== Does your religion dance? = By Mark Morford

Behold, the most dangerous issue facing modern faith: Its inability to evolve, nakedly

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/11/09/notes110907.DTL&nl=fix

It's a topic that jumped up like a stunned ferret from God's own hot plate three separate times recently — indicating, I think, that I'd better pay some sort of attention to it — the topic being the obvious but still desperately under-discussed idea that perhaps the most dangerous problem facing man in this modern age of radical technology and dazzling scientific conundrum and otherworldly raspberry vodka and ever-expanding notions of love and sex and human interconnection is the sad and treacherous fact that, well, religion and belief as we know them in America are, by and large, far too horribly stuck, limited, fixed in time and place and stiff karmic cement.

Put another way: We as a culture just might be suffering a slow, painful death by spiritual stagnation, by ideological stasis, by cosmic rigor mortis. It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance. And what's more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.

The idea is everywhere, and not just in the obvious, sour religious outhouses of evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam and rigid Catholicism. It even popped up while I was in conversation with tattooed Buddhist and author of "Dharma Punx" Noah Levine at the Roxie theater during LitQuake '07, he and I chatting about the dangers of dogma and the problem of trying to adhere too closely, too severely, to classical Buddhist rules of behavior, concluding that even Buddhism has its dangers, its limits and its issues and general theological potholes.

Levine, a fairly conservative Theravadan Buddhist, admitted that even he had to seriously adjust some of those old rules to make them tolerable and digestible, particularly in regards to how poorly classical Buddhism valued women and the feminine principle (not to mention other rather impossible dietary and lifestyle restrictions), outmoded ideas that sort of make you wince and cringe and say no no no, Buddha couldn't really have meant that, could he? ...

Sometimes even various states of undress! And, although separate from the dancing (usually), we even embrace sex as natural and wonderful (again, usually). And best of all....no one would dare walk into a circle and proclaim women as anything less then completely equal (or maybe even slightly more then equal..hehe) to men. Anyone trying to dictate to a modern pagan woman how she should dress or behave would find themselves on hurting end of a broomstick!

Anyway, I thought it was a great article. I agree that no good comes from invoking heavy dogma that sways so opposite from the very humanness of us.

But it's not very much discussed. I wrote about this on the R/T forum once.

The basic idea in the Black Church of the King era, as pioneered by theologian Howard Thurman, was that the church needed to move away from looking at Jesus as an object of worship to a subject of his own story, which was the story of a revolutionary in an oppressed colonial society. It is said that King kept a copy of Thurman's "Jesus and the Disinherited" in his pocket at all times. It also meant that King could freely write that he did not believe in the supernatural (and therefore counter scientific) claims of Christianity. Liberation theology in South America and South Africa took similar turns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzxb2T1eX9I

"The reason our institutions, our traditional religions, are already crumbling is because THEY'RE NO LONGER RELEVANT! It's time for us to create a NEW philosophy, and perhaps even a new religion, you see, and that's okay because that's our right. We are free children of God with minds that can imagine anything, and that's kind of our role. How do you evolve ideas? I'll give you an example right here... Why is the drug czar in this country, well I'll go back, why do we HAVE a drug czar in this country? A. B, Why is he a cop? Why isn't he a guy in recovery who's HAD an alcohol and/or drug addiction and overcome it, and why doesn't he HELP people with the same problem, with compassion rather than condemnation? Why do we put people who are ON drugs in jail? They're SICK! They're not criminals. Sick people don't get healed in jail. See it makes no sense! And if we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might be more compassionate, and something like HEAVEN might dawn."

-Bill Hicks

dance dance dance.

but I'm no stiff shirt, actually the only thing stiff about me in these olden years is my joints;-)

Jimmy Buffett pretty much summed up my dancing in Gods own Drunk singing about the bear dance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwzY2q9yjrs


http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/God's-Own-Drunk-lyrics-Jimmy-Buffett/8422B0EFB5A38696482569A1002CA673

Madoke. No one says what it might look like though. LOL Stiffness, I hear ya man, but that's one I don't need to worry about. :rofl: Elbow feels like a rusted out pelican beak this morning. :donut:

Thanks! :hi:

The premise is false

It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance.

This isn't true in the most superficial observation of religious expression in this country. All of the major mainline religious communities have been in motion throughout history, adapting their faiths to their time and locale. It is still happening today.

The throwback position is in the conservative backlash of fundamentalist Christianity, and other faiths. It is a rejection of modernity, which brings about a literalist reading of religious texts that is actually modern in it's own history. This is the type of religious expression the author is referring to, but represents only a small part of religious observance on this planet of ours.

IIRC, Robert Bly used to say that. Claimed it was an old Irish proverb. I don't know about that, but I like what the statement implies.