelty].")
So I asked Regina, "What about masturbation?"
Regina became indignant, and refused to answer the question!
On the other hand, Regina (raised Catholic, but went on to become an
evangelical Protestant minister), was amused when I told her that on the
late '80s television show China Beach (depicting nurses serving in Vietnam
in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War), the nurses were joking among
themselves: "Women who use the 'rhythm method' are known as mothers!"
Go on to: Ancient Greek Vegetarianism
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