While many might disparage Joel Osteen for his light and fluffy messages of self-worth and consumer-friendly pop psychology masquerading as theology, he speaks the same language and shares the same codes with most people. Why? Because most people live in a world dominated by self-help and consumer-friendly pop psychology! You don’t feel like an outsider with his pearly whites staring at you as if to echo Stuart Smalley saying, “I’m good enough, smart enough, and gosh darnit people like me!” To the growing population of religiously unaffiliated believers in God, most of the religion we offer is encased in codes that are hard to figure out with little help offered to help people understand them much less participate in using them. Neither fear of hell or a weekly coffee hour after a “nice” sermon are going to fit the bill. So people outside the church, and many people inside to be sure, will feel like that out of place dinner guest. Far better to go to the bar with some old friends and maybe meet a new friend or two where the only real codes are eat, drink, and be merry. Who knows, you might even get lucky at the end of the night without God anywhere near to threaten you with eternal torment. Drew Tatusko ☀
Jesus became a heretic to the religion of his day. Perhaps part of what he revealed is that we are all heretics in the eyes of God. This is why faith is the ground of religion, not some puppet human authority that has the gall to claim sole possession of the Truth. Drew Tatusko ☀
So this is the fact: our consumerism is slowly killing the planet like dropping one little grain of salt on a slug one grain at a time. But this earth is not defenseless. When events happen that threaten it, it kills those threats. It has done it several times before. Hope all the junk we keep consuming and will keep consuming at accelerated rates for the next millenia is worth it. The top 10% of the world that are making money off of it seem to think so. And this is why all that crap in Copenhagen was a useless excuse for politicians to grandstand and prop themselves up, nothing more. Drew Tatusko ☀
Going green” is now a trick to get you to consume more or at the very least continue to consume the at the same rate and send more of your money into the economy since you think that it costs more to be ethical and moral in production and supply chain practices. However, since most consumers don’t know what this cost should be or where products actually come from, all a corporate marketing department needs to do is brand it as such to make you “feel” better about consuming. And that’s all it is. In order to change environmental, political, labor, etc. practices there needs to be much larger changes in not what people consume, but in how much they actually consume. If you keep consuming what you do and do not change fundamental consumption habits regarding how much money you put back into the market cycle of business, the entire “green” brand has worked in reinforcing your consumption habits rather than change them. Drew Tatusko ☀
College students graduate with 10’s of thousands of dollars of debt, home ownership is a myth since few people stay long enough in the same home to own it, car leases, credit cards, etc. The value of the US economy is purely speculative and that is clear by the ratio of produced goods and exports versus the ratio of speculative investments and exported labor. The US economy needs debt in order to be prosperous and that means it needs the public to hold that private corporate debt. Even more troubling is that the US budget invests in these debts through subsidies. One does not need to look much farther than massive corporate agriculture to see how this works. Profitable local farming is all but dead as a way of life – unless you’re Amish (they don’t pay federal taxes by the way). The dollar is thus only branded as something liberating when in actuality it is a vehicle of oppression itself. Drew Tatusko ☀
When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, he is getting at the core of what it means to be human – the inherent neeed to be loved by another. Love is the deepest form of human connectedness. Love is a social function of what it means to be human. It is so deep that it is not we who define love in our relationships, but it is the love that binds our relationships together that forms us and gives us life. Loving our neighbor is not just an ethical mandate. It is to name the core of our being. It is to identify that for which human beings are born: to love, and be loved by another. It is as Paul says, that without love we are literally nothing. Without love we are not as human as we can be. Love is what makes us the image of God. It is not the flesh, nor the power of our brains, it is the need for love that can be fully expressed only in our human communities. It is love that defines us. If God is love, then God working in that which defines the core of our humanity is what makes us truly human. For the Triune God is a community bonded inextricably through love. The same love that binds the three persons of God into one is the same love that binds us together. This is our religion. It is not doctrine, but love that binds us together. If we are not bound together by love, we are no longer in the image of what God intended and less human that we were created to be. Drew Tatusko ☀
Want to change something? Consume less, get out of debt, and volunteer to do something in order to invest in your local economies. Stop selling your souls to banks and mega church preachers who want to suck your value out in order to fuel up the private jet. Turn the damn TV off, stop watching Fox and MSNBC, and read a damn book by a scholar who cares more about truth than selling another book of crap. The way to take control of our situation is by taking control of what you consume – period. Otherwise you will just let this poison continue to suck the life out of whatever soul you have left. Drew Tatusko ☀
So, what about the US? The rate of religiosity is and has been fairly consistent. Religion is alive and well in the US and there are no signs of decline. However, even as those once strong mainline denominations continue to decline as their populations die off due to low birth rates, we do have to observe how the boundaries are shifting. The idea that Christianity is less powerful, less important, and declining has to be checked against how people define their own religiosity. Whatever the decline over the past 20 years in self-identified Christians means, it is clear that it is the religion that forms the majority religion in the country. To say that this is a post-Christian age is premature. To say that it is post-Christendom as if Christianity was this mythical state establishment at one point also overstates what this meant in the 18th and 19th centuries. What Chrisntianity is doing is shifting as it always has done in a state structure that makes it possible. Those that adapt to change and promote social change will likely fare well. Those that hunker down in the ideology of an era they will never get back will fade into the wind as a memory. Drew Tatusko ☀
I am continually amazed at how some people do not see those whom Jesus challenged as reflected in their very Pharisaic slavery to the law. Paul believed himself to be a slave to Christ not the law because he understood Jesus to have fulfilled the law of death with the law of grace and mercy. If this is not the heart of the Gospel then the Gospel does not exist and we call Jesus a liar. Drew Tatusko ☀
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