I haven’t written much about religion lately, mostly because I am the midst of a personal spiritual journey–saying so just like that here sounds remarkably pretentious, I can’t help but notice. 
BUT the point is, until I’m done…well, I don’t suppose I’ll ever quite be done, but…until I’m rather more settled on the precise direction of said journey, I haven’t wanted to try to tease out any coherent sentences on the topic. But I really couldn’t resist this.
As Jeff at Alas, A Blog says, it is pretty interesting to see Jesus presenting the Constitution of the United States to the admiring multitudes a la Moses and the Ten Commandments…er, what a creative idea! On so many levels. But really, my favorite part is the collection of quotes included on the page, demonstrating that no matter what somebody says, you absolutely can twist it around to mean whatever it is you really want it to mean! (Also, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Abraham Lincoln? Not a Founding Father. Born, as a matter of fact, 22 years after the signing of the Constitution…I guess all that ancient history just starts to blur together in the minds of idiots the zealous…)
My favorite quote is the one presented from Thomas Jefferson, to wit:
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed from their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God?” — Thomas Jefferson
HA! CLEARLY Jefferson is saying that atheism is a threat to the liberties of our nation (!!11!) Believe and believe NOW, ye heathens, or the wrath of God and State shall fall upon thee..!
…um. Well. Actually…no…if you want to see the whole, entire quote:
“The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execrations should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment of the human race or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry is also destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so true that, of the proprietors of slaves, a very small proportion are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”
Slavery, folks. Slavery was the threat to the liberties of our nation, and Jefferson was actually decrying the Christianity-based reasoning that far too many proponents of slavery used to justify keeping other human beings in a state of mean and miserable servitude. But context, schmontext! The word “God” is in there, dammit, and that’s good enough for us..!
Sigh.
Well, let me see. I was just reading a post on religion by Billmon at Daily Kos, so it’s on my mind.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to take a quotation out of context — that’s just what a quotation is, in fact: a bit of a longer text taken out of its original context. Even the longer passage you quote is taken out of its context, as shown by its opening sentence. One also has to bear the historical and biographical context in mind — that Jefferson himself was a slaveowner, so he must have been corrupted by turning other human beings into property, and making himself a despot over them.
But even so, I think that the people who are using the shorter version of the quotation are not misusing it. Whatever Jefferson’s larger subject, the fact remains that he declared the liberties he was discussing were “the gift of God,” even though he denied those liberties to his slaves every day of his life. And the jump from his argument to that bit of scenery-chewing is so abrupt that I suppose I ought to look at the whole Notes on the State of Virginia, where this passage comes from, to see if it was the starting place for another argument I can’t see here. That last rhetorical question fairly begs to be taken out of context and used for political agitation, it seems to me. It just happens to be bullshit. Returning to the historical context, Americans were just as crazed by Christianity in Jefferson’s day as they are now; there was little danger that they were going to forget the importance of their god in everything they did and thought, as they worked their slaves and killed Indians.
And I think you ought to reread that Wikipedia article on slavery. The Bible doesn’t condemn slavery, indeed the New Testament uses slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the believer. There’s an excellent book on this by Dale Martin, Slavery as salvation: the metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity. It was the abolitionists who had to twist and turn the Bible, taking passages out of their context, to make a Christian case for the abolition of slavery, and they never made a very good one.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to take a quotation out of context — that’s just what a quotation is, in fact: a bit of a longer text taken out of its original context.
Bzztt, wrong, thanks for trying. “Out of context” refers to the “Fallacy of quoting out of context” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_quoting_out_of_context
If you are quoting someone, it is taking a summation of what they are saying from a real good line. If it’s out of context, it’s distorting what they are saying. Thus the quote is out of context, and that’s not acceptable.
As for Jefferson owning slaves; you can be a hypocrite and still right. Jefferson got a lot of things right, a lot of things wrong.
And, finally, I’m not going to argue with you one way or another about what the Bible says. To quote Jack Black “The Bible says a lot of things”. But, Lisa never said anything about what the Bible said- she said that there were people who used Bible-based reasoning as an excuse for slavery: and that was undeniably true.
What Antigone said, though maybe without the “bzzt wrong” snark.
Also? This painting fits what many cultures (though apparently not the Conservapedia-Brand of American Christianity) would call evil: it is the text-book definition of hubris, that one sin we are all enjoined to avoid.
These tools are presuming that they know the mind of God: they’re defining Jesus. Oddly enough, he’s pretty much exactly like them: a white Evangelical right-wing American who last had a new thought in 1972.
As Fred over on Slacktivist says, and indeed I am paraphrasing, if what Jesus wants/doesn’t want turns out to be remarkably like your own list, you are probably doing it wrong.