Clearly, when we progressives reflect on the great work being done by MRFF’s Michael Weinstein, or come across a brilliant, heartfelt article such as David Antoon’s The Cancer From Within the really serious work that all of us as American progressives ought to be doing everywhere, and all of the time, becomes strikingly obvious.
Indeed, if we as progressives essentially neglect our obvious responsibility in this matter, there is a very good chance that very soon we will be responsible for losing our Constitutional Democracy and the American Creed of democratic freedom with equal justice for all under the rule of law that flows from it forever!
To put this matter another way, right here and now we progressives must become more authentic. To help us do that we must, as individuals, make every effort to abandon our denial and accept absolutely the indisputable fact that the universally sacred is an on-going and vital operation in the real world.
True, we are really going to have to work at it! This sort of understanding is not second nature to us as it was to our founding fathers. Nevertheless, if we intend to keep their Constitutional bequest to us we are going to have to find a way to translate their understanding into our own words and soon, before it's too late!
Indeed, any sort of stubborn refusal on our part in this matter poses no less of a potential nihilistic disaster than George W. Bush’s ordinary refusal to accept the impending calamitous effects of global warming as being real - the gratuitous squandering of everything that makes being an American worthwhile!
Having said this, it must be hastily observed that, like our founding fathers before us, we progressives are under no obligation whatsoever to accept any part of the vapid, self-serving right-wing Christian hoopla that passes for an acceptable understanding of that which is indeed the sacred truth and reality of our world.
For example, as our founders understood to the very depths of their being that which is indeed sacred in our world belongs not to Christianity but to all the world and to all of humankind equally. Moreover, it does so in a unified and coherent way that is unconditionally and unequivocally non-sectarian as ordained by the source of all being!
Consequently, by definition, no rigidly formalized Christian orthodoxy can ever measure up to that standard. In point of fact, as our founders well knew, it simply does not choose to! In other words, inasmuch as the Christian religion becomes a rigidly orthodox way of human thought, feeling, belief and behavior it must, by design, also become an unnatural sectarian tyranny of gratuitous preferment, exclusion, hostility and divisiveness at the expense of everybody, and everything, else, including the source of all being.
At Christianity’s core, unfortunately, that seems to be the whole point really - the likes of humankind as Christian zealots viscerally loathing what is truly, ecumenically and equally sacred so that they can continue to worship themselves worshiping their god as the unnatural, self-serving and puerile sectarian god they themselves need god to be in order to feel better about themselves in particular. As Pogo, the late and great American philosopher, adventurer and raconteur, once observed, “we have met the enemy, and he is us!”
Make no mistake about it! Today’s leading Christian poseurs together with all their hysterical, sectarian neuroses are fair game in the extreme for all American progressives. After all, these radically sectarian arrivistes, not us, are the ones who chose to pollute the sacred public realm of our country with all of their supercilious, self-conscious presumptuousness in the first place! Consequently, we as progressives merely render ourselves as morally and practically irrelevant as they are if we smugly choose to just summarily dismiss them.
Instead, right here and now, let all American progressives be resolved, as our founding fathers were in their time, to never allow ourselves to ever feel either self-righteously complacent or intimidated in this matter, but rather to take control of the argument and reframe it solely on our terms as progressives. No excuses! No alibis! No denials!
In that spirit, then, let all of us as American progressives now dedicate ourselves to that which is in fact most real in our world, it’s truly sacred nature, which is nothing personal, but rather the selfless, all-empowering joy of the source of all being for being no-“thing” in particular in and as the inalienable and eternal truth of all potentialities – all possibilities - in and as all the things of its world in and as the natural order of all things, which for that is the sacred public realm…
by means of perpetual, selfless and all-empowering coherent change according to the indeterminate and spontaneous meetings-relationships between all things in mutual, interdependent freedom…
which is the unified belonging of All in All and All as All in and as the source of all being to all of everlasting and beyond.
That’s it!
It’s all the inalienable and eternal joy of the selfless and all-empowering source of all being that works the same way for everything and never changes the rules in and as the sacred truth of our world according to its own natural disposition of indeterminate and open-ended mutual, interdependent freedom for the life-affirming well-being and democratic belonging of others in and as itself – The World Democratic Position, if you will! It is all provided for by the U. S. Constitution. By the same token, it really comes to life in the American Creed that flows from that.
As American progressives, the choice that now confronts us could not be clearer!
We can either begin to actively acknowledge and promote in everything that we think, feel, believe and do publicly that which is most true and real about our world, which is its pre-ordained, sacred World Democratic Position, and for that bring more peace, happiness and prosperity into the world than most human beings even dare imagine, or we can continue to stubbornly refuse to have anything to do with the sacred truth and reality of the world and for that bring down upon the world…whatever…probably Armageddon if radical American Christianity has anything to say about it!
As to what the future will bring, one thing is certain: as always whenever fundamental American principles hang in the balance, it will be our decision as progressive Americans, and ours alone, to make!
Good luck to us all.
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